Witch World
Date: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Science fiction meets sword and sorcery in these five novels by the legendary New York Times–bestselling author and "superb storyteller" (The New York Times). On a planet in a parallel universe where magic is a reality, these five high fantasy novels of the Witch World set on the western continent of High Hallack once again illustrate why prolific author Andre Norton was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The Jargoon Pard: When a strange traveler gifts young heir to the throne Kethan a belt of leopard skin embossed with a stone—a jargoon—carved in the s
Publisher: Open Road Media

Witch World: High Hallack Cycle

The Jargoon Pard, Zarsthor’s Bane, The Crystal Gryphon, Gryphon in Glory, and Horn Crown

Andre Norton

CONTENTS

THE JARGOON PARD

Of Gunnora’s Shrine and What Chanced There in the year of the Red Boar

Of the Heirship of Kethan and Life in Car Do Prawn

Of the Trader Ibycus and the Jargoon Belt He Brought

Of the Gift of the lady Eldris and the Coming of the first full Moon Thereafter

Of the Warning from Ursilla and the Cloud over Arvon

Of Maughus’s Plot and the Opening of my Own Eyes

Of the Wild Hunt and My flight Therefrom

Of the Maid in the Forest and the Star Tower

Of How I Dreamed and of What Ill Followed

Of the Snow Cat and What Chanced in the Haunted Ruin

Of Those in the Tower and How I Chose Danger

Of the Discovery I made and How I Planned to Put It into Use

Of How I Was Prisoner to Ursilla and My Mother Foretold My Future

Of How the Three from the Star Tower Took an Interest in My Fate

Of How I Chose not the Beast’s Way and of the Secret of Ursilla

Of How Ursilla Read the Smoke Runes and Sent Me to Do Her Bidding

Of How the Lady Heroise Told the Truth and I Confronted Ursilla

Of Sorcery Wrought and Unwrought and How We Learn Our Destiny

ZARSTHOR’S BANE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

THE CRYSTAL GRYPHON

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

GRYPHON IN GLORY

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

Kerovan

Joisan

HORN CROWN

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

About the Author

The Jargoon Pard

Kethan’s horoscope tarot reading

Of Gunnora’s Shrine and What Chanced There in the year of the Red Boar

Many are the chronicles of Arvon, for that is a land old beyond the imaginings of men, even though those men may be born of the Elder Races and, therefore, long in their own lives. Some tales are near forgotten, so that a song smith has but bits and patches of them caught in memory. Others are new forged and detailed. For in a land where the Power is known and used, then marvels do follow after, as the long-fleeced sheep of the Dales follow close upon the piping of their shepherd.

There is much in Arvon pertaining to the Seven Lords and those who ruled before them that is lost, though their judging still lies active in the land. Even those who can wield the Power do not know all, nor ever will.

Who was Gunnora? Was she once a Wise Woman of such stature in the land that after her passing some spoke of her as never having been flesh, but spirit alone? If so—that part of the truth is long befogged. But that Gunnora’s influence remains, that all womankind knows, to take heart in. For she is the one whose sign is a sheaf of ripe grain bound together with fruit of the vine ready for the plucking. It is Gunnora’s amulet each maid wears, upon which she lays her hand at the moment that she conceives, and that she will hold tightly when the time of childbirth is upon her.

To Gunnora’s shrine came those for whom doubtful runes have been cast, that in her sanctuary they may be cured of barrenness, or else have an easier time of child-bearing. And that she has power within the matter of healing, all will testify.

Thus, at Gunnora’s shrine, begins the chronicle of Kethan—or if I speak less like a songsmith and more in the common tongue of the land—my own story. Yet the truth of what happened within that shrine at my birthing was a long time hid and held secret. At last only sorcery wrested it forth into the light of day and the full knowledge of men.

It was the custom of the Four Clans—Redmantle, Gold mantle, Bluemantle and Silvermantle—that inheritance follows the old ways. Thus a man’s son does not succeed him in leadership, no, rather the son of his full sister does she bear a boy child. For it be the blood of the women of the Clan that is reckoned the truest by descent. In the House of the Car Do Prawn, she who would provide the heir was the Lady Heroise.

Though her brother, the House Lord, Erach, had wed early, having already a son, Maughus, and a daughter, Thaney (yet an infant in her cradle), Heroise showed no inclination to take any man to her chamber. She was a woman fiercely proud, with a small talent for the Power. As a young maid she had studied with the Wise Women of Garth Howel, bringing one of their number, Ursula, with her to Car Do Prawn when summoned to return.

The idea was firm in her mind that she should, in time, bear a son to take the chieftain’s chair. To the shaping of that son, mind and body, she must bend every care, so that when the day arrived that he was shield-raised by the men-at-arms, and his name shouted to the four corners of the Great Hall, it would be her will that would govern all his actions. And in this project she had the alliance of Ursilla, with all the knowledge of her calling.

Who was the father of the child she carried in the early spring of the Year of the Red Boar no one could name. It was accepted as her right to choose such in temporary alliance only, if that was her wish. Stories were whispered behind hands that her mate was of Ursilla’s providing, but it was best not to inquire too deeply into his beginnings lest that be uncovered which would make the coming heir less—or perhaps—more than human. For heir, Heroise was certain, her child would be. And in this Ursilla also gave her assurance.

In the Month of Snowbird, the Lady Heroise and her women, together with Ursilla, traveled to Gunnora’s shrine, for the Wise Woman, Ursilla, had cast a foretelling that troubled her. Her uneasiness alarmed Heroise in turn, so that she determined to have all the help she could call upon that the result of all her planning would match her consuming desire. Thus by easy stages, for ragged sweeps of snow still lay upon the ground (though the hint of coming spring was in the air at midday at least), they came to the shrine.

Gunnora has no priestesses nor shrine attendants. Those who seek her out come into a Presence that they may sense but never see. Thus they were met by no one of their own kind. But in the stabling, a little distance from the shrine, were two horses, while in the outer court a man paced like a great caged cat up and back, up and back, since he dared not enter the inner chamber, which was Gunnora’s alone.

The stranger glanced at Heroise as she came in, walking awkwardly because of the clumsy bulk of her swollen body. Then he turned away quickly, as if he feared that he did a discourteous thing. So he did not note that Ursilla gave him a long, measuring glance as they passed him by, and that a faint frown crossed the Wise Woman’s face, as if she had touched upon the edge of some troubling thought.

But she had no time now for any other save her charge, for it seemed that the Lady Heroise had miscalculated her time, and her pains were already upon her. She settled in one of the small inner rooms, only Ursilla, as a Wise Woman, attending her, the other women awaiting without.

There was a languorous scent upon the air, as if all the flowers of late summer bloomed in abundance, and it seemed to the Lady Heroise that she drifted among the beds of a great garden. She knew pain, but that was a far-off thing, which had no tie with her body and meant nothing. Rather in her now worked a great joy, such as in her cold and devious mind she had never known before.

Nor was she aware that in a neighboring chamber of the shrine rested another woman and with her one of the Wise Women from the neighboring village. She, too, dreamed joyfully, awaiting a child to fill her arms as love for it already filled her heart.

Nor were either aware of the storm that gathered, though the man, who paced and waited, went to the outer doorway and stared at the black massing of clouds overhead, regarded the clouds anxiously and shivered. It seemed to him that, though he knew all the humors of nature well and through many years, the brooding stillness under the dark roof now stretched over the land was not quite like anything he had seen before. Because of his own nature, he was alert to forces that were not of the Arvon of men, but the Arvon of Power. Perhaps now that Power was about to manifest itself in some fashion that was a threat to all below.

His hands went to his belt, and he ran his fingertips questioningly along it, as if he sought something there that was no longer his to find. But his chin was up, as he eyed the clouds, and what he half-believed might move them so, with a grim defiance. His clothing was plain, a brown sleeveless jerkin over a shirt of forest green. His cloak lay behind within the court. On his feet, the boots of a horseman were dull brown, the breeches above them green.

Yet there was that about him which said he was no field man, nor even chief of some small and unimportant holding, such as his garb suggested. His dark hair was thick and grew in a peak upon his forehead, and his eyes were strange in his weather-browned face—for they were a tawny yellow, like unto the eyes of some great cat. Anyone glancing at him once might well turn to look again, drawn by his air of authority, as if here stood one who answered only to his own will.

Now his lips shaped words, but he did not utter them aloud. His hand rose from his belt to make a small sign in the open air. At that moment there came a great neighing cry from the stable. The stranger turned swiftly—though he could not see around the corner of the building. At a repetition of that cry he darted back, caught up his cloak, and was off toward the horses he had earlier stabled.

He found there the men who had ridden with the party from Car Do Prawn making haste, in view of the storm, to get their own animals into shelter. But the two mounts already there reared and neighed, striking out with front hooves, as do warhorses trained for the fierce battles in the Dales, so that the servingmen and guards swore lustily and fingered their riding quirts, yet dared not push closer.

There were elements of strangeness about these two mounts now prepared to defend their own quarters against any invasion. They were dappled gray and black, the markings not well defined, but so intermingled that perhaps in the wooded countryside, their shading would produce a cover to confuse any who searched for them. Longer of leg than most were they, also, and slimmer of body.

Now they swung their heads toward the man who had come running, and whinnied in combined complaint and greeting. The stranger pushed past the men from the Keep without a word and went to the mounts. At his coming, they stood quiet, only blowing and snorting. Their master passed his hands down the arch of their necks and over their flanks. They made no further sounds as he urged them toward the opposite end of the stabling.

There he put them together within one wide stall and for the first time spoke:

“There will be no trouble, but keep to your own end—” His words were curtly delivered, carrying a tone of order. The commander of Lady Heroise’s escort scowled. That such a common-appearing fellow dared speak to him so before his men was an insult, which, in another place, he would have been quick to answer.

However, this was the shrine of Gunnora. Here no man dared test what might happen if blades were drawn—weapons of death bared in a place dedicated to life. Still, the glance he shot after the stranger promised no good at any future meeting.

There was one among the men of Car Do Prawn who continued to stare at the stranger standing between his mounts, a hand lightly laid upon the neck of each as they inclined their narrow heads toward him, one nibbling at his hair. Pergvin had served the Lady Eldris in years gone by, she who had borne the Lord Erach and his sister Heroise. Deep in him memory stirred, yet it was a memory that he would not share with any here. If what he half suspected might indeed be true, what a wild chance of fate had brought this meeting at this day and hour? He wanted mightily to confront the stranger, call him a certain name, see if he made answer. Only there had been an oath sworn in the past after an exiled one went out the Gates of Car Do Prawn never to return.

“Pergvin!” A sharp summons from the commander brought him to the task of helping with their own horses for this was a gale that was like to crush utterly any puny human creature.

So heavy was the rain that they could not see the shrine from the door of the stable, though that building lay only a short distance away. Wind swooped upon them, driving in a lash of icy rain, until they pulled shut the door and barred it. While the stable itself shuddered around them in warning.

The stranger left his horses, went to lay hand upon the door bar. However, Cadoc, the commander, stepped quickly before him, interposing his body between that uplifted hand and the latch.

“Leave well enough alone!” He had to raise his voice to a near shout as the howl of the wind outside deafened them. “Would you let in the wrath of the clouds?”

Again the stranger’s fingers dropped to his belt, slipping back and forth, searching. He wore a short sword, but the weapon—closer to a forester’s all-purpose tool and clearly no battle arm—was tight sheathed.

Cadoc, in spite of his anger, shifted from one foot to another under the stare the stranger turned upon him. Still he held his ground while the other, after standing so for a long moment, gave way and returned to the far stall where once more he stood between his mounts, a hand on each. But Pergvin, stealing a look when he could, saw that the man’s eyes were closed and his lips moved to shape words, which he could not, or dared not, voice aloud. Also, when he watched, Pergvin had an uneasy—nearly shamed—feeling, as if he intruded upon some man who was engaged in that which was very private. He turned away quickly, to seek out his own unhappy fellows who jerked their heads and hunched their shoulders with every blast of wind that struck upon what now seemed a very flimsy shelter.

Their own horses, unlike those of the stranger that now stood quiet, showed signs of panic. So the men needs must work to soothe the beasts. Thus they forgot some of their own fear as they dealt with the animals.

Within the shrine the Lady Heroise was unaware of the fury sweeping beyond the walls. But Ursilla, watching by the Lady, harkened to those gusts and wails, felt the beat of wild nature’s force reaching her through the very substance of the ancient building. In her there grew a fear and wonder, for she could not expel from her mind that this was a portent. She longed to be able to use the Power, to perhaps read the meaning behind the fury that now enfolded them. But she dared not distract any of the energy that she kept centered on the Lady Heroise so that their mutual desire be safely accomplished.

In the other chamber, the woman on the couch half stirred out of the drowse Gunnora had sent. She frowned and put out her hands as if to ward off some threat. The Wise Woman, who watched by her, took the hands in hers, willing peace and comfort to return. Not possessed of any great Power was she. Beside that which Ursilla could summon, her talent was the feeble striving of a maid as yet much untutored in the ancient learning. Yet the peace and goodwill in her flowed through her hands and stilled the fear that rose in the half-conscious woman. The dim shadow that had touched her fled.

It was at the height of the storm that the birth cry sounded and from each chamber did it come, one being like to an echo of the other. Ursilla looked down upon the baby she had received into her hands. Her face twisted, her mouth was a wry grimace.

The Lady Heroise’s eyes opened, she looked about her as her mind awakened. Her struggle was over, all she had planned and worked for was won.

“Let me look upon my son!” she cried.

When Ursilla hesitated, Heroise pulled herself higher on the couch.

“The baby, what is the matter with the baby?” she demanded.

“Naught—” Ursilla replied slowly. “Save that you have a daughter—”

“Daugh—” It was as if Heroise could not force the whole of that word from her quivering mouth. Her hands grasped so tightly on the covering of the divan that she might be preparing to rend the stout cloth into strips.

“It cannot be! You wrought all the spells the night that—that—” She choked. Her face was a twisted mask of rage. “It was in the reading—that you vowed to me.”

“Yes.” Ursula wrapped the birth cloth about the baby. “The Power does not lie; therefore, there must be a way—” Her features set, her eyes stared straight at Heroise. Yet in them there was now no intelligence. It might be that Ursula’s spirit had left her body, sought elsewhere for knowledge she must have.

Heroise, watching her, was tense, very quiet. She did not spare a single glance for the child now whimpering in Ursula’s hold. All her attention was fixed avidly on the Wise Woman. She felt the Power. Enough of her early tutoring remained for her to recognize that Ursilla now wrought some spell of her own. But, though Heroise’s tongue uttered no more reproaches, she twisted and tore at the covering with crooked fingers she did not try to still.

Then intelligence came back into Ursula’s eyes. She turned her head a little, pointed with her chin to the wall at their left.

“What you would have lies there. A boy child, born at the same moment as this one you bore—”

Heroise gasped. A way out—the only way out!

“How—” she began.

Ursilla gestured her into silence. Still holding the baby within the crook of her left arm, the Wise Woman faced the wall. Her right hand rose and fell, as with the tip of her finger, she drew signs and symbols on the surface of that barrier. Some of them flared red for an instant, as if a spark of hearth fire glowed in them. Others Heroise could not follow for the swiftness of those gestures.

While she signed so, Ursula chanted, her voice rising and falling as she recited words, spoke Names. Still never was it louder than a whisper. Yet it carried to Heroise’s ears through the rumble of the storm. At the sound of one or two of those Names, she shivered and shrank, yet she did not protest. Greedily she watched, her fierce hunger for what she wanted most alive within her.

Then Ursilla had finished. “It is done,” she told Heroise. “I have raised a spell of forgetting. Those within now sleep. When they awake they will have a baby who shall seem to them the rightful one.”

“Yes! Do it quickly, quickly!” Heroise urged.

Ursilla was gone, the Lady lay back upon the divan. This she had done—borne an heir for Car Do Prawn. In the years to come—her eyes shone—she—she would be mistress there! And with the resources of all the hold land—the lordship—behind her, the heir her creature, and Ursilla to aid her—what else might she not achieve in due time! She laughed aloud as Ursilla returned, a baby wrapped in a birthing cloth once more within her arms.

Coming to Heroise, she held out the child. “Your goodly son, Lady.” She used the old formal words of the birthing woman. “Look upon him, name him, that he may have life well set before him.”

Heroise took the baby awkwardly. She peered down into his face where eyes dark-lashed were tightly closed, one small fist pressed against his mouth. He had dark hair. Well, that was right. Her own was near the same shade. She pulled away the cloth to inspect the small body critically. Yes, he was properly fashioned, with no mark upon him that could afterward be raised to question his identity.

“He is Kethan,” she said swiftly, as if she feared someone to dispute her naming and her owning. “He is my true son, heir to Car Do Prawn, so do I swear before the Power.”

Ursilla bowed her head. “I will summon your women,” she said. “Once the storm is spent, we had best be on our way.”

Heroise looked faintly uneasy. “You said they,” she nodded toward the wall, “would never know.”

“That is true, for now. But the longer we linger, the more chance may upset our plans, even though I have used mighty spells to further them. She—” Ursilla hesitated. “The one who is the mother yonder, there is something about her that I find strange. She has some of the talent—”

“She will know then!” Heroise clutched the baby to her so tightly that he awoke and gave a little cry, waving his fists in the air as if willing to do battle for his freedom from that grasp.

“She may have talent,” Ursilla countered, “but she is not my equal. You know that we can judge another of our kind.”

Heroise nodded. “But it is best to be away. Send my women to me—I would they see this baby, know him in the first hour for Kethan, who is mine alone!”

In the other room, the mother stirred. The shade of uneasiness, which had been upon her face earlier, had returned. She shifted her head upon the pillow and opened her eyes. The space of a pointed finger away lay the baby. And over her bent the Wise Woman.

“Aye, m’lady, this be a proper little daughter. She do indeed! Your goodly daughter, Lady. Look upon her, name her, that she may have life well set before her.”

The mother gathered the baby into her arms joyfully. “She is Aylinn, my true daughter and that of my Lord. Oh, go and bring him quickly, for now that I am out of Gunnora’s care, I feel uneasy. Bring him quickly!”

She held the baby close and crooned lovingly. Aylinn opened her eyes and then her mouth, giving voice to a small cry as if she were not quite sure she found the world entirely pleasant. The woman laughed joyfully.

“Ah, little daughter, welcome are you, thrice, four times welcome. Indeed life shall be better to you than it was to me when I was young. For you have my arms about you and my Lord’s strength to guard you—and both our hearts to hold in your two hands!”

Outside the storm began to die. The stranger fought his way out of the stable to meet, at the door of the shrine, the Wise Woman. As he hurried to his wife, he heard a stirring in the other chamber, but it held no interest. Nor did he even watch when, in the morn of the following day, those from Car Do Prawn rode away, their mistress in her horse litter, her son in her arms.

For the three left behind, there was also a faring out some time later. They turned their faces northward to the wilds of the forest, which to them meant home.

Of the Heirship of Kethan and Life in Car Do Prawn

Car Do Prawn is not the greatest of the Keeps that gave allegiance to the Redmantle Overlord, nor the richest. But what it holds within its boundaries is satisfying to look upon. There are orchards of cherry and apple, from which come not only fruit in due season, but also cider, a cherry cordial for which we have no small fame in Arvon. There are also fields of grain, always yielding abundantly at Harvest tide. And there are flocks of sheep and a goodly herd of cattle. Centermost in this smiling and fruitful country sits the Keep itself, and about that a small village. The village lies open under the sun, its cottages possessing sharply gabled roofs, the eaves of which are carved with fanciful shapes. Their walls are all of a light gray stone, the roofs of slate, while those carvings are entwined with runes painted green and gold.

But the Keep itself, while of the same stone, has no such lightsome embellishments. There is always about the Towers a seeming of shadow. It might be that some invisible cloud keeps it so. Within the walls, even in the depths of summer, there abides a chill that none save I ever seemed to note. There I had often the sense that things moved along its very old corridors, in the corners of its shadowed rooms, which had little in common with the ways of mankind.

From the time of my first understanding, my Lady Mother made plain to me that, in the future, I would rule here. But that promise gave me no feeling of pride. Rather, I oftentimes wondered whether any man could claim full sovereignship within such a haunted place. Perhaps my own reticent nature was my protection, for I never spoke to her nor to Ursilla (of whom I was greatly in awe) of those strange and disturbing fancies concerning Car Do Prawn.

Until I reached the age of six, I lived in the Ladies’ Tower, where my only companion in age was the Lady Thaney, she who was Lord Erach’s daughter and my elder by a year. It had been told me early that our destinies were designed to be one, that when we came to a suitable age, we would be wedded, thus fast locking together the House fate; though at the time this meant little or nothing to me, or perhaps to her.

Thaney was tall for her age, and very knowing, also somewhat sly. I early learned that were we in any mischief together and discovered, the blame would fall wholly upon me. I did not like her or dislike her. I accepted her presence as I did the clothing on my body, the food on my plate.

With her brother Maughus, the matter was far different. He was some six years my elder and dwelt in the Youths’ Tower, coming only at intervals to visit his grandam, the Lady Eldris, his mother having died of a fever shortly after Thaney’s birth. I say his grandam, though by decent, I was also a grandson. However, the Lady Eldris made plain her preference, and either ignored me, or found fault whenever I was in her sight, so I kept away from her apartments.

Ours was a strange household, though I did not realize that, as it was all I had known. Thus I could believe that all families perhaps lived in the same fashion. Lady Eldris had her own apartments and it was there that Thaney was supposed to stay, though she followed mainly her own will, for her waiting woman was old and stout and more than a little lazy, not keeping as strict a watch upon her ward as custom demanded.

Maughus’s visits to their rooms were a signal for me to be on guard. He made very plain when we were ever private together (which I saw, as best I could, was seldom) that he carried ill will for me. He was fiercely proud, possessing much of the same ambition that I knew was inherent in my mother. That he would not be Lord in the Keep after his father caused a bitterness that ate at him even as a child, growing stronger through the years until I was well aware he hated me for what I was, if not for myself.

My mother, the Lady Heroise, and the Wise Woman, Ursilla, had in turn their own chambers, which lay at the top level of the Tower. My mother was much concerned with matters of the household. Whether in the past there had been any clash of wills between her and the Lady Eldris, decided in my mother’s favor, I never knew. However, when Lord Erach was absent, it was the Lady Heroise who held Manor Court in the Great Hall and gave the orders. At such times she had me ever beside her, seated on a small stool a little behind the Lord’s great chair, which had the red mantle of our clan draped across its back, listening to what judgments she would give. Afterward, she would explain to me the way of this or that decision, whether dictated by custom, or the product of her own reasoning.

That she longed to occupy the seat permanently, I learned by instinct while I was yet a small child. It was as if the qualities that were adjudged by the world to be those of a man had been embodied in her woman’s flesh, so she chafed against our customs, decreeing the narrow limits of her own life. In one thing alone she was free, and that was the use of the Power.

Ursilla was the only being within the Keep my mother acknowledged her superior. The Wise Woman’s knowledge and talent was, I know, a matter of abiding envy for the Lady Heroise. Though my mother possessed a small talent herself, it was in nowise enough to fit her for the long learning and discipline of spirit that would have made her the equal of her instructress, and that lack she had the intelligence to recognize. But she did not admit in any other thing that she was less than able.

The Lady Heroise lacked the temperament to school her own desires and emotions for any further training in the Other Ways than she had learned in her youth. Even had she not been the vessel to bear the next heir for Car Do Prawn, she would still have been unable to enter into the full training of a sorceress. And to desire so greatly what one cannot obtain because of some lack in one’s self is a matter to sour and warp the one who has failed.

If she could not have one kind of Power, then she would excel in another. To this end she now strove with all the force of her ambition.

I have said I was in awe of Ursilla, and I would have gladly avoided her. But, even as my mother enforced upon me her form of training, so did the Wise Woman concern herself equally with my affairs. Though that part of the Power which is wielded by a sorceress is not the same as that which a Warlock or Wizard may summon, still she gave me what learning she deemed useful, carefully pruning such lessons, I realized later, of any material that I could use in an attempt to escape the fate they had set upon me.

It was Ursilla who taught me to read the runes, who set before me carefully selected ancient parchments—mainly those dealing with the history of the Four Clans, with Arvon, and with Car Do Prawn. Had I not had a measure of curiosity about such things, I would have found such tutoring a dull and discouraging time of enforced attention. But I developed a liking for the Chronicles the Wise Woman deemed useful in fashioning my character and learned eagerly.

Arvon itself, I discovered, had not always dreamed away time in this ease of golden days that now seemed endless. In the past (the addition of years was obscure since it seemed that those who wrote the accounts were never interested in reckoning up any strict numbering of seasons), there had been a great struggle that had nigh destroyed all ordered life.

Before that period of chaos, our present domain had not been bordered by the mountains to the south and east, but had spread beyond, reaching east to the legendary sea, also south into territories long since forgotten. However, those of Arvon had always had the talent in lesser and greater degrees, and our Lords and rulers were often also masters of Power. They began to experiment with the force of life itself, creating creatures to serve them—or, in mistaken experiments, ones to slay their enemies horribly. Ambition as strong as that which moved my mother worked in many of them, so that they strove to outdo each other to establish only their wills across the land.

They awakened much that should never have been allowed life—opened Gates into strange and fearful other dimensions. Then they warred, ravishing much of the land. Many of the forces they had unleashed were plagues destroying even some of the Power itself. The disputatious Lords withdrew as their numbers grew less, returning here to the home—heart of their own country. Some came quickly, alarmed and dismayed by manifestations that they could not control. Others lingered as long as they might, their roots planted so deeply in their own holdings that they could hardly face what seemed to them to be exile. Of these latter, a few never came back to Arvon.

Perhaps in the Dale land to the south, where another species of man now lives, they or their descendants still had a shadow life. But none here knew if that were so. For, after the last withdrawal, the ways outward from Arvon were spell-sealed, no one venturing forth again.

Still not all who had retreated were content with their escape from the results of folly. They continued to challenge their fellows, until the day when the Seven Lords rose in wrath and might, and there was a final, terrible confrontation between the ones who chose the path of struggle and those who wanted only peace and perhaps forgetfulness.

Many of the Great Ones who had used the Power to their own wills were thereafter either exiled beyond Gates that led to other dimensions and times or extinguished when their will force was utterly reft away. Then their followers also went into exile under certain bonds of time.

When I came upon that story in the Chronicles, I asked of Ursilla whether any of the wanderers had ever returned. I do not know why that was of importance to me, save that my imagination was struck by the thought of myself being so sent out of Arvon to wander hopelessly in an alien world.

“Some have.” She made me a short answer. “But those are the lesser. The Great Ones will not. It is of no matter now, Kethan. Nor should such concern you, boy. Be glad that you have been born into this time and place.”

Her voice to me was always sharp, as if she waited for me to commit some fault she could seize upon. Often, while reading, I would raise my head and find her staring at me with such an intentness that small sins I had reason to answer for were drawn to my mind immediately, and I squirmed upon my stool waiting for her to draw a confession from me by dominating will alone. But this never happened.

What did change was that I reached the age when, by custom, I must go out into the Youths’ Tower and there begin the tutorage that would make me a warrior (though for some long years there had been no war except some raiding at intervals from the wild men of the hills). The night before this event, Ursilla and Heroise took me into the inner chamber, which was Ursilla’s own shrine, if shrine might be the term given it.

Here the walls were not cloaked with hangings, but unadorned bare stone, having painted on them, in time-dulled colors, signs and runes I could not translate. In the middle of the floor stood a single block of stone as long as a bed a man might lie upon. It was lighted, head and foot, by candles, four of them, as thick as my small boy’s arm, set in tall holders of silver much pitted and worn, as if they also had existed for countless years.

Above the table hung a globe from which beamed a silver gleam nigh that of the moon itself. I could see no chain to support it. Rather, it was suspended there invisibly, while about the block, on the floor, was painted a five-pointed star. This glinted so bright and new the brush of its coloring might just have been lifted.

At each star point there stood another tall candle-holder, so that the wax cylinders so supported were on a level with Ursilla’s shoulder, well above my own head. The candles at the head and foot of the stone block were red, but those in the points were yellow.

In the corner of the room itself were braziers of the same silver as formed the candlesticks, each putting forth scented smoke, which curled up to the ceiling overhead where it gathered in a blanketing cloud.

Ursilla had put off her usual robe of dull gray, the coif of pleated linen that always wreathed her thin, sharply featured face and hid her hair. Now she stood, arms bare to the shoulders, hair dark, threaded with silver, lying loose over a robe of blue that drew the light of the silver moon overhead, until the fabric rippled with dazzling color.

On her breast lay a great ornament, also of silver, set with moonstones, the gems deeply milky, with about them some of the blue one sees in winter’s ice. And this pendant was fashioned in the form of a full moon.

My mother was also differently clad, though she was wont to go richly dressed always. Unlike Ursilla, she did not now appear more finely garbed than usual, but rather more simply. Her robe was orange, owning something of the orange of fire flames, across which her hair hung like a dark cloak. And the ornament she wore was not a moon, but rather an oval fashioned of copper, plain and un-gemmed.

She had led me into the chamber. Now she stood just beyond the edge of the star, her hands tightly gripping my shoulders as I stood before her, almost as if she feared that I might wish to escape. I was so overawed by what I saw that I did not think of what part I might be called upon to play here.

Ursilla moved about the block of stone, and, as she pointed her finger at each of the waiting candles, a small burst of flame answered her gesture as the wicks caught. At last, only the one directly before my mother and me remained unlit.

Now I was urged forward until we both crossed into the floor star. My mother, moving swiftly, caught me up, to lay me prone upon the stone of the table. As she settled me so, I felt suddenly drowsy, unable to move. Nor was I afraid.

The last of the star candles was crowned with flame. Now Ursilla lighted those at my head and feet in the same manner. While above, that waiting cloud of soft gray smoke began to descend. I felt the need to close my eyes. Faint and very far away, I heard a chanting rise. But the words had no meaning as I slipped into sleep.

When I awoke, it was early morning, and I lay in my own bed. I did not even have traces of dreams following me out of that strange sleep. However, the memory of its beginning clung. Again I sensed, young as I was, that I would not be told the meaning of what had happened to me. This was a secret thing about which it was best not to talk.

Commander Cadoc, my uncle, Lord Erach, and the main portion of the forces within the Keep were absent. They had gone with the Harvest gift of wine and grain to the holding of the Redmantle Clan Chief. So it was an older man who came to claim me that morning, one Pergvin whom I had seen many times before, since he was the outrider whenever Lady Eldris chose to move beyond the walls of the Keep.

In appearance, he was a man of middle years, and never a talkative one. Among his fellows he had a well-established place, as he was an expert swordsman and a good rider. But it would seem he had no ambition to climb higher in Erach’s service and was content with his life as it was. I was a little wary of him, for the one dark promise that lurked behind the excitement and small triumph of being promoted at last to the Youths’ Tower was the knowledge that there I would be largely at the mercy of my cousin Maughus. And since Pergvin was deemed of the Lady Eldris’s household, he would also be ready to favor my tormentor.

“Lord Kethan.” He spoke formally, sketching a gesture such as men used to an officer. Then he looked beyond me to where my mother stood, straight-backed, no shade of any emotion on the smooth face, which always bore a youthful glow as if she were still a young maid, with only the glitter of her eyes betraying the mind that was very old indeed in many ways.

“My Lady, Lord Erach has given me governorship over Lord Kethan for the while. All will be well with him—”

She nodded. “That I know, Pergvin. Son—” Now she spoke directly to me. “Bear well what lies now before you, put aside childhood, and reach for all that shall make you more speedily a man.”

My excitement had ebbed, my apprehension grew. For in those moments I felt myself far from a man, rather more and more of a child without any security in which I might trust. This Pergvin would take me from the safe cover that had sheltered me all my life, deliver me directly into another world in which Maughus had power and I no defense. That I could stand up to his bullying, I did not believe, having tasted too much of his sly trouble-making during the short visits when I had not been able to escape his company. But that I should ask for any aid, either from that stern person who was my mother, or from this stranger who had come to fetch me, that I would not do. For young as I was, I determined within myself that no one, above all Maughus, must ever guess I felt fear. That was the deepest shame, one I dared not allow myself to sink to.

“You will have a lonely time of it, Lord.” Pergvin had not taken me by the hand, I noted thankfully, as if I must be drawn reluctantly to a waiting doom. And when he spoke to me it was with the tone of one addressing an equal in age, not one trying to force awkward conversation with a small boy. “Lord Maughus has gone with the gift party, we shall have the Youths’ Tower mainly to ourselves.”

I hoped that my relief at that news was not openly manifest. At least some kind fate had given me a space of time in which to learn a little about this new life without having to be on guard against the spite of my cousin. I longed to ask questions, but my fear of being thought too much a child kept me quiet.

We had crossed the wide courtyard and were near the door of the Tower that was to be my new home when there was a sudden loud barking. A great, spotted hound flashed out of nowhere. To me he looked very large, and, as his lips drew back in a warning snarl, his fangs showed threateningly. But, just as he might have been about to leap at me, he flattened to the ground, his snarls changing to a whining. Though I knew very little of dogs, having seen them only at a distance, this behavior was not natural, of that I was sure. Whining, saliva dripping from his jaws, the dog faced me for a long moment. Then, with a loud cry, he backed away, snapping and snarling, as if he faced some enemy too strong to attack, before he fled, tucking his tail tight against his haunches.

I watched him go in dumb surprise. When he had first appeared I had known a flash of fear. Now this abject terror in the hound’s flight was utterly puzzling. Had Pergvin in some way caused that to protect me?

However, when I turned to gaze at my companion, I saw amazement as open as my own mirrored on his face. He studied me oddly, as if, before his eyes, I had somehow grown some monstrous form. Then he shook his head slightly, as if he might be trying so to brush off some confusing fog.

“Now that be a queer happening—” he said slowly, though I believed he spoke his own thought aloud and was not addressing me. “Why should Latchet do so?” He was frowning a little, though the puzzlement was still to be read along with that frown. “Eh, a queer thing that do be. Ah, well, we’d best step out briskly, my Lord. It be close on the nooning and this afternoon we must get you a mount—”

I found the food brought me by Pergvin much plainer than that served at my mother’s table, being mainly a round of cold meat, some cheese and bread. But all tasted good, and I left very few crumbs. When I had washed my hands in the table basin, I was willing enough to face my new lessons, which were to begin with riding.

My mother’s life had been strictly within the Keep walls, and the one or two times I had been beyond them were to walk through field or garden with one of her women. Neither she nor Ursilla had encouraged or allowed outside exploration. But if I learned to ride, then I, too, could see the wide world, perhaps next year accompanying my uncle on such a journey as Maughus this time shared. So eagerly I followed Pergvin to the stable that afternoon.

He led me down the line of stalls. Horses eyed me over the half doors that kept each in its own place. They tossed their heads, snorted, made ear-piercing noises. Again I was surprised, for when I had watched, from the Tower windows, riders coming and going in the court-yard, I had never been aware of such uneasiness and din.

Men turned about to watch me coming, and several of them hurried to quiet mounts who now reared up and kicked at the wooden walls about them, making an even greater confusion. Then I was aware of Pergvin’s hand hard and heavy on my shoulder, as he turned me back toward the outer door.

“Out with you, my Lord,” he ordered urgently. “Wait you outside until I come.”

I would not run, I told myself, I would walk, though I felt about me a great fog of fear, so that my heart beat faster, and I found myself breathing in short gasps. But walk I did, hoping again to display nothing that these men could see and know to be signs betraying that fear.

Of the Trader Ibycus and the Jargoon Belt He Brought

Pergvin’s choice of mount was strange, I thought, but I did not question his actions, for I knew little of the customs of my new life. When he brought forth a slow-moving mare, the weight of years making her step ponderous, I was content enough. Any horse would be a wonder in my eyes at that moment.

Though the mare snorted and pawed the ground once or twice, she stood steadily enough as Pergvin showed me how to mount. However, as I settled in the saddle, she flung up her head and snorted loudly, so that he caught the reins and spoke softly to her, running his hand along the curve of her thick neck as if he had good reason to soothe some fear she held.

She began to sweat and the acid smell was thick in my nostrils. Pergvin led her on, out of the courtyard gate, and into the paddock beyond the Keep where the mounts were exercised. There my lessons began, and I caught eagerly at every word of instruction my tutor uttered, for I found being so mounted was a kind of freedom in itself—promising better to come, even if Pergvin, walking beside me, now kept one hand on the reins that I held awkwardly, while the mare ambled along.

I was disappointed when Pergvin headed once more toward the Keep Gate, hating to exchange the wide outside for the haunted narrow ways within. Just inside the Gate, he halted the mare and swung me down from the saddle, pointing to the door of the Youths’ Tower and bidding me await him there, while he led the mare back to the stable.

For the first time then I was aware that there were watchers. Grooms and men-at-arms were unusually numerous in the courtyard. As I crossed, they moved out of my path without looking directly at me. I shivered as I reached the door where I was to wait, for I was not a stupid boy, even if young, and I believed that there had suddenly arisen some barrier about me of which both animals and men were seemingly knowledgeable, though I myself could not see nor sense it. My mind returned to that strange night within Ursilla’s chamber. What had been wrought there then that had done this to me?

Now my awe of Ursilla and of my mother was for the first time colored by resentment. For if they had so set me apart from the outer life of the Keep by the art they practiced, then I was surely the loser. I wanted none of of their solicitude even if it might protect me from Maughus’s bullying.

As Pergvin neared the stable, the men scattered quickly, to disappear here and there out of sight, as if they did not wish him to know they had been interested in us. Never before in my life had I felt so alone. But I held my head high, gazing openly around as if I saw nothing of their furtive goings, nor believed that any matter was amiss. Even as I had learned to so protect my thoughts from Ursilla and my mother, so must I wear the same outward shell here, I now believed.

That was my introduction to the man-world of Car Do Prawn. Had it not been for Pergvin always there, quick to offer some unobtrusive advice or aid, I know not what might have become of me. For I learned speedily that all animals had a strong dislike for my company. If I approached the hounds, they first gave tongue as they might on sighting some ordained quarry, then that lessened until they whined, slavered and fled.

I could not mount any horse until Pergvin had soothed it with what I early learned was a dried herb potion he concocted in secret. Even then the creature sweated profusely and shivered while I was on its back.

Yet in the matter of arms, I was not so great a disappointment. Though I was lighter by far of body than my cousin Maughus, still I could make up by a keen eye and the learning of sword skills what I lacked of his strength. With the crossbow, I was a skilled marksman within a year, using a lighter weapon Pergvin produced for me.

It was my delight, along with the sword he had found somewhere in the armory, one more slender of blade and less of weight than the usual, and one that, when I took it up, seemed as if it had been forged just for my service. I asked once if both weapons had been made for Maughus as a young boy, for I did not want to use any of his arms, even if they were now discarded, lest it cause fresh trouble between us. But Pergvin had said no, that these were from an earlier time, fashioned for another youth.

As he told me that, he frowned a little. Though he looked at me as he spoke, yet I had the feeling that he did not really see me at that moment but someone else he had known. So, though I did not often ask questions, I was moved then to do so.

“Who was he, Pergvin? And did you know him?”

For a long moment I thought that he was not going to make me any answer. In truth I had the impression that I had overstepped some permitted bond—just as if I had dared to question Ursilla concerning some part of her forbidden knowledge.

Then Pergvin gave a glance right and left. He might have been checking to see if any were near enough to overhear. However, the Keep was well emptied at that hour, for my uncle had ridden forth on the hunt into the north forest lands. Early it had been learned that such expeditions were not for me, for no horse or hound would stay to their business were I present. Thus was another black mark laid against me openly by Maughus—one I could in no way refute.

“He was a son of the House,” Pergvin said reluctantly. “Or rather a halfling son—”

Then he hesitated so long I was moved to spur him on.

“What mean you by halfling son, Pergvin?”

“It was in the long ago when the Lady Eldris was but a young maid. There was a love-spell laid upon her and she answered it—”

He had truly astounded me now. The Lady Eldris was as long lived as all our blood and years counted for little in our aging. But to me, she was a stern forbidding dame with nothing lightsome about her. To think of her drawn by that fabled spell, a love-call, was the same as saying that one fine spring morning the west Tower freed its stones from the earth and danced a planting frolic.

I think Pergvin read my incredulous reception of the confidence in my countenance, for this time his tone was a little drier and sharper.

“All of us were young once, Lord Kethan. There will come doubtless a day when you shall remember and another be startled at your words. Yes, the Lady Eldris went as she was called. But it was not a man of our Clans who laid the spell upon her.

“Those were the days of the Last Straggle, and there was a gathering of Clans and others who were then our allies to determine defenses and ploys against the Dark Lord of Ragaard the Less. Since all who answered the summons needs must leave their Keeps but lightly defended if they were to join such a gathering, the women and children were taken to the Clan fortresses for shelter—those who agreed. For as you know, there were ladies then who rode in armor and led levies from their own lands.

“While at the Fortress of the Redmantle, the Lady Eldris was seen and desired by one of the Wereriders—a lord among them. It was he who laid the spell that brought her to his bed. But his spell did not last, and no real liking came of their meeting on her part. So that in time she returned to her own people bringing with her their young son—

“It is said that when she left, her Werelord and his Clan were elsewhere, for they were always in the midst of the bitterest fighting, they being what they were born to be. And, by the time he got note of her going, it was too late for him to claim her again.

“Her brother, Lord Kardis (he who fell some years later at the Battle of Thos), gave back freely her Clan right and laid it also on her son. However, as the boy grew older he showed the blood of his father the stronger. At last he went to Gray Towers where he could find cup-fellows and shield-companions of his own kind. Then later, when the Seven Lords won peace, those of the Werefolk were sent into exile, for their blood is ever hot and they take not easily to a world without war. It was only a few short seasons ago they returned to Arvon from far wandering. But I do not think that any old sorrow binds the Lady Eldris. She later took the Lord Erach’s father to husband and bore both him and your Lady Mother. Thus perhaps time faded all that lay behind. But it is true that her elder son did dwell here in his early youth, and that those weapons were his. However, all this is now a matter best forgot, my Lord.”

“Wererider—” I repeated, wishing I dared ask more about that unknown half uncle of mine from the past. Only it was plain that Pergvin would not talk more about him.

There are many strange folk in Arvon. We are not all of one kind or nature. Some are very different indeed when we compare them to ourselves. Of that number not a few are dangerous enough so that those of the Clans avoid them and their territories. There are those totally unlike us as to body and mind, others that mingle within their natures both that which is like unto us and that which is strange beyond our understanding, a third kind that are both different and enemies to our ways.

Yet it is not any physical difference alone that raises barriers between one sort and another, but rather spirits that cannot meet. I have seen the forest people come freely to our sowing feasts, our Harvest festivals. These we welcome, though they are closer to the plant world than to ours. Also I have seen some with the outward seeming of the Clansmen from whom I shrank as if from a blast of winter’s strongest cold.

A Wererider, like the forest people, possesses a mixture of inheritance, being sometimes man, sometimes animal. I had come across divers references to such shape-changes in the Chronicles Ursilla had supplied, but at the time I had had little interest in them. Now, because of Pergvin’s story, I wished that I had paid more heed to those old hints. For the tale of the Wereson who had used these weapons before me awoke a desire to know more. Had he also in those days felt between him and all others here the same invisible barrier that fed my growing loneliness?

Lonely I was, and turned inward upon my own thoughts more and more. Had it not been for Pergvin I would have fared even worse. But he companied me under the guise of teaching me a warrior’s ways. And, as the seasons passed, he took me on small journeys out from the Keep so that I learned more than just the fields and lands I could see in half a day’s riding. I knew though, that in this he was hampered by the rules of my mother, who would never allow me to spend a night away from the Keep.

I was still summoned to the Great Hall whenever court was held there—now sitting behind my uncle, as I had behind my mother. While Lord Erach was just to me after a fashion, he did not extend to me any great kindness. The fact that I could not hunt, that horse and hound hated me, gave him worry, I know. He went as far as to consult with Ursilla on the matter. What answer she made him I never learned. But the meeting led to a greater coolness in him toward me that was a source of unhappiness to me.

Maughus did not bully me openly as he had when I was a child, though he never lost any opportunity to point out my inability to fit neatly into the right pattern of Keep life. Often I found him watching me in such a way as to arouse within me an anger that was partly fear—not truly fear of Maughus himself, but of some formless thing that he might summon in time to my betrayal.

I had passed from boyhood into the time of young manhood when we had an extremely plentiful harvest that overjoyed us all. Yet that was also the Year of the Werewolf, which was an ill sign in every way and which in a measure we dreaded. By rights, this season should have celebrated my wedding to Thaney. Only, under such a sign, Ursilla decided—and Heroise, in spite of her desire to further her plans, backed her—no such uniting could prosper. Thus it was decreed that with the coming of the new year—which lay under the sign of the Horned Cat, a powerful one but such as promised better, the wedding would take place.

Of Thaney I had seen little, since she had gone early to Garth Howel, where the Wise Women gathered, there to learn such sorceries as those of healing and the protection of house and home. It was reported that she showed something of a talent in such matters, which did not, I knew, altogether suit my Lady Mother. Yet, by custom, Heroise could not raise her voice against the furthering of any development of such in her niece.

Maughus was much away also, acting as messenger for his father in various meetings of the Clan or Clans—for all four of the Great Clans were astir.

Arvon itself had passed into a period of unrest which crept upon the land subtly enough. The very names of the years, as they passed, showed that the balance of the Power was a little troubled. For we had behind us such as the Years of the Lamia, the Chimera, the Harpy and the Orc. There were signs that the golden peace of my childhood was fading, though the why of this puzzled all who thought about the matter. And there were embassies sent to the Voices, asking for readings on the future. That this grew cloudier they admitted. Still there was no menace that was openly discernible, upon which men could set their eyes and say—this is what troubles us so.

Pergvin summed the matter up one evening as we sat together over our evening meal.

“It is like the sea tides, this flow and ebb of the Power. When too much of it fills the land, then there is trouble and restlessness.” He stared moodily into the tankard of our last year’s cider. “It begins so always, too—with the land bearing in great abundance, as if we were being warned to fill up all storage places in preparation for a siege. While in us there gathers an uneasiness of spirit, as if there were a whispering in our ears, urging us to action we do not want to take. So the Shadow comes—as the sea tides—yet not so often—”

“Sea tides?” I caught eagerly upon the two words he had repeated. “Pergvin, have you then seen the sea?”

Still he did not raise his eyes to meet mine. Instead he asked a question in turn.

“My Lord, how many years of life think you stretch behind me?”

When I had been young enough to first come under his tutoring, I had thought him old. But, as my own years mounted up, I had guessed him to be of middle life. Age in the people of Arvon was hard to count until they reached near the end of a long, long span of years. Men could die of certain sicknesses, or baneful curses, and in battle. However, natural death and the lessening of vigor, held off a long time from us.

“I do not know,” I answered truthfully.

“I was one of those who took the Road of Memory through the Waste in the Dales,” he said slowly. “The Great Time of Trouble, I knew, and what followed it. Yes, I saw the sea, for I was born within sound of its never-ceasing waves.”

The same awe that I held for Ursilla touched me now. It was as if some hero from the Chronicles had stepped from the parchment rolls to front me. That Pergvin could remember the Exile from the South was such a marvel.

“I remember too much,” he said harshly and drank his cider. Such was his air of withdrawal, I dared ask no more.

Then there was an interruption to our evening. A horn cried beyond the Keep Gate, and we recognized its summons as that which announced the arrival of a wandering merchant trader—doubtless come to set up a booth at our Harvest festival. Our welcome to the man who rode within was warm and ready, for traders were widely traveled men who brought with them much knowledge of places our own people seldom if ever saw.

Our visitor was plainly a man of high standing among his fellows, for he did not lead a single packhorse. Instead, he commanded a party with several outriders and a number of goods-carrying animals, among them not only the horses we knew, but several stranger beasts that were long of leg and whose bodies were humped upon the back so that the packs hung lashed on either side of the lump.

By Lord Erach’s order the nearer paddock outside the walls was assigned for a camping space, and there the men of the trader’s caravan quickly set up a picket line for the beasts, separating the horses from the humped ones, and then tents. Their master was pleased to accept the hospitality of the Keep and a seat at our table for the night meal, with the ladies and their waiting women, eager also to hear any news, occupying their feast chairs.

He was not a tall man, the trader, who introduced himself as one Ibycus (a name that had a new ring, not akin to any we knew). However, though he lacked inches perhaps, he did not lack presence. His manner was easy, with all the polish of a high House, the air of command upon him as surely as it rested on my uncle.

The longer I watched him, the less I believed he was one of our own folk. In spite of his youthful appearance (for in his outward seeming he might as well count not many more years than did Maughus who had not yet returned from his last mission), Ibycus gave a deeper impression of not only age, but of wisdom well controlled. I was led to wonder if he were not perhaps more than trader, perhaps some one of the Wise Ones using his present employment as a useful cloak.

If that was the truth, he was one favorable to us, for there was a lightsome, happy feeling to our dining. The shadow, that always seemed to me to hang within the Keep, was for a time dispelled. We listened to his flow of talk, and he had much to say of the lands he had recently passed through, giving several personal messages from our kin and accounts of how it fared within their holds.

At first I watched him only. Then, as if by chance, I caught sight of Ursilla and the expression that lay on her features. That she had come to meet our guest was a concession on her part, for she seldom visited the Great Hall, keeping to her own chambers. And now—

Yes, there was an uneasiness about her as she watched and listened, as if in this stranger she saw some faint menace. I was sure I saw her fingers move once or twice in a complicated gesture half-hidden by her plate. She might be bringing to bear the seeking of her sorcery to uncover some danger. Yet if that was what she sought, I knew suddenly that she failed. And her failure in turn was a rising source of dismay within her.

It was when the table was cleared that the trader summoned one of his men to bring in a stout chest. After it had been set down before him, he slapped its lid with his open palm, saying, “Wares have I in plenty, my lords and ladies. But the pick of what I carry lies here. With your goodwill, I shall make a show of them.”

Eagerly the ladies urged him to do so, their voices rising shriller above the deeper voices of the men who were not backward in such encouragement either. And the chest was opened.

From it Ibycus brought out first a length of cloth, black and much folded. This he spread out and smoothed upon the board before he lifted out divers small bags and boxes, some of silk, some of wood, others of carved bone or crystal. From each he shook its contents, to be flattened out upon the cloth in a display of such wealth I had not believed existed outside some ancient tale of a Firedrake’s treasure horde.

There was gold there and moon silver, even the ruddy copper, wrought into very ancient settings for gems. And of the gems—I do not think any of us looking upon that show could have named near the half of them.

We were silent, as if we all at one time together held our breath. Then came cries of astonishment. Also, those farther away left their seats and crowded closer, to feast their eyes on all the brilliant glitter. None stretched forth a hand, a finger, to touch. The display was too overpowering. We must all have had the feeling that it was too rich for our owning, that we must look, but we could not hope to possess.

I was one of those who had moved closer, bedazzled by all that lay there. Then somehow my eyes made a choice, and I centered my gaze on the article that lay closest to me.

It was a belt made of golden fur, so sleek and gleaming that, even among the riches heaped about it, the. fur retained a brilliance, or so it seemed to me. The clasp was a single large gem—yellow-brown in shade—the like of which I had never seen. The gem had been wrought into the likeness of a cat’s head. Still, studying the buckle much closer, I saw that the cat was not intended to resemble a small, tamed one, but perhaps one that was akin to the dreaded hunter of the heights, the snow cat—more deadly a fighter than any other beast we knew.

“This interests you, Lord Kethan?”

At that moment it did not seem strange that Ibycus addressed me by name, or that he stood beside me. The others were intent still upon what lay there, and now they were venturing to touch this piece or that, all talking at once about their preferences.

But it was the trader himself who took up the belt and held it out to me.

“A goodly piece of workmanship, my Lord. The clasp—it is a jargoon, a stone that is of the more common sort. But it has been most cunningly cut by one who knows the art well.”

“And the skin?” something prompted me to ask.

“The skin—ah, that is of the pard. One sees them seldom nowadays. They are as fearsome hunters as their cousins of the snow—though somewhat smaller.”

My fingers itched to take the belt from his grasp. At the same time my will denied that gesture, for I had the belief that if I did I could never relinquish it again. And I had no wealth with which to make it my own.

Ibycus smiled and nodded, as if he had asked some question and had it answered. Then he turned to answer some question Lord Erach called to him.

But I drew back, out of the circle of light about the table, away from the Great Hall itself. For the fierce longing that was in me to possess the belt was such that I was frightened at my own wavering control. Thus I stood in the dark, wondering if it were such a madness as this that forced a man to thievery.

Of the Gift of the lady Eldris and the Coming of the first full Moon Thereafter

I sought my own chamber, disturbed by the strong emotion the belt had aroused in me. Though I stretched out upon my narrow bed, I was far from sleep. The moon, which was new, was not strong enough as yet to beam in the windows above my head, so I lay in darkness as I had for many seasons within this same somewhat bare chamber.

The belt! I need only close my eyes to see it in my mind, gleaming as it had in the hall. A curious fancy that the strap had a kind of life of its own haunted me. I wanted fiercely to run my hands along the furred surface, to take into my hold the carved head, gaze deeply at the jewel of its fashioning, as if I could read therein some foretelling of the future, as the Wise Ones do.

At length I could lie still no longer, so distraught did my craving for that length of fur render me. I arose and went to the window, resting my arms upon the sill, for the opening was set so high that the sill was at shoulder height for me. There I lingered, looking out into the night.

The Youths’ Tower was the northernmost of the Keep and the window faced that direction. I could make out dimly the fields and orchards that stretched outward—the village lay southward. Beyond, the forest began, a wood wall between us and the high hills, which held so much that instinct taught us to avoid.

For the forces of Arvon that had wrought disaster in the past had, in the last reckoning, fled back into the hills and forests. Barriers of the unseen Power, as strong as the concentrated will of the Wise Ones and the Seven Lords had been able to set, restrained them there. No man knew now if any of those we considered the enemy still lingered, or whether they had opened other gates between worlds, those that they knew so well to manipulate, leaving Arvon.

Some of their servants, the lesser ones, were still a menace. But it was part of the nature of those that they were tied to certain portions of the land and did not often stray from their accustomed “runs.” Thus, for the main part, they could be avoided. And, of those, some were in a way an added defense to our own heartland, prowling about to keep out any man from south of the Dales who might venture to explore in our northward direction.

The Dales! I remembered what Pergvin had told me—that he was one who had taken the Road of Memory, the Road of Sorrows, followed by the exiles who had withdrawn during the dark days into Arvon. Those who dwelt there now were not of our race, being lesser, in that they had not the Power, barbarians only a few generations away from utter chaos. They were short-lived, too, seeming to last but a day or so of our time before they matured, then died of that age, which had set a deadly finger upon them from their birth. We had naught to do with them.

Dark was the night, though the stars were brilliant overhead. They glittered as did the gems Ibycus had displayed. From the north came a wind that reached fingers within my window, chilling my bare flesh. Yet I did not go back to my bed and huddle into the coverings there.

Rather, I found my head well up, my nostrils expanded to drink in the wind, as if it carried some message. There was a faint excitement, born deep within me that I had never felt before. The night’s very darkness drew me, beckoned. I had a queer flash of thought—how would it feel to run bare of body through the grass, to splash into a stream unheedingly—to—?

The excitement died as swiftly as it had come. I shivered now. The dark promised ill instead of joy. Drawing back from the window, I settled upon my bed. Of a sudden, the sleep, which had eluded me, descended. I yawned, my eyes burned, as if I had been too long without rest. Stretching out, I slept.

There was a dream—from it, I started awake. My heart was racing as if I had been running at top speed, my body was slick with my own sweat, and yet the chamber held no great warmth. The first gray light of predawn made a showing in the narrow slit of window. I sat up—what had I dreamed?

I could remember nothing, had carried out of sleep no hint of what had so—so—Was it fear that had moved me or some other fierce emotion? Even that I could not now answer. To return to sleep was impossible.

Moving quietly, I washed in the waiting basin. The water was chill, but not unduly cold. I began to dress, still fighting a blocked memory for some hint as to what I had dreamed. For though I could not recall it, the doubt lay heavy on my mind. That dream was of great importance—I must—

However, as I moved about the normal task of dressing, the urgency also began to fade, so that when I went softly out of my small chamber, none of it remained. I felt slightly foolish, as if I had hurried to meet someone who had no intention of fronting me.

When I reached the middle court, I discovered another before me. The trader Ibycus stood watching the door from which I came. He was smiling a little. At sight of me, he nodded. Then I was sure that this encounter had been planned, though for what purpose I could not guess.

“A fine morning, early though it be, Lord Kethan.” His voice came low but clear.

I was a little at a loss, being sure he had a purpose in meeting me, yet unable to guess what that purpose might be. His air was that of one awaiting a longtime friend, though he greeted me with formal address. In turn, I felt that about him, which made me swear he was no trader, but deserving of the fullest respect, as much as the High Lord of my own Clan, or one of like position.

“A fine morning, Lord.” I found my tongue at last.

“Lord?” He put his head a little to one side, his eyes very bright as he surveyed me. I might be now some trade object he had to value. “I am a trader, not the master of a Keep.”

Something within me was stubbornly certain that, while he might not be master of any holding within Arvon, neither was he trader only. Thus I met his gaze squarely, awaiting enlightenment.

Ibycus raised his hand to finger his chin. Upon the forefinger he wore a large ring. The stone, which formed its setting, was unlike those among his treasure, being dull, without any brilliance or life. It could well be only a bit chipped off the nearest field rock. In color the oval was a sere gray; the setting that held it was, I thought, silver. Yet if so, that metal had been allowed to tarnish, which also made me wonder. For the ring was indeed a poor-looking thing for the master of such riches to choose for his own wearing.

“Lord Kethan”—he still smiled—“it seems you are one with eyes in your head.”

I flushed. Had he so easily read my thoughts? A talent for such discernment was what the greater of the Masters were rumored to possess. Suddenly he thrust out his hand toward me, not to grasp mine, but so that the ring was near on a level before my eyes.

“What do you see?” he asked.

I ran my tongue tip over my lips. What he wanted of me I could not guess, but that there was some deeper meaning in this encounter I was now very certain. Obediently, I gazed upon the ring.

There was a kind of shimmer across the stone. The dull surface appeared to move as might the surface of a pond when one tosses in a stone, rippling—

Then—

I think I must have exclaimed aloud, my surprise was so great. For an instant or two I had seen the head of a cat thereon, a snow cat, its fangs exposed in a snarl of warning! So much life was in that picture I did not believe it was any carving resembling the one of the belt buckle.

“What do you see?” So imperative was the order in his repeated question that I answered with the truth.

“I—I saw the head of a snow cat!”

Now Ibycus held his hand before his own eyes, peered intently into what was once more the dull gray of the stone. He nodded abruptly.

“Well enough, Lord Kethan, well enough.”

“Well enough for you perhaps,” I was embolded to say then. “But what is the meaning—”

The trader did not allow me to finish the question. “In due time, my young Lord, all shall be made plain. Just as it is plain to me now why I came to Car Do Prawn. I make mysteries you think?” He laughed. “When you were a small lad did you not learn your runes by beginning with the simplest combinations? Would you have been able to read any Chronicle then put into your hands without such preparation?”

I shook my head. I wanted to be angry at his usage of me, indeed at his hinting and his mysteries. However, there was that about him which kept my tongue discreetly silent.

“This I leave with you as a thought to hold in mind, Lord Kethan—be guided by what you desire most, not the demands others shall try to lay upon you. Even I cannot read some runes. They must be revealed properly in due time; and sometimes time marches but slowly. You shall be given a gift—cherish it.”

With that he turned away abruptly before I could speak, though I stood, mouth half-open, like a fish gasping above the water of its safe pool. Nor did it seem that I might follow him to demand an explanation of his words, for something outside myself kept me where I was and silent.

He went directly to the Ladies’ Tower. Apparently he was awaited there, for the door swung open at his first knock. I remained where he had left me, chewing over the words of his speech.

I did not have any private meeting with Ibycus again. By nightfall he had gathered his train of men and pack animals to depart from the Keep. That he had made some sales of his wares was certain. My mother and the Lady Eldris had kept him long while they decided over what they might afford. But I believed that not much of his treasure remained behind when he rode out. And I deeply regretted the belt.

However, I told myself repeatedly, I could never have hoped to purchase it. In addition, there were none within Car Do Prawn to whom I would appeal to aid me in acquiring such a thing. Though I might be Lord Erach’s acknowledged heir, yet I had no purse into which I could dip.

Three days later, came the day of my birth anniversary. When I had lived with the Lady Heroise and Ursilla, this had not been made an occasion for any feasting. Rather, it was celebrated as a solemn time when Ursilla had worked some spell or other, my mother assisting her, aiming at me the force of their Power, always, as they explained, to strengthen and protect my small self.

But, after I moved to the Youths’ Tower, if they still carried on such a ceremonious marking of the day, they no longer required my presence during it. So the date became like any other, save that, by record, I was deemed a year older, and more would be demanded of me in wisdom and strength.

Therefore, I was surprised when there came a message that the Lady Eldris wanted my attendance, the reason being given that it was that date. The night before, Thaney had returned, escorted by Maughus and a suitable train of waiting women and outriders. As I put on the best and newest of my feast tabards (the one stitched with the device of my heritage), I wondered if they planned this day to make some formal announcement of our coming marriage.

It was late afternoon when I crossed the courtyard to the other Tower. Within, the light was dim, so already the waiting maid who admitted me held in one hand a lamp that burned well, emitting a scented vapor. Following her, I climbed the first flight of the old, worn steps to the apartments wherein my grandam had her rulership, though memory almost sent me higher, toward the portion that had once been my home.

Within the presence chamber, there was no daylight at all, for the walls were close hung with tapestries, the colors of their patterns muted. Yet here or there, the light of one of the lamps would catch the face of an embroidered figure or grotesque beast and bring such to life. Lamps there were in plenty, others hanging from chains suspended from aloft.

These were all ablaze, giving forth heat as well as scented vapor, so that the room, after I had been within it but a moment or two, was stifling. I longed to pull aside one of the hangings and find a window that could be flung open for fresh air.

The Lady Eldris sat in a high-backed chair between two of the pillar lamps. There was no silver in the thick, dark braids that swept below her waist when she arose and that were interwoven with threads of soft gold, interset with green and pale yellow stones. She, too, wore the tabard of ceremony, enclosing her body stiffly from throat to hip. A single great green stone, like a third eye to watch me, rested in the middle of her forehead.

Like Pergvin, she had aged little, her appearance was that of one in early middle years. And, while she did not wear my mother’s openly displayed arrogance and need for dominance, she had authority in her person, underlying her every gesture.

I made my manners carefully, going to my knees and putting my lips briefly to the hand she held out to me—a hand chill to the touch in spite of the concentrated heat of the chamber. Though my head was bent in courtesy, I was keenly aware that she eyed me up and down, not with the satisfaction she always turned in Maughus’s direction, but with the aloof and faintly hostile withdrawal she had ever shown me.

“Greetings to you, Kethan—” she said, making the words by her tone merely words, without warmth and welcome.

“Good fortune, sun bright and lasting to you, my Lady.” I gave the proper answer.

“Stand up, boy. Let us see what the years have made of you!” Now there was a hint of testiness in her voice. It meant she was constrained to this meeting for some reason and she did not propose to make it an easy one for either of us.

Arise I did. Now I saw that, though two of her waiting women hovered in the background, neither my mother nor Ursilla were present. But another advanced at the Lady Eldris’s beckoning. That this was Thaney, I had no doubt.

She was the Lady Eldris over again, as her grandam might have been those untold years ago when the Were-rider had set a love-spell to ensorcell her. As tall as I she stood, the stiff formal folds of her tabard and robe hiding but still hinting at the curves of the body beneath, a body ripe and ready for marriage. She had the same dark hair of her grandmother, but looped and arranged into a great coil on the back of her head, secured in place with gem-headed pins and combs.

Her face was as I remembered it, regular of feature, but there was a petulant twist about a mouth that appeared proportionately too small, and already a faint frown line between her dark brows. She was not smiling, but rather looked sulky, as if she clearly desired to be elsewhere at this moment.

I knew the action custom demanded, though reluctance to carry that out grew in me. However, having no choice, I reached forward to clasp her hands, draw her close enough to kiss her cheek. I could feel the tension of her body and understood well that there was no response from her, except perhaps a quickening of dislike.

“Very pretty!” My betrothed had said nothing, not even my name as a greeting. It was the Lady Eldris who made the comment.

“Well, girl.” She spoke directly to Thaney. “You will not do so ill after all. He is presentable—”

With that she paid me no compliment. I was keenly aware of a mutual contempt they might well have shouted aloud. Still I was firm in my resolve that neither of them would I allow to know that. Betrothal—solemn as that ceremony might be—was not marriage. To that thought I clung now, for there moved in me the knowledge that never could I take Thaney to wife. There must be some way to gain my freedom.

The Lady Eldris waited for no answer from either Thaney or me. Instead, her hands dropped to her lap to pluck at the strings of a silken bag resting there. Those loosed, she drew out—

The pard belt!

Again the moment I saw it, I experienced the same fierce and rending need to make it mine, the need I had somewhat forgotten since the time I had last seen it.

“A goodly token, girl, for your future. This forms a tightly closed circle, such a circle as your marriage must be. Give it—with your vow—to your future lord!”

Thaney did not at once reach for the length of fur, dangling from the hand her grandam held out to her. Did she fear if she did complete the gesture the Lady Eldris demanded of her she would be irrevocably pledged to a future she disliked? Apparently, she dared not completely defy the order, however.

Taking the belt at last, she turned to me, her voice as sullen in tone as her mouth looked while she uttered those words:

“My Lord, accept from me this symbol of our future unity.”

I had only half an ear for her words. The belt was all that mattered. Yet I restrained myself, so I did not actually snatch it from her hold. I had enough presence of mind to thank her and the Lady Eldris.

Thaney did not even nod as my words died into a somewhat embarrassed silence. I saw that the Lady Eldris was smiling derisively.

“See that you guard it well, Kethan,” she said. “It is a very great treasure, indeed it is. Now you may go. We have fulfilled the bargain and I am weary—”

Her dismissal was so abrupt as to make me angry. But such words and actions were only a scratch across my pride. In truth, I was well pleased to be out of the hot, perfumed room, my treasure looped about my arm. As I returned to my own quarters, I ran my fingers continually across the fur, reveling in touching such silky warmth. Also, I did not put it away in my coffer as I laid aside my festival clothing, but had the overpowering fancy to fasten it about my bare waist under my jerkin. To me there was no strangeness in what I did. There it felt right It seemed needful that I wear it so.

That night when I sought my bed I did not lay it aside, but kept it on. Again, it was a night when I could not sleep. Gazing from the window into the dark was not enough. Rather, as the full moon rose, I knew that I must be out—free—away from this pile of time-pitted stone.

Though I had never done so before, I pulled on breeches and boots, taking time for neither shirt nor jerkin. I slipped out of the Tower, through the Gate that in this time of peace had no sentry on duty. Once in the open, I began to run. There was a headiness and wildness in me that possessed by body, urged me on and on.

I crossed fields to enter the screen of bushes forming the outer fringe of the woodlands. There I kept along the banks of a stream, so that the moon-dappled waters sang at my side, until I at last reached a glade where there was the full silver of the moon and a pool reflecting it. There I ripped off my clothing and leaped into the shallow water, cupping it in my hands and splashing it up over me. The belt formed a darker line about my body, while the gem of the pard’s head took fire from the moon in a way I had never seen any gem burn before. It blazed up, more and more. I was caught in a fiery cloud. There was nothing now but the wildness alive in me, the flashing of the pard’s snarling head before my dazzled eyes.

Of the Warning from Ursilla and the Cloud over Arvon

When I awoke with the coming of morning, birds twittered in the trees above me. The fire of the moon had left the pool, though a dwindling silver disk still rode in the west. I blinked and blinked again, bemused at what lay about me, for in my mind there was a memory—a memory of wild, exultant life enclosed within the night. I had seen more, heard more, scented more of a strange world, vividly alive, than I ever had in my life before. This was the freedom that something long buried inside me craved. To return to the Keep was like forcing myself back into a cage, yet I had no alternative.

Some instinct also warned me that, were my night’s adventure known, I would be prevented from repeating it. I must regain my own chamber unseen. I sat up quickly, reached for the breeches and boots, which lay an arm’s distance away, to pull them over my dew-moist skin. The belt about me now was just a belt. Even the gem buckle appeared duller, as if half-consumed by the fire that had blazed under the moon’s touch. Still I ran my hands lovingly along the furred loop where it cinched about my middle.

The hour was still very early. I hoped to reach my chamber before there was any stir in the Keep. Again, some caution I did not understand led me to take a way along which there was cover. Thus I skulked, in the fashion of a scout approaching some enemy camp. I reached the Gate and slipped through to run for the Tower door. In doing so, I must pass the entrance of the Tower wherein the ladies dwelt. Someone moved out from the arch’s shadow there to front me.

Ursilla!

There was no avoiding a meeting with her. She had turned to face me and her hand beckoned, drawing me to the arched doorway as she retreated into that more private place.

When she did not speak, I fidgeted from foot to foot. Then she pointed to the belt where it showed against my skin, only half-concealed since I was not wearing a jerkin.

“Where got you that?” Her voice was a harsh whisper, meant to compel the truth from me.

Again by instinct my hands were at my middle, cupping over the gemmed buckle. I had a queer feeling that I was threatened. Also, I was angry with myself for being so submissive to her, Wise Woman or not.

“It was a gift,” I returned with scant courtesy. “The Lady Eldris and Thaney gave it into my hands as a betrothal pledge.”

Ursilla’s features sharpened, her lips pulled away a little from her teeth. Just so had I seen one of the great hounds snarl in soundless rage.

“Give it to me!” Her fingers stretched out, curling to resemble talons, as if she would tear it from my body. “Give it to me!”

By the very force of her emotion, she released me from the spell of obedience she had cast.

“No!” I denied her with a single word. Then turned and ran, unmindful now of anyone sighting me. It was not until I reached my own chamber and stood there, panting, that I regained control over the panic that had taken me out of Ursilla’s reach. I dropped down on the edge of my narrow bed and tried to sort out my own mixture of emotions to learn, if I could, what had brought me racing here like a frightened child.

The sense of freedom with which I had awakened had gone. In its place arose a frustration, mingled with fear. I was in a cage—and Ursilla threatened to keep me therein. She would see that I did not repeat this night. I was aware of that as if it were written in flaming runes upon the wall before me. The belt!

I unhooked the buckle, held the gem head on a level with my eyes, examined it closely. Yes, in the day, it was dimmer. But there was no way Ursilla would get this from me—no way! It was truly mine in a manner that nothing had ever belonged to me before. I had known it instantly when I first saw it laid out among Ibycus’s treasures. That the belt had been used by the Lady Eldris for her own purposes, intended to bind me to those purposes, mattered nothing. All that did was that I could now fasten it about my body. This I again did, checking the buckle well to be sure it was surely closed.

Ursilla might be mistress of potent spells, but get this from me she could not. I do not know why I was so certain of that fact, only that I was.

However, I was not to escape the Wise Woman so easily. It was midafternoon when the message came. I had been at swordplay with Pergvin and had won from that expert a certain measure of approbation. Since he was always more critical than commending, I felt new triumph. Perhaps that sense of being more alive, which I believed the belt afforded me, would now work to give me prestige among my fellows. So I was in a good-humored mood, which was not even dashed by a peremptory summons to my mother’s bower.

As I crossed the courtyard I was sure that this must be some ploy of Ursilla’s and that within the influence of the rooms where she had her own center of Power, it behooved me to go very warily indeed. Only I was no longer a small boy to be ordered about; at this moment, I felt all man grown, the master of my own destiny and life.

There was no sign of either the Lady Eldris or Thaney as I passed by their chambers, ascending to the floor where my mother ruled, with Ursilla ever at her shoulder. The cloying scents were gone as I climbed. Also, the room into which the waiting maid ushered me had no enwrapment of tapestry about its walls. Rather, it possessed uncovered windows through which came the light of day and the smell of the drying hay on the fields below.

Still there was richness here, also. My mother’s chair-of-state was as highbacked, as well cushioned, with its red mantle of House draped across it, as that of the Lady Eldris. And, in place of the tapestries, the harsh stone of the walls framed strips of parchment on which were painted uncanny-looking birds and beasts quite unlike those I had ever seen, the colors brightly laid on to make their scales, feathers, claws, horns and the like, brilliant and as near glittering as gems.

My mother sat with a lap table before her on which was spread just another such painted strip, where, within dark outlines, she was pointing a brush with care, filling it with small flecks of scarlet, and then, taking up a second brush, outlining each of these with a speck or two of gilding. She did not raise her head at my entrance, nor bid me any welcome.

I was used of old to such treatment, since she would not take her eyes from her labor until she had completed the particular portion of the picture she worked upon. That she was alone surprised me, for I expected Ursilla to be present, yet of the Wise Woman there was no sign.

The Lady Heroise placed the two brushes in a narrow tray upon her table and pushed it away from her. She surveyed me, coldly and critically.

“You are a fool!” She spoke at last.

Since that reception also I had had before, it raised no resentment in me, only a desire to have her come more quickly to the point and explain in just what fashion I was foolish.

“You have let them bring you to heel as if you were any hound from my Lord’s pack,” she continued coldly. “Why I should have a son so wit-lacking that he cannot even see when he is being leashed to another’s purpose—” She shrugged. “What is done—at least it can be undone.”

Still I waited. It pleased her to approach the subject in this involved fashion. When I was a child such maneuvers had some influence on me, so that I grew uneasy the longer she was inclined not to state my fault directly. Now, after years of this, I was able to curb any emotion her words aroused until she reached the heart of the matter.

“The Lady Eldris is—” she began and then hesitated. I had early learned that between her and her mother there was no love and very little liking, though when they met, their formal manners were well controlled, and they displayed the united front that custom demanded of them. That my mother had replaced the Lady Eldris as mistress here was sure and established, but I had never, through the years, caught any hint that this state of affairs caused any resentment. It was rather as if her mother had been content to relinquish the cares and duties of chatelaine to her daughter.

“You have been caught in her net,” the Lady Heroise now stated firmly. “If you do not break that influence early—” Again she hesitated. Then, at length, she apparently decided upon the blunt truth.

“The belt is cursed.”

That she believed what she said, I had no doubt. But that Ursilla had put that thought into her mind I was also certain.

“In what manner?” For the first time I broke silence with that question.

“It is a thing of the Wererace. Ursilla knew it for that when first she saw it. That the Lady Eldris must also have known it is our misfortune. For she saw in it a chance to get what has long been her will.”

“That being?” I asked again. In my early dealings with my mother, I had been very manageable. Now for the first time in my life, I could think my own thoughts and be myself. Perhaps this was because it was less than a full day’s time since I had tasted freedom such as I had never known before.

“To bring Maughus to the heirship.” Again my mother stated simply what must long have lain at the core of a silent struggle of will. “She gives to you this cursed thing in such a manner that it cannot be refused, setting upon it the symbol of betrothal. Already the belt has begun its work— Where ran you last night and in what form, Kethan?” She leaned forward, and her eyes seemed to blaze as they stared at me, in a lesser blaze perhaps, but not unlike the glitter the moon had drawn from my belt.

“I slept beside a woodland stream. I ran nowhere. And I am no shape-changer, my Lady.”

This was the result of Ursilla’s meddling. At that moment, however, another face flashed into my mind, that of the shrewd, pleasant, trader. What had he said to me at our private meeting? “Be guided by what you most desire and not the demands others would lay upon you. You shall be given a gift, cherish it.”

Now I added my answer, a question:

“How knew the Lady Eldris that her gift carried this Power?”

There was more than annoyance in my mother’s face. There was a flash of pure anger.

“From the trader, how else? Ursilla scented Power in him. He can only be one of those set to stir up mischief and strife. In other days there were such, traveling among our people, striving to influence them this way or that. Ursilla has read the stars. They are not well positioned for Car Do Prawn, perhaps even for this land.”

“You say that the Lady Eldris favors Maughus, that I know. But custom is custom. She cannot pass over the fact that I was born your son, thus am heir.” I was feeling my way cautiously, again as might a scout in forbidden territory, but here I must deal with words and not patches of shielding shadow among fields.

“Fool!” My mother arose to her feet, giving an impatient shove to the table that sent one paintpot to smash upon the stone. She paid no attention to the breakage. “A shape-changer is always vulnerable. Unless he is a trained Were, he has no control over such changes. Do you think that any within Car Do Prawn would accept your lordship if they knew that was your failing? It was tried here once before. There was an heir true born before Erach, of a different father. He was half Were, and when that was known, his mother, all within these walls, exiled him. You are not even half Were. Wear the cursed belt and you will not be able to control shape-changing. One moment a man—the next an animal! Do you think Thaney—any maid would wed with you? You would be hunted out from these walls. And—the longer you cling to that thing of horror—the deeper will become its hold on you! Give it to me!”

She held out her hand in imperious command.

What she had said, she believed. But the fact remained, I did not. To me this was a brew of Ursilla’s making. I had not forgotten her gaze turned upon the trader, the way her fingers had covertly moved as if she tried to spin some spell against him. I had no liking for the Wise Woman; in fact, during the past days, since my meeting with Ibycus, my feeling toward her had moved from awe and uneasiness close to detestation.

“This is Ursilla’s bidding,” I said slowly.

My mother’s hand dropped to her side. Her tongue tip showed between her lips, moved back and forth as if licking away something that lay there and was not to her liking. Her eyes had narrowed, and now her face was devoid of expression.

“You will obey me!”

I did not know until that moment that I possessed the strength to set my will against hers. And, as I found that possible, a frail wisp of the exultation I had known upon my waking brushed my mind. What did I care about their intrigues?

When I made no answer the Lady Heroise suddenly smiled, as if she had controlled the anger she had let me see.

“Very well.” The change in her tone was so abrupt that I was unable to adjust to it at once and was caught off guard. “Cling to your toy, child. You shall learn and when you do, pray that it is not too late and you have not lost all through your stupidity. Get out of my sight until you learn your duty and come back to it in the proper spirit.”

She seated herself composedly, drew her lap table once more into position, reached for her brush. It was plain that to her I no longer existed. But she had accepted a small appearance of victory on my part that heretofore would have been unthinkable.

I left the Tower with much to consider. Was Ursilla’s story the truth? Had the trader for some hidden purpose given the Lady Eldris a tool to use against me? Opposed to all my mother said, what did I have as arguments? The impression the trader had made upon me, the sense of complete lightness and confidence the belt had given me and the memory of a short part of the night free under the moon. All small, almost shadowy things, still they held me back now from believing that my mother—or Ursilla—might be totally right.

I knew that the Lady Eldris bore me no goodwill, and doubtless Thaney agreed with her. Who within the pile of Car Do Prawn, I wondered then, did have any friendship for me? To my mother and Ursilla, I was to be a tool. I had realized that since the time I had first knowledge. Lord Erach showed me no favor, only a kind of tolerance. Maughus, I was sure, hated me. Who else—Pergvin? Only perhaps.

And to him I could go with no questions about the belt. I knew what his reaction would be—give it up so I might not be more unpopular than I now was. As I recrossed the courtyard, I felt very much alone in that hour. Again in my room I unlaced my jerkin, pulled loose my shirt, and sought the clasp of the pard head.

It would not yield to my fingering!

I worked more and more furiously, striving to loose the buckle. It remained as stubbornly closed as if it had never opened before. In growing panic, I now believed that it was a thing of Power and perhaps it had come to possess me.

Staggering to the window, I leaned against the sill, drinking in cool air. My heart labored and my hands shook a little as I rested them on the stone, fighting for control. I—must—not—let—myself—open the gate to fear. Calmly, rationally, I must find the catch, loose this—

I rubbed my sweating fingers on my breeches to dry them, made them move slowly, not convulsively tear at the buckle. One pushed—thus—

The pard’s head released its grip, the belt loosed, would have looped free to fall to the floor, had I not caught it.

I held the strap up into the full light of the window, angry with myself. See how they could play upon me— make me believe their tales. A catch sticks a little and I am condemned to wear a curse about me! “Fool,” my mother had named me. Looking upon the belt I knew I was not that. I would be the greater fool if I let myself be ruled by their desires.

The wonder the belt had held for me from my first sighting flooded back. It was a precious thing! There was no harm in it. Instead, when I cherished it, I was nearer the free man I dreamed of being. If Ursilla would chain me again, she must have this. And she would not!

I clasped it about my waist with determination, hid fur and gem once again with shirt and jerkin. I was lacing the last when Pergvin came with a word from my Lord that I was to attend him in the Great Hall at once.

There was truly a gathering of authority awaiting me there. Not that I had any standing or could voice an opinion, but, as my Lord’s acknowledged heir, I must be present at his decisions. Cadoc, who was his Commander and Marshal, Hergil, a quiet, older man whose passion was the keeping of the records and who was reputed to know much of those who practiced the Were Power, were there. Hergil had been on a month-long absence from the Keep. But so unobtrusive a person was he that one did not miss his presence much. Neither did he speak often. But, need any reference be made to some event of the past, and it was to Hergil one applied for confirmation.

Maughus was very much to the fore. The years between us seemed to grow more instead of fewer as the seasons slipped by. Where he used to torment and belittle me, he was now wont to ignore me entirely. That I did not mind. Now he sat hard by his father, a goblet in his hand. This he turned around and around in his fingers as if admiring the time-blurred design embossed upon its sides.

I slipped into a place beside Hergil (none of them acknowledged my presence), subdued as always by the atmosphere of age and austerity that formed my impressions of the place.

“It is true then”—Erach spoke heavily, as if whatever news he must make plain to the rest of us was not of a favorable kind—“that there will be a muster of forces. We stand with The High Lord Aidan as does Bluemantle and Gold.”

“But Silver?” pressed Cadoc, as my uncle lapsed into silence.

“No man knows. There has been coming and going between the Keeps of the western marches and the Inner Lands.”

“Silver ever had a liking for alliance with the Voices of the Heights,” Hergil commented. “It was they who held the Hawk’s Claw for nigh half a year in the days before we took the Road of Memory out of the Dales. Their blood is half of the Oldest Ones under the moon.”

“But who meddles?” demanded Maughus suddenly. “I have been messenger to some twenty Keeps. I have ventured clear to the Whiteflow. Everywhere men are uneasy. They have taken now to riding armed when abroad. Yet there is no reported foray of the Wild Ones from the Higher Land, no war horn has sounded.”

I thought of Pergvin’s talk of how tides of trouble ebbed and flowed in Arvon, and that it was near time for our time of peace to be overset. But not to know the enemy for what he was—that was to loose upon us an unease greater than certainty might produce.

“We do not know,” his father replied then. “Yet such is our heritage that we can sense a storm ahead. It is said that the Voices read the star charts and so can foretell. If this they have done now, they have sent forth no warnings. It may well be that one of the Gates shall open and some terror long ago expelled through it return, strengthened and armed, to confront us.”

“There is this,” Hergil said in his quiet voice. Low though his tone was, we all turned our eyes to him. “There has been a great warring throughout our world. The Dales have battled ruthless invaders and, after a long term of years, driven them forth again. Overseas those of our cousinhood have also been embroiled in a struggle that has left them near beaten into the ground. This war they won, but in the winning, they made such an effort with the Power that for generations they will not be able to summon much to their service again.

“Thus our element of defense has been drained bit by bit, both from the new peoples who are not of our blood and from those who are like unto us. Who knows if such a draining has not weakened the safeguards of our world so that those beyond a Gate, or Gates, sense—or know— that this be the hour to move again?”

“Pleasant hearing!” commented my uncle. “But perhaps in the gloom lies bitter truth. For ourselves we can only try that we not be caught utterly defenseless. Therefore, let us live each hour as those who must prepare against a siege. Then, if disaster breaks, we shall be as ready as we can be without clearer knowledge. To each then a task—”

He began to lay out duties and labors for us all. Thus, in the stirring of some menace we could not put name to, I half-forgot my own private misgivings.

Of Maughus’s Plot and the Opening of my Own Eyes

By my uncle’s desire I dealt with the harvesting of our outer fields to the north. There I labored with our field men, not only checking in the loads upon the wains sent to the granaries about the Keep, but also aiding to pitch the bound sheafs upon those same wains. For with the feeling of pressure that had fallen upon us during those days, there was no division of rank, we worked hard together to make sure that we would be, as Lord Erach had promised, well prepared for any siege.

All other of our Clan Keeps might have been likewise employed, for no messengers came during those weeks. Nor were there now any lightsome plans for a Harvest fair such as had been our way in other years. It seemed better that each man remain in the safety of his own roof place and not go riding abroad farther than the limits of his own fields.

Each night I stumbled to my bed so spent of body, so drugged of mind by the long labors of that day that I had no thought of aught except a need for sleep before the dawn horn would arouse us in the morning for further efforts. I continued to wear the belt, but in those days, it was no more to me than any other article of clothing. Nor did I hear more from either my mother or Ursilla.

They were busied also. The brewing of our cordials, the preserving of fruit, the baking of the hard journey bread (which could be kept without spoiling for long periods of time) lay in their hands. Even the children of the village hunted down nut trees on the edge of the forest, disputing with the woodland creatures for the spoil of that hard-shelled harvest, dragging home bags of kernels that could be picked from their tough coverings, ground into meal, and used to season and add taste to bread.

The days, then the weeks passed, and time came once more to the full moon. Our labors were slackening. The greater part of all our land could produce in the way of food was now well stored. We had had perfect weather for that garnering—no days of rain—not even the overhang of a threatening cloud. Almost we could believe that the Power itself was extending this favor to us.

However, at times I heard the field men grumble. Or, when they straightened their backs for a moment’s rest, they looked about them with eyes that were not content, but questioned more and more. Their portion was too easy this year and they mistrusted that ease, fearing such might forerun some great difficulty to come.

On the eve of the first full moon, I rode the last wain back from the final field, my bones aching as if I had never known any rest for my body. There was no laughing, nor playing of rude jokes among my crew as had always been the portion of men released from hard but successful labor in other harvest times. I noted that, though our head reaper had woven the last stalks into the rude likeness of the Harvest Maid and the men toasted her in the cider sent to the field, yet they did so without joy, but as if this, too, was a duty that must be followed.

Nor did the Keep stand cheering as our wain trundled in, the Harvest Maid impaled on a pitchfork to top our load, though a semblance of the proper ceremonies existed in that those of the Keep had turned out to see us come into the courtyard. And my uncle gave the signal for a second toasting to the Maid.

I recognized the girl who handed the tankard to me. She served in my mother’s quarters upon occasion. Only now she gave me no smile, nor any word or greeting, but went mumfaced.

With my back set to the wall of the Youths’ Tower for support, my arm so tired that I could hardly force it to rise at my will, I brought the tankard to my lips and drank thirstily. This year even the cider had a bitterness to it that lingered on the tongue, so I did not finish my portion.

I was so spent after I had stumbled up the stairs to my chamber that I made no move to drop my clothing or wash my body in the water that stood waiting. Instead, I straightway fell upon my bed and closed my eyes. And I must have instantly fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep, for of that night, I remembered no more.

My awaking was slow. The sun painted a bright, glittering patch on the floor that hurt my eyes. The mighty ache that had been in my back the night before, now seemed to pulse within my skull. I raised my head, and the stone walls about me wavered, a bitter sickness flooded in my throat.

By will alone I lurched across the chamber to where the tall ewer of water stood. My hands trembled so I had to use both to raise it, and I splashed more liquid to the floor than into the basin beside it. But I scooped up some of what gathered there and dipped my face into it.

The chill of the water on my skin brought me out of the daze that had cloaked me. I was able to master my heaving stomach a little. That I had some illness—no! My mind moved sluggishly, but I was remembering the bitter taste of the cider I had drunk the night before. And she who had brought me the potion was under Ursilla’s bidding.

Now I became aware that the stained and rumpled shirt I had worn to bed was no longer laced, but flapped loosely about me, baring my body and—the belt!

My hands flew to assure me with touch that the report of my eyes was the truth, that it had not been reft from me. However, that theft had been attempted was my strong suspicion. The drink had been drugged. Ursilla knew well the lore of herbs, both helpful and harmful. Such learning was a necessity for any Wise Woman. Why she had not been able to accomplish her purpose while I lay helpless I could not understand. Nor could I confront her, or my mother, with mere suspicion.

But this experience proved that I must begin to mistrust what lay about me. My stubborn conviction that I would not surrender the belt, no matter what scheming might lie behind the Lady Eldris’s gift, was only strengthened by these suspicions. I would not be forced, nor plundered, if I could help it.

While I stripped and bathed in what water was left, brought forth fresh clothing, my mind was busy. It came to me that the moon’s phases might have something to do with Ursilla’s actions. I wished I knew more of shape-changing. Perhaps if I approached Hergil— Dare I? I hesitated to take any action that might reveal a weakness Maughus could seize upon.

Were the Lady Eldris and Thaney only waiting for me now to betray myself? I shrugged on a clean shirt, the linen of its folds pleasantly scented with the herbs used to battle those inroads of damp and mildew that haunted the Keep walls, drew its lacings tight, once more hiding my belt.

Tonight again there was a full moon. I had answered to the wild excitement the belt had engendered the last time only once—on the first night of such a moon. But, since Ursilla’s drugs had prevented me last night from any experience, could it be that the second night might answer as well?

I must know and I could not trust the word of any— even Hergil. Certainly not that of my mother or Ursilla. Therefore, this day I would walk with care, eat and drink with greater concern—which would be easy enough. During the Harvest there were no formal meals within the Great Hall, men were given cakes of journey bread, cheese and dried meat directly from the kitchen when they so called for it. By the temper shown last night, I did not believe that there would be much feasting this day. And, even if such be served, I could fill myself with fruit and the like, avoiding aught that might be meddled with.

When I issued forth from my chamber, it was near midmorning, so long had that drug kept me in thrall. The courtyard, in contrast to the activity of the past few weeks, was almost slumberous. I could hear voices from the stables, but no one moved in the open. Though my stomach had earlier troubled me, now I felt a great hunger and made my way to the buttery hatch where one could obtain a serving of bread and cheese upon demand.

As I rapped upon the sill one of the cook boys bobbed into sight. His own chin was sticky and he was licking crumbs from his lips as he eyed me, flushed of face, as if I had caught him out in some petty pilfering.

“Your wish, Lord?” he squeaked and near choked in the process from some ill-chewed lump he had swallowed in far too great a hurry.

“Bread, cheese—” I told him shortly.

“Cider also?”

I shook my head. “What I have said, no more.”

Perhaps my words were a little too forceful, for he looked surprised as he went. I was annoyed by my small self-betrayal. Care and care—that I must take now.

He reappeared with a course napkin for a server. In that was a thick portion of bread that had been raggedly slit open and a lump of cheese pushed in. Since the bread was still warm enough to melt the cheese a fraction, I thought I could accept it as trustworthy.

I gave him thanks and, with the napkin in hand, I straightway made for the gate and so came out into the open of the day. The sun blazed overhead with hardly a trace of cloud to be sighted. At this hour the dew was well sucked away from grass and bush, and the mown fields were dusty brown, almost withered looking. I turned my back upon them and went along an ancient path of moss-grown blocks into the garden where herbs and flowers were grown, both for their scents and their healing virtues.

However, here too was company. I heard the higher voices of women, saw three who moved among the late-season roses, harvesting those full-blown blooms that would be rendered into cordials or sugared for sweetmeats. Having seen the maids before they saw me, I slipped into another path, bordered by high-growing berry bushes, now nearly stripped of their fruit burdens.

It was the sound of my own name that made me pause. Though I had no intent of listening to the chatter of those busied with their rose culling, yet to hear oneself spoken of is bait few, if any, can resist.

“It is true—they sent old Malkin to the Youths’ Tower in the night—to the Lord Kethan’s chamber. She came shuffling back, sniffling as if she feared to have her ears boxed near off her head. I would not wish to run errands for the Wise Woman. She—”

“Best bridle your tongue, Hulda! That one has eyes and ears everywhere!” There was a stern warning in the rebuke.

“I reckon there are eyes enough on our young Lady. She has sulked for days and her temper rises with the sun and does not set with it. Yesterday she threw her mirror at Berthold and cracked it side to side—”

I heard a sound like a breath sucked forebodingly. “That is an uncanny thing.”

“So the Lady Eldris told her,” retorted she who had reported the happening. “Also our Lady pointed out that mirrors are not commonly come by, and there may be no more traders this season from whom Thaney can get another. Then Lord Maughus came in and they put on smooth faces and sent all from the room that they might talk in private.”

“Yes. That was when Malkin was on the stairs so long. I say she is one of the ears you spoke of.”

“If she can hear through door and wall, her ears are far better than most. She is so old I wonder that she can still creep around.”

“Have you ever thought—” And now the voice asking the question dropped to a tone hardly above a whisper, yet it came clearly to me. “Have you ever thought that Malkin might be—different?”

“What mean you?”

“She serves the Wise Woman, but no other. I heard old Dame Xenia once say that Malkin came with the Wise Woman and that, even in the days that are longer ago than any of us are now old, Malkin looked the same, like a worn old shadow barely able to creep about. You know she never comes into our solar, nor has she ever spoken, that I heard tell of, unless someone asks her some direct question. There is a strangeness about those eyes of hers, too.

“Though she keeps them most times cast down in a way that veils them from anyone who looks upon her, yet, I tell you, when she goes into the dark, she never takes up candle or lamp to light her way, but walks straightly as if dark still be light to her.”

“The Wise Woman seems to trust her. I wonder why she was to seek out the young Lord. Ralf saw her on the stairs, and then he watched her lift the latch of the Lord’s chamber. Nor did he hear any sound of voice within as if she brought some message. He wanted to learn more but his lord summoned him straightway and he did not have a chance—”

“Peeking, prying—you and Ralf—would you get the Wise Woman to turn her eyes upon you, Hulda? You are very unwise if you chance that!”

“Yes. And do not tell us your tales, either! I have no wish to gain either her notice or her ill will! It is enough that we must live with the changes of spirit our young Lady shows, or the sometime full angers of the Lady Eldris. Let those who serve above have their own worries. Let me see the baskets—ah, we have enough for the first drying. And do you both watch your tongues and think no more of what Malkin does or does not do in the night!”

I heard the swish of their skirts as they moved from me. But what they had said fully confirmed my suspicions that it was Ursilla’s hand and mind that lay behind my night of unconsciousness. Well, her servant had not gotten what she had been sent for, though I could not count that as any triumph on my part. As I found a bench at the far end of the garden, one sheltered by two walls of shrubs, I chewed my bread and cheese, more mindful of my thoughts than the food I swallowed.

Upon one thing I was determined, that come nightfall this eve, I would not be any prisoner of Ursilla’s. Should I stay apart from the Keep, here in the open? The memory of that wondrous night upon my first putting on the belt was enough to make me long for another. Yet perhaps, were I missing, my mother might well summon out a force to hunt me down. It would be better that aught I did be done secretly. Though she might have set them to watch and spy upon my coming and going.

The sun did not reach in to me here, and there was a drowsy contentment in the garden that began to lull me. Fat bees, about their harvesting with the same vigor as we had shown these past weeks, blundered heavily laden from flower to flower, and birds sang. It was very hard here and now to believe in intrigue and danger.

Slowly, I became aware of something else, that my own senses seemed heightened in a way I had never before noted. When I looked about me colors were brighter, the outlines of plants and flowers sharper, more distinct. The scents caught by my nostrils were richer, my hearing keener. I do not know why I was so sure that this was so, I accepted it as the truth.

There grew in me a need to be one with the growth about me. I dropped from the bench to kneel upon the grass, run my fingertips among its blades as if I lovingly combed the fur of some giant placid beast slumberously well content. I bent my head to sniff at the faint, delicate perfume of some tiny flowers that hung bell-fashion from a stem as thin as a thread, to tremble a little in the air displaced by my movement. The wonder of what was happening filled me until I forgot all that threatened, was content to just be in this place at this hour.

Such a moment could not last. As it faded slowly, the old doubts and lacks of my life returned stronger than ever. In this place, I now felt like one who disturbed peace, a brash intruder, so I left.

There was not a feasting, but a dining together that night. I sat in my place looking from face to face, alert to any glance, any change of countenance that might gain me fuller knowledge. There was laughter and much giving of toasts, thanks brimming for the bountiful Harvest.

However, all this surface clatter rang shallow, and those gathered here seemed feverishly bent on making a clamor, perhaps to drown out their own thoughts.

I ate with care, sparingly. When I replied to toasts, I was thankful for the solid metal of the goblet that did not reveal that I touched lip only and did not drink. Also, I contrived to pour away the liquid surreptitiously into an urn, filled with flowering branches, that luckily was placed behind my seat.

Ursilla did not show herself. But my mother fronted the Lady Eldris across the board, and Thaney sat among the unwed maids at their own table after the custom. I was conscious that Maughus watched me from time to time. But his regard I did not fear at this moment as much as I did some hidden act. For I believed that his dislike was so open any move he might ever make toward my discomfiture would be delivered without need of subtlety before the faces of all.

Our dining broke up early. There was little heart for the games and singing. Throughout the meal, Lord Erach, though present in person, seemed otherwhere in thought, though now and then he spoke low voiced to Hergil. And he wore a frown that deepened with every such exchange.

I was growing impatient. To be by myself, to attempt once more to elude all the Keep and those it contained, to hunt out the freedom I had savored, the need worked within me until it seemed that I could no longer control it. So I slipped away, heading for my chamber since I knew better than to seek the outside when any there might watch my going.

Only—when I deemed that it be time that I could try to leave and I set hand upon the latch—I discovered it had been made fast outside. Then indeed I cursed myself for a fool! How easy a way to bring me under control— yet I had not foreseen it! Had Ursilla somehow ensorcelled me from afar so I had overlooked so simple a thing and taken no precautions?

Back and forth I paced the chamber. There was no cool breeze through the window. Rather now the walls about me radiated heat as the moon arose and its silver beamed outside. I was burning, stifled—

My fingers tore at my clothing, pulling off the cumbersome fabrics and leathers, so that on my body was now only the belt. I looked down at it. The jargoon buckle was blazing—as if it sucked avidly at that heat I felt about me, used such to build up an inner energy.

The gem dazzled my sight and—

I lifted my head. My position seemed awkward. I could see only at an angle. But—I was on my hands and knees—no! I was—on four padded paws, wearing a body covered in light golden fur. A tail twitched, arose in answer to an involuntary tug of muscle I did not know I possessed. I opened my mouth to cry out, but what issued from my jaws was a heavy half-grunt, half-growl sound.

Against the far wall rested the polished shield that was not only made for battle, but that served also as a mirror. I moved toward it and saw reflected in its center—a pard!

Yet there was no fear, no panic in me following the first moment or two. Rather I lifted my head high and knew a triumph and a glory in this body. Why did men speak so evilly of shape-changing? In their ignorance they did not realize what might come to him who so tasted knowledge that was not of his own species—his limited species—

I gloried in my muscles, in the quick sinuosity of my movements as I prowled back and forth. And I was so caught in the wonder of my change that I did not hear the lifting of the latch. It was only when the light of a lamp banished the moonlight that I whirled about, snarling.

Just in time, I sighted the bared steel of a sword, knew that was what Maughus waited for, that I should attack him. However, though I might wear a new shape, my own mind was still in command. I would not play my cousin’s game so easily.

He was not alone. Darkly cloaked, the hood half slipping from her head, Thaney stood behind his shoulder. Her face was a wry mask of disgust.

“Slay him!” Her hoarse whisper rasped in my ears.

Maughus shook his head. “No, he must reveal himself as what he is—I am too well known for my dislike of him. I will have no man say my sword drips his blood because I would have his heritage. But you see the truth of it, sister. He is a shape-changer. We need only say that and men, in their present state of dreading all that may be manifestations of the Dark, will get rid of him for us.”

He moved back, still holding the sword at the ready. The door slammed. I heard once more some bar drop across, prisoning me within.

Of the Wild Hunt and My flight Therefrom

For a moment the beast was uppermost in me. I leaped for the door, crashing against it with bruising force. Whatever bar Maughus had set held stoutly. When I heard my own snarl, the sound put a curb to the animal part. What my cousin intended for me I could not guess, but that it would be a peril great enough to endanger perhaps even my life, I believed.

No longer did I delight in my new body. I wanted out of it, back into the familiar shape that was truly mine. Yet I knew no spell, nor trick of ensorcellment, which would win that for me. Bitterly I realized how right Ursilla had been, my mother had been, in distrusting the belt. My mother had named me “fool.” Now, in my desperate plight, I laid a far harder name upon myself.

What had happened was only too plain. Somehow— perhaps through the trader Ibycus—the Lady Eldris had learned the secret of the belt and made sure that it would be put into my hands. Thus she could well remove me from the path of her favorite. Because I knew only too well that what Maughus had said moments ago was the truth—a shape-changer had no good name among those of the Clans. Such a one was alien, one with the forest people, the halfling bloods that the wholly human never quite trusted.

With those of the Keep people so worked upon already by the cloud of suspicion that had crept slowly to poison their peace, they would treat me as they had Lady Eldris’s halfling son in the long ago—drive me into exile. But my lot would not be even as good as his, for I had no Werekin to seek out, no other shelter awaiting me.

The belt—I lowered my head, looked at my furred body. Yes, beast form though I might wear, the belt was also still about me. I could not distinguish its fur well because it matched my own present hide. But the jargoon head shone bright and clear. Suppose I could rid myself of that binding? Would I regain man form so?

However, though I hooked at the fastening with the claws of one paw, jerked and pulled at the buckle, it remained fast closed. The window? Dared I leap from the window, find a place to hide until moonset? That much lore I had learned from the Chronicles—that the full moon largely controlled such changes.

I reared up on my hind legs, rested my paws upon the sill, crowded head and shoulders forward that I might stare down. My chamber lay in the second story of the Tower, the drop below was sheer and without a break. I was not yet used enough to my new body to attempt such a leap; and, as I stood so supported within the window frame, I heard a small sound from the direction of the chamber door.

It required but an instant to drop to four feet again, pad across to listen. Had I really heard the stealthy withdrawal of the bar that held me prisoner? I was not sure.

If the barrier was now gone, who had taken it? Maughus wishing to entice me out for his dark purpose? Or did I have some friend here who wished to upset my cousin’s plan?

I lifted a forepaw and extended the claws, catching them in the crack between door and wall. Slowly, and noiselessly, I levered. The door responded, moving toward me. It was unfastened. Knowing that, I paused to listen. For I was sure that the hearing possessed by my new shape was superior to that of any man. Just as the air I drew into my wide nostrils held scents I had never known before.

There was no sound from without. I heard not the slightest hint of breathing of anyone set to attack when I came forth. A choice was before me—remain where I was and await the fruit of Maughus’s malice, or escape —if escape I could—and meet him later on my own terms.

The scales inclined in favor of the latter decision. Again I pawed at the door, this time perhaps applying too much strength, for it swung widely open. The light without did not seem overly dim to me. Again the pard’s heritage was mine. In my mind I had a plan of what I must do. There was only one person within this stone pile who might now give me aid (not for my sake but because of her own plans)—Ursilla! Learned in the old knowledge, she would know what could be done to rid me of this shape, or at least hold me in safety until the hour of natural change came. Then—I must in turn yield to her demands and let her have the cursed belt. With that gone, Maughus could prove nothing, do nothing—

I slipped noiselessly out of the chamber. The smell of man was strong and with it another odor that brought an involuntary snarl to wrinkle my feline muzzle—hound. However, I could see no one, hear no one. Whoever had released me from the trap my own quarters had provided had not lingered. Pergvin? Yet how would he have known—unless Maughus had talked freely of what he suspected and planned to do.

The stairs were before me. Softly, I skulked down them. Before me was another portal, this one also barred, but with the bar resting on my side. I rose, my paws braced against the door, set my muzzle under the edge of the bar, pushed awkwardly.

At first the length of metal resisted, but then it began to move, with a grating sound that seemed thunder-loud in my ears. I paused to listen—more than a little suspicious now. What if Maughus had set up this whole venture to tempt me into the open where he could make public my change before I could reach Ursilla? Yet what choice did I have? To hide in my chamber tamely and wait to be unmasked was something my nature would not allow me to do.

Finally, the bar thudded back far enough to release the door. I gave it a strong push and so won out into the open. There I slunk into the nearest shadow to listen and to sniff.

Horse—hound—man—strong odors, but ones I knew even when in my own body. With them were a myriad of new scents I could not put name to. In spite of my determination to be utterly done with the belt and all it meant, there was some excitement, the feeling of freedom, rising within me. I had to force myself to control those impulses, to realize there was now only one possible freedom—to be released from the belt and what it had laid upon me.

I surveyed the Ladies’ Tower. The lower door would be night-barred on the inner side— Then I thought of Thaney. If she had issued forth secretly from there, might she not have left it unlatched, ready for her return? However, upon that I could not depend. There was the outer wall of the Keep that stood on the far side. Were I to gain that, it could well follow that, from the higher surface, I could leap to the window of my mother’s apartment, which fronted in that direction. At the moment, I could see no other way.

Yet to gain the top of the wall I must go through the outer guardroom, up stairs meant to aid defenders to reach the parapet in times of siege. Now there was an unnatural quiet about the courtyard itself that I found disturbing.

To pass the way I must go, I needs must skirt both the stable and the run where the hunting hounds were kenneled. Knowing how strong animal odors were to me, I could not but believe that both horses and hounds would scent in turn the pard who slunk past. All I needed to bring about discovery would be such a sudden clamor in the night.

I could not remain where I was, though. So, my belly fur brushing the stones, I began a stealthy swing toward my chosen goal. I was never to reach even the edge of the stable.

A clamor of hound cries broke the still of the night as if ripping apart the sky itself. Into the moonlight burst the foremost of the pack that my uncle boasted would be ready to face even a snow cat at bay. They continued to give tongue, yet they did not close in upon me. But the fear and anger born of their charge filled me, driving out the man, giving full freedom to the beast.

I leaped, claws extended. The hounds yelped, crowded back. Now the horses within the stable must have caught my scent, for they seemed to go mad, their wild whinnies rising. Men were shouting, pouring into the courtyard. A crossbow bolt whistled by me.

The hounds were between me and the Gate. If I did not win past them, I would be shot. There were not enough shadows to give me cover and the hounds would nose me out of any hiding place. The largest, the pack leader, Fearfang, was between me now and the Youths’ Tower.

He alone of the bristling, snarling dogs seemed prepared to carry the fight to me. He paced, his eyes shining redly in the limited light, his lips lifted in a continuous snarl, though he uttered no sound. The animal in me knew that, while the others were made prudent by fear, this hound wanted only battle.

I gathered my feet under me. My tail twitched. Then I jumped, my bound lifting me over the pacing threat of the hound. Nor did I halt then, but went through the Gate in great leaps, heading for the open, which to the beast side of me was the only promise of escape.

The hounds, heartened by my retreat, gave tongue loudly. I knew that Fearfang must be in the lead. Also, there was more shouting now. Over my head arched a flaming fire arrow, to strike in the stubble of a field and provide a torch that already was lighting the chaff about it.

The arrow was my answer as to whether or not I had entered what was meant to be a trap. Someone had loosed the hounds, had prepared the arrow and others like it now streaking through the sky to strike about me. Not only was I betrayed as a shape-changer, but, in addition, I would be hunted. Were I to die during such a hunt, he who planned the action could plead that he had taken me for truly being the wild animal whose guise I wore. And I knew in my heart that Maughus meant to make completely sure of me.

For an interval I fled blindly, my only thought to keep ahead of hounds and hunters. That there would be hunters I had no doubt at all now. Then once more my mind brought under control the frightened beast. It was needful that I get away from those who hunted me, yes, find some: shelter where I could wait until the day destroyed my ensorcellment. But that I could not do by purposeless flight.

I had never ridden on any hunt. The peculiar reaction of both mounts and hounds had kept me from learning the skill that was considered so much a part of a man’s training. Thus I had no knowledge to guide me now—unless—

Unless I allowed, deliberately allowed, full rise to the part of me that was pard, not man! Dared I do so? I was reluctant, yet the fear of death may present one with bitter but unescapable choices. I tried now to submerge the man in the animal, discovering it frighteningly easy to do.

What followed then was as if I was a distant spectator of my own actions. The queer separation within me was hard to define for anyone who had not experienced it. Yet it existed, and, I think, did save me from what Maughus intended.

My speed had well outstripped any riders, though I could hear their cries, even the sound of a rallying horn. If any fire arrows now fell, they landed well behind, just as I was slipping from the fields.

I dug claws into soft bark and climbed into the first of the more massive trees. But that in itself was no refuge. The hounds need only gather below and they would have me trapped, to be held for the arrival of their masters. Many of the trees were giants—their lower limbs wide enough for me to pace cautiously. From the first such I made a desperate leap to the next, catching hold of a second limb, then scrambling to walk and climb for a second airborne advance.

Four trees did I so use to break my trail. However, there was no further way offered from the fifth. All I could do was jump as wide as possible, landing in brush that broke under my weight, to my discomfiture.

The strip of woodland, while narrow, ran far to the north, reaching into the hill region usually avoided by the Clan people. That it had other inhabitants, I well knew, and some of them could be summoned by my hunters to give news of my going. Others were such as I had no wish to meet either as a beast or man. If I might only find someplace to lie up until dawn I was sure that my escape would be assured. Beyond that point I did not now try to look.

The clamor of the hounds had grown fainter. Perhaps they were baffled by my expedient of taking to the trees. They might well be doing sentry duty under the one I had first climbed. I did not run wildly now, but slowed to a steady pace.

From my right came the sound of running water, perhaps the same stream that had drawn me on my first venture with the belt. Water, too, could be used to cover my trail. I veered off from the direction I had been traveling and came out upon the stream bank. Here the moon shone fully. To my cat’s eyes, all was near and clear as it might be for a man at midday.

I pushed into the water, involuntarily hissing as it washed about my legs nigh shoulder-high, disliking the sensation of wet fur. But I trotted on against its current upstream. I do not know how far I so journeyed before I reached a sprawl of rocks with many wide crevices that appealed to the animal part of me as adequate for concealment. The moon was riding down the sky now. In so much I had won. I need only stay here until the morning and—

However, all my wariness, my stratagems, had been for naught. There was a flash of wings in the air over me. Then the same wings were buffeting my head, my shoulders. Pain lanced my body, as a great hawk used beak and talons on my back just above my loins. I threw myself down to roll upon the ground, beat up at the bird, still so shaken by the sudden attack that I did not know how to counter successfully.

Though I lashed out, squalling as any infuriated cat might, the hawk had achieved its purpose. I watched it rise, my last frenzied leap falling far short as the bird spiraled upward. In its talons hung the belt, swinging limply, its buckle still clasped, but the hide of its making clawed and torn in two.

I crouched upon the stone. The gashes the bird had left in my back during its ruthless attack smarted with pain. Worse was the fear that, with the belt torn so from my possession, I had been exiled to beast form. If I only knew more of shape-changing! And why had the hawk—?

The bird could not have been any servant of Maughus’s. No normal predator could have been trained for such a purpose. No—the creature was either one of the unknown and to be feared aliens of the forest—or— A sudden thought made me growl. Ursilla?

I had no idea of the width of the Wise Woman’s knowledge. But I had a hearty respect for what she might do. That she might accomplish such an act as this could not be denied. Now I was not even sure that the bird had been a true hawk. It was well known that those dealing with the Power could summon divers strange servants. While such an act had never occurred in the past when I had lived with Ursilla, I dared not judge this to be outside her range of talent.

If Ursilla had the belt! Sorely shaken and not a little afraid, I looked about me, and, choosing the largest of the crevices, I crept inside.

Catlike, I licked the moisture from my fur, strove to put healing tongue to the scratches my attacker had left. But few of them could I reach. Then I lay full length, my head resting on my forepaws. The night and the chase had been long, my body ached for sleep. Rest— I could no longer deny it.

I think I half-expected to wake and find myself ringed with the hunters. But I hoped that I would rouse in the form of a man. When the sun reached well into my hiding place and I opened my eyes, it was to know the full truth. I was still a pard. Knowing that, I realized fear to the full, the fear that had first touched me when I had seen the bird wing off with the torn belt. I was trapped in this form without the key to shape-changing.

Also, I awoke with the deep hunger of the animal, the absolute need to fill an aching belly. Once more, if I were to survive, I must let instinct overbear human reason. That instinct led me to the streamside.

Fish swam there. Sighting them, saliva filled my mouth, drooled a little from between my jaws. I hunched down, poised a paw. A swift movement, then a fish flopped beside me, leaving me absurdly pleased at the result of my untried skill. My fangs snapped and I gulped down mouthfuls, hardly tasting what I ate.

The stream dwellers had fled, there would be no more caught here. I padded along past the rocks, made another try—and missed. But the third landed me an unwary catch twice the size of the first. Having finished it off, I sat up on my haunches to look around.

Where I might now be, except well into the forest land, I had no idea. Nor was I even sure in which direction the Keep lay. I could backtrail downstream and seek to return the way I had come. Only I had no doubt that were I to do so I would meet with Maughus and the hounds. Until those from the Keep had given up the hunt, I would not dare go back. Yet I must know whether it was Ursilla’s creature that had taken the belt, leaving me more securely a prisoner than if I lay behind bolted and barred doors and stone walls.

Also, those in the woodlands who had friendship with the Clan people would certainly be alerted to give knowledge if they saw me. I knew that a pard was a beast seldom if ever found this far north—being more truly native to the southwest Waste. At this very moment there could be spying eyes upon me—

The thought of that drove me once more back to the rocks and the crevice. I hated to skulk within as if fear ruled me. However, prudence is sometimes a weapon when others fail. Let me, now that I was fed, lie up for the day and set out by night. The great cats are mainly creatures of the dark, and perhaps, with shadows about me, the fact that I was not one of those known to hunt in the woods would not be so easy to perceive.

My thoughts continued to worry away at me, so I got little sleep that day. I watched two of the small forest deer splash across the stream. The pard part of me responded with a message of meat, while the man noted their graceful trot and wished them well.

The man still alive in me—

That was the thought, which haunted me with dark and lingering dread. If I remained caught within the beast, how long might that man live? For perhaps the appetites and the desires of the pard would grow stronger and stronger with time, until there was no Kethan to be remembered or to control, only the cat to be hunted and slain if his enemies could encompass that.

Ursilla would know—she would rescue me—if I could reach her. There might be a fearsome price to pay for the bargain. And—

The other thought arose then. Would it ever be well to pay such a price? Might it not be better to remain a pard than yield wholly to Ursilla and my mother, lose all command of my own destiny, held by their reins as if I were one of the plodding, heavy-footed horses that had no other life in this world than to haul the wains, their years lived out in the harness put upon them by uncaring men?

I could not utterly suppress the sense of excitement and freedom that was returning now that the chase was well behind me. To be a prisoner—no! My pard side denied that. Better death than to be caught in Ursula’s net. Still— if I could gain the belt—without any bargain?

To dream of that was foolish indeed. I knew I was no match for Ursilla—a trained Wise Woman. How could I dare to think that I might win in any contest between us?

A Wise Woman—

I raised my head from my paws, causing a twitch of pain in the talon slashes by my sudden movement.

There was more than one Wise Woman in Arvon. And there were others too—the Voices—the many who had mastery of one part of the Power or another. There were those right here in the forest who might not be well disposed toward all humankind, but who might be tricked or wheedled into sharing some part of their knowledge.

That was a wild thought, one that had little hope of ever becoming a plan I could put into action. Yet it began to fill my mind, and the excitement born of the belt fed its growing.

Of the Maid in the Forest and the Star Tower

By twilight I had slept a little and my hunger was once more awake. Though I ranged along the stream for some distance trying my fishing skill again, I had no luck. Either my first successes were due to some fleeting pity from Fortune, or else the fish had been warned by them, though the latter hardly seemed likely in such a short time.

Eat I must, and food that might have sustained me in my true form—berries, cresses and the like—would not suffice now. I must have meat, and the pard was fast taking command, induced by hunger into attempting a true hunt.

I was still padding along the riverbank when a rank smell alerted my animal senses. It was meat—on the hoof and not too distant. As they had during my escape from the Keep, the set of beast instincts claimed me. I was now all pard and not man.

Two bounds carried me to the top of a ridge of stone. A light breeze blew toward me, bearing a heavy reek from my destined prey. My eyes, better adjusted to this twilight than human ones would be, marked well what snorted, grunted, snuffled and rooted below. A family of wild pigs, a fearsomely tusked boar in command, was moving toward the stream.

Even the pard hesitated to challenge such a formidable opponent. The boars were noteworthy as one of the greatest perils of the forest, rightly feared by even those who would dare to tree a snow cat. Their tusks were wickedly sharp, and the creatures had a sly cunning that they used well when trailed. It was known that they sometimes doubled back to set an ambush for any hunter foolish enough to track them in their own territory.

Surprise would be my best weapon. I crept along the stone, flowing forward in that silence native to the feline species when they find need to employ it.

Though the younger pigs, even the sow, looked to be better eating, I knew that the boar must be my quarry, since with him disabled or dead, the greatest danger would be gone. My muscles tensed for the leap.

The sow, with her piglets and two half-grown older offspring, had snorted on a length ahead. The boar was tearing up the ground with his tusks as if he dug for some delicacy he had sniffed lying below the surface.

I sprang, giving voice to no cry. And I landed true, the weight of my body bearing the rank-smelling animal under me to the ground. My jaws made a single, sharp snap, and I delivered a blow with one paw, putting into it all the force I could summon. The boar lay still, his neck broken, dead in an instant.

Then I heard grunting and raised my head, voicing a warning snarl of my own. The sow now faced me, her litter sheltered behind her, rage plain to read in every line of her body.

I snarled again, watching the small, red eyes. Would she attack? While not having the strength of her mate, she was still such a fighter when cornered as to make any attacker think twice. I crouched lower over the body of the boar, readying for a charge if she showed fight.

The young pigs squealed, uttering a thin, ear-troubling sound, and the two older ones pawed the ground. Yet they made no move, seeming to wait for some unheard order from their dam.

When the sow did not rush, I decided she was only on guard for her young. I took hold of the body of my kill, retreated slowly backward, ever watching the sow. She continued to grunt, lowering her head to tear at the trampled soil with her lesser tusks. Though the picture of seething rage, she did not move toward me.

At last she raised her heavy head, gave a final grunt, and whirled with a speed I thought uncommon to her species. Driving her litter before her, flanked by the two older pigs, she had the whole family on the run. I was left to drag my kill to the top of the ridge and there satisfy my hunger, firmly closing my human mind to what I did, allowing the pard full control.

Before I had finished, I heard small rustlings and knew that at a safe distance around me the scavengers, drawn by the scent of my feast, were gathering. When I was gone they would move in to fight and squabble over what remained, until only well-picked bones would lie among the rocks.

I had eaten, now I would drink—but farther on. I had no wish to once more front the sow and her litter. Though I had faced her down once, if I came again and seemed to threaten her piglets, I could well have such a struggle as would mean grave danger. Again Fortune had favored me in that quick, sure kill from which I had come unmarked. There was no reason to exhaust my luck by too frequent testings of it.

The moon was rising slowly. Its reflection did not yet shimmer on the water as I drank deeply and then sat down to lick clean my fur. My hunger and thirst satisfied, my beast nature was lulled. I was ready to think again.

The plan for seeking out some forest Wise One to aid me seemed very thin and difficult to follow. Yet I dared not so soon return to the vicinity of the Keep where I was certain Maughus and his huntsmen waited. Or would my mother and Ursilla bring such pressure to bear that he would have to abandon his plan for ridding himself of the obstacle that I was? There was no way of guessing what passed behind me. It was better to turn all thoughts to what might lie about or before me at this moment.

As I lingered by the stream, my ears and eyes reported what action they could detect. I heard movement among the trees, picked up scents. Huge-winged night moths hovered over the water feeding on smaller winged things that rose from the reeds or stream edge. Now and then another airborne marauder swooped upon the moths to take a victim. About me the land, air, water seethed with life as I had never been aware of it when I had walked as a man.

Since I still had no other guide, I decided to travel along the stream. There were game trails that came down to the water here and there. Perhaps I might find one that also served men or beings enough like men to be approached. On so slender a hope I must hang for a time.

Though I picked up many scents as I prowled, never was there one that my pard self did not recognize as animal. If I did cross the territory of any of the forest people, such was not made known to me, even by my new, keener senses. At length, I began to despair of ever finding an intelligence of the sort to comprehend my troubles.

It was when my hope had reached the lowest point, was near vanishing indeed, that I heard low singing not born from the rippling water to my left. The notes, rising and falling in a cadence near that of a chant, drew me.

I lifted my head as high as I might, awaking twinges again from the claw wounds on my back, sniffing the night air. Human! There was before me someone of the species I had once been before the curse of the belt imprisoned me. And any human who chose the forest for a place of dwelling should surely be in touch with the Power!

Among the trees I stalked, the chant growing ever louder as I went. I could distinguish words now, but they had no mind-meaning. Still, that they were of the Power was made manifest by the tingling in my hide, the answering excitement they engendered. No man can pass unshaken when some sorcery is at work nearby.

At last I crouched behind a fallen tree, gazing out into a glade where the moon shone clearly upon a pillar of glistening, flashing quartz—gemlike with life-fire beneath its light. For life of a sort coiled and flowed within its length, moving with the constant play of some imprisoned flame.

At the column foot, encircling it, grew a mass of plants, each one crowned with a single silver-white flower, which mirrored in miniature the moon above, under which they opened their petals as if they thirsted for the same light. They gave forth a subtle perfume as fresh as any springtime breeze, though this was the autumn season.

From behind the pillar of cold flame came the singer. She rested against one hip a wide, flat basket into which she dropped bloom heads she snapped from among the flowers. And as she made her choice she chanted.

In the moonlight her body was as white and fair as the harvest she was culling. Her only garment was a belt about her slender waist, from which depended a short fringe of skirt giving forth soft tinklings at her every move. This fringe was fashioned of silvery disks strung on fine chains, a number spaced on each chain.

Between her small, young breasts hung the symbol of the horned moon, appearing carved of the same flaming crystal as the pillar about which she paced. Her long, dark hair was fastened at the nape of her neck with a band of silver, but strands brushed behind her fringed skirt, so long were the locks.

I had never seen her like, even among the forest folk. My pard nose told me she was human as to scent, yet no maid from the Clans would walk alone in the forest rapt in a ceremony of Power, performing some rite in the moonlight. She must be a Wise Woman. Yet, she was as different from Ursilla as the first beams of dawn light are from the dregs of a long and dusty day.

Three times more she wove her path around the pillar, plucking the flower heads until her basket was heaped high. Then she took it in both hands and, standing so she half-faced me, she held her harvest high, her face turned up to the moon as she chanted louder. She might be so giving thanks for what she had garnered.

Haw she beauty? I did not know, I could not judge her by the standards of the Keep. But there was that in me which struggled for freedom from my furred curse. In that moment when I looked upon her so, I was all inwardly a man, and a man drawn by the fairest that lies in women.

So great was her Power (her own Power and not that of the Wise Ones) upon me, that, without thinking, I arose and advanced into the moonlight, forgetting the guise I wore and all else. She had lowered the basket, and now she looked straight at me.

There was startlement in her face.

That brought me to myself, would have sent me cowering once more into cover. She steadied her basket once again against her hip. Now her right hand moved in one of the signs that the initiated use for protection, of recognition.

The line she drew so in the air was visible, glowing as brightly as any flame torch for an instant. She spoke aloud as if asking me some question. But her words were strange ones I could not understand.

That I did not reply as she expected appeared to concern her. Once more she drew the sign as if to assure herself that it had been right. Then, as the lines disappeared, she spoke again, this time using the tongue of the Clans and the open land.

“Who are you, night treader?”

I tried to say my name. Only what came from my beast’s mouth was a strange, guttural cry.

Now she pointed two fingers at me and spoke other Wise Words, watching me intently as she did so.

Once more I tried to speak. This time, to my sudden fear, I found that I could not move even my mouth. She had laid some spell upon me. Nor did she watch me longer, seeming to think that I was well held against any interference in her concerns. Leaving the pillar she neared the edge of the glade. There she set down her basket for a moment, to take up a hooded cloak within which she concealed her form, so that from moon silver she became in a short moment a gray shadow.

With the basket once more in her hold, she slipped away among the trees. I could have wept like a man who had lost his hope, or howled like a beast from which his rightful prey has been reft. But the bonds she laid upon me were as imprisoning as if she had lifted the crystal pillar and enclosed my body in it.

As I struggled with all my will to break free, the bonds began to loosen. At length I could move, if slowly. My strength returned little by little. As soon as I could stagger, I drew myself to the point where I had seen her disappear and there I set my beast sense to nose out her path.

Though I wavered along at first, sometimes striking against the tree trunks, my tread became firmer. I had to keep a slow pace lest I lose the track I followed. Even with the keenness of my sense of smell I found elusive the traces left by the one I sought, as if she had attempted to hide her trail.

Then the scent that guided me was gone, hidden in a wealth of odors, some sweet, some acrid, some spicy, the like of which I had not known before. I had come to the edge of another clearing many times the size of the one in which my youthful Wise Woman had performed her sorcery. This was no common forest glade, but rather a carefully tended garden.

The beds of growing things (things differing from the Harvest I had helped to garner from the fields of the Keep) spread outward from the foot of a Tower. Under the moon I could see that it also was unlike the buildings of the Clan in which I had been reared.

The forest structure was not round nor square, the two most common forms of towers, but five-pointed, like a large representation of the floor-painted star I had seen in Ursilla’s private chamber.

Between each of the points was set a slender pole, reaching as high as some narrow windows that were visible in the second and third stories. The rods or poles gleamed with a faint light that surrounded the Tower itself with a haze. I guessed they might be some form of protection perhaps far more effective than any known to the Clans. The stone of the Tower itself under its radiance had a glisten quite unlike the rough look of normal blocks, and was a dull blue-green.

There was also a glow of light in several of the windows that I could see as I crept about the outer rim of the clearing to view the Tower from all sides. That this was the home of my Moon Witch I did not doubt. Nor did I believe she lived there alone. As I approached the other side of the Tower from the place where I had first sighted it, I came upon a paddock with a stable shelter beyond. These were like the ones I had known and had none of the strange quality of the Tower. Several horses grazed in the paddock, two of them with colts by their sides.

They must have caught my scent as I moved, for their heads came up and the stallion trumpeted. As I did not approach any closer, he quieted and only trotted along the fence between me and his herd. That the rest of them did not show the frenzy my presence had always evoked in their species before surprised me. They returned to their grazing, and even the stallion stood quietly when I paused, his head turned so his eyes could watch my every move. Beyond his watchfulness, he displayed no fear.

I made the entire circuit of the clearing. The Tower had a single entrance to the north, a small door nigh indistinguishable from the wall, set in one of the crevices between the points. And about the whole of the building there was a feeling of secretiveness and—withdrawal was the only word that came into my mind—as if those who sheltered there had, by choice, little to do with the ways of men.

It was in my mind that they doubtless also possessed devices to ensure their privacy. Still, we who are of the Old Race know when anything is of the Shadow. And about the Star Tower there was no stench of evil to warn one away. I found a place under a bush beyond the garden where I could stretch my length and yet watch the door. In me hope was growing, if but feebly, once again.

Now and again I blinked at the dimly lighted window visible from my lair and wondered whether the Witch Maid was behind it. Why had she culled the moonflowers? What spells did she now raise with their aid? If I could only have answered her question!

I arose, circled a little, and lay down again. The night was far along now. Already the moon had passed from overhead. Now the dim light, behind the window above, had been snuffed out. Only the haze from the poles wreathed around the Star Tower.

My head sank forward to rest upon my paws. A small breeze swept toward me, coming over the garden to load itself with the odors of herbs. Now I knew this to be an herb garden, larger than any I had ever seen, and with the familiar were mixed many I could not put name to. Paths marked with water-worn stones divided the ground into beds for easier access to reach their crops.

Some plants there were already fading, falling early into the dormant sleep of the cold season lying yet a moon or so before us. Others waxed more vigorous as if the dying of the growing year was an incentive for them to produce more abundantly.

I knew only Ursilla’s spell-weaving. In it, she made use of herbs and spices—small amounts of the latter she bought from traders. But the ones she grew were only a handful compared to this abundance. And the Moon Maid had been gathering flowers—Did she practice a Magic that was centered on growing things—Green Magic?

Some men speak ignorantly of White Magic and Black, meaning that which is wrought for the benefit of mankind and that of the Great Shadow, which ever threatens him. But those well into the Mysteries do not speak so—rather they aver that Magic is divided otherwise, and each part has both a dark and a light side.

There is Red Magic that deals with the health of the body, physical strength, the art of war also. Secondly comes Orange Magic, which is a matter of self-confidence and strong desire. Yellow is the Magic of the mind, needing logic and philosophy, that which the Thaumaturgists most dealt in.

Green is the hue not only of Nature’s growing things and fertility, but also of beauty and the creating of beauty through man’s own efforts. Blue summons the emotions, the worship of whatever gods men believe in, prophecy. Indigo is concerned with the weather, with storms and the foretelling by stars.

Purple is a force that is drawn upon warily, for it carries the seeds of lust, hate, fear, power—and it is far too easily misused. Violet is pure power among the spirits, and few, even of the Voices, can claim to harness it. While Brown is the Magic of the woods and glades, of the animal world.

Those of the woodlands about which I knew aught were learned in the Green and Brown. And of all Magics, these are the closest to the earth, the less easily misused.

However, no one with the talent ever draws upon one Magic alone, but mingles this spell with that, seeking to draw the innate energy of what is most inclined to the result the sorcerer desires. All can be misused, thus coming under the Shadow. But he or she who chooses that path reaches for a Power that may recoil eleven-fold upon them if they have a stronger desire than they have talent.

The Green Magic of the place soothed me as I breathed in the odor of the herbs, and with it the subtle rightness of the garden. If I could only make known to those who dwelt here the curse laid upon me, it could well be that they would have that which would aid me.

That night I carried hope with me into slumber, no longer caring that the predawn light was banishing the haze of the rods by the Tower and that the day world stirred toward wakefulness. To one thought did I hold as I slipped helplessly into what was near a drugged sleep—that here I might find—not friends, for that much I did not hope—but someone who would understand—and—just perhaps—offer me aid.

Of How I Dreamed and of What Ill Followed

I was in a far place, a place wholly alien to those of my kind—My kind? What species dared I now claim kinship with? For I was very much aware in this place that two natures seethed within me. Also, they did not lie quietly together in partnership, but rather carried on a ceaseless struggle for domination, now one and then the other rising into short-termed control.

However, in this place, each of the natures, so at war, made temporary pact, for they were both threatened. How I was so sure of that I could not tell. And the double identity that was me, twined and uneasily united for the nonce, was moving—

I did not walk in the body in that place beyond my waking comprehension. No, it was more as if I were a floating leaf drawn along by wind, the force of which could not be withstood.

I did not see with the eyes of man or beast. Rather I perceived what was about me by another sense I could not put name to. Thus I knew that I moved through a world of grayness in which naught had true solidity, only shadows. Very uncanny were most of the shadows among which I whirled. Some, I thought, had the aspect of beasts, some were monsters. Others took the form of men and women. From them always came an aura of soul-shaking fear or horror, so that I shrank from any near contact with them.

None appeared to notice me, or even be aware of each other. Each was enwrapped in a private world of fear and despair. They were not drawn as I was, but fluttered unhappily here and there as if in search, a search for which there was no end.

The farther I went the more complete and substantial became the Shadow forms. From gray wisps of mist they darkened, grew more dense. Now they did not drift above the ground: they ran breathlessly with sudden darts and halts. A few crept far more slowly, as if their own dark bodies were heavy burdens they could not escape.

These I saw the clearer because there hung a spark of light ahead. That was what drew me, though the other dark forms about me seemed oblivious of it. I had no choice, no escape. In me fear now arose to war with horror, as if my two selves were aroused once more to do battle. That was not so, for both man and beast cowered before the threat the spark of light suggested.

Brighter the gleam grew. From it, rays spread to reveal more of this land beyond all normal lands. Here were knife-sharp ridges, deep valleys between, as cups filled with utter darkness that emitted subtle promises of peril beyond my understanding.

I did not climb the ridges. Thankfully, I did not descend into the valleys, as I saw some of the other Shadow people do, to be swallowed up and lost. The current of air bore me on and on. Things rooted on the stone writhed, tossed long tendrils into the air. Those the shadow figures strove to avoid, as one flees a poisonous growth.

The light had become so bright as to dazzle whatever sense I used for sight in this place. Then it began to pulse. I knew—then I knew—that the light was formed by words, that it was my summons through some spell laid upon me.

There was no escape. Bound by strong ensorcellment, I was drawn to the source. Before it, I hung helplessly, forced to face the glare. Thus I perceived that what I confronted was a window, an opening in the fabric of this world. Through that the spell forced me to look—

The glare was five-pointed, a huge star the lines of which were formed by orange fire. In the center of the blaze stood one whom I could not distinguish, so bright and searing was the light about the muffled figure.

But the sorcery she wrought reached out for me.

Ursilla!

So she willed me back into her control. She would—

Frantically, I fought. Man and beast forged themselves into one for resistance. I had no real defense to set against her witchery, nothing but my will. However, that will was strengthened by what lies within all living things, the refusal to accept extinction without a battle. Perhaps such defense was the stronger in me during that moment because of my dual nature. I only knew that if I answered the call Ursilla gave, that which was truly Kethan would cease to be. There would remain only the part of me she could render totally submissive to her command.

The star formed a furnace of fire, scorching me. Ursilla’s anger at my stubbornness fed the fire. She would turn to other weapons, and those she had to hand, ready. Though she did not speak, her purpose was made clear to me. If I obeyed now—then a portion of Kethan would survive. If I caused her to exert the force necessary to chain me fully to her purpose, then the inner core of me would become one of the shadowy seekers running hopelessly across this alien land. What might return to my own time and place would be a husk she could fill with another entity utterly obedient to her.

The orange fire of dominance and rule was changing, deepening into another more forbidding hue. Ripples of the other color flooded out from the points. There was very little left now—the purple of dire danger spread. Return to her—or be destroyed!

Yet the united spirit in me, fearful, terrified as it was, could not surrender. I knew the penalty, but there was part of the identity of Kethan that could not obey, that could not allow Ursilla to have her way. I did not know from whence that utter abhorrence of her offered bargain came, only that it held me firm.

Then—

There was a great tearing across the star, now almost entirely ominous purple. The points burst apart, even as the Shadow country was pulled away, as if a fabric were being rent with calm intent. Into one of the gaps of utter darkness that appeared within the rents, I swayed, dropped, unable to control my going.

The sensation of heat continued, though it was no longer as severe as the burning tongues that had whipped from the star point to sear me. I opened my eyes into the light of midday, where the sun hung like a ball of fire overhead.

My transition had been too abrupt. I was still dazedly lost between the Shadow world and the real. But, as my senses returned, I saw the woman who stood on one of the paths radiating out from the points of the Star Tower, those that divided the herb garden into sections.

Memory returned slowly. I raised my head, knew that I was still a pard, caught in the beast trap. Something had saved me from Ursilla, for the moment—that I understood. I gazed wonderingly up at the woman, sure that my escape was her doing.

She was not my Moon Girl, though she was as slender of body. And her face was youthful, save for her eyes, which carried years of full wisdom mirrored in them. Though she was plainly a woman, yet she wore breeches, a jerkin, both of green to blend with the plants knee-high around her.

Her hair was tightly plaited, the braids wound about her head to form a soft crown of dark brown in which there was a tinge of ruddy light. Also, her skin was an even brown, as if her life was spent much in the open.

Beside her feet was a basket in which lay bunches of newly gathered herbs. But my gaze centered on what she held between her two hands, its tip pointed straight at me. Just so might a man hold a spear, to warn off an enemy, or in defense.

I recognized a wand of Power, yet this was unlike the rune-engraved one that Ursilla kept in her most private box, for it was not carved of bone with mystic words inlaid in black and red. Instead, the woman’s rod more resembled a freshly peeled branch, straight, unknotted. At the tip, turned toward me, was a single outstretched leaf, shaped like a spearpoint, of a very bright green.

As I stared at the woman, just as straightly did she regard me, her eyes as searching as Ursilla’s could ever be. This, too, was a Wise Woman, though I sensed that the Powers she served were not the same as the ones to which Ursilla gave homage when she called.

“Who are you?” The woman did not lower her wand-spear. I believed that were I to make some hostile move, I would speedily discover it far more than a peeled branch with only a leaf at its tip.

I could shape no words. When I tried, there was only that sound akin to a strangled grunting.

She held her head a fraction to one side as if she listened.

“Sorcery,” she spoke again. “Strong of the Power, but not well done. In the night I felt you come. Now—you draw that which is not of our world. That we cannot allow. To let even a hint of Darkness brush close to us—o!” She shook her head vigorously.

I gave my beastly cry for help. If this Wise Woman had destroyed Ursilla’s attempt to reach me (for I was certain she had been the one to rend apart the Shadow world), then perhaps she could save me—point a way to my escape from this body.

Slowly, I drew myself forward. Out of the bush where I had sheltered, I crept belly down. Perhaps with my body I could display my need, ask voicelessly for her aid. Thus I abased myself as best I could.

The leaf point was no longer held unflinchingly aimed at my head. In her hands the wand swung a little, back and forth. Bright as the day was, its tip wrote on the air symbols in trails of green smoke that quickly dissipated.

“No,” she denied me. “When the Dark strikes and evil walks the land, then we do not open our gates to any sorcery that carries the stench of the Shadow about it. I know not who you are, nor why you have brought your trouble hither. And there is naught that I can do for you. To let you remain—Even,” she hesitated, “even if you could. I do not believe that one such as you can enter into our safety. If you can—then that might be another matter—”

Her first firm denial appeared to weaken a little. I crept on. But, as I would set paw upon the edge of that same path in which she stood, there was a flash of green. The glimmer did not spring from her wand, but from the ground before me, while the paw that I had so reached out tingled with pain. I had stubbed it against some unseen wall of protection. What she had said was plainily the truth, her circle of Green Magic rejected me.

The shock of the rejection loosed the control of my man nature. For a moment I was no longer Kethan encased in a beast body that was a prison. Rather, I was a pard aroused to the full anger such a creature felt when its fierce desire was thwarted. My tail lashed, I raised my voice in a roar of animal rage. I sprang, only to be defeated by that invisible defense.

Now the woman’s expression changed. She raised her wand in one hand and brought it down in a lashing blow on the air. But across the painful scratches the bird had inflicted on my back there was a sudden hot agony, although her wand had been far from physically touching my body.

I screamed a cat’s full-throated scream, the pain feeding my anger, pressing the man back into close confinement in my mind. Kill—Kill! Almost I could hear the words as if such a command had been shouted in the ears now folded back against my skull. Again I snarled and struck out at the barrier that kept me from what was now surely my prey.

Once again her wand lashed the air. The blow fell truly across my wounded back and flanks. Dimly, even the beast could recognize that I was helpless, that to continue our unequal struggle would mean only more pain for me. With a last snarl, I slunk in retreat to the woods. Nor did I look back.

As I went, the man once more fought his way to freedom. The pard was under my control. My sense of failure was as grievous to my mind as the strokes had been across my body. My aborted attack had certainly closed all ways of communication with those in the Star Tower. And I was as certain, as if the woman herself had sworn it by some Name of the Power, that only there I might have found a measure of aid.

Now I did not care where I went. There was no lasting hope I might locate some other inhabitant of the forest who would be willing to play my friend. There were others who might offer me shelter—for their own purposes. But those I must avoid with as much energy as I would Ursilla.

The woman of the Tower had delivered me from Ursilla’s attack. However, she had done that only because the stir of such sorcery had in some way threatened her own safety. That I could count on such a gift of Fortune again, I greatly doubted. Ursilla might not weave the same spell, but she had others as powerful, perhaps many of them.

My unplanned wandering had brought me back, I saw, to the small glade where the pillar and the moonflowers stood. In the sunlight, the latter were tightly closed, showing only gray-green buds and a few badly withered, dead flower heads, while the pillar itself lacked the core of fire that had blazed high during the night. I hesitated under the branches of one of the trees that made up the waning of the enchanted place. Was this also closed to me? I had the haunting belief that some Power that was benign might shield me from Ursilla’s seeking. Where I could find such—?

I sank to the crouch the pard used preparing for a leap upon a quarry. Then, as I had done when I uselessly abased myself before the Wise Woman of the Tower, I crept forward inch by inch.

This time there was no heady perfume from the tightly closed flowers, no sense of enchantment and beauty. It would seem that the sorcery had departed, for I was able to enter into the moon garden, even reach the pillar, feeling no discharge of energy as I had the night before.

I touched nose to the pillar. It was stone, not crystal—dead stone. Nothing lingered here any longer to feed my hope.

Slowly, I retreated. The river again—for I was hungry. However, my hunger was only partly of the flesh. All my life, though I had lived close among my fellows, I had been as one set apart. That loneliness I had only half known for what it was, but in this hour the full desolation of it settled upon me, as a yoke of sword steel set about my throat, chaining me to that which was myself, which could never be one in thought or life with any other.

There were the Wereriders—

Dully, I considered whether I might search them out, hope to claim a measure of acceptance from those who also were two shapes throughout their lives. But they were shape-changers by inheritance and choice, bred to that strangeness. Whereas with me it was truly, as my mother had warned me, a curse to separate me from the normal world.

Was this of the Lady Eldris’s planning, so that I should be removed from Maughus’s path by this estrangement? I could accept that. Just as I accepted Thaney’s cry of “Kill!” when she had looked upon me over her brother’s shoulder and his sword was bared ready to slay. I had no tie with my betrothed to regret.

My mind picture of Thaney as I last saw her faded. There was another now, so sharply etched in my mind that I might be viewing her again just as I had watched her in the moonlight, all crystal and life, holding her basket of flowers on high. Witch Girl—Moon Singer—Yet she was of the Star Tower, firm closed against me.

The river flowed below. I went down upon an out-thrust bar of sand that near divided the stream at that point, dropping my muzzle into the water’s coolness, drinking deep. Perhaps it was the assuaging of a thirst, I had not realized I had, that banished all fancies to the back of my mind, alerted me to the necessity of living by the hour that was present, not in the past, or anticipating what might be a darksome future.

Once more I fished and found that Fortune favored me with two scaled bodies that I devoured eagerly, leaving not even an edge of spiky fin for any scavenger. The life about me was that of the normal forest world. I sensed no enemy, neither hunter, nor of the Power.

Jutting from the earth at an angle, I found a rock that was shelter from the heat of the sun. Beneath that I lay down, though I feared to sleep, lest I return into the dream Ursilla had spun for my entrapment. If Kethan so feared, the pard’s body was oblivious to such dangers. It is natural for any cat, large or small, to sleep more hours than a man. And I could not escape the needs of my present shape.

I roused again near twilight. Probably the beast instincts acted as a goad to drive me out of a slumber, mercifully this time untroubled by dreams. But, as I raised my head and gazed about, I was aware of danger.

What the danger was, or from whence it came, I could not determine. I only knew that my heart beat faster, my lips wrinkled back in a noiseless snarl that was the reaction of the pard. It was only after a moment or two of seeking to identify by my natural sense what threatened me now that I knew the peril was not of the natural world, but stemmed from another plane of existence. Ursilla! The conclusion that she had traced me, was about to resume the struggle between us, followed the recognition instantly.

My unplanned reaction was flight. I was out of my half cave, on the move with the wide bounds of a feline, before I had more than realized what might be the matter. In the open, came speedily the knowledge that I was not the only quarry who chose to run.

Paying no attention to me, who by nature was their enemy, two of the small forest deer matched my speed, drew away, their eyes showing the whites of fear. Before them, at a hard run, pounded three of the wolves who are so rarely seen by men of the Clans that they are near legend. Smaller things rustled in the shrubs and tall grass that bordered the river at this point, showing furred rumps now and then as they fled.

I was startled when I understood that I alone was not the hunted, and my conviction that this was some play of Ursilla’s was shaken. However, the terror that kept me in flight mounted when I tried to pause, until fear was commander in my mind, sending me headlong in a senseless race with all the rest.

There were sometimes hunts, out in the open, where men gathered with beaters to scare up the animals, drive them witless with fright toward waiting marksmen. To my Kethan mind, this present assault upon my nerves bore a distinct relation to that. Yet there came no sound of horn, no brazen clamor behind me. Nor would such have sent me headlong in this fashion.

We were being hunted. Only the hound that coursed us was a thing out of the Dark, the mere emanation of which was enough to start this stampede. When I settled upon that explanation it seemed to me a certain measure of my panic departed and I was able to regain a little control over my reactions to what drove us.

I began, not to slacken speed, for that I soon discovered I was not able to do, but rather to edge toward the right as I went. For I noted an oddity about this fleeing company, they ran along a single path across country—as if they must keep to a foreordained road.

More and more I angled right, until I had reached what I thought was the very edge of the fugitives’ way. There I gathered all my strength for one great leap—not ahead—but to the side—

My pard body arched through the air. Then—

I could not command my muscles. Falling, my full panic was reborn, to fill my whole mind, drive out intelligence, leave only the beast’s fear. In a second, I would dash against the earth.

But—

Something closed about me. I lunged, twisted, to find myself tight prisoner, wound about by sticky cords. I was netted!

Of the Snow Cat and What Chanced in the Haunted Ruin

My struggles were to no avail. Such writhing only drew about me more tightly the cords of the trap into which I had fallen. And, where the bonds crossed my hurts, they stung like living fire until I screamed aloud my pard’s squall of pain and terror.

What held me so was part of a web. Fighting to think clearly, to overcome my witless fear by human senses, I could perceive a resemblance, in the now torn strings wrapping me around, to the small webs one finds in the early morning spread in lacy patterns, pearled with dew, in garden and field.

What kind of creature could weave this—a web large enough to hold securely a plunging, fighting pard? That was a chill thought as my struggles grew less, my Kethan mind gaining control.

No man of my own people had ever ventured far into the forest or the hills beyond. Our knowledge of the forbidden country was limited to a handful of second-hand impressions and stories. There were strange creatures aplenty to be seen or met therein, that most men were united in believing. And few of them were ready to welcome my kind—save as prey.

My fighting against the web had tethered me to a tall standing rock. This, I now saw in the light of day, bore deeply incised carvings, which were so old and timeworn that it was difficult to distinguish any real pattern from their curves and lines.

A second such pillar reared some feet away, and it was between the two that the web had been anchored. My struggles had ripped the lines into streamers that had caught about me and the pillar against which I now half hung. Very thin and fragile the threads looked, but I could testify as to their strength.

As I tried to keep control, ceasing my plunging, examining them as best I could, I sensed something else.

Just as I had known that the Star Tower held no evil within its protective barriers, in fact, could be a refuge of sort against the Shadow, here was that reversed. From the pillar beside me came an emanation of cold, of a deadly chill to turn a man’s heart and mind into frozen ice. The evil in the chill encased me in a loathsome effluence, as if I now sank slowly into the slime of a pestilent bog.

At first the evil was disembodied, a cloud without form or person. But the more it lapped around me, the more aware I became that it was in some way almost tangible.

And that I would face that —thing—and soon.

Shudders I could not control shook my body now. In spite of my furred skin I was naked to the freezing force of whatever Dark Thing had so entrapped me. There was nothing I might do, save wait helplessly for it to come—to—

Movement!

I tried to screw my head farther around, to see more plainly what I had only glimpsed from the corner of one eye. This was an effort, but I managed to achieve a twisted angle of my head that gave me a wide range of vision.

The two pillars between which I was prisoner were backed by a tumble of rocks. No—not rocks! They were, in spite of the erosion of time, too carefully shaped. There had once been a building there—the pillars mounting guard before it.

Now the ancient blocks had fallen in upon each other in a heap. No grass had rooted about them, though the cracks were filled with a bleached looking earth. In fact, there was no vegetation within a wide area about the ruin. And in the middle of the rock pile gaped a dark hole.

There was a flicker of movement again within that. At last I had traced the evil to its source. The weaver of this web rested therein, viewing me with an avid pleasure that struck at my reason. I was prey!

Out of the hole, moved by stiff jerks, came a segmented leg. Upheld at the end of that a claw stretched wide enough to perhaps tear the throat out of my pard body. And, through the leg was covered by a hard encasing substance not unlike that of an insect carapace, yet at each joint of the segments there sprouted a tuft of course gray-white hair.

The claw closed upon one of the cords of the web that was still anchored to the pillar, applied a vigorous shaking that I tried to resist. That must have informed the lurking hunter that its trap did indeed enclose some living thing.

Leg and claw instantly snapped back into the hole. But that I had won no more than a very short respite I well knew. My neck ached at the stiff position of my head. Still I must face whatever might come at me from the lair.

The hole, the longer I stared into it, was not entirely black. There were small yellow points of light, very dim —but still there. I counted eight set in two rows. Eyes! Eyes surveying me, making sure I was safely a prisoner.

Beyond, the sound of the fleeing animals had died away. It seemed to me that I hung in a moment of utter silence—waiting—Then out of the hole came once more the leg—or arm—and then a second such! Beyond those only the eyes were visible, the rest of the creature lying deeper within the den.

I thought that I had screamed. Then I knew that the furious challenge had not burst from my throat, but another’s. A furred shape flowed fluidly into my very limited range of vision, leaped, not at the hole into which the arms had whipped back at the sound, but to the top of the jumble of blocks that formed my enemy’s den.

A snow cat! And a larger one than I had ever seen. The creature was in a snarling rage, its yellow eyes afire, its tail whipping from side to side. The gaze of the eyes fixed upon me and now it growled.

Well did I know the reputation of the giant hill cats. They were highly protective of their hunting territories, fighting to the death often to resist any invasion of the stretches of hill and forest that they considered their own. Save during the mating season, they held no contact with their fellows, walking alone and arrogant in their jealous pride.

That a pard was invading the snow cat’s territory was indeed a challenge. However, I was already helplessly the prey of the lurker in the hole, no threat to this newcomer. Why did he then wish to attack?

The cat was a male, at the height of his strength and might, I believed. Under other circumstances, I would have thought him a magnificent sight. But—perhaps death under his swift attack would be easier than that which the lurker had planned for me. Only no one welcomes death gladly.

Then—

I squalled again. Not from the pain of any wound, but from fear that struck me more severely than any rippling of claws. There was a voice in my mind!

That the Wise Ones could communicate so among their kind was well known. But they did it only when well trained and provided with certain safeguard barriers, so that such an invasion could be controlled and tempered. No ordinary human possessed such a talent, nor would welcome even the thought of it.

“Do not move!”

Did the lurker so warn me? Or the snow cat? Were the great felines thus able to communicate with their kind, unknown to men?

“Do not move.” Again that command was impressed upon my mind.

The cat! Certainly it was the cat!

He was now pressed belly flat on the stone, inching forward to another block, a little lower, that rested directly above the hole. As he extended a paw to place on it, I saw the stone move a fraction. Quickly, the snow cat drew back. He bent his head, sniffed along the inner edge of the block. Or was he examining closely the way it rested upon its fellows?

Whatever he had discovered, made him crouch down and back. I could see muscles ripple under his hide, the telltale twitch of the dark tip of his silver-white tail. He did not advance now with exploratory stealth, rather he leaped, landing full force upon the suspect block.

It gave under him, crashing down. But so quick was the cat that he was again arching his body into the air in my direction even while the block he had loosened by the weight of his body smashed to earth, sealing the hole, perhaps for good.

One of his forepaws, as he landed, had caught in the sticky cords of the web. He did not fight as I had done so disastrously. Rather he moved with infinite caution, drawing back his paw so the broken portion of web was stretched out. Then, lowering it to earth, he sawed the thread back and forth across a drift of grit that formed the soil around the ruin.

Where my most frenzied struggles had produced nothing but a tighter prison, his delicate handling of his bonds broke the cord, loosed him. I would have followed his action if I could, but I was too tightly caught.

“Be still!” He varied his command, padding back and forth just beyond the tangle of the broken web, studying me and my bonds. Then he turned, was gone like a flash of silver.

I was left to my entrapment. The snow cat had bettered my fate by so much—the hole was sealed and no claws now reached for me. The quick death that had been before me could well now become a slow one of thirst and starvation, or of horror, if scavengers chanced upon me so helpless. I had to face that prospect bleakly.

My forepaws were thickly entangled. The pain where the web strands had fallen upon my scratched back and flanks was gone, but my hindquarters were numbed. I had—

Back into view moved the snow cat. He mouthed the end of a branch splintered and gnawed as if he had freed it from the parent tree by the action of his fangs. The leaves, crushed by being dragged along the ground, gave off a strong, nose-wrinkling odor, acrid enough to make me cough and my eyes tear as the cat approached.

He laid his burden down with care that none of the mangled leaves touch his own hide. Approaching, he eyed me and the tangled cord with an absorbed examination.

“Danger—” His thought reached me strongly. “Only way—do not move!”

Once more he grasped the branch in his jaws. Making a visible effort, he swung it clear of the ground, brought it around by the strain of his neck muscles, and dropped the length so that it lay with sap-oozing leaves directly across the strands of the web, but not touching me. There followed a puff that looked like steam rising from the cord.

Where the leaves touched the remnants of the web, it withered, blackened, gave off a nasty stench. Now the withering ran out from the actual contact, along the portions in which I was enwrapped. I felt as if my bonds were being burned away. Perhaps that was what was happening, for they fell from my body in tattered, blackened strands.

That I was free, was all that mattered. I lunged away from the pillar. Only I found it hard to move. The numbness in my hindquarters did not lessen. I staggered, would have fallen had the snow cat not moved up so that his shoulder touched mine, his strength kept me on my feet.

That he was no true cat, I had already begun to believe. Yet there was about him, as we moved slowly away from that pocket of evil, no taint such as had hung about the dweller in the ruin and its trap-web. Another Were? Dared I believe that I had found such?

As my companion shouldered and urged me back into the ground across which the wild hunt had pounded, I no longer sensed the compulsion to flee. That the lurker in the ruins had been the primary cause of that panic, driving the forest creatures, I did not believe. I was certain that what had sent such force to snap at one’s heels was a harrowing hound of the Shadow.

The snow cat guided and supported me back toward the river. Slowly my hindquarters began to lose their numbness, but that was no favor from Fortune, for the wounds on my back began again to trouble me. The mounting pain of each step became a kind of red torment in my mind, and, at last, I moved in a haze of agony hardly aware of aught that lay around me.

Why I did not drop to the ground in my suffering I did not know. Save that just as I had been driven by some Shadow will earlier, so now I was kept moving by the determination of the snow cat. He did not again speak to me, mind to mind. However, there was a force radiating from him that acted as a goad of sorts.

In sight of the river he halted, his head up to sniff the air. About us were rocks and crevices. Toward one of those he nudged me. I crawled within, so spent that I thought each effort of raising a paw and putting it down once again was the last I could so endure.

There I crouched, my mouth dry, longing for the water of the stream I could hear from my hiding place, yet could not reach. The snow cat stood between me and the outer world, his stance one of he who waits. Through the ground under me I could feel, even as my pain-dulled ears could hear, the thud of trotting hooves. Men—? Hunters from the Keep?

If they saw the snow cat they would be after two trophies instead of one! He must be warned—Only I had not his trick of mind-speech, I could but utter a low growl.

“Not those you fear.” He did not turn his head to look at me, but his message was clear. “Be silent—”

I could see the rider now. There was only one within sight. He rode clad in mail, an ornate battle helm on his head. Mounted on that was what appeared to be a life-size eagle, its wings half upraised as if prepared for flight. The horse he bestrode was not akin to those of the Clan fold, but plainly of the same blood as the ones I had seen pastured by the Star Tower, the hide dappled, the legs longer than normal.

As the rider noted the snow cat, he did not reach for the sword sheathed at his hip. Rather, he raised his gauntleted hand in salute as a man gives greeting to another he knows. Then the cat moved forward, leaping to a rock that brought his fanged head near on a level with the rider’s.

Mount reined in, the rider, whose face was too much in the shadow of the helm for me to see clearly, sat easily in the saddle, facing the cat. Though I heard nothing, either with my ears, or my mind, I was certain that they spoke together by some method of their own.

I could see no belt about the body of the cat. If he were of the Werekin, then he needed no such key to change shape. Was he one of the Wereriders? Their territory was supposed to lie to the southeast of the Clan lands, but that would not prevent them from traveling elsewhere.

At length, the rider once more raised his hand to salute the cat. When he moved on, he changed directions, heading back the same way from which he had come. Had he brought some message?

The cat did not watch him go, but returned swiftly to where I lay. As he neared, his mind-speech was imperative.

“We must hurry. The Shadow is on the move!”

The part-buried man in me responded to the urge. I managed to waver to my feet. But my pard body was near spent. Somehow I staggered down to the water, felt that rise about my limbs, pasting my fur tight to skin. Again, his strength alone, pushing against me, brought me through the weak current, out onto the far bank.

There I sank down, utterly exhausted, though he nosed at me, trying to get me on my legs. Once more, I could hear a thud of hooves against the ground. The cat left my side, trotting purposefully toward the edge of the forest. Was the eagle-helmed rider returning, or was this indeed a hunter approaching, and my companion, having done his best for me, was prudently withdrawing?

At that moment neither guess mattered. I was far too spent to care. Apathetically I watched, unable to raise my head any to widen my field of vision. The cat had halted by the first tree, once more waiting.

From under the shade of branch and leaves moved a rider leading another horse by the reins. I knew her—the Moon Witch; though this time her white body was clothed in breeches, boots, shirt and jerkin of green and brown intermingled so that only when she had advanced fully into the open, could I see her clearly.

The cat reared up, setting his paws against her saddle blanket on either side of her leg, the mount showing no alarm at the beast’s move but standing quietly. She leaned over a little so that they stared eye to eye, then she nodded.

From the breast of her jerkin she pulled some small object, which hung there on a chain. With this in her hand, as if it might be a weapon, she came purposely toward me, the cat trailing behind.

Before she reached my side, the girl slid from her light saddle, her mount standing quietly with the reins dropping to the ground. She came to me, swinging in her hand from its chain a round globe of crystal. Within it was imprisoned a sprig of some sort of vegetation, green and glowing.

The Moon Witch swung the chain to encircle my head as I raised it at her coming. Then the ball with its sprig of green came to rest just below my throat. I—

I was a man!

My fur was gone, my skin was visible, though I had not regained my belt. I was—back!

The shock of the transition without warning was so great, my world swung dizzily to and fro. I was aware of her hands on me, that I was being lifted, carried. I was laid across a saddle and caught my breath at the pain of the jolting, which each step of the horse caused me.

Someone mounted up, raised me, though his touch on my back nearly tore a scream from my dry throat. For this was a man, not my Moon Maid who tended me, though from whence he had suddenly appeared, I had no knowledge.

I had a blurred impression of a dark head bent over me, a thin face, well browned by sun and weather, above which the hair peaked sharply. His was a secret face, one to keep thoughts and words locked well within. Like the Tower woman, one might have judged the stranger in the flowering of youth, but the eyes, yellow as any cat’s, were old—weary and old.

The eyes held mine. No mind-speech came to me, only a kind of force. It drove me steadily away from consciousness into a darkness where pain was gone and time no longer mattered.

Yet I was not entirely overborne by the stranger’s will. As if I sensed from a very far distance, I knew we rode on and the forest held us again. I was convinced, as well, that the stranger who held me meant me no harm, rather good. Also that I must not trouble myself with such matters now—but withdraw, to regain my strength and will. The wonder of my change held—the Moon Maid’s magic had wrought this. On my breast, I felt warmth spreading from the pendant she had put on me. That talisman I must hold to so I remain a man.

Of Those in the Tower and How I Chose Danger

I lay face down, my head turned to one side so that before my bemused eyes I saw only stone blocks of a wall. Across my back rested something cooling, soothing, drawing from my wounds the pain of the fire that had lain within the ragged furrows since I had won from the web trap. I heard voices behind me, not in my mind this time.

“The moly will lose its power soon. What then, my Lord?”

It was a woman who spoke so. A challenge hung in her tone.

“We must discover who he is, from whence he comes. I do not believe from the Gray Towers. Yet what other Werestrain walks this land? And he is not of the Shadow. If he rouses before the change, perhaps this we can learn—”

A man—he whom I remembered holding me before him as we rode from the river? But where did I lie? And who were they who had tended me? My passage from sleep to waking became complete as I felt that I must know answers to those questions.

I levered myself up a little on the bed and turned my head, to face those who stood beyond.

Yes, that was the man who had come to my rescue. The Moon Witch did not accompany him as I had hoped. Rather, there stood the woman of the herb garden who had driven me into exile. Why had she now given me both shelter and tending? I must be within the Star Tower, for I could see that the walls behind the two who were regarding me were oddly angled. The chamber must be shaped to fit into one of the points of the star.

“Who are you who have given me shelter?” I asked when neither of them spoke.

The woman came to my side. Her cool fingertips rested for a moment on my forehead. There was a faint perfume of spicy growing things coming from her hand, as if she had but lately been at labor in her garden.

“His fever is gone,” she said. Now she stripped the covering from my back, so I felt the small chill of air striking my shoulders and hips. Again, she touched here and there along what must have been the wounds the hawk had set upon me. “Healing well, the poison being stayed,” was her second verdict.

“You ask who we are.” She moved around into my full sight. “We are those who dwell apart, asking naught of any man save that we be left to follow our own ways.”

There was no welcome in her face, nor was there outright rejection either. She might be waiting for me to take some action, speak some word, on which she could base her judgment of whether I was friend or foe. Yet, for all her reserve of emotion, I knew I could never name her enemy. There was that about her which argued that she abhorred the Shadow in all its ways.

“And who are you?” It was the man who came a stride forward to stand beside her.

“I am—was—Kethan—heir to Car Do Prawn of the Redmantle Keep. What I am now—I do not know.”

I was sure I had seen a fleeting change of expression on his face when I named myself. Had Maughus’s hunters spread so far the news of my escape that it had reached this quiet place? Still I could not accept that this man or woman would yield to any pressure from such as Maughus. For they had about them both, like a cloak about the body in the months of cold, an elusive suggestion of Power. I could feel of them partly as I did toward UrsilJa, that they saw and did things beyond the talent of mankind.

“Car Do Prawn,” repeated the man. “Lord Erach rules there, but if you are heir—” He gazed at me interrogatively.

“I am son to the Lady Heroise, his sister.”

“That is a clear human line,” the man continued. “How came you then under the Were spell? Was it laid upon you?”

“By my folly, as Ursilla and my mother said, because of the belt—”

“Let him tell his story later.” The woman interrupted me. “I think it is time for the cordial. He must be strengthened or the moly will fail the sooner.”

I did not understand her meaning. However, when the man aided me to sit up and she brought me a cup of steaming liquid, I obediently emptied that even though the taste was bitter. As I so drank, another came into the chamber.

My Moon Witch! Again she wore the riding garb wherein I had seen her by the river. Behind her trailed two tawny shapes that I knew for wild cats half-grown. That any could tame them was a mystery, for such beasts are noted for their fierce natures. Yet, they rubbed about her ankles lovingly, hindered her so in walking that she must pick up the bolder, holding it within the crook of her arm, fondling its ears.

“There is a pied hawk in the air,” she said. “It has four times circled the garden. I do not think it hunts—but rather watches.”

“So—” The woman nodded, then looked to me.

“The wounds you bear, Clansman. They were scored by a hawk’s talons. What enemy have you?”

“One only with the Power—the Wise Woman, Ursilla,” I mumbled. The girl had been so intent upon her message that she had not looked to me. Now she turned full gaze in my direction. Within me another magic worked, one that bore no kinship with the Power.

I had seen her first in the majesty of one who speaks with what is greater than any of our species, robed herself with the Power. And then again I had seen her through feverish eyes by the river. Three times—still within me it was as if I had known her all my life. Or else had been aware there was such a one in the world and had unconsciously sought her. Yet she looked upon me with indifference. The cub she fondled might be of far greater importance to her.

“The Wise Woman Ursilla—She dwells at Car Do Prawn?” the man asked.

“Since my mother returned from Garth Howel. I do not—” I hesitated. To reveal myself so much less a master of my own destiny in the eyes of the Moon Maid, that was a hard thing. Yet there could only be truth with these three—that I knew.

“Ursilla is not fully my enemy. She would have me do her will. Therefore—her creature (I am sure it was her hawk) took the belt. Now she perhaps seeks me again.”

“Tell me more of this belt,” the man ordered with some of the same authority in his voice as Pergvin used when instructing me in arms.

So I told my tale, of the gift of the belt, the transformation that it wrought in me, of how Maughus had used that to force my flight from the Keep, and the later attack of the hawk.

“Thus without the belt, you believe that you cannot return to man form?” the man asked when I had done.

“I thought not—until now. But—what did you do for me, Lady,” I dared to ask the girl directly, “that made me a man once more?”

She pointed and I looked down to where there swung against my bare breast the small ball of crystal, within it the sprig of green, which to my eyes now did not seem so perfect, having a slightly withered appearance.

“Moly,” the Moon Witch replied. “The herb that can counteract any spell, until it dies. But when it dies,” she shrugged, “you will return to the pard, unless you learn better what can be done.”

It seemed to me that there was a kind of contempt in her gaze, as if I showed such stupidity in my past actions that I was hardly worth any tending. My feeling for her recoiled a little, to be tinged in turn with anger. Who was she to judge me so?

The man paid no attention to her, rather he gave me an order.

“Put forth your hand!”

When I had done so, he cupped his under mine, raising my palm closer to study the lines that met and crossed there. I saw again his faint change of expression.

“It is not the belt that wrought your change.” His words were blunt. “That only provided a key to open the door. Unfortunately, because it was the key, your guess that this Wise Woman can use it to control you now is the truth. And also—if the belt is destroyed—”

“I will be only pard?” I demanded when he hesitated.

“As it now stands, yes,” he admitted.

“And if Maughus gains the belt—then that is what he will do—destroy it!” The strength that had come back into my body made me want to leap from the bed, return forthwith to the Keep. If I fronted Maughus as a man I could challenge him and—But what had the maid said concerning this moly? I peered intently into the globe. There was no mistaking that the sprig within was dying.

“Can I get another?” I held up the globe to demand of the three.

The woman shook her head. “Only once can the spell work for the same person.”

“Meanwhile—” The girl still stroked the cub she held. The other had reared up to paw at her breeches. “The hawk flies overhead. Maybe so some other shall learn who shelters here—”

“Not so—yet.” The woman contradicted her. “I have set the spell—”

“It is not working,” the girl returned flatly. With that report, she startled both her companions.

The woman hurried from the room, the girl after her. I looked to the man for an explanation, to find that he was studying me.

“A spell-tie then,” he said slowly.

“What mean you?”

“Just this—you are tied to the belt. And the belt lies beyond these walls, in the hands of one with Power.”

“So—as long as I am here,” I caught his meaning, “I am a breech in your defenses—?”

“For now it does not matter.” He shrugged as if it really did not. “Tell me more of this wandering trader of yours, this Ibycus. What manner of man was he?”

“My mother said he was more than he seemed. She believed he confided in the Lady Eldris the secret of the belt so she could use it against me. I—I also thought he wore trading for a cloak.”

“If this be so—why then did you accept the belt?”

“Because—once I looked upon it I desired it so greatly I could not help myself.” I told him the truth, even though it might well name me a weakling, easily defeated by my own desires. I did not know why I wished so to stand well in the regard of this stranger. From the first, he had had to save me from the results of my own folly.

That all” three of the dwellers within the Star Tower regarded me as a lesser being, whose concerns made them impatient, I guessed. The assessment made me wish for some way in which I could prove to them that I was not the nothing of their accounting.

“The belt—” I put now into words what I had felt. “It made me—free—”

“Still, now it has bound you,” he pointed out. “And for such binding there is only one remedy.”

“That being?” To get the belt back from Ursilla? To win my own form again and destroy it? I pelted him with questions.

“The belt is the key, you must learn to use it.”

“How?” I demanded.

“The answer lies within yourself, and only you can seek it.” His answer was ambiguous. “But of this I am sure. Car Do Prawn holds great danger for you.”

“If I would get the belt, then I must return there,” I said slowly. “And if the gift of moly does not hold long enough—” I drew a deep breath as I surveyed the withered sprig within the globe, “then it is as a pard I must go.”

His steady gaze met mine. There was that in his yellow eyes which—

“You are the snow cat!”

He neither nodded nor spoke his affirmation of my discovery. But I knew that was true.

“But—” I glanced down at the belt about his jerkin. Its strap was the common one of tanned leather that any man would wear. “You have no belt.” I made a statement of that, not a question. “Then how—?”

Now he did shake his head. A rule of the Power stood between us, I understood, just as I began to know why these three had not named names in my hearing. The oldest rule of all is: a name is not to be given to a stranger, lest he make use of it in some ensorcellment. That I had anything to fear from the Star Tower, I was sure was not so. But that those within it would not give me shelter to their own peril, that I thought was also true.

“The Shadow gathers strength.” He broke the silence between us with words that had no immediate meaning for me. “Those who have taken the Darker Way awake, prepare to fare forth once more. I have a question concerning this Ibycus, the trader. You felt nothing in him of the Dark?”

I shook my head. “Rather, he seemed otherwise. Almost I wondered if he was some messenger or scout for the Voices.”

“The Voices, now there is a thought that bears shifting.” His hand lay on the hilt of his long hunter’s knife, drawing it a fraction from the sheath, then sending the blade thudding back into hiding once again. “Perhaps there approaches a time when once more we of Arvon must choose sides. Short indeed has been our peace.”

There was a set to his lips, his weary eyes were now half-veiled beneath their lids. In this moment, the illusion of youth that he wore so well slipped a little and I thought he had perhaps seen long years of time in Arvon.

“And,” he swung about to face me squarely, “to play small games with the Power in such a time is to invite peril beyond reckoning. I do not like it that winged eyes, which might be servant to your Wise Woman, circle now above this Tower!”

There was determination in that, a threat if I wished to read it so. Without any farewell, he went out—while I still sat upon the bed, holding in my hand the moly that had given me respite from the curse, wondering how much longer the respite might last.

After the man had left, I glanced about me, more interested now in the room than I had been when those three were in it. The odd shape, with one wall striking out in a point to help fashion the star space, made it strange. The walls were unbroken by any pictures or hangings such as the Keep chambers had. There was the bed upon which I lay, a narrow, shelflike affair. Against one wall a chest, richly carven, against the facing wall a small table on which rested a jug and washing basin. Poor looking indeed.

Yet herein I felt a kind of oneness such as I had never experienced in the Keep. There were signs of age about the walls, even as that which clung like moldering tapestry to the walls of Car Do Prawn. But here was not an age that made me feel the insignificant intruder, rather, in a strange way, one with all about me.

That I should have this sensation, in a place where manifestly I was not welcome, was strange. I had no training in the Power, no talent for it. And this was clearly an abode, even a fortress, steeped in the forces that very few of us can understand. Why then did I feel as if I never wanted to leave the Tower?

I got to my feet. Strength flowed back. I could bend and twist my body, as I did in test, and feel no pain from my back. When I quested with my fingers as best I might, crooked my neck as far as I could, to see my wounds, they showed pink, coated with new skin, well along to complete healing. So healed, I had no right to call for any more shelter. The hawk above was a warning of that. I wanted to bring no ill upon the ones who had succored me, even though they considered me unworthy.

It was the last thought that I chewed upon bitterly. The utter indifference of the Moon Witch clung as an irritating memory in my mind. Why did I long, above all else, to stand well in her sight? That was as utter folly as to expect any tenderness from Thaney! I must set aside such fantasies.

I—

As quickly as my man form had been reborn, so now it went from me. The globe I had kept in my hand dangled loosely, to slide from a paw that could not cup it. Four-footed, furred, I was once more the pard. Within the globe, the sprig of green was dark, completely withered.

A growl from the door whipped me about. One of the wild cat cubs snarled at me, the other hissed. The Moon Witch and her pets had returned.

She did not seem startled at my change. Perhaps she had already guessed that the moly had ceased to hold back the curse. The sooner now I was out of the Star Tower, into the forest—

For the first time I saw her expression soften, her lips curve into a smile that brought a whine from me. For, in that moment, all my hard-built wall against her indifference was overthrown. She put down the fur-ridged cub who withdrew, spitting and hissing.

Then she stooped and drew off the chain that held the globe.

“Listen.” Her fingers touched my head lightly. I could still feel the touch upon my fur even as she withdrew her hand. “You wish to go—that is well. But there is another key besides the belt. We cannot tell it to you, that is the geas—the command to be fulfilled—that enwraps it. If you can learn that secret, then you shall be far greater than you believe. Now—I may say no more, by the Power I hold in my small portion. I only trust that you shall find your key!”

She stood aside as I brushed past her. There was a door not too far away. Through that I flashed, so into the open, running between the highly scented herb beds, the fringe of the forest before me. It was not until I reached the shade under the first of the trees that I looked back at the Star Tower.

I half expected to see the hawk circling above it. But the sky was empty. However, though it was still day, from the poles I had seen as dim torches by night, there now wreathed that which was not light but more like the smoky clouds born of Ursilla’s ceremonial braziers. Watching the gathering wisps of cloud, I padded back. My test proved the truth of what I had believed. I could not now pass the barrier. The disturbing element that had been caused by my presence was gone. Once more those who had undoubtedly saved my life and given me, if only for a short time, relief from the curse, were behind their wall of protection.

If I longed to remain within sight of the Tower, I knew such lurking was of no use. Their defenses would not drop for me again. Perhaps if I could, by some unbelievable miracle, regain my man form once more, be Kethan, untied to any plot of Ursilla’s, then I could come hither and find the barrier down. But such a hope was very faint.

However, the words of my Moon Witch (how I longed to know her name!) were fresh in my mind. Both she and the Wereman who had saved my life had hinted that there was another way, besides the belt, besides the short-lived moly, to achieve shape-change. I was no sorcerer and they must know it, for the Power can never be bidden from another who possesses it. Thus they would not have said that had they thought I could not find the answer for myself.

I must set myself now to do so, though I had no scrap of knowledge at the moment to aid me. However, if Ursilla’s hawk was cruising, then I needs must first find a good hiding place beyond the reach of its keen eyes before I turned my mind to the riddle the ones in the Star Tower had set me.

Of the Discovery I made and How I Planned to Put It into Use

Having no better place to go I drifted again to the stream-side, fed on an unwary fish, then hunted out a hiding place among the rocks, one that could not be viewed from the air. Coming hither I had kept under cover, hoping that no airborne spy might sight me.

Always in my mind was the puzzle those of the Tower had set me. They were not malicious of spirit, trying to delude me. If they believed there was a way that one could win back to one’s proper shape, then it existed. The man who had been the snow cat wore no belt. However, that he was Werebom was entirely possible.

Must I search out such a plant as the moly? The sheer impossibility of such a quest daunted me so, I would not long consider the suggestion. Some ceremony then—? But how could that be so? Only those tutored in the Power dared call upon any manifestation of it.

Over and over I repeated in my mind the last words of the Moon Witch. There was a key—and, if it did not exist outwardly, then—within! Within myself! Did it hint that I possessed talent and did not know it? But if so—would Ursilla not have detected that early? Or—

Back my memory flashed to the strange time when the Wise Woman and my mother wrought over me some spell, on the eve that I was to leave their custody for another’s. Suppose Ursilla had sensed some portion of talent in me and thus made sure that it would be quenched or imprisoned by the spell they wove around me that night?

Sorcery was a matter of learning, though one had to have a measure of inborn talent to fuse with the learning before using it to any advantage. A man or woman might steep mind and memory in the wisdom laid up in ancient runes and yet be unable to put this into use. Still—Ursilla in the days of her teaching me had selected only certain rune rolls for my reading. Others were kept under lock and key, fast shut within her chests. Had the forbidden records held what she feared for me to learn? The more I considered the idea, the more my suspicion grew that I had been deliberately kept from any knowledge that could have provided me the means of freedom.

Whether I possessed any talent or not, it now remained that those of the Tower believed I could free myself from the curse of a pard’s body, if I found the right way to attempt such a feat. Upon their opinion I began to rely.

Nothing outside myself. More and more did I incline to the truth of that. The answer lay within my mind, entrapped there perhaps by Ursilla’s meddling, or maybe only unused because I had never thought it could exist.

Who was I? To those of the Keep, I was Kethan, heir to Erach. To Ursilla and my mother, I was their way to power. To Maughus, Thaney, the Lady Eldris, I was a barrier between them and what they wanted—that same power. To all there, I was not really a person, but a thing that could help or hinder their own desires. What did any of them care that I might have wishes or desires of my own?

The belt—why had Ibycus brought it? I was firm in my belief now that the trader (who could be more than a trader) had had a reason to carry that into Car Do Prawn. Who was Ibycus and why did he wish to meddle with my destiny?

Perhaps I was now reading far too much into the short exchange between us in the early morning. Yet, when I summoned up that picture from memory, it remained firm, well set. There had been no taint of the Shadow about the trader. My mother had hinted that he had had some dark purpose in selling the belt to the Lady Eldris, to my harm. I believed not. What he had said to me had been a promise, not a warning of any evil.

Therefore—the belt had more reason than just to make me Ursilla’s tool. Its promise of freedom was not a lie but the truth. Only, I did not have the belt.

Back I returned to the hard fact that if there was a key, I did not know it, could not hope to find it without some hint as a guide.

I lay bunking out at the rocks and the river. Once or twice I tensed as wings swept the air above. Neither time did the flyer have the appearance of Ursilla’s fierce servant. A key—within—

My nature was now dual as I had early discovered. There was the man part that could think ahead, plan, hope and despair. And, there was, to counter that, the pard who moved by instinct, had flares of rage or hunger, whose intelligence followed other patterns. Suppose—suppose the key lay in those other patterns?

Dared I allow the man to sink wholly into the pard without a battle? I shrank from that. The fear of being lost, man within beast, was strong in me. But if I were to find that key—I must search, not the land without, but what twisted, hidden ways lay within myself.

Now I deliberately forced the man to meet the pard, to sink into the animal, as I lay in my hiding hole. Down, down, past the layer of the hunting instinct, the fighting, defensive part, down, deeper and deeper. That which was Kethan was caught in a maze of thought totally strange to man—lost in the ways not understood. Yet Kethan went deeper still.

The man reached a point about which swirled a trap. To remain here—no! A struggle to break free, to emerge. I waged such a fight as no physical action could ever equal. Up—up—and out! As a drowning man fights to reach the surface of water, fill his aching lungs once more with the air he must have, so did the identity of Kethan reach toward the outer part of the mind, the identity he had so invaded. Up and out!

I lay panting in great gasps as if I had indeed been engaged with an enemy. But Kethan was once more in command. What I had sought did not lie in the depths of the pard mind. That I now knew, almost to my undoing. Therefore, it must be within Kethan.

How could I seek it within myself? Might I reverse the process—let the pard mind search for me, as an animal noses out the trail of a quarry? But that I did not know how to do. What I had found within the beast—the vigorous energy, the patience of the feline hunter, the will to defend threatened territory—the instincts of life—they all added up to a force as strong as a man’s will—if I could draw upon them without releasing the pard identity.

Memory was not going to serve me, that I already knew—not memory that could be drawn upon consciously. Did I have also an unconscious memory that held more, far more, than I was aware of?

I drew a mind picture of a room in which there were tall standing presses of rune rolls, all clasped together. Each of them held some portion of memory. Which one must I now take into my hand and open for enlightenment?

My mental picture grew stronger, sharper as I bent all my will and desire on forming it. Slowly, cautiously I tapped the energy of the pard’s fierce nature, drawing more strength to back my will. This was 50—the rune rolls of my mind lay spread so before me. It remained for me to choose the right one, to open and read.

I was deep caught in my picture. That which was Kethan moved between the lines of presses as a man might walk through a material room. Here and there I paused, still never did there come to me the spark that said this was the right one, the choice I must make. Had I mistaken my course? Fiercely, I thrust the weakening thought away. No, somewhere here the knowledge lay—it must be found!

More and more I drew upon the pard, brighter, more real became the room, sharper and sharper the runes that identified the rolls. I was going far back in memory. Then, before me, was a dark shadow leaning ominously across the space through which Kethan must move. This I knew to be the bar Ursilla had set to imprison me.

Kethan alone could not summon the force to cross it. But Kethan and the pard—yes! It was as if I were engulfed knee-high in a sucking horror of a bog through which I might push only a finger-wide space at a time. Still I fought forward, the pard giving me the force of will to win. Then—the bar lay behind me. Something was in this part of my sealed-off memory—something that was a threat to Ursilla. Therefore, it could well be the key I thought. Which roll—where—?

On an on—and as my search was prolonged, so did my hope begin to fade. The picture rolls grew fewer on the shelves of the presses. What memories could lie in my very early childhood that would have any importance now?

I came to the last of the presses—three volumes only. But—my hand (so did I think of myself as in that room) went out to the last volume. I drew it out of hiding, opened it—

There was only a picture within—but it was clear, laid in brilliant color. A pard’s body on the ground, a man arising from its head, and in his eyes—Now—I knew!

I released the mind picture of the room, the energy of the pard, I withdrew from memory. Now I lay outstretched, too weak to lift my furred head from the rock under me, as worn of body as if I had journeyed leagues without rest. But I had won!

It remained now to see if I could use the knowledge I had found. But not at once. I was too wearied by the search. Twilight was closing in. Nor was my small world unpopulated at that moment. So deeply had I been sunk in my search that I had not been warned by my outward senses. However, I could see clearly, riding at a purposeful trot along the bank of the stream, nearing my hiding place, a man.

Also—one I had seen before. It was he who wore the eagle helm, had held converse silently with the snow cat near this same place. His horse was surefooted amid the loose gravel of the stream shore, and the rider held the reins loosely, as if to leave for his mount a choice of path.

The closer he drew to me, the farther I shrank back into my crevice. For, though his meeting with the snow cat had been a friendly one, that did not mean the stranger might see in me anything but a dangerous beast. Nor had I any reason to wish to attract his attention.

I tried to make out the features under the shadow of the helm, though, even to my cat’s sight, they were hard to see. There was a haunting resemblance in what I could distinguish, but it was not until he passed me by that I realized from whence the feeling of familiarity had come.

This bird-crested rider was much like the man of the Tower—Another Were?

The rattle of hooves in the gravel, the faint sound of chain mail scraping against saddle, stilled. I dared to creep out of my hole, gaze downriver. The mount had waded out into the shallow stream, was crossing in the direction of the Tower. I hunched down to watch the helm safely out of sight.

I killed before night came, a slow-moving creature I could not set name to, something I had not seen before. It was much like a house lizard, yet many times the size of one of those small reptiles. And it had a brightly colored tail, which my pard nature distrusted, so that I devoured only half the body.

My strength was returning. I needed only to test myself. Then I knew well what I must do. If I had indeed learned the key, entering the Keep must be attempted. For I could not be ever sure of freedom until I had the belt once more. And to go into the very heart of what I now considered enemy territory was something that must be well planned.

The moon was waning this night. The strong influence that had kindled the shape-change in me would be failing. I could not choose better to test its temporary defeat.

Under the waning moon, on top of the rocks, I began my struggle. Just as I had fought to regain memory, now I turned within my mind to the building of the conception of Kethan as he was—a man! More and more detailed grew that picture. Finally, I held it finished and firm. So Kethan was!

Truly this was like forcing a key to turn in the lock of a stubborn door. Then—

The night wind was cold about my bare body, which now was not provided with a coat of fur. I stood, throwing my arms high toward the moon, so exultant in my triumph that I could have shouted aloud. But my moment of man-life was not long. I could not hold the change upon the first endeavor for longer than several deep breaths. Once more I was the pard.

Only—I had done it! This I knew was the secret of the Werekin. How such change had been granted to one not of their blood and birth—that I could not tell. But that I might master the pard for periods of time I now understood. I must draw upon my inner forces, harness the beast to the wishes of the man, until I could bring about such a change long enough to penetrate the Keep. Ursilla and Maughus would expect the animal. I would deal with them in human form where they dared try neither to master nor kill me, lest they evoke the ancient penalty for kinhurt.

However, I was still far from mastery of change to the point where I would have time enough to do what I must within Car Do Prawn. Time might be very short, yet I dared not allow that thought to push me into uncon-sidered action.

Thus began my self-schooling. I lay in hiding during the day, but, at night, as the moon lessened, I would turn my key—and the power to stand as Kethan grew each time I marshaled it to my service. I believed that with the coming of complete dark of the moon I could be ready to attempt Car Do Prawn. Thus I moved through the forest toward the Keep, hiding by day, ranging at night.

That all was not peaceful under those great trees could, I was sure, be sensed by any who penetrated only a short way into that unknown. I did not meet any of the forest people, and I had made a wide circle to avoid the Star Tower, since I knew that it was closed to me, even if I had found my own mastery of form. However, there were stirrings, comings and goings, which were to be felt rather than seen or heard. I did not know whether it was the pard’s more-than-human senses that recorded this, or if I was now more fully attuned to any manifestation of the Power.

There were places that I avoided with an inward shrinking. And it appeared to me that they grew more numerous every night, as if some seed of evil had been planted, sprouted, now grew outward, to encompass more and more about it. On my first flight into the depths of the woods I had not been aware of them at all.

Perhaps the inflow of the tide of the Shadow that Pergvin had spoken of now gained momentum. If so, the dark of the moon would feed it. For the Shadow grows ever in the dark, and to it light is a burden or even a blow.

I reached the fields before nightfall on the evening that I knew I must make my entrance. My unease had been greatly increased by this strangeness in the forest. Tonight it seemed that, with the setting of the sun, twilight loosed upon the fields a threat.

Lights winked, too early by far, in the houses of the village, the windows of the Towers. I noted that with new dismay. It would be almost certain that there would be sentries at the Gate. I could not walk boldly in, even were I again a man. Also, I must have clothing.

There was a shepherd’s hut not too far from the edge of the woods. Toward that I slunk. I had already noted one unusual thing about the Keep. No Lord’s banner crackled in the breeze from the tip of the great Tower, which meant that Lord Erach was not under the roof this night.

Dimly, as if it had been voiced a year ago, I remembered the talk of a muster of forces at the Keep of our High Lord, the coming together of the Redmantle Clan. I had not counted the days I had spent in the forest—the day of summons might have already arrived. Would the absence of many of the garrison make my task any easier? Would not those who remained be even more alert?

I sniffed the crack of the hut door. Sheep—a man—but both scents were stale. When I inserted my claws in the crack and exerted my strength the door came open.

The single, bare room was empty. Fortune spread wide wings over me, for there was a shaggy sheepskin coat hanging from a hook in the wall—such as a shepherd wore in the winter months when he must bring the flock into snugger quarters in a fold.

This night the dark was thicker, or was that only because I wished it so? I tried not to let my desires deceive me. At last I brought my will to bear, and Kethan stood in the hut.

With the shepherd’s long fleeced coat about me, I made my way to the Keep, rounding its wall well under the shadow of the Towers. There was a sentry at the Gate, well enough. And the man was alert, looking into the dark as one who expects, that at any moment, the enemy may materialize before his eyes.

I hunched my shoulders. To attack the man, perhaps that I could do. I could even lapse into the pard’s shape. But I might not strike down the innocent doing his duty. For it came to me that if I shed blood in this fashion, then I was lost. The beast’s way must not be mine.

To have reached this point and then to fail was more than I could bear, yet I could see no way out. While I hesitated, my frustration growing, that sense of mine, which was ever aware of the emanations from the forest was set alert. Only—it was not evil that threatened, it was Power working.

As I watched, completely shaken, I saw the sentry stiffen, his eyes fix and focus on a point, become rigid as he stood. Whence came that which reduced him to something that was no longer a threat, I did not know. But I took advantage of it, slipping past into the courtyard.

Behind me I heard movement. I crouched and whirled, ready to face a sword’s point. But, though the man moved again, his back was to me, his head did not turn. He had roused out of the trance perhaps without knowledge that he had ever been so neglectful of his duty.

Why? My first relief became the glimmering of suspicion. Though I had not known that force to be of evil, yet it came too readily to my aid. I had no friend to serve me so.

Ursilla!

That I must face her I had somehow known. Only I was not the green youth she had so overborne before. Since I had learned the pard’s ways and gone back to my first thoughts, I had become another. And by keeping guard—Though never must I underestimate the Wise Woman.

“Welcome back, Kethan.”

I was not astonished this time. That Ursilla was a shadow stirring within the shadows of the Tower arch was only what I should expect. As a duelist might approach the field of engagement, so I walked to where she stood.

Before I had reached her, she slipped around the edge of the doorway. I caught a dim gleam of lamp beyond. Now I had no recourse but to follow. Where Ursilla was, there would be the jargoon pard. And as yet, I had no plan of how to deal with her. Bargain I would not—

As I came within the Tower, I saw her on the stairs. She held a lamp in her hand, the light from which spread thinly to fall upon me. I saw her eyes widen a fraction as if she had not expected to see Kethan. Had she not sighted me in the courtyard, or had I only been a form she had known through the talent?

Her other hand moved. Within its grasp was her wand —a length of bone carved and inlaid with runes, red and black. I guessed she made sure that I saw it, just as Maughus in the same kind of confrontation would have made certain I sighted a bared sword, a ready weapon.

“Greeting, Wise Woman.” I spoke for the first time.

Her hand was stretched a little forward as if both to see and hear the better. She made a sharp gesture with the wand.

I felt within me the rise of the pard. Now I did not try to withstand that engulfment. Ursilla must not yet learn what I knew. If she would test my shape-control, let her believe it was slight. I must gather my force of will and hoard it against a time when a single, strong thrust perhaps could save me.

Thus as a beast, I followed her, silent-footed up the stairs.

Of How I Was Prisoner to Ursilla and My Mother Foretold My Future

Only when I was safely in Ursilla’s outer chamber did she turn to face me once again. Three lamps burned here beside the small one she had carried in her hand. In the light of those we were fully revealed to one another. Ursilla was smiling.

“Have you learned then, Kethan, that I am not one to be denied?” she asked slowly. She might be relishing each word as a man relishes some flavor or a favorite dish not too often set before him on the dining board.

I had never denied her Power, I thought. But human speech was now lost to me.

The Wise Woman seated herself in the room’s single chair, one as regal as those that my mother and the Lady Eldris held right to. Slowly she surveyed me, from head to tail tip and back again. There was satisfaction in her face. I could feel her confidence, not only in her own talent, but in what might lie before her that she had me once more to hand.

“Twice were you summoned,” Ursilla continued. “And in your folly you came not. For that there must be proper punishment in its own time. But first—”

Once more she pointed at me with the tip of her wand. I cried out in answer, for I felt then as if the rod had reached inside me, prodded and tore at my throat. I gagged, saliva dripped from my jaws.

Ursilla leaned forward, her eyes holding mine. “Do you understand, Kethan? I can mold you—answer me!”

So sharp was her order that my tongue and throat worked.

“I—understand—” The words were ill-spoken, for they had been shaped by a part of my pard form that was never intended to voice human speech. Yet they could be understood.

She nodded briskly. “Well enough! Now you shall answer me—What Power came between us when last we met?”

She meant the time of my journey in the Shadow land. But—and this I was now sure of—unlike the snow cat she could not speak mind-to-mind. If so, she would not have meddled to give me the ability to answer aloud. Therefore, it should follow that she could not read my mind either. I could pick and choose the words of my answer, giving enough of the truth to satisfy her, but not all.

“When—you—called—” It was very difficult to mouth human speech, and my throat began to ache from the effort. “I—was—in—edge—place—of—Power had defense—used it to break—contact between us—”

“A place of Power,” Ursilla repeated. “There are such in the forest, some long forgot. Of what manner was this place you discovered?”

I dared not tell her of the Star Tower, or even of the clearing wherein grew the moonflowers. Though I had found no refuge there, those dwelling within had assuaged my hurts. And the snow cat had saved my life (perhaps more than just the life of my body), when he had broken the web of the lurker. The ruin! It would do no harm to give her the ruin!

“Two pillars—old carvings on them—but nigh worn away—They guard a ruin—the blocks so tumbled—I could—not—tell what manner of place it was—”

The wand swung again in her hand and I felt a queer pain between my eyes. That she was in some manner judging the truth I spoke, I understood. I felt a heavy burden of unease lest she could still drag from me what I determined not to disclose.

“Truth it is between us. Later you shall tell me more of this place. If, even though a ruin, it has Power to break the door spell, then it must have soaked up much might of some great talent in the past. Was it also the place that gave you the semblance of man again, Kethan?”

“Yes.”

I braced myself for another testing. What would she do when she found that answer a lie? However, to my overwhelming relief, she was disposed to accept my answer without prying into its truth.

“Power indeed! Surely must we find the place!” The fingers of the hand that did not hold the rod crooked as if she would grasp some treasure. Then she sighed. “But that must wait another day. As for you, shape-changer—” She gave me again her full attention. “You shall do as I bid. My messenger, who left his marks across your loins, dart very well. I hold the belt. And there are various things that can be accomplished through it—as you shall discover if you try to stand against my will!”

Her cold voice held no idle threat, but deadly promise. The worst of my burden was that I could not be sure whether or not she was right. Could I, within range of her Power, use my key and put on my proper shape, even for a short time? I had no answer to that until I tried. And I must not risk such a trial until I was sure that it was the only manner of defense left me.

“Maughus commands the Keep since the Lord Erach has ridden with most of the men to the ingathering,” Ursilla continued. “He has had silver bolts forged since his first hunting failed, and he has sworn to bring you down. Nor will any here lift hand or voice to gainsay him. For all fear the coming of the Shadow and it was very easy for him to argue that a shape-changer in our midst is an open door for worse things. He moves—” She stopped, biting her lower lip between her teeth as one who betrays too much.

I believed that I could supply the end of the sentence she had enough prudence not to complete. Maughus moved also against Ursilla. However, I did not think him wise in that. Having had a goodly taste of what she could summon to aid her in her desires, I knew that my cousin would have little chance if he turned Ursilla openly against him. Were I he, I would be more than a little cautious of how I went—for Ursilla threatened was a peril few men would care to reckon with.

“Only here are you safe,” she said, with no change in her features, though that fact gave her satisfaction to point out, I knew. “You have no friends herein, Kethan. Your fair betrothed,” her smile now was gloating, “has broken the bond between you, and her father did not gainsay her in that, having the testimony of those who hunted a pard from these walls.”

“If Lord Erach—” I forced the words from my maltreated throat, “has so spoken, what manner of use am I now to you? For never will they shield-raise me as his heir—”

Her pinched smile did not lessen. “Not so. What sorcery has wrought, sorcery can mend. I have sworn that you shall be restored to your proper person—and that you shall, if you obey me. Then will I govern—”

That she need not complete either. I could well do it for her. If she restored me from what she proclaimed to be a curse laid upon me by the Lady Eldris working with Maughus, then her position would be very strong. Not only would she be properly feared for the Power she wielded, but I must be slave to her who might return me at whim to beast shape. Yes, Ursilla’s place in the Keep was assured—if she could keep me alive and out of Maughus’s hands, if she could defeat the belt and make me wholly human.

At that moment, I knew I did not want my body back at the price Ursilla would place upon such a bargain. I had known for many seasons that she stood behind my ambitious mother with plans of her own. Now all my suspicions were fully confirmed. It would be Ursilla who ruled here if I was shield-raised, the Lord Erach dead.

“Now”—she rose from her throne, snapped her fingers at me as a man summons the attention of a hound—“we shall keep you secret for a while. Also, I have that to do which will reveal the future, that I may lay my plans well based and prepared against all eventualities.”

So summoned, I followed her meekly into the inner chamber where lay the star painted on the floor. Into the center of the star I went, when she pointed to me with the wand. Then, she raised the symbol of Power and indicated with it each of the candles set in the points. They blazed up though no fire had been touched to them.

“Safe,” she commented. “None can come at you here, nor can you fare forth, shape-changer. Thus you shall remain awaiting my future pleasure.”

She turned and left me, while the candles burned with a steady flame. Crowding in upon me (for the star might have been filled with unseen bodies jostling in a throng), was the sense of Power unleased.

So far I had made but a sorry showing in my own attempt to win free from Ursilla. She had the belt, and there were half-a-hundred places within the Keep where it might be concealed. Here I was pent and unable to hunt. What did I have? Only the strength that I had earned to make me man again for intervals that were all too far short.

I prowled around the altar of stone set in the middle of the star—the one on which my mother had laid me on the long ago night when Ursilla had set her guard upon my mind. My mother? Did she know I had returned to Car Do Prawn? Or was she now so submissive to Ursilla that the Wise Woman saw no reason for sharing with the Lady Heroise any part of what she believed I could gain here?

However, the relationship between the two was of little importance to me now. What mattered was that Ursilla had me pent with her sorcery. I advanced cautiously toward the nearest portion of the star drawing. A paw put out to the line brought about the same shock that I had felt when I tried to enter the garden at the forest Tower.

The Star Tower! I sat back on my haunches. As the Moon Maid had urged, I had sought and found the key, though I was still unsteady and limited in the use of it. Could—could the same key apply not only to the control of my shape, but other things? Might my will be turned outward to defeat the barrier Ursilla had set around me?

I could—

But I was to have no time, for the door of the chamber opened and in came my mother, her richly bordered robe sweeping the floor, her eyes seeking me out. Like Ursilla, she was smiling. There was no mirth in her smile, only pleasure in my state of prisoner.

“You have gone your way, fool,” she said as she paused between two of the star points’ candles, their stiffly upstanding, unbending flames awaking a glitter from her collar neckace, her girdle, the gems at her ears caught in the net about her hair, on her fingers. She was dressed as one bound for a high feasting. “And how has it served you?”

I would not try to croak an answer in the half-voice Ursilla had forced upon me. There was no use in adding pleasure to her delight in seeing me so imprisoned.

The Lady Heroise laughed. “You—you are trying to pit yourself against our Power! Did you think you had a chance?

Our Power, she had said. But I believed that Ursilla would not agree to that. If my mother was so deceived as to think the Wise Woman was only her handmaid in my subduing, then perhaps a hint of the truth might set a useful wedge between them. I did find my voice:

“Ursilla brought me.” I got out the words with difficulty. “She would use me. Nothing was said of you—”

Her smile did not alter. “Ursilla is very strong, Kethan. But just perhaps—not as all seeing, all performing, as she would like us to think. We do not quarrel now, for our purpose is the same.”

With her usual grace, she turned from between the candles to approach a table above which hung a single lamp. To this she pointed as Ursilla had done, to start a flame leaping there. I think with this small gesture she wished to show me that she, too, could command some forces, though such tricks were among the lesser of any talent.

There were no throne-backed chairs here, only a three-legged stool such as might be found in a villager’s kitchen. It was carved and much timeworn. My mother seated herself thereon, and took up, from where it dangled on a chain from her belt, a box that I could see—even through the haze the flame set about it—was covered with runes.

She slipped off its lid with long-practiced ease and spilled out into her hand a pack of cards made from stiffened parchment. I knew them for her greatest treasure, for such aided in foretelling. They were not generally used among our people. It was said that they were not of the Power of Arvon at all, but one of the tools that those who had opened Other World Gates in the past had drawn through for service here. They were seldom put into use as there were few learned in reading any message they had to tell.

That my mother could do so was her great pride. At Garth Howel, this much talent had she shown, rather confounding those who had instructed her in the mysteries, for she was not otherwise greatly endowed. Now her smile grew brighter as she looked upon them in her grasp.

“Unfortunately, Kethan, you cannot shuffle or cut these as you should, having not the hands to do so. But this day and hour is the proper one for a reading and I shall keep you in mind as I do this.”

She had flipped swiftly through the cards and now chose one that she held up to let me view the picture it bore. “This will stand—or rather lie—for you. It is the Page of Swords, being a youth surrounded with a certain strength.”

This she laid upon the table. Now her fingers moved gracefully and skillfully, shuffling the cards once, cutting them with her left hand three times in my direction, shuffling again, cutting again, and then once more shuffling. She paid no more attention to me as she did this, the expression on her face one of intense concentration. I found myself as intent upon what she would do next as if indeed I hung across the board opposite her, believing that she could read what would chance for me in days to come.

Now she laid the cards out in a circle, beginning to the left, moving downward, then up to complete the round. She seemed not to look at them until she was through. Then, when she pushed aside those she did not use, she bent over the twelve on the board with the same fixed concentration.

“The Devil in the First House—that House that is yours. Ah—” She drew a deep breath. “Bondage—Magic for you—The Two of Wands in your House of Property —Lord of the Manor—Fortune—dominance—

“The Third House—there lies the Moon—peril—dreams—The Four of Wands for your Fourth House—coming of peace and perfected work—a haven of refuge—” As she spoke, her voice quickened, her face revealed shadows of emotion I could not read.

“In the Fifth House, the Ace of Wands—a birth—yes, the starting of Fortune—an inheritance—true, all true!” With her fingertips she drummed lightly beneath each card as she revealed the meaning it held for her.

“For the Sixth House—success—prudence—safety—!” With each reading her voice arose a little, her excitement grew more plain. “The House of Seven—here lies the Six of Swords, which means passage from difficulties—success after anxiety—

“Now the Eighth House—wherein lie your nature gifts—The Magician!”

She sat staring at the card for a long moment, puzzlement replacing the satisfaction she had earlier expressed. “Mastery of skill, of wisdom, the ability to direct Power through desire into manifestation—But how can that be! Ah, such cannot be meant for you. No, of course, you are the tool through which others shall work.” But I do not think she wholly believed the quick answer to the problem that her previous cards had shown her. While in me, for the first time, grew a truer interest in what she was saying.

The ability to take Power from above, direct that through desire into manifestation. Was that not exactly what I had learned in my shape-changing? But if it had been a true reading, then what of the rest she had so lightly foretold—success—peace? If I could only believe that they were true!

“The Ninth House.” My mother swept on as if she wished to leave the troublesome eighth card well behind her. “Five of Wands—Ah, this is truth—struggle to obtain success—loss—unless there is vigilance. But we shall be vigilant! Of that there is no doubting.

“Now—the Eleventh House—what lies there? Seven of Swords—a plan that may fail—uncertainty. Again a warning, and one we little need. Last of all—the Twelfth House—the Hierophant—ruling Power of belief, the need to be one with others—”

She raised her hands from the table, no longer regarding the cards, but watching me across the candles in the star points.

“You see the truth in this, Kethan? There lie great things ahead for your grasping. The way shall be hard, but no path to rulership is ever easy. You are told to be wary, but you are promised success, a oneness with others. It is a good reading—Still—” Once more she looked at the card she named the Magician lying in the Eighth House. “This I do not quite understand. Ah, well, ofttimes some parts of any foreseeing lie hid. The rest is all correct within my knowledge. You shall rule in Car Do Prawn yet, my son, and perhaps even beyond this single holding—”

She gazed over the cards to the wall, her expression that of one lost in some splendid fantasy of imagining. Twice she nodded in answer to her thoughts, not to any speech. Then she swept the cards swiftly together, restored them to their case, arose from the table.

“Be glad that Ursilla has left you safe,” she said as she turned toward the door. “Maughus has had silver bolts forged, he swears within his heart to bring you down— and silver is the death for any shape-changer when it is weapon wrought. Let him lord it here while yet he can. His day shall be a short one.”

I heard the whisper of her fine skirts across the floor, then she was gone. But her foretelling had left me with several thoughts. Now I tried to remember each card, the message she had gained from it. I would not have been so impressed had I not been struck by the answer she had read from the Magician, that which had puzzled her so. Master of skill and wisdom—I was very far from that. There were such—one heard tales of them—the Voices, others, some of the Dark, some of the Light. But they dwelt apart and one might not see one in a long lifetime —nor even meet another human who had seen one!

Restlessly, I paced around the altar block. I felt no hunger or thirst, nor was I tired. Perhaps some virtue within the wall Ursilla had erected kept me from such bodily discomforts. Only I could not practice patience and wait. I wanted to be at the action that had brought me back to Car Do Prawn.

Now I began to survey the room with all the keenness of the pard sight. It seemed to me that if Ursilla concealed the belt she would keep it in this place, which was the repository for all her tools of Power. There was a cabinet against the wall, its doors tight shut. Within that were stored the containers of herbs, the various liquids and powders that were used for ensorcellment. But, that was too obvious. Another case near the door held the rune rolls she had never let me touch. Could the belt perhaps be inside one of those? If so, it was as far from me as if it lay on the silver surface of the moon itself!

Back and forth I paced, my impatience like a whip upon me, or a hunger gnawing from within. The candles continued to burn, yet they did not shrink much in size. It must take a long time for their wax to melt. The stale smell of herbs hung heavy, my head ached a little, a vast depression settled upon me slowly but steadily. I could see no success for any save Ursilla. And, to that success, she would make me the sacrifice if she could.

Of How the Three from the Star Tower Took an Interest in My Fate

I do not know just when I recognized depression for an enemy. Perhaps within me, when I had tried and tested the strength I had for controlling my shape, a long dormant part of my mind had partly stirred to life. Had it been strengthened by the foretelling that had so pleased my mother—even though she was puzzled over that single card?

Such speculation did not serve any purpose. My Kethan mind began once more to assume the rulership of my dual nature. I deliberately fought under the restlessness of the pacing pard and stretched out by the altar. Anyone spying upon me there might think that I had surrendered and now waited tamely for whatever Ursilla planned.

That was far from the truth. I was exploring in another fashion than that of the merely physical. First, I studied the candles burning on the star points. That they in some manner controlled the barrier imprisoning me was a thought that grew steadier. Their flame was orange-red. Those colors mixed, related to physical strength of the body and self-confidence. Yes, those were the Magics Ursilla could well draw upon.

What stood against them? As never before my shape-changing, I began to concentrate on the subject of Magic and the Power. Though Ursilla had carefully selected the Chronicles she had permitted me to read, many of the stories therein had dealt in detail with the exploits of men in Arvon when the Lords and Voices had dueled with forces beyond any strength of arm or weapon.

Once more I summoned up the vision of my memory as a library of rune rolls, of vision I had fought so hard to achieve. This time the picture built up far more swiftly and realistically. I was not searching now for the unknown. I was almost sure where lay the material I would review.

Against the red of the body stood—yellow of mind? No—that was not what I searched for now, since yellow employed logic in which I had no learning or skill. What, then, opposed Thaumaturgy—solid learning? Theurgy, which was of the emotions, faith and belief—Blue!

Now what would confront that orange shade of self-confidence—overwhelming belief in one’s own Powers? Again I sought—

Within the world of nature, man did not create aught but his own image. Or did he? He who dealt with beauty did so humbly, knowing that he was but the tool, not the true maker. He could foster beauty—cherish it. But that which grew from his own efforts—never was it as wonderful as it had seemed before he brought it into being. Therefore, he was always the seeker, never a fulfilled believer who had accomplished the full sum of what he had wished to do.

Green was the Magic of that seeking, lying in all things sprouting from the earth.

Blue and green.

But if I had the answer, how did I now apply it? Where had I ever seen such colors stand for any sign of Power?

My mind picture changed. Once more I crouched at the edge of the Star Tower garden path, stared at the rise of blue-green stone across the lush harvest of the herbs. The Tower held the secret, and I was walled without!

Yet, so deep now was my need that it compelled me to keep the Tower picture in my mind. I strove to imagine myself walking down the path—entering once more into the queerly shaped room where I had lain when those who dwelt there had tended me. In my mind now, I began to picture the room. It had been thus and thus—

Only I could not bring the picture into any focus. Back and forth it rippled, as might the surface of a pool on which water flies were skating. The room—it was so!

All my will I pushed into that single effort. But—

This was not the room I had known! There was no bed—nothing as I remembered it. Instead, on the walls were looped strings of shining disks, winking with some inner light of their own. Three people stood within a circle formed of a chain of the same disks, a circle that was broken in five places by a tall standing, bright silver candlestick in which burned a green candle. The flames that showed therefrom were blue and green, even as the walls about.

At my first sighting, the figures within the circle had been misty, ill defined. However, after I gazed at the candle flames and back again, I could see them as clearly as if some intervening veil or curtain had been ripped away.

The—Moon Maid! Upon her, my eyes centered first. Once more she wore her skirt of moon disks, her horned moon pendant. Her body was as silver white as the lines of the circle in which she stood. In her hands was a silver rod, wound about with the moonflowers I had first seen her harvesting.

Beyond her, also facing inward as she did, was the stranger who had worn the Were shape, though now he was a man. His brown body was bare to the waist, and between his hands was the hilt of a bared sword, the point of which rested on the floor. Along its blade ran tiny waverings of light, steely blue.

The third was the woman who had first denied me refuge in the Star Tower and then nursed my wounded body. No longer did she wear the man’s clothing I had seen on her, rather an initiate’s robe and it was green. About her waist was a binding girdle of vines still bearing unwithered leaves. The same were woven into the braids of her hair, which now hung down her back.

Her wand with its green leaf spearhead was also pointed inward. I could see her lips moving and believed that she was chanting some spell or call to the part of the Power that she could summon or command to her desire.

What moved me then was an overwhelming need to make them aware of me, for I felt as if I stood in that room though outside their charmed circle. And I cried out—

“Look upon me! I am here!”

It was the Moon Witch whose head moved at my silent cry. She spoke, though I could not hear her words, nor did they resound in my head as had those of the snow cat.

The ones with her turned their heads, looked in my direction. I saw amazement on the woman’s face, the man half raised his sword. Then the woman’s wand came up, the leaf pointed to me. Her lips shaped words.

In this vision or dream, I could see the words, if I could not hear them. They were like glittering insects winged in the air, flying toward me. Then they winked out and were gone.

The amazement on her face grew. She looked down hastily at the wand she held. Back and forth the leaf wove some pattern. From her manner, I guessed that the motion was not of her doing, that the wand now acted independently of her will.

She spoke again and the man moved forward. His sword came up—point foremost in my direction. Still I felt no fear. There was about the vision a feeling of lightness, as if I had found my way to some place where I would be welcome. I must only give those before me time to realize that this was so.

The wavering lines upon the sword blade flashed the brighter. They ran, they dripped in tiny, flashing gobbets from the point of the blade. Only for a breath space did the man hold so, then once more the point sank down. He did not look amazed, only thoughtful. Then he nodded to the Moon Witch, and her flowered rod arose.

From the heart of the stone flowers burst other thin, white blooms. They might each be a source of flame as were the candles about us. They flared and died.

It was my belief that I had been tested in some manner, and that their defenses against me had not worked. I felt no fear, no wariness. All I wanted now, and desperately, was their full favor.

“You are here. What would you have of us?” The woman spoke then and her words were in my mind.

“I would call upon the Blue and the Green—those you serve and command. For they are mine—”

The answer I made her came not from my conscious thinking, rather out of the deepest depths of that which was Kethan.

“Give us your name—”

I knew her meaning. The name is the person, in part. For ill-wishing, a name known to the ill-wisher can serve as a bond or a weapon.

Kethan they had called me from my birth. Ursilla could command me by it if she turned to the ways of the Shadow. Was I Kethan? For a moment I was entirely uncertain. That name seemed wrong in this hour, as if it was no part of the real me. Yet I had none other to offer.

“I am Kethan.”

“Where are you?” she asked secondly.

“Within Car Do Prawn—within the bonds of the Wise Woman’s sorcery.”

“What do you seek of us?”

“What I can learn, to free myself.”

“It would seem you have already learned much,” the woman observed, “since you went forth from here.”

“I was told there was a key, if I could find it. I searched, and this was what I found—not by the belt but within myself.”

The woman nodded. “Well done, Kethan.” Her face lost the masklike quality it had always seemed to hold the times when she had looked upon me. “In truth, you have walked a goodly way down a strange road, but not one under the Shadow. I do not understand how you have become destiny-tied with us—that we must learn. But that you have been able to do so while entranced, coming thus to the edge of our summoning, that is proof that we must travel together, at least for a space. So you are caught within a Wise Woman’s sorcery.” Now she frowned a little as if facing a problem to be solved. “Tell us the manner of the binding about you.”

Though I did not now see Ursilla’s room behind the eyelids of my closed eyes, rather the center of the Star Tower, I spoke of the candles that blazed and how I believed that they provided the bars for my captivity.

“A longer way have you come down the road than we thought”—the man spoke now—“if you could search for that which will stand against your prison and find it here. If you are loosed from the spell, what then will you do?”

“I must have the belt—”

“That is so.” He gave agreement. “With it this Ursilla can keep you at her heel and her bidding. You know where it lies hid?”

“Not yet. Free, I shall learn—”

For the first time then the Moon Witch spoke. “If you have time.” And her words were a dire warning.

“I can but try,” I answered her.

“We shall give you what time and aid we can.” The woman had locked gaze with the man for an instant, as if they so mingled wills and minds. Now she gave me her promise. “Go from us, look to your candles. Use again the key you have found for yourself—”

I opened my eyes. Gone was the chamber wherein the three had stood. I was again within Ursilla’s locked star. I turned my head and stared at the flame burning steadily there. Orange—red—but it—must change—

Just as I had reached deep within me, within the pard —for the strength to change my shape, so now I bent the full force of my desire upon this—that blue and green must stand where now blazed the other hues.

Kethan-strength, pard-strength, I summoned, aimed with my will. Up to the limit of that strength I drew—But there was no change in the flames. I—must—do —better—

Harder I strove—Pard-strength, man-strength—those were not—not—

Into me flowed force of which I was now but the channel. I was aware of a mingling—I was Kethan. I was the pard—and—I was others—the three I had fronted in my vision. Different were the currents as they met and surged through me, as different in kind as the persons who aimed them to aid me. Never in my life had I felt so kin-strong as in that moment.

Darker burned the flame—to purple, the color of the Shadow—? No, it was changing hue, but from the tip down. No longer was it the orange-red. A blue-green surged along the flame itself. Then—the candle was all of the hue, which I hoped would win my freedom.

With a pard’s inborn stealth, I crept toward the candle. Had I indeed broken the circling ensorcellment? On—on—

I was out!

The others who had filled me with their force were gone. I could not have held them, but I felt curiously forsaken, bereft, as I was emptied of their presences. There was no time to dwell on such thoughts—I had to regain the belt before Ursilla returned. With it in my possession, she might still be able to threaten me a little, but I had a chance to withstand her.

I padded to the cupboard, clawed open the door. Only what I expected was within—boxes, flasks, some oddities whose use I did not know. Yet most of it gave forth an aura that tingled along my skin, caused the fur on my spine to rise, my ears to flatten against my skull. I had never been so sensitive to things of Power before. But here was a hint that if Ursilla did not stand in the ranks of the Shadow, she had strayed near to the fringe of Darkness in some of her delving into old and perhaps better-hidden knowledge.

I had not expected truly to find the belt within, but this was the first place to search. The only other receptacle in plain sight was the case of rune rolls and to that I went.

Though I had learning (perhaps more than most since I had found a liking for such knowledge in me and fostered it), I could not translate many of the markings on those rolls. Arvon has its secret tongues, those born of the Power through many ages. I judged that most of the library Ursilla had collected was of very old lore.

I could pass over any that were of lesser bulk, for the belt needed a larger roll if it were so concealed. Now I began to paw out any that looked possible, to shake them open, with little care for their age or worth. It had been a good idea that Ursilla would hide it so, but as my search advanced I decided that I had misjudged her slyness. There was no belt concealed here.

With the last of the possible rolls pawed half-open on the floor, I heard the grate of a lock. Snarling, I faced in that direction, even as the door opened.

Ursilla took one step within her inner chamber, stopped short.

Beneath her coif her eyes narrowed. She looked from me to the circle where the blue-green candle still pointed aloft to betray the manner of my escape. Then, as her gaze dropped to the plundered rolls, she began to laugh.

There was no sound in the laughter, though it shook her body, stretched her mouth. The sight of her amusement was to me as a blow across my beast muzzle. All my small knowledge had been wasted, and I had betrayed myself to the point that she would regain even more control over me.

“Your seeking is fruitless, Kethan.” She spoke at last. “But did you believe, poor fool, that I would conceal my leash upon you so? I should think after all the years wherein you were my pupil you would learn better. Though”—she stopped, looking beyond me once again to the blue-green candle flame—“perhaps I have undervalued you a little. Now, how did you learn that trick, I wonder? No.” She stretched her lips in the wry grimace that she used for a smile. “There is not quite time enough to delve into such a matter now.

“I have some news—my Lord Maughus knows you have entered the Keep. He is searching room by room. Luckily—”

What she might have said then was unvoiced. Someone else moved into the chamber behind her. Ursilla half-turned, but not quickly enough to prevent the entrance of the other.

In the light of the candles the Lady Eldris stood there, staring at the scene before her as one looks upon some nightmare come out of the night into the day. She raised her right hand and made one of the Power-averting gestures that are common among those without the talent. Sometimes, if backed by a well-endowed amulet, they are effective against the weaker manifestations of the Shadow.

“What sorcery do you?” Her voice was high and shrill as she flung the question at the Wise Woman.

Ursilla still smiled. “I use the Power in service of your House, Lady. Look upon this poor beast—look well!” She pointed to me. “Can you name him?” Her eyes glittered while she watched the Lady Eldris as a hound might look upon some small, defenseless creature in the field. “I think you can put name to him—the more so since you are responsible for his ensorcellment, even though you have no talent. I know why you wrought so, my Lady. But what is done by the Power can be undone. Kethan shall be Kethan again. And in that hour, look to your own safety, Lady. Often a broken spell will recoil upon the head of him or her who had the laying of it, even if not through their own use of Power but through their employment of others who can do so. Would you, yourself, care to run the forest on four feet—furred—with perhaps a hunt up against you?” She had moved toward the Lady Eldris and now she thrust her face very close to that of my grandam.

The Lady Eldris shrank back, her stare now fixed fully on Ursilla’s features, her hands held as if she would ward away some danger, yet feared her strength was not enough to so delay an accounting.

“No!” she screamed, trying to run through the door. But there again another stood, and the flames glinted on a blade.

“Maughus!” The Lady Eldris seized upon his arm, clinging to it with a frenzy, though he tried to throw her off and be free to slay me.

That he intended my death I knew. Now I growled, crouching low. Ursilla swung toward me. She stood back a little, one hand against the wall. Now she began to slip along it, kicking out to free her skirts from the tangle of loosened rolls I had left across the floor. Her hand was at the corner of the case in which they had been stacked.

“Kill!” Her voice cracked at me “Kill or be killed, fool!”

The Lady Eldris screamed, clinging desperately to Maughus, who struggled roughly now to rid himself of her grasp.

“No!” She shrieked again. “She will blast you—with the Power! Maughus—call up the bowmen with the silver darts. Steel will not harm a Were—”

He paused in the struggle. I could read the calculation in his face. But I was not at all sure of the ancient belief. To me, his sword looked very deadly and real. Though silver darts, by all the learning that I had, were even more perilous to such as I.

“Kill!” Ursilla cried again.

With both hands she tugged at the corner of the roll case, which puzzled me, for I could not see why she did not summon to her service some manifestation of her talent. Though it could well be that she had been laid under geas to do no harm to any member of the household that had sheltered her for so long. Such bonds were known.

“Kill!” As she cried that for the third time, the pard broke free, raging within me. I had left only the animal’s reaction to the immediate peril to guide me.

Of How I Chose not the Beast’s Way and of the Secret of Ursilla

Kill, Ursilla had bade me. And the rage was unleased within the pard. But, even as I crouched for the spring that would carry me to my enemy, the man stirred once again in my mind. Were I to so kill—yes, that deed would be but another key to lock me inside the beast. Maughus was my enemy, a threat to me—yes. But as such he must be fronted man to man. If I drew his blood with claw and fang, I trapped myself in the wilder breed.

The Lady Eldris was screaming. If Maughus had not called his men to follow him hither, the cries would surely bring them. I saw death dark before me. Still the stubborn core of man within the beast would not loose my body to attack.

I squalled a cat’s battle cry, pard nature striving to evade man’s control. No creature faces death tamely. Would the steel blade sing in to let free my life? Or, at the last moment, could I indeed strike back?

Only the fact that Maughus must give support to the Lady Eldris perhaps saved me from the final choice. His face a mask of hatred as deep and hot as that of the pard, he edged back, out of the room. For the Lady Eldris was clawing at him, shrieking and crying that he must wait, that he should let his henchmen deal with me.

Backward she jerked and pulled. He could not loose her hold unless he beat her away. Even his anger could not lead him to do that. Now they were both beyond the threshold. I heard a word uttered from where Ursilla stood. The door, without any hand laid upon it, clanged shut.

“Why did you not kill?”

I turned my head. Still the Wise Woman tugged at the case that had held the rune rolls. Her whole body was tense with effort as she strove to move the tall set of shelves.

I growled, for I could no longer answer her in words. That part of her spell had failed.

“It is slay or be slain now,” Ursilla continued. “Though Maughus has wrought far worse than he knows this day. And Eldris—Ah, there shall be an answer for my Lady also!”

There followed a grating sound that was louder than the clamor from outside the door, which was muffled by the stout portal now closed. I believed those without brought force to knock the wood down. Maughus’s men must have arrived.

However, my attention was for Ursilla and what she had done. At long last some hidden catch had responded to her urging, and the whole of the case swung open to form a second door. Ursilla hurried from it back to the cupboard. There, she gathered up the front of her robe, making a clumsy bag into which she tipped boxes and flasks she chose from her store with flying fingers.

Last of all, she caught up her wand of Power. With it she pointed first to me and then to the hidden door.

“In!” she commanded.

That any Keep as old as Car Do Prawn must have its secrets, I had guessed long ago, though I had not had any proof such existed. Ursilla had made good use of her time during the years she had dwelt here, and I did not doubt that she knew exactly where we were going.

The pounding at the outer door grew heavier. Already the latch had given way. It was only Ursilla’s spell that held it fast. How long that could last—who knew?

I slipped through the entrance to the secret way, found beyond stairs that led downward. Cramped and narrow was the passage for it must be contained within the wall itself. My furred shoulders brushed stone on either side. There came dim light from behind and I saw that the tip of Ursilla’s wand gave forth a limited glow, providing us with a torch by which to see the way, though there was naught here to sight save rough, dark stone and steps endlessly descending.

How far we went I had no way of measuring. But I was certain that shortly we were below the level of the earth outside the Keep. Still the way led down. Now I heard Ursilla’s voice, muffled, echoing a little.

“Brave Maughus! He shall beat his way in and find naught. Then will those with him begin to speak of how a Wise Woman can easily escape such blunderers with the use of her Power. They shall look sidewise at Maughus and straightly at any shadow. For a man may dream up wonders and people his world with them until he can believe they come into view full rounded and alive. No, I do not think Maughus shall rest easy this night to come.”

She laughed, not soundlessly, but with a rusty, creaky chuckle, which to my ears was worse than any cursing.

“Yes, not easy shall Maughus rest, nor any within this Keep. There shall be that loosed which will trouble them in many ways.”

Then the words I could understand ceased, as she began a queer singsong that made my pard’s hair rise along the backbone and nearly brought a protesting squall out of me, save that I did not want to draw upon myself at that moment any of her attention. As long as she occupied her talent with some means of making Maughus unhappy, her mind would not turn toward my further subjection.

That she was not pleased when my pard nature had not driven me to attack my kinsman, I knew well. Doubtless, there would be a reckoning over that. From now on she would be suspicious of my every move, uncertain of her control over me, which could lead to such ensorcellment as I would never escape. The journey through the inner core of Car Do Prawn was only a short breathing space between assaults as far as I was concerned.

I began to wonder at the nature of the goal before us. The stairway was so deep now within the earth (we certainly were well below even the level of the storerooms that made up the cellars of the Keep) that I could not imagine where it would end or its purpose. Had this passage been meant for a secret escape in time of trouble, surely it would have had some outlet nearer to the surface of the ground.

Though there appeared air vents within the walls, and though the way felt damp and there was an acrid odor I could not identify, which increased as we went, still there was breathable air. However, the deeper we went, the more I knew that we were coming to one of those places in which Power of a sort had its being.

I could sense neither the evil that marked the core of any Shadow dwelling place nor the peace that radiated from such sites as the Star Tower. This was something else, carrying with it a heaviness of the spirit, as if the weight of untold ages were centering in and burdening one small place.

Ursilla had ceased her singsong chant and moved in silence except for the rustle of her skirts as they brushed the wall. The light from her wand still gave us a faint sight of what lay about us.

Then, when I had begun to believe that the steps would bring us to the fabled Earth Center from which all life was said to stream long ago, they ended in a passageway.

This was a little wider than the stairs, but it also sloped gradually downward. Here the walls were not smooth, but, at intervals, were broken by carven panels. I could see little of the carvings, in the gloom, even given the pard’s superior sight. And there was naught in any I did sight that was familiar to me.

Dust had gathered in the pits and grooves of the carvings, just as it lay under our feet. Only there it had been tracked and marked as if we were not the first to come this way since it settled. And ever grew the feeling that this was an alien place, which did not welcome intrusion. It was far older than Car Do Prawn itself, I was now sure, perhaps dating back to the First Age of Arvon before the warring of the Lost Lords. That would put such an age on it as few men could reckon.

“Wait!” Ursilla’s voice startled me, I had grown so used to her silence, the silence of this place. “Here I must lead the way.”

I squeezed against the wall, allowing her to pass me. She walked firmly, as if our long descent had in no way tired her, even though she also bore the unwieldy burden in her robe. As she pointed her wand nearly on a level before her, its dim light showed that we had come to a carven archway that might be the end of the passage.

Under it we passed and out into an area I thought must be very large, though a velvet darkness hung about us there, just beyond the arm’s-length reach of the wand, for its light penetrated no farther. My padded paws whispered on a floor, Ursilla’s footwear awoke an echo. Here we had no wall to guide us, yet Ursilla struck straight out into the dark as if she knew our path very well, could see our goal before us.

Here an oppressive sense of alienness was a burden to hang in the mind, to slow one’s thoughts. I labored under a weight of fatigue that grew with every step I advanced. Still I tried to probe it, though I knew not how to use the talent. There was no emanation of evil, nor of what we had come to think of as good. This was a Power place, yes, but of a kind that I had never approached or heard tell of—totally unlike any known in the upper world.

Again I was startled by the sound of Ursilla’s voice. This tune she did not speak to me. She shaped odd, slurred, almost hissing sounds, which bore no relation to any words I knew. Nor were they a chant such as she had uttered on the stairs, but were uttered in a broken pattern, almost as if she spoke with one unseen, waited to be answered, then spoke again. There was no sound out of the dark to match what she said.

Instead, there came a chill wind that wreathed around our bodies, enwrapping us both as a giant, invisible hand might close upon us. The low wail of the wind was the voice of something that had never borne shape as we knew it.

There comes a point when one is dulled to fear. Or perhaps the place, with all its strangeness, laid some spell, so that fear could not break through to lodge in one’s mind. I did not fear, nor now was I curious. I accepted all that lay here as a part of its difference, which was not of my world.

Ursilla’s wand moved in her hand, back and forth, swinging from left to right. Now a brilliant fire shot from its point and touched something ahead that answered with a glow. Then there was an answering glow to the left, one to the right—an island of light lay before us.

So we came into a circle of radiance. For circle it was. Tall monoliths of rock formed the place. Each was carven into the likeness of a seated or enthroned being. Straightly their bodies sat on blocks of stone, facing inward—save that they had no faces!

Where features might have been wrought, there was naught but an oval globe. Globe, I say, because they were not stone; rather some other substance behind which light moved and wove patterns. From the globes the light of the place spread. Awakened by the beams of Ursilla’s wand, it lapped from one figure to the next, until all showed blind but brilliant countenances.

Above the globes were ornate headdresses, each varying in detail from the next. Their bodies were human in shape, but muffled in cloaks so that details were hidden. Each had stretched forth a hand (I say hand, yet the appendage was more like unto a claw so slender were the “fingers”). And the hands held objects, again each differing. Here was a ball incised with patterns, there a wand not too unlike those of the Wise Women, again there was a flower, with petals widespread. But the one that Ursilla faced had in its hand a man—small as a child’s plaything, drooping limply as if dead, or perhaps not yet called to life. The sight of the carved human struck through my dull acceptance of the place, disturbed whatever spell of lethargy had been laid upon me. For it suggested that men were but the playthings of the forces these faceless ones represented, and that hint of slavery aroused protest in me.

Ursilla knelt upon the floor. Not to do homage to the figure before her, rather to set out the bundles, flasks and boxes she had brought from her store. She seemed oblivious to the glowing nonfaces, though I was not. I liked them less and less.

In the very center of the circle was a brazier wrought also of the stone. Ashes, heaped within it, suggested that this was probably not the first time Ursilla might have used it for purposes of her own. That she played with something which was far better not to disturb was a belief now strengthening within me.

Not of the Shadow, not of the Power—what then composed the force lingering here? Something so old and elemental that it was beyond the boundaries of good or evil, existing first in a time when neither of them had been born to eternally war in the lands and hearts of men. To tap such a force—rash, indeed, would that be. Her own ambition had brought Ursilla to such a deed, which made my awe and dislike of her deepen to fear and hatred.

I wanted to be out and away. Still I was chained here as much as I was chained within the pard’s body. To one glowing globe, then to the next I raised my eyes, only to look quickly away again. The light patterns, forming and dissolving, the colors changing from one hue to the next with hypnotic speed—one might be caught and held by such.

As I nervously paced around the circle, avoiding Ursilla, busy as a housewife in setting out her plunder from the cupboard, I thought I could hear (not with my ears, but my mind as the Were had spoken to me) a distant whispering as yet not loud enough to be understood.

Ursilla made certain selections from her store, went to the brazier into which she dribbled handfuls of dried and crushed herbs with care, almost as if each broken leaf must be counted. When the last had fallen, the Wise Woman brushed her palms across her robe, then for the first time raised her head to regard me.

“What will be done shall be well done.” She Spoke cryptically. “My Power guided me here many seasons ago. Then I searched out the most ancient of our rune rolls to read the riddle of this place. Before we were here—and we are old beyond the numbering of our years—others dwelt in Arvon. They served their own forces, wrought with Power such as we cannot imagine. Their time passed, but they left behind them wells of their force, strained and weakened, perhaps, but still greater than aught even the Voices or the Shadow can summon in the here and now.

“I have waited, I have learned—” Her voice swelled in a chant that was close to a cry of triumph. “I know what can be done here—if one uses the talent. Uses it as I shall use it!”

I think she recited her own thoughts aloud, rather than spoke to impress me. Her face appeared lighted by an inner fire so that her skin held some of the glow of those featureless faces that ringed us in.

“We must wait now,” Ursilla continued. “This is not a thing easily done. The right hour must be set, those needful summoned to take part.”

She went from the brazier back to her supplies. Searching among them she found a bag and loosed its drawstring, to draw out a brown cake that she broke in two. As she munched on half of it, she threw the other section to me.

“Eat!” she commanded.

I wanted little to do with her, but that I must keep my strength of body brought me to obey. I crushed the cake in one bite and gulped it down. Though the stuff was tasteless to my pard’s reckoning, I knew the substance for journeycake, meant to sustain life for long periods of time when one did not have access to ordinary food.

“She will come soon.” Ursilla rubbed her hands together. “The sending laid upon her shall draw her. Then we shall make a beginning—and what an ending shall come of it!”

She laid her forehead on her knees as she sat at the foot of the one that held the man plaything. Perhaps she slept, perhaps she was entranced. I lay down as far from her as I could get. To venture into the dark was useless, I knew that as well as if she had told me so. This place would hold me until her spells permitted my going. Nor did I, at that moment, dare to try to separate man from beast. There was here too much the taint of the Older Things that I mistrusted as I had nothing before in my life.

Perhaps, I too, slept—or fell under some spell that held me in a state near to sleep. I roused quickly from what seemed a period of unconsciousness, the length of which I did not know. Ursilla had arisen and was standing close to where I lay, facing outward.

Her attitude was one of waiting and I listened intently. There was a faint sound of footfalls, another soft swish, which might mark the passage of a woman’s skirt across the ground. Both grew ever louder.

At last, into the circle of light, moved she who came, the Lady Heroise. Her face was drawn and haggard. Now she looked years older, older even than her mother. But it was what she bore in her hands, held out well before her as if she hated the touch of it and wanted to keep it from her body, that caught and held my full gaze.

The belt! The belt that had drawn me back to Car Do Prawn.

I uttered a growl I could not suppress at its sight. On my feet, I was ready—

Ursilla flung out one hand in my direction. It was a hurling gesture, yet she tossed nothing I could see. However, whatever she threw upon me in that moment now held me helpless where I stood.

My mother’s gaze was fixed. She walked as one who is ensorcelled, drawn to some meeting during her sleep. When Ursilla reached to take the belt from her, she gave a start and looked about her wildly.

Her face was a mirror of fear. “Ursilla!” Her words slurred together in a swift babble. “Maughus—Eldris—they have gone mad! They broke into your chamber. Maughus ordered that all within it be destroyed. When the men would not obey him, he hurled it all from the windows of the Tower into the courtyard, then piled it together with his own hands and set torch to it.

“He had sword to slay Kethan on sight, as one dealing with the Shadow, and has sent a messenger to Car Do Yelt where there is said to be one favored by the Voices, urging him to come and cleanse the Keep. He—he is like one mad! Even kin-killing is not beyond him now.”

Ursilla showed no agitation. “He has gained some night companions, Heroise. Not lightly does one threaten a Wise Woman.”

The Lady Heroise shuddered. “You have driven him beyond the borders of fear. He fears no more, he only hates—and wants to kill.”

“Let him rage, his time for such will be short,” Ursilla said calmly. “Even if he finds the door leading hither, he will not be able to enter until I permit. There are guardians set to prevent such intrusion. Shiver not, woman —this is the hour toward which we have ever looked. You have thought to rule Car Do Prawn, I say that you shall rule a larger part of the land.”

My mother wrung her hands, then wiped them up and down on the skirt of her robe, as if she wished to wipe so from them some taint that the belt had left on her flesh. She stared about her wildly as if she did not know where she was.

“Ursilla—the Magician! I have head the cards and the Magician lies in Kethan’s Sixth House. It is a sign—a sign—”

Ursilla shrugged. “A sign of greatness to come. You have told me this before and I explained to you what such a reading may mean. It is foolish for you to claim more foretelling than you have. We have no need for such signs and portents, not here where another Power sleeps until we awaken it.”

“I do not want—” my mother began. Tears gathered in her eyes, ran down her cheeks, dripped into her mouth as she spoke. “Please, Ursilla—this place—it frightens me!”

Ursilla shrugged. “You have left such qualms until too late, Lady. Now there is no retreating—”

My mother smeared her hands across her face, wiping away the tears as might a small child. Perhaps pity should have awakened in me at that sight, yet it did not. Close kin might we be, still at that moment, I felt nothing for her, when all she was and desired had brought us both to this.

Of How Ursilla Read the Smoke Runes and Sent Me to Do Her Bidding

Ursilla moved with the surety of one who knows well what must be done. She made a slow circuit of the seated ones, pausing for a moment before each to gaze fixedly into the flowing, ever-changing globe that served it for a face. So intent was her study that she might have been reading in the ceaseless flow of muted colors there a message each had for her. In the end, she once more faced the one that dangled the man-toy from its claw fingers.

Now she raised her voice, but not in any chant. She brought out, from the front lacing of her robe, a small bone whistle that hung from a silver chain. This she put to her lips, drawing from it a thin, eerie piping that hurt my pard’s ears until I could have roared my protest aloud, yet that I could not do.

Then—

From somewhere there came a faint and very faraway answer to the whistle. Maybe it was not distance that separated us, but rather time—or so the thought touched me. Three times did Ursilla sound that call, three times was she answered. Each answer grew stronger, as if what she so summoned drew closer.

She turned halfway about to point the tip of her wand at the brazier she had so carefully filled. From the wand came a burst of vivid fire, like a lightning flash, to bedazzle the eyes. That within the brazier was kindled and flared up. However, the flame did not last. Back it sank to smolder, and what followed were puffs of smoke.

Though the cold wind we had felt here earlier had long since died away, and there was no troubling of the air I could detect, the smoke streamed at a sharp angle toward the figure with the man-toy, wreathing it around until the bulk was nigh hidden except for the gleam of the featureless ball face. There the colors grew richer and stronger, their rippling changes swifter. I held my head lowered, fearing to allow my gaze to center there. For in me grew the idea that this might be the fashion in which this very ancient force could work upon its victims.

Ursilla allowed the whistle to drop from her lips, to hang upon her breast as the Moon Witch’s crescent pendant lay—

The Moon Witch!

I was shaken by the conviction, even as memory presented me with a picture of her, that I must not think of her, nor of any who were of the Star Tower, not in this place! Could the influences Ursilla summoned so recklessly, reach far enough out when they were called to break the peace of that forest refuge? I did not know, but neither did I want my own unthinking action to provide any bridge.

Now Ursilla’s thin body swayed from side to side, though her feet remained fixed in one position on the pavement. The smoke cloud swayed with her, sending out tendrils right and then left. They appeared to hang in the air for a moment, then clasp the figures on either side of the one she fronted.

In such a manner did the smoke spread to enclose them all, to wall us in. When the last gap was united, no more smoke came from the brazier. What had burned was now only a nearly consumed, dusty powder.

Now the globes were blazing. I heard my mother breathing in heavy gasps. Her fear was like a visible cloak, blowing out from her shoulders in some gale. Then—

There was no longer any sense of fear, or even of identity from her. When I turned my head to look, she stood blank-eyed. Yet her body also swayed in perfect time with Ursilla’s. Whether the Lady Heroise willed or no, she was now a part of whatever the Wise Woman would do here.

But I was not. There was that within me which held stubbornly against this witchery. I knew who I was and whyfor I was here. Those facts I held in my mind, keeping my eyes from the glowing globes. Now I refused to watch directly either Ursilla or my mother, lest their absorption also entangle me.

Ursilla raised her wand, pointed out. This time no fire sprang from its tip. Instead, she moved the rod into the edge of the smoke as if she wielded some huge pen and was writing on the insubstantial surface with it. What she saw in answer to what she did, I had no way of knowing.

I would give quick glances at her actions, looking away again within the instant, for fear that I might be entrapped. To me all her gestures were meaningless.

Yet there was a force at work here. My skin tingled, a cold grew outward from my spine to seize my legs. I wanted to throw up my beast head and howl aloud my fear and awe. Elemental was the force. It might have been churned up from the age-old rock about us. That this energy had aught to do with my species was false. Nor could it, I believed, be channeled by such as Ursilla. I half expected to see the seated figures rise and trample upon the three of us for disturbing their quiet with our petty desires.

Ursilla’s arm fell to her side, the point of her wand rapped against the floor. The smoke thinned more and more, drawing away from the figures, drifting in ragged wisps out into the darkness of the cavern. A short cry from my mother brought my attention.

She had sunk to her knees, her two hands hiding her face. Her body was visited by great shudders. But Ursilla still sood erect, facing the figure she had chosen to evoke, if that was what she had done here.

Slowly she turned. Her face was almost as masklike as those of the seated figures. Her eyes were wide open and never have I witnessed such a glow in any human eyes. Almost, one could believe that there was a massing of twisting colors behind them, even as there was behind the face-globes.

She spoke then and her voice was calm, with a remoteness of tone that I had never heard in any voice before.

“It is begun, well begun. Now is the time for you to play your part.”

Her wand swept up, not pointing to the Lady Heroise, but rather to me. I was taken by surprise and had no defense ready.

There was no crackle of fire bursting from the rod this time. Instead what came was a command—a command and the knowledge to carry it out, implanted in my mind. Nor could I gainsay the order. Her desire ruled my body, both beast and Kethan.

“Go!”

Again she pointed with her wand. Not back in the direction from which we had come, but out past the figure she had paid homage to—into the darkness.

Within me, it was as if both Kethan and the pard now were locked into a third entity, with the order Ursilla had given in full control of my body and mind. It seemed as if Kethan watched what happened, as a man might look out from the window of a Keep cell.

Even as she ordered, so did I go. Out into the dark I sped, without even the wan glow of the wand light to show me any path. I did not need it. There was a sense of direction implanted in the order itself that drew me like a collar about my throat, the leash fastened thereto tugging me along.

Dark was the cavern, a velvety black that even a moonless night might not achieve. And it was very large, for though I ran hard, my paws spuring dust as I went, still there seemed no end to this journeying.

At last I came to what seemed the far end of the place, and there I slowed a little as I blundered blindly onto a ramp way that led upward. This time there was no stairway, only a series of ramps, each a fraction steeper than the one behind. The urgency laid upon me kept me at the best pace I could make under the circumstances, climbing, climbing through the dark.

However, the farther I withdrew from the strange place the lighter became the weight upon me. I could not escape the geas Ursilla had set upon me, no. I think it would have taken one well learned in sorcery to break that—if it could be broken, forged as it was from learning forgotten long ago. But behind the geas, I could think again, perhaps plan some way to bring Ursilla’s plans to naught.

That I would come out in the Keep, or even near Car Do Prawn, I doubted. I believed that I would have little to fear from Maughus at this moment. But what I had to circumvent was what Ursilla’s orders would have me do. I must reserve my strength against the time when I would face that action.

Up and up—how long had we been here? How long did it take to reach the living world? There was only the dark and the way before me, and to each I began to believe there was no end.

Then—far above as if it were a single star in the night, I sighted a wan, grayish glow. There was an end! Heartened by that sight, I again quickened pace, though my limbs were wearied with the strain set upon them, and my ribs ached with every panting breath I drew.

The gray spot was sharper, somewhat brighter. Yet it had none of the promise of sun or even daylight. All I dared hope was that it opened out on the surface. At last I drew my weary body up a slope, which was the sharpest of all, and came out—into twilight.

Around me, shutting off much of the view, were rounded mounds. From the sides of some of them protruded worn blocks of worked stone. I might be in some very old and forgotten temple or Keep. I turned my head to survey the door through which I had come. It was a dark hole in one of the mounds, with nothing to mark it of any importance.

However, the compulsion laid upon me gave me no time to study my surroundings further. Again my invisible leash jerked. There was that which I must do—a way to follow until I found what Ursilla must have to finish the sorcery she would need to buttress her desire.

There was a person—somewhere—Ursilla must have that one—I had no name, not even a mental picture. But the geas would lead me to the one. Then—that one must I bring back.

Just as the man within the pard had refused when Ursilla had cried “Kill!” and my enemy stood before me, so now did all that was me—both man and pard, prepare to fight this command. But not yet. Instinct (or something akin, which had come to me during my own struggles as a Were) told me, warned me—do not waste your forces fighting until the proper time.

I padded swiftly through the coming night, turning this way, that—always guided by the geas, as if my nose sniffed out a plain trail. The land through which I moved was forest-edged. I recognized no part of it however, and I thought that I was farther east than I had ever been before.

The mounds were behind me now, trees closed in. The forest was very silent. I heard no stirrings of any other creatures. This portion of the land might be deserted by all life.

I came to a spring and drank thirstily, washing from my muzzle and throat the dust of that dark cavern. But I did not hunger or hurt. The thinnest sickle of the new moon arose. Seeing it gave me knowledge that we must have spent a far longer time in the cavern than I had judged.

It provided no light, but my pard’s eyes probed the dark well, and I needed no guide. Twice I edged by places wherein there was the stink of the Shadow, like pools of corruption. I hated them so I snarled as I slunk past, wishing I could tear them utterly apart.

What dangers lay at their cores I did not guess, and I had neither time nor inclination to explore. However, I dreaded the fact that such appeared to be spreading in the forest.

It was not until I reached the river that I guessed where my quest was drawing me—back toward the Keep! Who there was my quarry? Maughus? Eldris? Even Thaney? I had no love for any of the three, but in the final moment that which was me would struggle in their defense. Or else I would die—though perhaps my body might live on.

As I crossed the river in bounds from one water-washed stone to the next, I began to believe that it was not the Keep to which Ursilla had headed me, but elsewhere. Then I knew—

The Star Tower!

Had Ursilla guessed (or perhaps read from her spells) that the ones therein had given me aid to escape her? Was this her revenge?

I tried to fight, to control the pard’s body. To no avail. Though I snarled in fury at my own helplessness, still I moved through the night, heading straight for those who I would least harm. My horror at what Ursilla had done to me was so great that had Maughus stood before me in that moment with his sword, I would have leaped to impale my body on the blade.

Now I strove to reach those ahead with some mind-warning. The trick of mental contact I did not have, but I could hope that part of their own defenses set by the Power would pick up some troubling to alert them.

As sharp as the thrust of the sword I wished would strike me down, there came an answer.

“We know.”

The Were snow cat! As he had spoken with me before, so was he in touch with me now.

“Kill!” I thought to him. Better that I lay dead than Ursilla succeed in whatever deviltry she would do. All I knew was that I must return with the one the Wise Woman had selected. The rest of the peril I could guess.

“Come—”

That was not the snow cat. The woman of the Star Tower spoke then. She must not let down her defenses—!

Feverishly, I tried to project my thoughts, let them see the evil that rode with me to imperil their peace. How much Power Ursilla might wield through me now I could not judge. However, I feared that what she gathered in the cavern was stronger and stranger than anything known now on the surface of Arvon. And that the Star Tower could defend itself against it, I feared, was futile.

Before me lay the garden clearing and the Star Tower. I breathed in the rich scent of the herbs. And I expected to see the haze of the protective wall about the points, the mist as I had seen it before. Perhaps that would hold even against the force Ursilla had aroused.

However, there was no haze. On the path before me stood three shadowy forms, as if to bid me welcome. I fought with my own body, struggled to stop well short of them. For now it was made plain to me whom I was sent to seek—

The Moon Witch!

“Kill me!” I thought again. There was no hope of self-preservation left now. Either I would die here and now, or such untold evil as I could not imagine would engulf this maid—perhaps the others, too, but certainly her.

None of the three shrank from me and the Wereman did not heed my frantic plea. I saw then they were garbed as they had been when they had backed me with their Power in Ursilla’s Tower room. They held high their symbols of Power—the branch with its single green leaf, the rod interwoven with moonflowers, the sword. The latter—its blade should be aimed at my heart, my throat.

I snarled and growled, my fury rising. Why did they not heed me? I came to bring disaster upon them, yet they made no move.

The woman first extended her wand toward me. Perhaps she could aim a force through that—destroy me—

Instead there flowed into my churning thoughts and fears a soothing, as her herbs had soothed my torn skin when I lay under her tending. The urgency Ursilla had laid upon me as a goad, was muffled, muted—

“I am a danger—” I thought. Though I was not sure on my side of any contact, I hoped that the Wereman, at least, could read that warning.

“We know—we have seen.”

His answer formed clearly in my mind. I longed to ask how, but they must have their own ways of reading spells aimed at them.

“I must take—her!”

Again I gave warning. Surely they could understand by now that Ursilla’s sorcery had left me no escape. Either I took the Moon Witch back into the buried cavern, or I would die. Of the two choices, the last was the better.

“Not so.” Again came the Wereman’s reply. “We have foreread through the water, through the stars, through the fire. Destiny is somehow entangled for us and you with us. We cannot right the scales until we face this sorceress of Car Do Prawn, that is the reading.

“There is ax time,” he continued. “And there is sword time. They are the times of human man. There is wind time and Star times—which are the times of the Great Lords and the Voices. And there is Weretime and spell time—these last twain call and govern us.”

I did not fully understand what he would say. But that our destiny was entwined amazed me, though I did not doubt his words. For if he were no Voice, yet that he governed Powers of his own was something I well knew. Now the woman’s voice rang through my thoughts.

“Earth and Air, Fire and Water. By the Dawn of the East, the Moon White of the South, the Twilight of the West, the Black Midnight of the North, by yew, hawthorn, rowan, by the Law of Knowledge, the Law of Names, the Law of True Falsehoods, the Law of Balance—so do we move.”

As her words sped through my mind, leaving nothing but wonder behind them, the Moon Witch advanced from the others, coming straight to me. She laid her hand upon my head as she had done the other time when she had bid me seek out the key of my enchantment. From her light touch more easement of my burden flowed.

“The moon is thin, but it lives,” she said aloud. “It waxes, and so does that which arms me. What you would have me do shall be done. And I think that your sorceress shall not find the facing of what shall come easy.”

Thus, when I turned my back upon the Star Tower, in truth I did not go alone, for the Moon Witch walked beside me. And behind came the woman, as surefooted and swift as the great snow cat that padded at her side. We crossed the river, heading back the way I had come, the same guide drawing me straight as a released arrow.

Yet the easement they had given me allowed a slower pace. We walked the night, we did not race through it. Now and again the Moon Witch’s hand would brush my head. And each time she did so her touch lightened my heart, strengthened my hopes that what I brought back to Ursilla was not what she wanted, but what she deserved.

The false light of near dawn was about us when we came into the place of tumbled mounds. But when we were nigh to the dark hole of the cavern entrance, the woman cried out.

I turned swiftly to face her. She had halted, had her hand out before her, running it up and down in the air as if she laid her palm against some surface. There was naught there that I could see, and the Moon Witch and I were several paces past that point.

The snow cat reared on his hind legs and rested his huge paws on an invisible barrier. Growling, he extended his claws, raking them as if along a vertical surface.

My hardly won hope was smothered in an instant. I needed no words to tell me that there was a force field in existence here—one that admitted me and my victim, but not the two who would lend us their support.

I tried to retreat, to take with me the Moon Maid. For I mouthed some of the disk-strung strings of her skirt to pull her. However, just as the others could not come forward, so I could not return.

The forward pull on me was so strong that I knew I could not long withstand it. I would be drawn underground, forced to bring the Moon Witch with me. Better that the Wereman had done as I had begged and slain me out of hand. Destiny entwined or not, they could not reach me now, and I could not reach them.

Of How the Lady Heroise Told the Truth and I Confronted Ursilla

“Go!” The snow cat’s command startled me. I was as one caught between two imperative orders, each of which dragged at me—in opposite directions.

“Go!” The Tower woman echoed him. “This is not a spell of might, but one worn thin by years, one we can break. However, if you linger, then she who awaits you shall know and perhaps send that to make this barrier the stronger.”

I wanted to believe that it was the truth. But dared I? Only the Moon Witch’s hand on my head once more, her face turned resolutely toward the hole of utter darkness, told me that if I could not accept the complete belief in the others’ Power, she had. Fearless she appeared, only she did not realize—

Reluctantly I went forward, she matching pace with me.

“There is great dark here,” I thought. “I am led, I do not know how—”

“Then I am led also,” she returned. “For we shall be one now.”

Thus together we entered the hole, descended warily the first of the ramps. I soon could not see her, even through my heightened cat senses, but her touch never left me.

Then—a dim glow moved beside me. Something not unlike the haze that enwreathed the Star Tower. It came from the disks that made her brief kilt, from the horned moon on her breast.

“There exists a great force here,” she said then. “It awakens all that is in tune with Power.” In her other hand she swung forward her flower-studded wand. I saw that each of the flowers, widely open, produced a wan circle of light. “Even though Mother Moon reaches not into the earth, yet her Power is fed here. Long ago there must have walked some in this way who knew the moon calls and used them.”

That she was not alarmed awakened still more strongly my own fear for her. I tried to express the fear by voice, forgetting that I had only the gutterals of the cat to make myself heard. Again she must have read my thoughts.

“No, Kethan. I do not deny that this Wise Woman of yours has sorcery beyond my knowing. But also, I do not believe that she reckons that I, in turn, can summon some that may, in turn, be strange to her. I have been well taught.

“When I was still so young a child that my speech was not plain, I saw beyond the barriers of men. My mother, reading the fire and the water, knew that I had in me talent, and one that differed from her own. However, that is not a fact to be amazed at. For my mother is a Witch of the Green Way and my father once was a Wererider.” She said that as proudly as one who recited a listing of blood-kin heroes in some Keep.

“My mother, knowing that I would be a worker of force, took me to the Fane of Neave. Those who serve there weighed my talent and said that I would be a Moon Drawer. Thus, when I was somewhat older, I went to join those of Linark. There I learned much. From my mother and my father still more when I returned to Reeth. For long ago there was Moon Magic at Reeth and the stirrings of it were still alive when my mother and father discovered the Tower and took it for their dwelling.”

Her words came easily. She might have been speaking to some friend as they walked across any open field. Still we were going farther and farther into the depths of the earth, to face a Power that I believed greater than my race had ever tested before.

I had been right in my guess. The snow cat had been a Wererider. But why was he not then at the Gray Towers?

“My mother,” the girl beside me continued, perhaps because again she had read my thought question, “was a Bride of the Dales. Have you not heard that tale Kethan? It is so famous a one that songsmiths have already worked it into the Chronicles.”

Yes, that I had heard. The Wereriders had been among those exiled from Arvon when the struggle of the Elder Lords came to an end. Far were they sentenced to wander, and to be homeless, until there were certain changes in the star readings. Then they might ask to return.

South to the Dales they had gone. Later, when there had come a war of men against men—long before I was born—they had made a pact with the men of the Dales, the ones who had taken over our deserted lands. They served beside the Dalesmen, driving the invaders of High. Hallack to the sea, or slaying them.

In exchange for their services, the Wereriders had stated a price, that when the war was done and High Hallack victorious, they would receive from the Dales Lords maids to be their brides.

Thus in the Year of the Unicorn, thirteen such maids were brought to the border of the Waste. They chose among the Wereriders and so came into Arvon and to the Gray Towers. But that there had been a Witch among them—that part of the tale was new to me.

“They did not know my mother was of Witch blood. She was taken as a child from overseas, found captive on a ship of the invaders and fostered by a Dales Lord. But the talent lay in her. That caused trouble among the Riders, for they feared to bring one of Power among them.

“They strove to lose her in the Other World, yet there she and my father fought a battle and won, so returning to their bodies here. However, thereafter, my father would not dwell in the Gray Towers, for he liked not what the Riders had done in their fear. So he and my mother found Reeth—or rather they were told of Reeth. Thus the Star Tower came to be our abiding place. Of Reeth we have made a place where the Green and the Brown Magic are entwined, to stand as a stronghold against the creep of the Shadow.

“But now Arvon is again troubled. There is talk of Gates about to open, exiles to return. Not all of them are like the Riders, willing to accept peace. Lately the Riders themselves have sent messengers to my father, saying the day comes when they shall be summoned to defend their lands. Not yet has he answered them fully. I think in him kin-ties pull one way, his old anger another. Until he settles that struggle within himself he cannot say he will do this or that. But Reeth’s hold on him is, we hope—my mother and I—greater than one of memory— since much of that was unhappy. Reeth has a place, so our foreseeings show, an important place in Arvon. Long was it forsaken, but now it lives, and, within it, the force of that life grows!”

As she continued, I could almost see through the complete dark the rise of the Star Tower walls, smell the scent of the herbs that made the garden around it. My longing to be there once again was like a pain.

“Yes,” she said, and I felt that she sensed the longing. “Reeth is like a warm hand, to cup protectingly around one. Still it is what we do that makes the hand endure.”

My mind turned to what I now did and I was sickened. I strove to halt my body, I fought against the compulsion Ursilla had laid upon me. To play Ursilla’s foul game, with the Moon Witch as a part of it—no, that I could not allow!

I snarled and spat. My limbs would not answer the commands of Kethan—the pard was Ursilla’s thing! Again the Moon Witch’s hand rested on my head. I could not reassure her, yet she strove to reassure me! And she could not possibly understand to where I took her, what might await her there.

“Kethan.” Her words took on the solemnity of a chant. “My name—it is Aylinn, my mother is Gillan, my father, Herrel.”

It took a full instant out of time for me to realize what she had done. By naming herself and the two from the Tower, she had claimed a kind of kinship. For a name is the inner core of a man when the Power is in use. And to grant that knowledge to another is the fullest trust one may bestow.

“You should not!” I protested.

“Ah, but I have!” There was something akin to laughter in her reply. Not the horrible laughter of Ursilla’s triumph, but rather the joyful note one hears among happy friends. The sound of it warmed me as no fire had ever done. For, though many in Car Do Prawn could claim me as kin, there had been none I could name in return as friend. Those of the Star Tower were as cup-companions and shield-mates.

“This is a long way,” Aylinn commented, as one who was now a little shy and would speak of matters less close.

“I do not know how long,” I returned.

While she had told me of herself I had not been aware of the crushing darkness. Now it wrapped us about as if to smother us in its heavy folds. I wished that I had counted the ramp ways when I had come up so I knew how far we needed now to descend. But then I had been driven by a single thought—to reach what Ursilla had sent me for.

Down and down. The glow of my companion’s kilt and pendant remained alight, but showed little beyond the portions of her own body against which they rested. Still, any light in this place brought with it a measure of comfort for those who were bred for the surface of the world and not its depths.

At last we reached the floor. I turned left, to head out into the center of the cavern, for it was my belief that the circle of globe-faced figures must form the center. Far ahead there was a faint speck of light in that direction.

The cord of force that had guided me back tightened. I thought Ursula was aware we came, and I warned my companion of that fact.

“In truth she must know.” Aylinn’s answer was tranquil. “She already moves to meet us. However, Kethan, what she does not know is that Gillan and Herrel have broken the force barrier above and are now following.”

How could she tell that?

Again the sensation of soft laughter. “Kethan, for purposes of the Power we have been one in minds and hearts several times over. Any part knows when the whole is near—”

I did not quite understand it. But her certainty again raised my hopes. What Ursilla could do I dreaded because it was unknown. However, the confidence of my companion suggested that perhaps this time the Wise Woman would meet opponents she could not so easily defeat.

We were running now, I with the pard’s leaps, as the strength of the bond jerked me on and on, Aylinn lightly, as she might have done across some woodland glade in utter freedom.

Thus we came to the figures. But there were others among them—Maughus! How had he won to this place? And the Lady Eldris! My cousin and my grandam stood statue-still. They might have been carven from the same stone as the seated ones. There was no sword in Maughus’s hand, though one lay bare-bladed at his feet.

His face was a mask in which fear and anger were intermingled. But the one my grandam wore was of fear alone, though, when her eyes shifted now and then toward my mother, hatred shone there also.

Ursilla waited for us, her wand of Power outstretched as a fisherman might hold a pole by which he has hooked a catch he now draws to shore. Aylinn no longer moved beside me. When I glanced back, I saw her face in the light from the glowing globe-visages of the surrounding figures. It was serene, but set—another mask, save that this reflected no emotion, and her eyes were alive.

Her flower-enwreathed wand lay across her arm as if it were indeed only a sheaf of long-stemmed blooms she had gathered along the way. If Ursilla believed that the Moon Witch was truly part of her catch, she might well be surprised.

“Welcome, Kethan.” Ursilla broke the silence of those within the circle. “You have done well—”

“And you—” She turned her glance from me to survey Aylinn from head to foot, then back again. There was startlement, quickly veiled in her eyes. Whatever she had expected, it was not to be confronted by the Moon Witch.

“So—” Her voice was a hiss as her wand moved, flicking back and forth as might a swordsman’s blade before he engaged. Sparks flew from the rod as it swung. Then I saw Aylinn smile, not in victory, or in mockery, but openly, as a child would do.

“You have called, Wise Woman. I have come. What would you have of me?”

My mother wavered from where she stood on the other side of the brazier—her face mirrored open amazement.

“Who—are—you?” She breathed as might a nearly spent runner and pressed her hands against her breast as if to ease the pain.

“I am she who the Wise Woman has summoned,” Aylinn returned.

The eyes of all were centered on her. Her bearing was as proud as my mother’s when she was wrapped in her finest feasting robes.

“No!” The Lady Heroise retreated step by step as Aylinn advanced. My mother might be facing some wraith of the Shadow, which had intruded in this place. Her astonishment had changed to what was manifestly fear. Now, with a visible effort, she turned her gaze from Aylinn to Ursilla. Her voice rose shrilly. “You have brought the wrong—”

“Not so!” Ursilla interrupted. She lowered her wand, though still held it with the point toward Aylinn, who did not seem to notice it at all.

“The spell does not fail, not with the force of the ancients behind it,” the Wise Woman continued. “Which means—”

My mother lurched forward as one so stricken she could not keep her feet without support. Her groping hand fell upon Ursilla’s shoulder.

“This cannot be!” Her protest now was near a scream.

“Do you think I know not our Clan blood? We have no talent beyond the lesser. This is one possessing Power!”

I listened completely bewildered. There was something between my mother and the Wise Woman, something that made my mother completely oblivious of all else.

“You did not ask concerning the father.” Ursilla’s thin lips stretched in a grin akin to the grimace of a fleshless skull. “Did you know his blood-kin?”

My mother dropped her grasp on Ursilla and cowered away. She beat her rolled fists together. “No! What did you then summon to my bed? What have I bred?”

Ursilla laughed, the same terrible laughter I had heard when she promised to make Maughus rue his violence.

“Seemingly better than you thought, my Lady. As for the breed of your mate—you did not care. It was the child who mattered.” Now the hand that did not hold the wand made a sign in the air, which flamed orange.

Bewildered, I looked from one to the other. The secret they had held between them so long was first understood by Maughus. His body rocked a little as if he tried to move and could not. But there was a wild light of triumph on his face.

“So—that was what you wrought!” he spat at the two before him. “Now it comes clear to me. You went to Gunnora to bear your heir, my Lady. There all your charms failed you, for you bore a daughter instead of a son! Where got you then this Shadow-bred mongrel?” He looked to me with a death wish in his eyes.

In that moment, he had ripped wide open all the past, made many things clear to me. Yes, I could see plainly what had chanced—that the Lady Heroise and Ursilla, their ambitious plans ruined by the birth of a daughter instead of a son, could be tempted to exchange children. If Ursilla had now laid a spell to bring the missing daughter hither (and that I could believe), then Aylinn was that daughter. But who was I?

“Be silent!” Ursilla swung around, pointed the tip of her wand at Maughus. His jaws clamped shut, his face reddened with anger, yet he could not utter another word.

“We have lost nothing,” Ursilla stated firmly. “Why think you I have called—her?” She gestured toward Aylinn. “As long as she exists she is a threat. The more so, I now reckon, because she is what she is. Therefore, we shall rid ourselves of the threat. And”—she laughed that vile laugh—“in the ridding, we shall bind to us your dutiful son by such ties as he can never break and rid ourselves also of this loud-tongued fool.” It was at Maughus that she nodded then.

My mother shrank yet farther away. She watched Ursilla with the look of one held entranced. But the Lady Eldris screamed, her voice awakening strange and spine-chilling echoes from out of the earth.

Ursilla reached within the inner pocket of her skirt. When she withdrew her hand, I saw what she held, all coiled together—the belt that anchored me to her will. She shook it loose. Where the hawk had torn it asunder it was mended.

In that moment, before she turned upon me the full force of her command, I made my move. Man—man! My will caught and held upon that one desire. All the energy I summoned, all I could find in either man or pard, that did I draw upon.

I stood Kethan. The beast was gone.

Again the Lady Eldris screamed. This time Lady Heroise echoed her cry. Beyond Ursilla I saw Aylinn give a small nod. She held her beflowered rod in my direction. Through that, I believed, had come an additional surge of energy to my aid.

Ursilla did not seem disconcerted by my transformation. She might even have been expecting some such move on my behalf. This made me wary. I stooped, caught up the sword that had fallen at Maughus’s feet. He himself was fighting whatever force held him, but his fight was in vain.

Ursilla raised her wand. I wondered if I could knock it from her hand with the length of steel I now held. Iron is a remedy against some forms of sorcery. Though would Ursilla have allowed me to arm myself so had she had any fear of that? I thought not.

However, she did not aim the wand at me, but again at the brazier. For the first time I noticed that it was once more filled and ready to be fired. A beam struck into its contents, smoke began to rise and this time, with it, flame tongues.

The Wise Woman again laughed. “Well armed you are now, Kethan, for what must be done. This is no place of the Shadow as we know it in these lesser days. But there are forces that will gather here to drink new-spilled blood. And, having so been fed, they will then be amiable to command—for a space. Therefore—they shall have their feast!”

Now the wand was pointed toward me at heart level.

“Kill,” she said calmly, as if she uttered an order no different from any one might give a servant in hall or stable.

My arm rose, though I fought it with all my will, even as I had fought to be a man not a pard moments earlier. Also, I willed my tight grip upon the sword to loosen, to let it fall once more into the scuffed-up dust of centuries.

My struggle was as fierce as Maughus’s had been, yet I took one step forward, then a second. My sword was pointing now, straight at Aylinn’s white body.

No! I stopped, swayed. Let me be beast for all my days then! This I would not do! Let Ursilla blast me with her sorcery, with all the menace that lurked in this place. Let her kill my body—kill the essence of me that dwelt within that body. This I would not do!

I tottered back and forth, the point of the sword wavering up and down as Ursilla’s will vied with mine for control.

“Run!” I shouted, and it was echoed out and out—“Run—run—run—”

Still Aylinn stood where she was. Her eyes held mine. I could not understand why she did not flee. Had Ursilla, in some way, woven about her the same stass-spell as held Maughus and his grandam?

“Kill!” Ursilla’s command was shriller. I could feel the anger in it.

I summoned the last of my own will—and held fast.

Then—

Pain such as I had never known before racked my body. I cried out.

Ursilla held the belt over the flames in the brazier, feeding the length of the strap to them little by little. As the fire licked at fur and hide, so did it also eat upon my flesh.

“Kill,” she cried. “Kill or die in torment!”

The victory might well be hers! I could not hold long my concentrated will as the agony ate into my mind and body. But while I could—that I would.

Of Sorcery Wrought and Unwrought and How We Learn Our Destiny

Through a red mist of pain I saw Aylinn lift her flower wand in my direction. There followed an instant or two of relief from torment. Only it did not hold. Again the flames engulfed me as they avidly licked the belt Ursilla dangled into their reach.

Then, in spite of my torture, I saw the belt begin to writhe in Ursilla’s hold, even as a living thing might fight for freedom. With a mighty jerk, it tore loose from her fingers and moved through the air. A hand arose, caught it.

Gasping, I stood free of the torment of those last moments. The belt lay in the hands of her whom Aylinn had named Gillan and Green Witch. Beside her crouched the snow cat, eyes aglare in the reflection of the brazier fire. Ursilla tottered. The force of the pull that had brought the belt out of her grasp had upset her not only bodily, but threatened her control of the force she had summoned.

She stared first, unbelievingly, at her empty hand, then raised her head slowly and looked at the two who stood just without the circle of the seated ones. No shadows of the dark concealed them. Perhaps the light, which made them so plain to our eyes, came from the Power, as well as the illumination generated within the circle.

I saw Ursilla’s face change. No years had drawn the flesh from her bones, but, in the few moments she confronted the two, age settled deep upon her, so that her coif framed a face that was close to a skull’s visage.

“Who—are—you—?” Her words grated forth rustily. She might have been speaking against her will.

“Those summoned—” the Green Witch replied. “Did you believe, Wise Woman, you might call one of kin, without others also coming?”

“Kin!” Ursilla was recovering from the shock that confrontation had caused her. She threw back her head, a cackle of hideous laughter loud in this place. “Claim you this one”—she pointed to Aylinn—“as kin? You are wrong, woman! She is no blood of your blood. You and your furred lord did not have the fashioning of her! If you would see the child you truly bore—look to this fool!” Now her pointing finger moved to me.

“So we have heard—” Gillan showed no surprise. “There has been free talk among you and we have ears. Son—” she looked past Ursilla straight at me. “Take what is yours!”

Through the air she tossed the belt and I caught it. It came to my hand as neatly as it had gone to hers earlier. I made haste to fasten about me the singed belt but, as my fingers caressed it, I could not now discover any signs of fire damage upon it.

Ursilla snarled as a beast would snarl. Her wand swept up as if to ward off an attack. But I had already locked the jargoon buckle. The sword was in my hand. My own gaze was for Aylinn. What did it mean to her to have this old truth now bared? She who was one with Gillan and Herrel—

But—still she was one with them! I knew it as I looked upon her, for I could sense the strong Power that united them. Daughter of their bodies she might not have been, but daughter of their hearts and minds, that she truly was. She showed no surprise, her serenity remained. It belonged to one secure in who and what she was.

“Did you think, Wise Woman,” Gillan asked, “that one could pass through the truth of Neave’s own Fane and not learn even what sorcery strives to hide? This is our child by the will of those far greater than we ever hope to know—”

As I looked upon them, the Green Witch who was my mother, the Were who had fathered me, and Aylinn who was their chosen child, I could understand the justice of their choice. In me there was a cold desolation growing. Not from fear, but from the pressure of the loneliness I had known all my life, but that now was given meaning and completion.

I was no heir to Car Do Prawn. Maughus would have what he had always sought. Now I could be no tool for Ursilla’s shaping either, since the truth was known. I was—apart and alone.

The retreat into self was my mistake. For Ursilla attacked. Her wand flashed up, its tip pointing at Aylinn. Fire burst, enwreathed my Moon Witch, hid her from sight. I heard a cry from out of the fire.

Then I leaped into flames that curled about me, caused a moment of raw agony. My lunge brought me to Aylinn.

I threw out my left arm to bear her back, away from the dancing tongues of flame.

We were together in a circle of fire, fire that burned not orange and red, but with hues a deeper, deadly color—the purple of the Shadow. We could not retreat farther, for our backs were against the rigid knees of the seated figure, about which the purple wall of shifting fire crept closer.

The Moon Witch held her staff against her breast. I could feel the rhythm of a chant throughout her body, though she did not open her lips. As she had done for me, so I tried in turn to do for her—to give her my strength to serve her purpose.

Then I moved swiftly, dropping the useless sword, catching her by her slender waist to toss her up upon the lap of the stone one. There was room there for her above the flames. Perhaps, before they could reach her, Gillan and Herrel might evoke an answer to the horror Ursilla had wrought.

Through the ever narrowing, creeping advance of the fire I could see the others. Ursilla worked feverishly, drawing about her feet with the tip of her wand another circle to enclose her, and the brazier. She threw something from the breast of her robe into the stone cup. More smoke arose to hide her. But her chanting I could hear—the hissing, slurred words to evoke the unknown sorcery of this place. Through the smoke I heard, a moment later, the shrill note of the bone whistle—a frantic summons.

“Kethan—up!” It was Aylinn’s voice. She had curled up in her strange place of refuge and now reached toward me. But there was no room. And the purple flames gave off that which made my breath strangle in my throat, so that I choked and retched, as if all the evils of the world poured from within in a foul fog.

“Up!” Aylinn clawed at my shoulder. Her nails left red lines on my skin. I could feel the force of her will also, drawing me in the same way the spell Ursilla had laid had drawn me, first to her and then back to this cursed place.

Somehow her will did bring me up, so we huddled together on the lap of the seated one. It was not the figure that held the limp man-toy, for which I was dimly grateful. In its claw hand was a half-open flower. Now I saw Aylinn put forth her own hand to run fingertips across the stone petals, even as she might touch one of her moon-flowers.

She no longer was tense with the will to power which had been in her when first the fire ringed me round. Rather she waited—though for what event or signal, I did not know.

Ursilla’s protective circle touched upon the base of the seated one with the man-toy. Now smoke whirled out in thick coils to enclose it along with Ursilla herself. I waited for more to flow around the circle, engulfing one of the faceless beings and then the next as it had done before. However, this time the puffs of smoke remained stationary. Through the upper reaches we could see, faintly, the flow of the globe face above us. In it colors spun with increasing force, growing ever darker.

The flames crept now to the foot of the statue on which we had taken refuge. It appeared to me that the fire burned with anger, if that can be said of fire, lashing out with many tongues in an attempt to reach us. Yet the highest flames were well below us.

For a moment (Though how long might that last?) we seemed safe. I gazed eagerly beyond the flames to see what chanced with the others. Ursilla remained hidden in her smoke veil. The three from the Keep huddled together, their eyes wide with fear. Whatever spell Ursilla had put upon Maughus was slowly passing. The Lady Eldris clung to him. He had freed one arm and raised it before them both. Though he was weaponless, his gesture was one of defense. Beyond them, near their feet, crouched the Lady Heroise. All her arrogance had ebbed. She did not any longer even weep as she had when she had come at Ursilla’s bidding. Her face was blanched with fear, her staring eyes fixed upon the smoke cloud that concealed the Wise Woman. It was that, which drew all their attention. None looked at us above the flames.

There was good reason for that. Even the most insensitive of living creatures, one with no vestige of talent, would certainly have been aware of the forces collecting in that long-forgotten shrine (if shrine it was). Ursilla had thrown open some Gate—

One of the Gates of legend? Aylinn’s head turned against my shoulder as that thought slipped into my mind. I read the wonder in her eyes.

We, who were born after the great struggle between the Powers of Arvon, knew only through legends what had occurred in the dim years of long ago. We had Chronicles that spoke often of the Gates and what could be summoned through them. (It was far harder to expel such aliens back through the uncanny openings in the skin of our world.)

But of the nature of the Gates themselves, or the keys that opened them, or where they might be situated, that knowledge was never made plain in the tales. Such was forbidden, shunned by all who dwelt in the Power—unless the Shadow now meddled in some way; for a check upon these of the Greater Dark was ever hard to keep.

It was well within reason, I believed, that this place could mark one Gate. And, if Ursilla, in her madness, threw it open—

Where were the two from the Tower? I had been so bemused, first by Aylinn’s great danger, and then by the sorcery of the Wise Woman, I had almost forgotten them. Now I shifted as well as I could in the small cramped space of our refuge trying to sight them. However, the bulk of the figure, on which we sheltered, cut them from view. Aylinn’s hand closed on mine.

Her flowered wand shifted in her other hand, pointed toward the flower carved in the figure’s hold. She tilted the rod carefully so that its tip rested in the heart of the stone flower.

“Give me,” she said in a voice so low it could not have reached beyond my own ears, “give me all you have to give—kinsman!”

She did not glance toward me, rather fastened her full concentration upon the flower and the wand tip. A moment later, I knew that she had now become a channel for force, some of it raised by her own calling, some drawn from me. Though I was not practiced in such matters, I strove, as I had to separate man and beast, to release to her what small aid I could give.

So intense was my desire, my whole world narrowed to the small point where wand touched the carven flower. I could feel the energy going out of me, caught up by Aylinn, refined, strengthened, interwoven with what she had to give in turn. Then only did it flow down her wand.

Brighter blazed the moonflowers, the pure white radiance clear and clean above the sullen purple of the flames that still strove to consume us. The wand changed to a shaft of moon fire, eye-hurting in its brilliance.

Still Aylinn called upon me, still I gave freely, not reckoning any future cost.

Now, where the point of the wand touched, there showed a pale circle of fire. That, too, grew, brightened, spread out and up, to make the petals of stone resemble those of the moonflowers, as if the rock carving was transformed by our force of desire into a living thing.

I was dimly aware, even through my concentration, of something else. There was a change in the figure where we sheltered. Vibration ran through the substance of the shrouded body, not the vibration of breath, or heartbeat—but—akin to that!

I dared not allow myself to think of anything but what Aylinn would do now. I willed away suspicion of such change.

The flower was fully alight, to the very tips of its petals, not as purely bright as the moon blooms, rather silver instead. From the petal tips broke thin spirals of radiance, until what we could see, in truth, was not just the stone flower, but a much greater and more wonderful bloom sketched in the air about it.

Slowly the stone petals began to open further, folding back, as might those of a bud in full warmth of day. The other radiant petals, which the first guarded as a core, did likewise.

Out of the core emerged a sliver of silver light, another, more. I had seen field flowers, after blooming, scatter seeds that bore tufts of stuff upon them to aid their wind flight. Out and out flew these bits of light. Some vanished into Ursilla’s smoke wall, some dropped sooner into the purple of the flames at our feet.

Aylinn raised her wand. She looked up and around over her shoulder, seeming to seek out the globe face that hung above us. The drain of energy had ceased. I felt too weakened to move. Yet, somehow, I forced myself to do as she had done.

There was still the ceaseless roll and swell of color captured within the oval. But—there was something else!

Had I seen it? Or had my imagination only for a moment made me think that I perceived eyes marked there, eyes that regarded me as if from a very great distance—eyes to which I meant little or nothing, eyes drowsy from sleep? I am not sure, and yet I believed that I did see this.

If such eyes did look upon us, they were quickly gone again. In Aylinn’s hand her wand grew dark and drab. From its length the moonflowers withered, falling in seared bits. The stone flower and the radiance around it were gone. Where the seedlings (if seedlings the splinters of light had been) had fallen, there had been other results.

Of those that had met our prisoning flames, we could see no remains, but their passing was marked. For in certain places the circle of fire was quenched, leaving openings that no outward surge of fire could cross and close.

Also, in Ursilla’s wall of concealing smoke, other light seedlings had torn wide windows. Through these we could look upon what happened as she called upon all she had learned to serve her in this time and place.

Now I could see that Gillan and Herrel had moved forward, to one of the windows in the smoke. The snow cat crouched low. Pard memory tightened my own muscles as the black tip of the silver-white tail quivered.

He leaped—threading through the window in the smoke expertly. Behind him, Gillan thrust forward with her leaf-tipped rod, aimed at Ursilla’s head.

The Wise Woman had been standing with head flung back, her eyes shut, pouring from her mouth the stream of hissing, slurring calls. Now her head rocked forward as if dealt a shock. Her words, if words they were, were choked for a breath or so. At that moment, her incantation hesitated, the snow cat swung out a mighty paw in a blow such as few even of that great breed might hope to equal.

Claws raked and then caught. The brazier was overbalanced and fell. Out of its hollow spewed the burning stuff Ursilla must have mixed with such care. There was no more smoke arising from the scattered bits, quickly fading to ashes. The cloud of smoke, already in the air, began to fade.

But—

A cry arose in my own throat, echoed hoarsely from the dark. For the seated figure near Ursilla had—moved!

From its claw hand the man-toy fell limply, tossed aside as something now without value. But the claws hovered above the snow cat, closing in. I heard a Were-roar of defiance. Saw Ursilla’s mouth stretch over sounds that seemed to distort her human lips. She lashed out at the cat, and he retreated before her wand as she drove him back under the slowly descending hand.

What could be done? Aylinn cried from beside me. I could not listen coherently to what she said. Rather I concentrated upon what I must do.

Gillan’s leaf point quivered now. The wand to which it was fastened wavered back and forth. Her face was drawn by fear, not for herself, but for Herrel.

Then—not knowing I had made the descent—I was on the pavement. My fingers closed about the hilt of the sword I had dropped at the foot of the figure. This in hand, I staggered forward, forcing my drained body to do my will.

The snow cat had easily made the leap through the opening in the smoke. But the wall, save for that, was still intact. I had no time to hunt another doorway, nor did I have the strength to raise myself through the one that existed. I had only the sword—and to some sorcery iron was a deadly thing.

I drew on all the energy still in me, raised my arm shoulder high. Then I hurled the blade as I might have a spear.

Through the window in the smoke it carried. I had had such a short time in which to aim. And my weakness betrayed me. The point did not strike at Ursilla. Instead, it clattered feebly against her wand.

There was a brilliant flash of light, so great as to half-blind me. I threw up my arm to shield my eyes. So—I had failed!

“Kethan!”

Aylinn’s hands were upon my shoulders. I knew her touch even though I could not see her.

I blinked, perceiving only a haze ahead, one shot through with color. Through it, in some strange fashion, padded on four feet an indistinct animal shape. The snow cat!

Gillan closed in upon my left, even as the cat reached us. I blinked again, rubbed my eyes, hoping to clear away the fog born from the flash.

Now the last of the smoke was whirled away by a wind that arose out of nowhere. Crouched against the feet of the figure who had answered her spell-call was the Wise Woman.

By her feet lay the sword, its blade half melted, blackened. Of her wand there was no sign at all.

Ursilla was the focus of that wind. Under its buffeting, she cowered close to the pavement—and—She was—

She was gone! There was a length of cloth that had been her coif, a tangle of robe. But she was gone. Over where she had crouched hung the empty claw hand that had reached for a new toy to hold throughout the centuries.

“Her power”—Gillan’s voice reached me dimly through the wind that still wailed—“her power was broken and then recoiled! She is—finished!”

“So be it!”

That was another voice, one I knew. Maughus moved away from the two women, watched us with eyes in which there was little of sanity left.

“If you think to take Car Do Prawn—” All that had happened appeared to mean nothing to him, his own cause was all that mattered. And he spoke thus to Aylinn.

She laughed. “What want I of your Keep?” She moved closer to Gillan. “I want no part of any heritage. I have my own place.”

“You—” He swung now upon me. “You have no claim—”

“Nor want one,” I told him. There was a vast weariness about me. “To you goes Car Do Prawn, Maughus. No man shall now gainsay your right.”

He eyed me doubtfully. Perhaps he could not believe that I would not do as he might have done in my place, fight for the Keep. But to me, Car Do Prawn now seemed as far removed as a star, and far less desirable.

“Yes, Lord Maughus, to you Car Do Prawn—”

We all turned in startlement. There stood another, beyond the circle of the seated ones. Now he came briskly into the waning light. As he passed the place where some of the purple flames still danced fitfully, he waved his hand. They disappeared.

“Ibycus—” I was tired beyond the power to wonder what had brought the trader hither to this place and at this hour.

He bowed. “Just so, Kethan. I see that you have made excellent use of your gift—”

My hand fell to the belt. Part of me wanted to strip it off—hurl it from me. The other part forbade. Beast I might be again when there came a need, but now Kethan would ever control the pard.

He nodded. I knew he could read my thoughts as easily as if they were runes set out on some roll.

“Very true.” Now he turned his head to look upon Gillan, and, behind her, Herrel, who once more stood a man.

I saw them both suddenly make the same gesture of respect, one I had seen used only from Keep Lord to a messenger of the Voices.

“You think we may have played some ill tricks, Lady?” Ibycus asked Gillan.

She hesitated. “I think rather there was meant to be a meaning to all of this that the players in your act did not know.”

“You are entirely right. Ursilla would provide her tool, the Lady Heroise, with an heir—for her own purposes. Her efforts in that direction evoked the knowledge of one to whom is entrusted the duty of keeping the balance of power here in Arvon. Thus we made use of her ambition in order to temper those who are to stand firm in times to come. With you, Lady Gillan, Aylinn became the person she was meant to be. In Car Do Prawn, had Ursilla not played her own game, this maid would never have learned the depth and height of her own powers. While Kethan”—now he smiled at me—“was tested as a sword is tested by a smith, proving that he had the strength desired. And the last venture—within this you four have woven well a pattern that will hold—”

Herrel spoke as Ibycus paused. “I read in your words hints beyond hints, Messenger. Do we now venture once more into battle?”

“So much we can read, but that foreknowledge is limited. Your Werekin, with their Dale brides, have forged a new race. These two”—he gestured to Aylinn and then to me—“are also to be counted of that heritage. We have been informed that this is of importance, the whyfor will come to be discovered in time. Now—” He stood with his hands on his hips as his eyes studied each of us in turn. “This is no place for those of Arvon. Old and old it is, and best forgotten. Out—”

With his forefinger he pointed swiftly to Maughus, to the Lady Eldris, to Heroise. And—they were gone!

Us, he did not so indicate separately. But a wave of a hand included us four together. There was a breath of cold and darkness, then—

We stood with the sun of midmorning warm upon us. The other three watched me with an inner warmth, greater than any sun glow could ever be.

“Welcome home, Kethan!” said my father, as Aylinn drew me forward to walk down the door path of the garden.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express her appreciation for the aid rendered on two technical matters connected with this book.

First to Mrs. Merrill Gladstone of the “Rock Pile” who produced a jargoon and also the information concerning the finding of such semiprecious stones, their weight, color and the like.

Second to Mrs. Phyllis Schlemmer, the sensitive, who demonstrated the various forms of tarot and then worked out the proper horoscope tarot reading for Kethan.

Zarsthor’s Bane

WAN SUNLIGHT touched the upper reaches of this unnamed western dale to which Brixia’s unguided wandering had brought her. It was far enough from the ravaged lands eastward to promise a breathing space of dubious safety—if one took care. Squatting on her heels, the girl grimaced at distant clouds to the east, a hint of worse weather to come. She drew the thin blade of her knife back and forth across the sharpening stone, eyeing that silver of worn steel anxiously. It had been sharpened so many times and, though it had been well forged and strong, its making was in the past—the past she did not even try to remember nowadays. She had to be very careful, she knew, or that finger of metal might snap, leaving her with no tool—nor weapon—at all.

Her hands were sunbrowned and scarred, the nails of her fingers broken, rimmed with a grime which even scrubbing with sand could not banish entirely. It was very hard to think now that once all she had held was the spindle of a spinner, or the shuttle of a weaver, the needle of one who wrought pictures in colored threads upon the thick stuff meant to cover the walls of a keep. Another girl had known that living, soft and secure, in the High Hallack before the invaders came. Someone who had died during the time stretching behind her like a corridor, the far end of which was so faint in her mind that she had difficulty remembering.

That Brixia had survived flight from that enemy besieged keep which had always been her home made her as tough and enduring as the metal she now held. She had learned that time meant one day to be faced from sunrise until she could find some shelter in the coming of dark. There were no feast days, no naming of one month upon another—only times of heat, and times of cold when her very bones ached and sometimes she coughed and knew the bite of the chill until she felt she would never be warm again.

There was little spare flesh on her now; she was as lean and strong as a bow cord. And near, in her own way, as deadly. That she had once gone in fine wool, with a necklet of amber, and the pale western gold in rings upon her fingers—to her that now seemed like a dream—a troublesome dream.

She had walked with fear until it had become a familiar friend, and, had it been banished from her side, she would have felt queerly naked and lost. There had been times when she had nearly shut her eyes upon the rock walls of a cave, or upon the branches of some tree arched above her, ready to lose her stubborn will to endure, to accept death which followed her like a hound on the trail of a fal-deer already wounded by the hunter.

Still there was within her that core of determination which was the heritage of her House—was she not of of the blood of Torgus? And all in the south dales of High Hallack had known the Song of Torgus and his victory over the Power of Llan’s Stone. Torgus’ House might not be great in lands or wealth, but in spirit and strength it must be reckoned very high indeed.

She raised a hand to brush back a wandering strand of her sun-bleached hair, sawn off raggedly at her neck level. Not for any skulker of the unsettled lands were the gold braided strands of a bower dweller. Now as she drew the knife back and forth across the stone she hummed the Challenge of Llan on so low a note that none but her own ear might have picked up that thread of sound. There were none to hear—she had scouted this place well shortly after dawn. Unless one counted as listener the black-plumaged bird which croaked menacingly from the top of a nearby, winter-twisted tree.

“So—so—” she tested the keenness of the blade on that errant strand of hair which kept fluttering down into her eyes. The sharpened steel sliced easily through the trees, leaving a puff of severed hairs between her fingers. She loosed her hold and the wind swept those from her. Then she knew a touch of fear again. Better—in this country unknown to her—that she had safely buried that portion of herself. There were old tales—that powers beyond the reckoning of her own people could seize upon hair, nails, the spittle from one’s mouth and use such for the making of ill magic.

Save that there were none here, she thought, to be feared. Evidences there were, this close to the Waste, of those who had once held this country—the Old Ones. They had left monoliths of stone, strange places which beckoned or warned the spirit.

But those were but the markers of long vanished power or powers. And those who had wrought with such were long since gone. The black bird, as if to deny that, cried again its harsh call.

“Ha, black one,” the girl broke off her hum to glance at the bird. “Be not so bold. Would you take sword against Uta?” Sitting back on her heels, she pursed her lips to give a low but carrying whistle.

The bird squawked fiercely as if it well knew whom she so summoned. Then it arose to swoop down slope, skimming only a little above the ground.

From the tussocks of green grass (there were no more sheep on these hills to nibble it ground short) there arose a furred head. Lips drawn back, the cat spat, eyes slitted in annoyance as the bird sheered off and was gone with a last croak of threat.

With the vast dignity of her kind the cat trotted on up to Brixia. The girl raised a palm in greeting. They had been trail comrades and bed mates now for a long time and she was inwardly flattered that Uta had chosen to company her so during her aimless wanderings.

“Was the hunting good?” she asked the cat who had now seated herself an arm’s distance away to give close attention to the tongue washing of a back leg. “Or did the rats move on when there were no more people in that ruin to bring in food for them to steal?” Talking with Uta gave her her only chance to use her voice during this wary solitary wandering.

Settling back, Brixia surveyed the buildings below. Judging by the remains this had once been a well cultivated dale. The fortified manor with its adjacent defense tower—though now roofless, bearing signs of fire on its crumbling walls—must once have been snug enough. She could count twenty fieldmen’s cottages (mostly from the outlines of their walls alone for that was all which remained to be seen) plus a larger heap of tumbled stone which might have been an inn. A road made a ribbon along which those cottages had been strung. It had run, Brixia guessed, straight to the nearest river port. Any traders coming into these upper dales must have followed that way. In addition those strange and only partly tolerated people who roamed the Waste, prospecting in the places of the Old Ones, would have found this a convenient market place for their discoveries.

She did not know what name those who had lived here had given their settlement. Nor could she more than guess what had happened to turn it into the wasteland. The invaders who had ravaged all High Hallack during the war could not have reached so inland a place. But the war itself had spawned evil which was neither invader nor Dale, but born of both.

During that time when the Dalesman’s levies had been called elsewhere, two-legged wolves—the outlaws of the Waste—pillaged and destroyed at will. Brixia did not doubt that when she went poking below she would find disturbing evidence of how this settlement had died. It had been looted—perhaps even the ruins combed more than once. She was not the only sulker in the wasteways. Still she could always hope that there remained something usable—if it were only a battered mug.

Brixia wiped her hands across her thighs, noting with a small frown that the stuff of her breeches was so thin over one knee that flesh showed palely through. Long since she had put aside skirted robe for the greater ease of a forest runner’s wear. She kept her knife in her hand as she reached out for her other weapon, the stout hunting spear. Its point had been newly sharpened also, and she knew well how to use it.

Her pack she would leave here hidden in the brush. There was no need to linger long in the ruins, in fact perhaps she was wasting time to even explore. But Uta would have given her warning if anything larger than a rat or a meadow-leaper laired there, and she could always hope for a find. Her spear had come out of another just such blasted keep.

Though the dale, as far as she could see, seemed deserted, Brixia still moved with caution. There might be unpleasant surprises in any unknown territory. Her life for the past three years taught her the very slim edge which lay between life and death.

She closed her mind firmly on the past. It was weakening for the spirit to try and remember how it was once. To live for this day only was what kept one sane and alert. That she did live and had reached this place unharmed was, she thought, a matter for self congratulation. The fact that once she had known such a keep as home, worn soft wool, fancifully woven and dyed, over her now muscular and famine thinned body, no longer mattered. Even the clothes she now had were looted—

Those breeches, worn so thin, were of coarse and harsh material, her jerkin was of leaper skin, cured crudely, then laced together by her own hands, the shirt under she had found in the pack of a dead Dalesman, she having come upon the site of an outlaw ambush. The Dalesman had taken his enemies with him. She wore the shirt as she made herself believe as a gift of a brave man. Her feet were bare, though she had a pair of wooden-soled sandals in her pack, ready for the harder trails. Her soles were tough and thick, the nails on her toes rough and broken.

Her hair sprung from her scalp in an unruly, wiry mass, for she had no comb but her fingers. Once it had been the color of apple-ale at its most potent, sleek, shining, braided. Now, bleached by the sun, it looked more like autumn-killed grass. But she no longer possessed any pride in her person, only that she was strong and clever enough to survive.

Uta, Brixia thought fleetingly, as she slipped from one stand of brush and tree to the next (ever alert to any warning, ear, eye or nose might give), was far better named “lady” now. She was large for a house cat. But it might well be that she had never warmed herself before any man-set fire—being feral from birth. Only then her calm uniting with Brixia would be doubly strange.

Brixia had awakened from very uneasy slumber one night near a year gone, as far as she could reckon, though she kept no calendar, to discover Uta seated by her fire, the cat’s eyes reflecting the light like large reddish coins in the air. Brixia had sheltered then in one of the moss-grown, roofless husks of some building the Old Ones had left. She had discovered that those drifters she must name enemy had little liking for such relics. But there had been no harm in this one—just walls fast returning into the earth.

She had been a little wary of Uta at that first meeting. But, save that the cat’s unblinking stare made her feel that she was being in some way weighed and measured, there had been nothing remarkable about Uta. Her fur was a deep gray, darker on the head, paws and tail—with a blueish gleam when the sun touched it. And that fur was as thick and soft as some luxury cloth the traders had once brought from over-seas in the lost years before the invaders’ war tore the dales from top to bottom, east to west, and broke life apart into shattered pieces perhaps none of the survivors might ever gather together again.

In that dark face Uta’s eyes were strange color, sometimes blue, sometimes green, but always holding a red spark by night. And those were knowing eyes. Sometimes, when they were turned on Brixia, the girl had been uncomfortable—as at their first meeting—as if, behind the slitted pupils was an intelligence matching her own to study her in serene detachment.

Girl and cat, they now made their way to shrubs which formed an overgrown and untidy hedge-wall about the larger ruin Brixia had guessed to be an inn. Remains of two walls stood, fire marked and crumbling, no higher than the girl’s shoulder. There was a cellar hole in the ground now near filled, and she had no mind to grub in that.

No—the best hunting ground was the lord’s domain. Though that would have been the first to be looted, of course. Still if the fire had gotten out of control before the looters had finished, then—

Brixia’s head went up. Her nostrils expanded to catch that scent. In the wilds she depended upon scent as did any of the animals, and, though she did not realize it, nor ever think about such things much, that sense was now far keener from constant use than it had been before war had made of her a rover.

Yes! Burning wood!

She dropped to hands and knees, crawled with a hunter’s caution along the side of the inn, seeking a thinner place in that wall of brush which enclosed it. At length she lay flat, pushing forward the boar spear inch by inch, to lift back low-hanging branches and increase her field of vision.

Fire at this time of the year, when there had been no storm with lightning to set a spark, could only mark a camp of humans, Which in this country usually meant—outlaws. That some who had once lived here might have drifted back to see what could be salvaged—She considered that possibility and did not altogether dismiss it.

But even if the village Dalesmen had returned they could be her enemies now. They need only catch sight of her for her to be their quarry. To their eyes in her present ragged state she was no different than the outlaws who had despoiled them before. They might well take her for the scout of another such band.

Though Brixia searched the scene before her with close attention she saw no signs of any camp. The house was, she decided, too destroyed to provide shelter. However, the tower still stood, and, though its window slits were unshuttered to the wind and storms and must have been so for a long time, the rest presented an appearance of being less ill used.

Whoever sheltered here must be in the tower. She had no more than decided that when there was movement in the doorway and someone advanced into the open. Brixia tensed.

A boy—undersized—his fair head near as unkempt as her own. But his clothing was whole and looked in good condition. That was dark green breeches, boots, and his jerkin was of metal rings sewed on to leather, provided with sleeves to his wrists. He wore a sword belt and. in the scabbard, a blade with a plain hilt.

As she watched, he threw back his head, put his fingers to his lips and whistled. Uta stirred, and then, before Brixia could stop her, the cat flashed out of hiding and sped into the courtyard before the keep, her tail banner high. But it was not she alone who answered that summons. A horse trotted from around the tower and came to the boy, dropping its head to butt against his chest, while fingers scratched the root of its forelock caressingly.

Uta had come into full view of the boy and now she sat down, primly folding her tail end over her front paws; turning on him, Brixia was sure, that same measuring gaze which she used with the girl from time to time. She, herself, was unwontedly irritated at the desertion of the cat. For so long Uta had been her only companion—Brixia had come to think of her as she might a comrade of her own species. Yet now the cat had gone from under her very hand to visit with the stranger.

The girl’s frown grew the sharper. There was nothing here for her—no chance to go searching for any useful loot. What remained, if anything did, would be discovered by this intruder. Best slip away as soon as she might and leave Uta to her fate. After all it looked as if the cat wished to change her allegiance.

The boy looked down at the cat. Now he loosed the horse and went to one knee, his hand outstretched.

“Pretty Lady—” he spoke with the accent of the upper dales, and his words were startling to the listening girl. It had been so long since she had heard any voice except her own.

“Come—Lady—”

“Jartar?”

She saw the boy’s body stiffen as he glanced back over his shoulder at the tower door.

“Jartar—” That other voice was low and there was something in it—Brixia crooked her arm to rest her chin as she lay in hiding—even her breath slow and light.

Two of them—at least. She had better not try to move yet—even though she was nearly sure that the craft she had learned by force of need was equal to covering any retreat.

The boy stood up, went back in the tower. With a toss of its head the horse ambled over the stone pavement, heading toward a good stand of grass. But Uta trotted toward that same doorless opening in the stone.

Brixia felt a small warmth of anger within her. They had so much—clothing, a sword, a horse—she had had nothing but Uta. Now it seemed she might even lose the cat. This was the time to get away. Still she made no move to slip back as quietly as she had come.

She had been alone for so long. While she knew that safety now lay only in loneliness, yet memory stirred. She watched the tower door with a certain wistfulness. The boy had not looked formidable. He wore a sword—but who in this land did not carry such weapons as he could find? Of late there was no law, no might of Dale lord to offer protection. Safety one carried in one’s own hands, in the strength and dexterity of one’s body. However, though she had heard only one voice calling out of the tower, that had the deep tone of a man’s, it did not signify that there might not be more than one therein.

Prudence demanded that she creep away at once. Only—there was a need, born of a starvation of spirit, which was eating at her as might starvation of her spare body. She wanted to hear voices—see someone—Brixia had not known how deep was that desire until this moment.

Folly, Brixia told herself sternly. Yet she yielded to that folly, moment by moment. One of those moments proved her withdrawal already too late.

Movement in the door. Uta, who had reached the edge of that, withdrew by a graceful leap to the pavement without, sitting tail over paws again. Then the boy issued forth, but this time he half supported a companion.

A tall man, at least beside the boy he seemed tall. He walked oddly, shambling, his head bent forward as if he stared at the ground as he came. His arms swung loosely from his shoulders and, though, like the boy he wore mail (his being a well-made shirt of it—not crude ring and leather stuff), his belt scabbard held no sword.

He was wide of shoulder, narrow of waist and hip. His hair had been cropped, but not too recently, for it curled behind his ears and down a little on his neck, swept back from his sun browned forehead. That hair was very dark, and so were his brows which slanted upwards at the far corners. There was a cast to his features which Brixia’s troubled memory noted. Once, a long time ago, she had seen such a man—

There had been a story about him—she groped for the first time in many months, deliberately stirring up memory she had sought to deaden. Yes! What had they said in whispers about that other man—a lord from the west who had spent a single night in the keep, sitting at meat in the high seat of an honored guest at her father’s right hand? He was—half blood! Triumphantly her rusty memory produced the term she wanted—one of those the Dales folk looked upon askance but trod softly about—one whose fathers had wed strange ladies—people of the Old Ones—most of whom had long ago left High Hallack, fading away toward the north or west where no sensible man would want to follow. There were always whispers about the half-blood—they were said to have powers which only they understood. But her father had welcomed that lord in open friendship and had seemed honored that he stayed beneath their roof.

Now she saw that there was a difference between that man in her blurred memory and this one who came from the ruined tower. He did not raise his head to look about him as he advanced a few steps, but halted to stand quietly, still staring at the pavement. There was a curious emptiness in his face. He had no sign of beard (perhaps that also was a mark of his ancestry) and his mouth opened slackly, though his chin was well set. If it had not been for that emptiness mirrored in his lack of all expression he might have been considered a well-favored man.

The boy held him by the arm, drew him along, the man obeying docilely and never looking up. Bringing him to where there was a tumble of stones, his companion gently forced him to be seated there.

“It is a fair morning—” To Brixia’s hearing the boy’s voice was strained, the words tumbled out too fast, sounded too loud. “We are home at Eggarsdale, my lord, truly at Eggarsdale—” The boy glanced about him, glancing up and around as if he sought some aid.

“Jartar—” For the first time the man spoke. His head came up, though there was no change in the dull cast of his face as he called that word aloud. “Jartar—”

“Jartar is—gone, my lord.” The boy caught at the man’s chin, strove to bring the slanted eyes up to meet his own. Though the man’s head moved unresistingly in that hold, Brixia could see there was no change, no lightening of the deadness in that set stare.

“We are home, my lord!” The boy’s hands went to the man’s shoulders, shook him.

The body in that hold yielded limply to the force of his shaking. Still the man did not resist, nor show that he recognized either boy, words, or the place in which he sat. With a sigh his young companion stepped back, again looking about the courtyard as if to summon up some aid which would break what lay upon his lord like a spell.

Then he knelt, took the man’s hands in his, held them tightly against his breast.

“My lord,” Brixia thought he used a vast effort to keep his voice even, “this is Eggarsdale.” He formed each word slowly and distinctly, speaking as he might to one who was deaf but might hear a little if one took good care. “You are in your own place, my lord. We are safe, my lord. Your own safe place, you are home.”

Uta arose, stretched, moved lightfooted across the pavement towards man and boy. Coming to the right side of the man she reared, setting her forepaws on his thigh to look up at him.

For the first time there was a change in that face so lacking in any sign of intelligence or emotion. The man’s head turned slowly. He might have been fighting against an obstructing force in order to move at all. But he did not face the cat. The boy’s visible surprise became demanding concentration, including both cat and man in the intentness of his gaze.

His lord’s lips worked. The man might be fighting to produce words which he was unable to speak. For a long moment he continued so. Then he lost that measure of faint attention, if attention it had been. Once more his face emptied, was the mirror of a ruined mind, as broken as the remnants of what the boy had called his home.

Uta dropped from her place at his knee, eyed the down winging of a butterfly, to bound away after that with playfulness she seldom displayed. The boy loosened the man’s hands, sprang after the cat, but she skimmed neatly between his reaching hands, slipped away between two stones.

“Puss—puss!” He dodged around the stones, hunting and calling frenziedly, as if to regain sight of the cat were the most important thing in the world.

Brixia smiled wryly. She could have told him his efforts were in vain. Uta went her own way. The cat must have been curious about the people in the tower. Now that the curiosity was satisfied they might never see her again.

“Puss!” the boy pounded with his fist on top of part of the tumbled wall. “Puss! I—he knew, for a minute—by the Fangs of Oxtor, he knew!” He threw back his head and cried that last aloud like a battle shout. “Puss—he knew—you must come again—you must!”

Though he said that with all the intensity of a wise-woman evoking one of the Powers, he had no answer. Brixia realized what the boy wanted. That faint interest of the man in the curious cat must mean a great deal to his companion. Maybe it was the first response his lord had shown to anything since wound or illness had reduced him to this husk. So the boy wanted Uta to hand as a hope—

Brixia stirred a little. So engrossed was that other in his own web of hopes and fears, she felt that he might rise to her feet and walk away in the open, without his noting her. And she should withdraw—only now a curiosity perhaps akin to Uta’s kept her where she was. Though her wariness had eased a little—she saw in these two no immediate open threat to herself.

“Puss—” the boy’s voice died away almost despairingly.

The man shifted a little and, as the boy turned towards him, he raised his head. There was no change on his dead face, but he began to sing as a songsmith might voice a song for a hall feast.

“Down came the Power

By Eldor cast—

Fierce pride,

Strength meant to last.

Out of the dark

At his call

Came that to make him

Lord of all.

But Zarsthor bared the Sword of Mind

Raised Will’s shield,

Vowed by Death, heat and heart,

Not to Yield.

Star Bane blazed,

Grim and bright

Darkness triumphed

Over Light,

Zarsthor’s land fallow lies,

His fields stark bare.

None may guess in aftertime

Who held Lordship there.

Thus by the shame of

Eldor’s pride

Death and ruin came to ride.

The stars have swung—

Is the time ripe

To face once more
the force of night?

Who dares come in dark and shame

To test the force of Zarsthor’s Bane?”

The poor verse might limp, sounding little better than the untutored riddling of an unlettered landman, yet there was something in his singing which made Brixia shiver. Zarsthor’s Bane she had never heard of. However nearly every dale had its own legends and stories. Some never spread beyond the hills which encircled that particular holding. The boy halted. His incredulous expression once more became one of excited hope.

“Lord Marbon!”

Only his joyous hail had just the opposite effect. The man’s vacant face once more turned downward. However, now his hands moved restlessly, plucking at the breast of his mail shirt.

“Lord Marbon!” the boy repeated.

The man’s head turned a little to the right, as one who listened.

“Jartar—?”

“NO!” the boy’s hands clenched into fists. “Jartar is dead. He has been dead and rotting this twelfth month and morel He is dead, dead, dead—do you hear me! He is dead!”

The last word echoed bleakly through the ruins.

IT WAS UTA who broke the silence following the dying away of that resounding and despairing word. The cat crouched to face that portion of the hedge behind which Brixia flattened in hiding. From her furred throat sounded what was near the scream of a a tormented woman. Brixia had heard such a shriek before—it was Uta’s challenge. But that it was aimed at her came as a shock.

The boy whirled, his hand slapping down on the hilt of his sword in instant reaction. There was no chance now for Brixia to slip away—she had waited far too long. While to continue to lie here only to be routed out of hiding like the cowardly skulker they might well deem her—No! That she would not wait for.

She arose, pushed through a thin place in that hedging, to advance into the open, her spear ready in her hand. Since there was no arrow on any bow string to provide menace, she believed her spear was fair answer to the other’s sword.

Uta had faced about after that betrayal, staring round-eyed at the boy. His face was taut, wary. Now his sword was out of the scabbard.

“Who are you?” There was wariness in his sharp demand also.

Her name would mean nothing to him. During the past months of solitary wandering it had come to mean little to her either. She was far from the dale of her birth, even from any territory where naming her House might have some proper identification. Since she had never heard of Eggarsdale it was logical to suppose that such an isolated western holding would never have heard in turn of Moorachdale or the House of Trogus which had ruled there before all ended in a day of blood and flame.

“A wanderer—” she began, then wondered if answering that demand at all would in a small way weaken her position.

“A woman!” He slapped his sword back into its sheath. “Are you of Shaver’s get—or Hamel’s—he had a daughter or two—”

Brixia stiffened. The tone of his voice—Pride she had forgotten made her stand straight. She might have the outward seeming of some field wench (which he had certainly deemed her by his manner) but she was herself—Brixia of Trogus’ House. And where was that now? There was a ruin as smoke blackened and desolate as this—nothing else.

“I have no tie with this land,” she said quietly, but her level return gaze was a challenge. “If you seek some field woman of your lord’s holding—look elsewhere.” She added no title of respect to that statement.

“Wolfhead wench!” The boy’s lip curled. He drew back a step, taking his stand before his lord in a gesture of defense. His eyes darted right, then left, striving to seek who else might lie in concealment.

“Those are your words,” she returned. It was as she had thought, he believed her one of an outlaw band. “Give not any name to another, youngling, until you are sure.” Brixia put into that all she could summon of the proper distance-speech she had once known. A Lady of the Holding would speak so in answer to such impertinence.

He stared at her. But before he could reply, his lord moved, got to his feet. Over the boy’s slightly hunched shoulder his dull eyes regarded the girl without interest, or perhaps even not seeing her at all.

“Jartar delays—” The man lifted one hand to his forehead. “Why does he not come? It is needful we be on the march before nooning—”

“Lord,” his eyes still on the girl, the boy backed another step, putting his left hand on his lord’s arm, “it is time to rest. You have been ill, later we shall ride—”

The man moved impatiently, shook off that touch.

“There will be no more resting—” a shadow of firmness deepened his voice. “There can be no resting until the deed is done, until we have the ancient power again. Jartar knows the way—where is he?”

“Lord, Jartar is—”

But though the boy once more grasped at the other’s arm, the man paid no attention to him. There was again a shadow of awareness on his face, a lifting of that cloud of dull unreason. Uta trotted toward the pair of them, come to stand before the lord. Now the cat uttered a soft sound.

“Yes—” Exerting himself, the man pushed aside the boy, went to one knee on the pavement and held out both hands to the cat. “By Jartar’s knowledge we can go, is it not so?” He asked that question, not of his human companion, but of the cat. His eyes met those of the animal with the same unblinking stare as Uta could focus for as long and steadily as she wished.

“You know also, furred one. Have you perhaps come as a sending?” The man nodded. “When Jartar is with us—then we shall go. Go—” The slight animation he had shown began to fail, knowledge slipped visibly away from him. He was like a man swiftly overcome by slumber he could not fight.

The boy caught at his shoulders.

“Lord—” He looked beyond the man he supported to the girl.

There was such hostility in the glare he turned upon her that Brixia took a stronger grip on her spear. It was as if he hated the sight of her enough to open attack. Then a flash of understanding came to her. He was moved by shame—shame that someone should see his lord so bereft of his senses.

Instinctively, at that moment, she also guessed that for her to make any sort of a move, say anything which would show she did understand, might in turn render matters worse. Totally at a loss Brixia met the boy’s glare with what calm she could summon. She wet her lips with tongue tip, but said nothing.

For a very long moment they stood thus and then his glare became a twisted scowl.

“Get out! Go—! We have nothing left worth the stealing!” He made another gesture towards his sword.

Brixia’s temper flared. Why that order seemed like a lash laid across her face she could not have told. These two were nothing to her. She had seen suffering and trouble enough, and had learned that in order to survive, she must go her own way—alone.

But she curbed that temper. With a shrug, she retreated toward the hedge from which she had emerged, caution telling her not to turn her back on the pair. Though she, nor no one else, need have anything to fear from the man.

The boy had him on his feet again, was urging him back towards the tower door with a steady murmur of encouragement pitched too low now for Brixia to hear. She watched them disappear before she went also.

It would be wise to leave the dale entirely, she told herself as she climbed the slope towards the ridge top. Yet she made no move to go. An expertly flung stone stunned one of the leapers in the grass, and she dressed the lean body skillfully, saving the skin to be worked upon at her leisure. Six such would form a short cloak and she had three already green cured and rolled within the journey bag at her hidden campsite.

Knowing that she might not be the only one to have marked those camped in the ruins, she took extra precautions at concealment herself. Had any outlaws seen the horse, the sword the boy wore—that would be loot enough to draw down a small raid. Brixia wondered if the boy realized how dangerous his camp among the forgotten hold buildings might really be. She shrugged. If he did not it was no responsibility of hers to correct that ignorance.

As she built her small fire of carefully selected wood which would give the least possible smoke, and then used a spark from her prized snapper to light it, her thoughts were with the two below. Brixia was reasonably sure there were only two.

The boy named this Eggarsdale and spoke of it as home. His Lord was plainly unable to care for himself—how then did they propose to exist? Yes, there was game of a sort to be found. But without a bow one had to have dexterity with a throwing stone to bring a leaper down. She had near starved—had eaten grubs and chewed on grass—until luck favored her and she had learned enough to remain alive. While a single leaper made hardly a full meal for one at best.

Brixia turned those bits of her own catch she had spitted in the heat of the fire, to be half cooked before she tore at them hungrily, and sat back on her heels. Though she had had no time to explore the long overgrown garden patches below she could well guess that few edible plants had seeded, or rerooted themselves during what was doubtless years of abandonment. There were herbs one could cull, and that she had done when and where she could. But those, if they could be found, would not show in any quantity. Unless those two had come supplied—how were they to fare?

Brixia turned her stick spits again, jealous of the fire which sputtered and leaped under the spill of juices she had no way of catching. Her mouth filled with saliva as she smelled the roasting meat.

There was a small sound to draw her attention to the opposite side of the fire.

“Unfriend,” she said, eyeing Uta sternly. “If you have changed your House Shield, lady, then go there and ask for a guest place at the great table—come not to me.” Still she flipped one of her meat sticks up, stripped its burden off, using a leaf to shield her fingers, letting the half-seared chunks lie on a second leaf for Uta to take or refuse.

The cat sat waiting for the meat to cool enough to mouth. Yet she glanced only now and then at the offering, rather watching Brixia the while in that dis-concerting unblinking manner. The girl shifted. It was only Uta’s way—there was no reason to feel that in some fashion her own thoughts were being combed and shifted.

“Yes, go to them, Uta. The big one seems to like you well enough.”

The girl narrowed her own eyes and stared as straightly back at the cat. Uta’s actions in regard to the man had puzzled her. Not for the first time she wished there was some way of communication possible between them. Before that desire had been born of her own loneliness—at those times when that had formed a prison for her. Then the physical presence of the cat had not been enough to banish the girl’s dark thoughts, Brixia had longed for another voice—to shake her out of such aching emptiness.

Now she wished speech because of curiosity. In some way Uta had been able to pierce the clouded mind of this Lord Marbon—to bring him into some measure of awareness. Why—and how?

Brixia took up a skewer and waved it in the air, cooling the meat it impaled enough to chew at it.

“What did you do to him, Uta?” she asked. “He is as one moon-blasted. Did it come from a wound, I wonder, or some trick of the invaders? Perhaps a fever—Who is this Jartar upon whom he calls, and who the boy says is dead?” She chewed vigorously at the tough meat. Uta was eating, too, and had not even looked up at her questions.

That song—it could not be any of a swordsmith’s making—crude, ill fashioned—like it had been done by someone without skill, only a driving purpose. Brixia was slightly surprised at the turn of her own thoughts. But to her those carried the sense of truth. Purpose in that song? Zarsthor’s Bane—what else had the song named it? Star bane.

Someone called Zarsthor had taken up the sword against a foe and had been destroyed because the enemy had had this weapon. Brixia shook her head. There were legends in many about old wars and struggles. All of them held a small kernel of truth, but a truth which meant nothing today. Unless the dark touch of Zarsthor’s Bane still lay upon this dale.

Nothing was entirely improbable among the dales of High Hallack. The Old Ones, before they had with-drawn from the lands bordering the great sea (fading northward or westward beyond the Waste itself), had strange knowledge and many powers. There were places to be shunned and other places—She stopped eating as a sudden flash of memory struck her with such intensity that it was almost as if she herself had been whirled away in both time and distance.

The afternoon that they had fled from Moorachdale’s keep, when the warning came that the defense could no longer hold, Brixia’s breathing quickened. Running—running through the twilight—the soon-come leaping of destroying fire behind, the screams and shouts—It seemed that at this moment she could feel again a sharp pain beneath her ribs, that in her leg—as she fought against the drag of her long skirt, fear sour in her mouth.

On—up to the ridge. Kuniggod had run beside her, urging her on. Kuniggod—Brixia’s face twisted at that memory. She wanted to thrust it away from her—far away—but memory would not now be denied. Kuniggod, who had risen from her bed wheezing and coughing from the Deep Chill, but who had made sure her nurseling was out and away before death fought its way to the door of the ladies’ bower—using the inner stair of the hall—the bolt hole gate.

They had run though the night, apart from any others who had broken free. Thus Kuniggod had led her to that narrow way among tall stones where they had stumbled along, clinging to each other, Brixia then half witless with fear. She had been so unknowing of the way which they were taking that they had come into that Place before she noted truly what was about them.

No dalesblood willingly sought the sites which the Old Ones had once claimed for their own purposes—not unless such a seeker was a Wise Woman already learned in some of the unwritten knowledge. Even then that Wise Woman walked softly and with great care, for there were malefic powers to be faced—sometimes rising without warning. Save that Brixia had always heard it whispered that such plague spots of the Dark had their own warning atmospheres and could be smelled, or felt, before the foolish were full into their nets.

Where Kuniggod had guided her was one of those shunned places, yet it seemed that her old nurse had had knowledge of it. For as she had sunk, coughing, with tearing gasps for breath in between, the woman had clutched at Brixia, holding her with all the strength she could summon when the girl, coming to her senses, would have run forth again.

“Stay—” she had gasped. “This is—not—of—any evil—”

Then Kuniggod had fallen forward on her face so that Brixia had in turn knelt to gather her into her arms, hold her, while the woman choked and struggled for breath. The girl knew that her old nurse could go no farther, nor could she go on and leave her. So she had huddled under the glow of a moon which was far too full and bright—for it appeared to hang directly above them—showing her every detail of the place.

It did not form a true circle she perceived by a closer study. Rather stones of a silvery gray-white, which shimmered in this light, formed two crescents, their pointed horns some distance from each other—leaving so two entrances to the inner part where the refugees crouched. Those stones were not rough, rather had been smoothed before being set so. Brixia could see that there were lines traced near the top of each. But whether those formed some design, or were the remains of inscriptions too weather worn to be any longer read, the girl could not tell.

However, the longer she studied those stones the more the light appeared to curdle and cling about them. They might, to her fear dazzled eyes, be giant candles, their light exuding from the sides as well as from those crowns where wicks should have been. Yet the light in the stones did not spread far beyond them, only furnished a glow to cloak each pillar.

Looking upon those steady glimmers of light Brixia’s first fear of the unknown had slowly seeped away. Her heart, which had pounded so fiercely as Kuniggod had drawn her here, slowed its beat. She began, without realizing, to breathe both more deeply and quietly. From somewhere came a numbing, a lassitude, which oddly comforted her. Her head nodded, she felt pleasantly drowsy, content.

At length she must have slid down to lie, Kuniggod’s head still pillowed on her arm, feeling as safe as if she rested behind the drawn curtains of her own bed. And so lying she fell gently into a deep sleep.

When Brixia had aroused the next morning she still lay with Kuniggod, and it had taken her time to realize where she was and what had happened to her. No stark fear returned to assail her. A curtain had dropped between her and what had happened the night before—as if years of time separated one part of her life from another. She had sensed a new strength, the restlessness of purpose which she could not understand, but her ignorance did not bother her.

Nor had the girl felt more than a shadow of sorrow when she knew that Kuniggod’s spirit had left her. Brixia had placed her nurse’s hands together on that quiet breast, kissed her forehead. Then she had stood and looked at the pillars. In the light of morning they were simple stone. Still there continued to abide in her this peace, or an absence of emotion—a new freedom from her fears. She knew then that it lay within her to survive—that survival in fact was demanded of her for a purpose which was not clear.

Whether that peace was of good or ill, she did not question. In that dawn light it gave her the strength to go on living, and enough of it she bore with her as shield and support through what lay ahead.

Now in this camp above Eggarsdale Brixia sat gazing into the flames and wondering. What had worked in her during that night she had spent encircled by the double sign of the new moon? Why had that memory now returned to her so exactly and in such vivid detail at this moment when somehow she had never desired to recall it before? Why did it seem that all which lay before that hour was of very little account in her life, rather that what she had done since had more meaning—would be of use to her?

Why—and why—and why—?

“There are many whys,” she said aloud to Uta. The cat was washing her face, but at Brixia’s words she stopped the swing of her paw, looked over at the girl.

“I am Brixia of the House of Torgus—or am I still, Uta? Oh, I do not mean the wearing of fine wool, the sitting in a seat of honor, the saying to man and woman—do this—and having it done. Those are not the signs truly of House birth. Look upon me,” she laughed and was startled, realizing how long it had been since she had voiced such a sound. “I look as such as might beg meat from a feasting, or be stoned from a village by those minded not to treat with suspicious wanderers. Yet it is true, I am Brixia of the House of Torgus—and that only I myself can take from me—by some act so unworthy of my heritage that I must judge myself and render punishment thereafter.

“Your young friend in the valley rendered outward judgment upon me, Uta.” She shook her head. “I thought I had thrown aside pride as a useless thing. Pride does not put food in the mouth, covering on the back, keep breath within one’s body. Not that kind of pride. Perhaps I have rather the need to say ‘you cannot defeat me—you shadow of fear!’ That is the kind of pride you walk with, Uta. I think it is a good pride.”

She nodded emphatically. Still in the girl stirred a core of discontent. She had remembered too much, even though it was clouded and far away. And how that boy had looked at her—that now began to sting more than it had even when it first touched her.

“So be it!” Brixia balled her right hand into a fist and drove that into the cup of her left palm. “Those two are nothing to me, Uta. Nor can their thoughts touch me now. We shall be off with the morning coming and leave them to lord it over their tumbled blocks of stone.”

What she said was the best of good sense. Still—

As Brixia went about making her preparations for a night’s camp—finding a break in the ridge which was nearly half a cave and covering its floor with dried leaves and grass for the kind of nest she had come to use for her temporary lodging places, she paused and then to glance at the tower below. Now she did not skulk or attempt to conceal her presence. For she was sure that the boy had no reason to seek her out, his care for his lord would occupy him fully.

She watched him come from the tower, take the horse to where a stream ran. After the animal had drunk, he led it back into a walled field. Then he went again to the stream side, bringing along a leather saddle bottle which he filled and carried back to the tower. Never did he look up, she might already be wiped from his mind.

Somehow, that, too, was like a prick against tender skin. Though why she should care, Brixia did not understand. His unconcern made her more bold. She took no cover as she herself went to that stream with her own worn water carrier. And she lingered to wash her face and her neck, wishing that there was a pool hereabouts which she could use for a mirror. Though perhaps it was just as well there was not, she decided as she combed through her thatch of hair with her fingers, picking out bits of leaf and twig left by her journey through the hedge.

Why she lingered—even arranged to camp here for the night—Brixia could not understand. Her stay had no purpose, yet, when she tried to plan going on, there was an uneasiness in her which would not let her leave that bed for far. Restlessly she prowled along the ridge above. Even when she, almost absentmindedly, brought down another leaper she took no pleasure in her skill or such excellent unexpected addition to her supplies.

When Brixia returned to her nest place, she found Uta crouched on the crown of one of the rocks which formed its sides—the cat’s head fixed so that she looked, not down at the tower, but rather along the ridge itself to the westward where the dale opened its other throat upon the dreaded Waste.

“What is it?” Brixia had seen that concentration in Uta before, and she had fast learned what it might well portend.

Though the girl’s senses, trained by the life as she was following, were keener than most of her kind, they were sadly limited compared to the cat’s. Brixia raised her head, used sight and her sense of smell, as well as hearing, for the task of finding what was serious enough to keep Uta so absorbed.

There was a trail of smoke from one vent in the tower. Those sheltering there apparently did not know the trick of picking the right dried wood to give as little sign of a fire as possible, or else they did not care if their occupation was noticed. No, not the Keep—then—

The girl dropped down in the shadow of the rocks, staying on her knees, the standing stone favored by Uta pressing against her left shoulder, exposing as little of her body as she could while she surveyed the dale. There were the broken walls which had marked the fields, the gardens, and the crop places. Brush made a thin screen, spreading ever farther, along some of those walls. To the west the fields ended in a copse of wood which no sight, unless it be that of a bird, could penetrate.

But up out of that wood now burst birds. Those wheeled and called hoarsely. Brixia snatched up her spear. She knew meaning of such alarm signs very well. There was an intruder in the woods—and these birds had very little to fear save—man!

Intruders—coming out of the waste? Had they been of the same party as the two below surely they would have ridden in from the east following the old road. Outlaws—rats and wolves from the Waste gathering to gain what scant pickings might still lie here—even as she had earlier thought to comb the ruins.

Rats and wolves they might be—but they had fangs and claws!

A boy with a sword—a man with blasted wits—and neither given any warning.

The two were nothing to her. And what had she—a knife thinned near to the point of breaking when she put any pressure on it—a hunting spear? It would be folly—rank folly—

Her thoughts hammered at her. But she was already slipping away from her hiding hole, heading down slope, using every fraction of cover craft she knew. Beside her Uta crept with the same caution.

This act was folly, but somehow she was bound to it.

KNOWING WELL that the tower must already be under observation by those hiding in the wood which lay in the opposite direction from the way she herself had taken, Brixia crouched in the last bit of cover considering her next move. It was plain she must come into the open in order to reach that shadowed door. If she were only Uta now—

Uta! A furry head nudged against her arm and she glanced at the cat who eyed her intently in return. Then Uta moved to the right, melting in her own way into the tangle of brush. Perforce Brixia went on hands and knees after her, struggling to force a path through that mat of vegetation.

Stone broke the wall of brush—the foot of the wall which had once been the outer defense of the keep. It was roughly laid, one unsmoothed block placed upon another. Uta used it as a ladder, climbing from one pawhold to the next on her way to the top.

Brixia ran her hands over the same space. There were cracks and crevices enough to provide her with a means of ascent. She hesitated, her hands planted firmly against the stone. Folly! She could still turn back—reach the upper slopes of the dale unseen. Why was she doing this?

She had no answer save that some compulsion deep within kept her to it. Slinging her spear across her shoulder by the thong which held it during her travels, the girl put her fingers and toes to searching out a ladder way of her own.

Uta flattened her furry body on the top of the wall, peering down as if she wished to know whether Brixia followed her or not before she went on. As Brixia did start to climb, the cat, with a flirt of her tail, vanished.

Would the ruins of the manor cloak her passing over the wall from those in the copse? Brixia had no idea, she could only hope so. Listening, she could still hear the clamor of the disturbed birds, and she judged from that the skulkers were yet under cover.

On the other side of the wall stretched the paved courtyard which fronted both the fortified, and now half razed, house, and the tower at its side. Brixia dropped, having chosen to land in some rankly growing vegetation rooted below in a patch of wind gathered soil.

From that she made a dash to the shattered side of the house, moving beside it until there remained only a last crossing of the open to reach the tower door. Uta was before her, just disappearing into that opening. Brixia took a deep breath, and unslung her spear. She had no intention of entering there without her weapon to hand. It might be that she would not be judged a friend—or at least an ally.

A sprint took her to the door, she dodged inside before any sound she had made could act as warning. The dusk within was only partly dispelled by a hearth fire. Near that sat the man, watching the flames, Uta beside him. But the boy was on his feet, facing her, bared steel in hand.

Brixia hastened to speak before he could move. She wanted no struggle with him.

“There are lurkers in the wood. Your fire smoke drew them perhaps—” She waved one hand to the hearth, the spear ready held in the other. “Or you might even have been trailed here. You have a horse, there’s his mail,” now she gestured to the man, “those alone would be lures for any outlaw.”

“What’s it to you?” the boy demanded.

“Nothing. Save that I am no wolfhead.” Brixia retreated a step. Her thoughts were confused. Why had she allied herself with these two who indeed meant nothing to her?

The boy watched her even as he moved in turn to stand before the man as a shield.

“You stand alone,” Brixia continued, “as far as any fight is concerned. They’ll lick you up as easily as Uta takes a mouse, and far more speedily, for they do not hunt for sport.”

His expression of wariness did not change. “And if I do not believe you?”

She shrugged. “Have it your way then. I do not put iron at your back to urge you into battle.” She glanced around the chamber in which they had taken refuge. Against the wall to her right was a steep flight of stairs leading up to the next story. This room had a bench against one wall, a stool on which the man sat, a pair of saddle bags. Two cloaks had been used on top of hacked branches and grass to form a pair of beds. That was all.

Her eyes came back to the bench. That offered a forlorn chance, but it was all they had. She did not believe that they could dare to retreat now—the boy might be able to move under cover, but burdened by the man—no—

“That,” she pointed with the spear to the bench, “can go across the door—if you had not the fire you might have hidden up there,” she nodded to the stair. “That’s if they did not trail you in and know just how few they face.”

He thrust his sword back in its scabbard and was already heading toward the bench. Brixia slung her spear and went to the other end of that. The boy looked up at her as he bent over to take a hold.

“Let be! We do not need you! I stand by Lord Marbon—”

“Do so. However, though I have no lord to fight for, I still have my own life.” She caught the other end of the bench and heaved. Shuffling together they brought it to form a low barrier when placed across the doorway—a nearly useless one the girl privately thought.

“If only—” The boy glanced to the man by the fire. It appeared to Brixia that he was not speaking to her, rather voicing some thought. Then his attention returned to her and there was an open scowl on his face. He laced his fingers together, cracking his knuckles.

He spoke again—as if the words were pulled out of him by forceful extraction, and he hated the fact that he must say this:

“There might be a way out—he would know.”

Brixia, remembering how she herself had long ago won out of just such a place, knew a sudden leap of hope, as quickly vanquished. If the Lord of Eggarsdale had had any emergency exit from his domain it was either destroyed in the taking of the keep, or else its secret was so lost in the mazes of a disturbed mind that it could never be known now.

“He will not remember.” Then she added, because any one will cling to hope, “Will he?”

The boy shrugged. “Sometimes he can a little—” He went to kneel by his charge.

Once again Uta had raised to her hind legs, was resting her forepaws on the man’s knee. His hand caressed her head, though he still stared into the flames.

“Lord.” the boy put out his hand, “Lord Marbon—”

Brixia took up a position by the door, dividing her attention between what was happening in the room and listening for any sound from without which might mean those others were moving in. There came the whinny of a horse—and she grew tense, bringing up her spear.

“Lord Marbon—” the boy’s voice was sharper, more insistent. “Lord Jartar has sent a message—”

“Jartar? He is coming at last?”

“Lord, he would meet with you. He waits by the far end of the inner ways.”

“The inner ways? Why does he not come openly?”

“Lord, the enemy holds about us. He dares not try to ride openly. Is it not always Lord Jartar’s way to come and go unseen?”

“True. The inner ways then.” The man stood up, Uta now rubbing against his legs. He surveyed the cat and there was life and animation in his face. “Ha. furred one. It is good to have one of your house again allied with us, as in the days that were. The inner ways—then.”

He walked with a free stride quite unlike the aimless shuffle, to the end of that cavern within the thick keep wall which housed the hearth and their small fire. With his hands he stroked the stone there even as he had stroked Uta.

His fingers, which had moved so confidently as if he knew exactly what he must do, slowed. One hand dropped to his side, he raised the other to rub along his forehead as he looked to the boy over his shoulder.

“What—” all assertive life was gone from his voice. “What—”

Uta stood up on her hind legs, her paws dangling before her lighter underbody fur. She mewed softly, authoritatively. Lord Marbon looked to her. His attitude was one of listening, he might well have understood the sounds the cat made.

“Lord,” the boy moved in upon his other side. “Remember—Lord Jartar is waiting!”

The man looked about. He had not lost all the look of intelligence, though that apathy seemed to be sliding back over his face once again.

“This—this is not—not—right—” His glance took in the walls, the bareness of the chamber.

Brixia could have gnawed her fingers in her impatience. Her imagination, which seemed to have been suddenly aroused, pictured for her what might be creeping up outside. That they could hold the tower room was impossible. Also that she had allowed herself to be caught in this trap for some foolish and not understood reason aroused her anger against herself. But caught they were—even if the boy spoke the truth and this Lord Marbon had a hidden bolt hole—that such might lead from this very room was yet to be proven. Or that the cracked brain could remember—

“Jartar—yes!” Once more the use of that name appeared to pull together the man’s scattered thoughts—just as the strings set on the doll by a puppet showman (such as she had seen once long ago) brought to life carved wood and leather.

Once more Lord Marbon put out his hands to the wall. Brixia heard what she had feared from outside—a sound which could only have been the scrap of a boot against stone. She readied her spear and then looked to the stairway. Why had she not seen before the possibility of that? The two of them—with sword and spear, might have held the top of that stair—at least buying a few more moments of life. The knife in her belt—that would be her last key out, better than any fate she would be offered—

The sound from outside was not repeated. But she did not doubt she had heard it. Only a louder grating snapped her head around for a moment. Beside the fireplace a gap in the wall had appeared. Into that the boy pushed, suddenly and with full force, his lord. Uta sprang, vanished in the darkness, and, as the boy stepped within, giving no warning to her, Brixia sped in turn. The gap was closing but she braced the spear as a lever and fought her way in. As she pulled out the shaft again, the wall swung totally closed leaving her in deep darkness, so thick it was like a tangible cloak about her.

Brixia heard sounds from her right, and she put out her hand slowly. The space in which she stood was very small, with a wall to her left and another directly before her. With an idea of either a climb or a descent in her mind, Brixia used the spear to sound a way to the right.

Tapping before her she went some five steps until the floor vanished. Still using the spear as a guide the girl discovered there the first of what might be steps. At that point she paused to listen again. Sounds were continuing from that direction. So, if she was ever to find her way out, she must follow.

Brixia tapped her way with the spear, testing each step before she took it. Her left hand slipped along a wall which was dry at first, and then grew slimed with moisture the farther she descended. Now there was the smell of stagnant water and other foul things. Twice her hand burst a fungi growth making her cough from the acrid stench that loosed.

She counted twenty steps in that stairway then her spear cane warned her of level space ahead. The sounds made by those she trailed were muted. Brixia wondered how they could have drawn so far ahead. Unless they went without taking the precautions that she thought it prudent to exercise.

There was a complete absence of light and the dark weighing on her spirit, gave easy rise to that fear with which her species had ever regarded night and what might crawl in it. She loathed the slimy feel of the wall, but at the same time she needed to touch that as an additional guide through this place. How long these “inner ways” might run was an unknown factor. Such escape passages were usually set up so that the exit would be well beyond any besieging force. That in Moorachdale had been twice the length of the village street—or so she had always heard it said.

Now she felt a breath of air moving against her cheek. It was not strong nor fresh enough to banish the stench of slime and the unseen wall growths, but it did signify that there was some ventilation here. Brixia pushed forward, her calloused feet encountering the same moisture and slime as cloaked the wall. Once the girl was nearly shocked out of her iron control when something she trod upon wriggled. She leaped away, her feet slipping, until only a quick twist of her body kept her from falling full length into the noisome mess on the floor.

Brixia discovered a turn in the passage by running full face into the right hand wall. At her left now showed a very faint gray which was shut out twice and then revealed once again—a change which must signify the passage of the others.

The way sloped up and she drew a deeper breath of relief, believing that she was nearing its end. Only to know disappointment when she reached the source of the light. For that filtered through a crack in the rock and proved to be far too narrow to do more than allow something as slender as her spear to penetrate. However, the very small portion of light did show another turn, this time to the right.

Brixia was about five strides along that when there came a burst of real light, the red-orange of flame, ahead, and toward that she hurried. The glow showed her that the passage she followed ended on an edge of a ledge. She looked down into what had been a natural cave without the sign of any tampering by man.

Against the wall, holding a torch, was Lord Marbon. She could see only the back of the boy who was on his knees crawling into a hole at the other side of the cave. Of Uta there was no sign. Although he held the torch, Lord Marbon had lost that return of reason which had brought them into this underground way. He stared vacantly ahead, his eyes wide and unblinking in the shine of the flames. But, as Brixia slipped down beside him, ready to pass by and attempt the new passage on her own, he turned his head slowly to look at her.

Something stirred deep in his eyes, his lips moved—

“Star blazed, grim and bright,

Darkness triumphed over right—”

The girl was startled. Then she recognized the lines he had sung—the song of Zarsthor’s Bane.

“Find it—must find it—” He spoke hurriedly, slurring his words together. Marbon caught at her arm, showing surprising strength, for he held her quiet so, and she knew that, short of using force, she could not break free. “Nothing’s right—it is because of Zarsthor’s Bane.” He lowered his head a little, thrusting his face closer to hers. “Must find—” The recognition of a sort made his eyes fully alive.

“Not—Jartar! Who are you?” His voice was sharp, held a ring of command.

“I am Brixia,” she returned, wondering just how much his wandering sense had returned.

“Where is Jartar? Did he send you then?” His grip on her was tight and steady enough so that when he shook her, her whole body moved.

“I do not know where Jartar is,” she tried to find some words which would satisfy this lord who, by the evidence of the boy, called on a dead man. “Perhaps—” she used the same excuse his attendant had, “he is waiting outside.”

Lord Marbon considered that. “He knows, from the ancient runes—only he—I must have it! He promised that it was mine to use. I am the last of Zarsthor’s line. I must have it!” He shook her again as if he would force what he wanted out of her by such rough mishandling. Now her hand closed about the hilt of her belt knife. If it were necessary to use that for protection against a mad man—why, then she would.

But it was not only his visible madness which aroused her fears—it was something inside herself. Her head—she wanted to cry out—to wrench free of this Marbon and run and run—Because—deep in her she stood in front of a door and if that door would open—!

This was not the shrinking that the sane sometimes feel when confronted by the abnormal among their own species. Her new emotion was totally alien. She could not turn her head, break the tie between their eyes. There was a need rising in her—something she must do—and nothing else in all the world mattered but that need which compelled, which made her its prisoner. She found herself whispering:

“Zarsthor’s Bane.” That was it! What she must find—what would give true life—bring again into order all which had gone awry since the Bane came to life.

Brixia blinked once, again. The feeling was gone—the need was gone! For a moment he had ensorcelled her with his madness! Now she jerked and twisted, breaking his hold, inching away from him along the wall.

But Marbon did not try to seize upon her once more. It was rather as if, when she had broken free, she had also released him to slide back once more into that place of no knowledge. For his face suddenly smoothed, became entirely vacant. He stared at the wall, not at her. While the hand with which he had held her fell to his side.

The hole which might lead to the open beckoned her, but Brixia was afraid to go to hands and knees, leaving her back unprotected, lest he pounce upon her again. So they stood against opposite sides of the cave as she tried to determine a way of quick escape.

“Lord—” the boy’s head suddenly appeared in the hole, “all is clear without.”

Brixia burst forth, eager to share her knowledge of what might be a danger.

“Your lord is crazed.”

The boy’s face contracted with rage as he scrambled to his feet.

“You lie! He took a bad hurt at the Pass of Ungo—the same time as his foster brother was slain. His hurt and his sorrow has upset for a time his knowledge of what we do and where we go. He is not crazed!”

His lips twisted into a snarl. Brixia thought that inwardly he must agree with her, but some emotion would not let him admit it.

“He is back here—in his home,” the boy continued. “The healer said that were he in a place he knew well, his memory could return to him. He—he thinks he is on a quest. It is an old tale of his House—the story of Zarsthor’s Bane. He would gain the Bane and put all right again. It is that belief which has kept him alive.

“It is an old legend of his line—of how Zarsthor who came to Eggarsdale crossed the brother of his lady—she was of the Old Ones—and Eldor in his pride and rage made a pact with some dark power, laying upon Zarsthor and his blood after him, even onto the land he then held, a curse so that when they gained aught. they lost the more.

“When the fighting went against him so grievously this past year, my lord came to think more and more of the Bane. And Lord Jartar, who had ever an interest in ancient stories, more so if they dealt with the Old Ones, spoke with him often. So it became fixed in my lord’s mind there was perhaps after all a true meaning in this story out of the past. Thus my lord made a pact with the Lord Jartar—who swore that he had chanced upon some secrets which might lead to the unraveling of this story of the Bane—that they would indeed search out the truth of Zarsthor and what might lie hidden in the past—”

“But how does one find secrets out of the past?” In spite of herself Brixia was caught by a faint excitement. For the first time in a long march of days she was drawn to an idea which was not strictly a part of her fight to keep on living from one day’s dawn to sunset, from sunset to the next dawn.

The boy shrugged, his face held a bitter twist of mouth, a frowning pull of eyebrow toward eyebrow.

“Ask that of the Lord Jartar—or rather of his shade! He is dead, but the Bane lives in my lord’s mind. And maybe it possesses him now past the point whereby he can believe in aught else!”

Brixia bit her lip. The boy had already turned away from her. Perhaps Marbon had ensorcelled him, too after the fashion which had worked on her for those few moments when they were alone here. It could well be that in truth it was the lord’s delusion which had led them both to this ruined valley, rather than any advice from a healer.

She watched the boy take the torch from his companion, lead the man to the hole and gently force him to hands and knees, then push him towards that exit. Once set in motion Lord Marbon did not resist, but crawled on into the dark. When he had vanished the boy thrust the torch into a crack in the rock and dropped to follow.

Brixia, having no mind to remain underground if there was a way out, crept in herself, on the other’s heels.

The narrow passage was a short one, and they came out into a deeper twilight where several trees and some brush formed a curtain before the break in the ground through which they had come. They were well up on the northern slope of the dale’s guarding hills. As they squatted there, under the cover of the brush, Brixia surveyed the keep below. Faint light played in one of the tower’s slit windows—there must still be fire within. Also she was able to count five shaggy, ill-kempt ponies, the like of which outlaws rode, if they were lucky enough to be mounted at all.

“Five—” she heard the boy half whisper beside her. He, too, had wriggled forward until his shoulder nudged against hers.

“Perhaps more,” she told him with some satisfaction. “Some bands number more men than mounts.”

“We shall have to take to the hills again,” he commented bleakly. “That or into the Waste.”

In spite of herself Brixia felt something of his discouragement. She was resentful of having to think of anyone but herself, but if these two wandered on without any supplies, or any more knowledge of woodcraft than she guessed they had, they might already be counted dead men. It irked her that she was not allowed by that strange nagging, new born within her, to leave them to the fate they courted by their folly.

“Has your lord no kin to shelter him?” she asked.

“None. He—he was not always accepted among those soft-handed, lower dales people. He—has, as I said, other blood—from THEM—” Among the Dalesmen “them” so accented meant only one thing—those alien peoples who had once held all this land. “He—that was what made him what he was—what he is. You wouldn’t understand—you’ve only seen him now,” the boy’s voice was a passionate whisper, as if he feared he might not be able to keep his self control. “He was a great warrior—and he was learned, too. He knew things other Dale lords never dreamed of understanding. He could call birds to him and talk to them—I have seen him do that! And there wasn’t a horse what wouldn’t come and let him ride. He could sing a sleep spell for a wounded man. I have even seen him lay hands on a wound which was black with poison and order the flesh to heal—it did! But there was no one who could so heal him, no one!”

The boy’s head sunk forward until his face was hidden in the crook of his arm. He lay quietly but Brixia stirred as there spread from him into her an almost overpowering sense of pain and loss.

“You were his squire?”

“After Jartar died I carried his shield, yes. But I was not rightfully a squire. Though I might have been some day if all had gone well. My Lord took me by choice from among his mother’s distant kin. I—had no great possessions to hope for—we held but a border watch tower and there were two more brothers—so there was no favor right for me. It’s all gone now anyway—all but my lord—all but my lord!”

His voice was thick, and he hunched his shoulder in her direction. Brixia knew that he hated her knowing these feelings. She must let him alone and ask no more.

Turning, she edged away from that vantage point. But—where they had left Lord Marbon—there was no one! She looked around quickly—there was no sign of him—

“HE’S GONE!”

Her cry brought the boy shoving past her. Then he was on his feet, completely unheeding of any other eyes which might be watching from below. Brixia tried to catch at him, remind him of their present peril. But her move came too late, he had plunged into the brush on the other side of that pocket-sized clearing. Plainly nothing mattered but his Lord as far as he was concerned.

Brixia remained where she was. Now that they were safe out of that keep trap, there was no need for her to company longer with the two of them. No need at all. Only, no matter how much her prudence insisted upon that, still she was, a moment or so later, moving reluctantly to follow the boy.

Of Uta there was no sign either. Perhaps the cat, for some purpose of her own, had gone with Lord Marbon. Slowly Brixia pushed through the bushes in the same direction the boy had taken.

Chance continued to favor them with cover, for beyond the bushes there was a sunken trough in the ground, much overgrown with vines and brush. Newly broken twigs and torn leaves marked that as the path. Brixia advanced along the cut warily. Though there was little danger of being surprised by any wild thing large or vicious enough to attack without warning, there might well be other things loose in this dank place—things suited to nest among such growth.

For there was much about these bushes, the vines. which was forbidding. Fleshy leaves were a dark green, so dark as to appear smoked into blackness. Some were veined with red or a rusty yellow-brown—like dried blood. From those which had been crushed by passing of those she trailed there arose a musky odor, unpleasant, different from any vegetation she had smelled before.

The branches and stems were black, and that blackness, touching against Brixia’s arms, her body, left streakings upon her flesh and clothing as if they exuded moisture. She used the spear as best she could to push low hanging limbs out of her way.

Now the girl suspected that this path, cut between two ever rising banks, could not be natural. Had it been fashioned by some now dried stream it would have run from the north—down slope. But this angled east to west along the side of the ridge. It must have been made to hide those emerging from the bolt hole, guide them towards the Waste.

Twice Brixia halted, determined to turn back, or at least scramble up out of this ill-omened path. Yet each time she surveyed the growth along its walls doubtfully (the brush obviously thicker there) she shrank from forcing an opening through it.

During her last halt she heard enough to bring her spear to ready. No voice had been raised in a true whisper, no crashing sounded from ahead or behind. She stood, seemingly isolated, in a dull, dark green walled tunnel utterly alone.

No—that did not issue from small gust of wind lifting the thick puffy leaves, nor—

The girl faced toward the way she had come, striving to identify the sound. It was a—a chittering—a clicking, as if teeth struck upper jaw against the lower. She had heard once or twice a noise not too unlike it when Uta had watched a bird beyond her reach.

“Uta!” Brixia called softly—at the same time knowing deep in her mind that this was not the cat. The sound was spaced—it might form words of so alien a tongue that she had no hope of translation.

From behind? No, as she listened, tense, she was sure that sound did not echo up the tunnel which had grown deeper until the brush along its walls met to form a roof over her head. It—she stared downward—and a cold fear grew in her—it was as if that came from underground!

Every instinct urged her to go crashing ahead in instant flight. But—perhaps that was what was wanted of her. Instead, making an effort for control, she paused, her head a little on one side, listening to that clicking. Then she saw—the way ahead only a fraction visible under the combination of dusk and the overshadowed path, was shifting! Under the thick layer of leaves which made a rot-muck into which her feet sank there was a—sinking! The ground itself—yes, she could feel a change in it! She had a sudden and horrifying vision of the path falling down, away, into some gulf, taking her with it. And that in the hidden burrow under her feet there awaited—

She dared no longer hesitate here! Fearfully Brixia kept eyeing the ground under that mat of leaves reduced to slime which bespatted her bare feet with every step she took. What if some—some thing would now rear up to make sure of her capture?

The girl broke and ran. With a rising of the walls, or the sinking of the path, the way was clearer. She did not have to fight so hard to get through. By straining for sight she could see the tracks in the mould. The others—or one of them—was still ahead. Now she wanted nothing more than to be in the company of her own kind.

She hated and feared the blur of shadows. While the stench of both the broken leaves and the muck stirred up underfoot was sickening. Brixia hurried on, aware now that the path under her feet was now steady and rising, as if aiming to cross over the ridge height. Twice she slipped as that climbing angle steepened. Here there were marks in plenty to show that the others had fallen or been forced to scramble ahead with increasing difficulty.

Slightly ahead, was a tangle of broken branches. crushed leaves, some twigs still quivering. Thrusting through at the same spot she came out in the open under a lowering sky. Yet there was enough light left to hearten her a little. Before her a ledge jutted into open space. On three sides that looked to be without any escape and for a dazed moment or so she wondered if the boy and Lord Marbon had somehow fallen off this exposed perch. Having very little head for heights, Brixia (there being none to witness her lapse from confidence) drew near the left hand side of the ledge on hands and knees, even then quailing before looking down.

What she saw was astounding. There was no mistaking here the hand of man—or else that of some intelligent being who had altered nature to serve its purpose. For below, hugging what was otherwise a steep cliff, descended a flight of stairs. Weather worn, covered with lichen, those steps angled steeply down to the floor of a narrow valley. While on the cliff which side-flanked these were hollows and ridges of carving—also weather worn and mottled by lichen.

Dusk deepened fast. In the limited light those lines and depressions seemed to leer or scowl, forming faces so alien that Brixia quickly turned her eyes away from the wall. Below she heard a rattle of falling stone and saw movement. There was a curious hazy cover for the ground below—quite a distance below as if the base of this narrow valley was far under her perch, much deeper than that on the side of the ridge from which she had come.

There the shadows lay very thick. But these were not yet dark enough to mask the two who stood by an outcrop of stone. Even as her gaze centered on them, the larger broke from the grasp of the smaller. Brushing aside his companion when the other tried to stop him, the taller kept on westward, striding with the measured step used by the practiced traveler.

Determined to catch up, Brixia arose, fighting the feeling of being about to pitch forward from heights, and began to descend the stairway. One hand went out to find holds in the carvings, for the wide open space to her right made her head swim. Deliberately she schooled herself to look only at what lay immediately before her.

By the time she reached the end of that way, for she had dared not hurry, the other two were again well ahead. This second valley being strangely bare of any vegetation, she could see them in spite of an odd wavering of outline.

Brixia rubbed her eyes, thinking that perhaps it was her own sight which caused that difficulty in seeing more distant objects. For whole moments the way was clear, then again, when she looked down at her own feet or at one of the outcrops of stone (and those were many) all was a blur.

At least the air here was clear and she could breathe without drawing into her lungs the stifling stench clinging to that upper path. Here, though, the footing was hard for her unshod feet, drifts of gravel and small stones tormented even her well toughened soles. At last Brixia was reduced to a slow pace, lest she render herself too foot sore to move. She regretted those sandals lying back in her pack—abandoned in the dale. Several times she was tempted to raise her voice in a shout to those ahead, begging them to wait for her. With the dark so close upon them surely sooner or later they too would be driven to halt.

The girl had seen nothing of the cat since she had entered that passage in the keep, and Brixia wondered now if Uta had indeed come down from the upper ridge at all. Somehow it was important that Uta be one with them. She found herself worrying lest Uta had gone off on her own.

The dusk thickened, and. with that deepening of the dark, the girl became more and more wary. Perhaps that strange, invisible, chitterer of the covered way did not follow here, but the sense that she was not alone, that there was that which spied upon her, gripped tighter with each hobbling step which she forced herself to take.

To halt here was more than she could do. She wanted company—any company—to banish that feeling of being utterly at the mercy of some unknown. Now and again she paused for the space of a breath or two, listening—to discover that in this valley were none of the reassuring noises which filled nights in the open. No insect chirruped or buzzed, no bird called—the silence was complete, so that her own breathing sounded loud in her ears, an accidental scrape of her spear haft against the stone as sharp as the war horn of a keep company.

There was—Brixia tried to subdue her imagination. It was not true that she walked amid a throng of unseen things! Nothing moved save herself. Shaking with more than the chill of the night Brixia steadied her body against a stone which stood shoulder high beside her.

Her fingers moved over a pit, a ridge—She turned her head to look. A face—!

What sorcery made the crude carving stand out against the stone, visible through the dark, she could not guess. It was as if her touch had awakened inanimate stone into a spark of life.

A face—? No, there was nothing remotely human in the features of that mask. The eyes were huge, round, and each was centered with a small spark of flame which formed a pinpoint of greenish white light. Where nose and mouth should have appeared there was rather sketched, in a diabolically realistic form of art, a wide muzzle-mouth a little agape, enough to show the tips of sharply pointed fangs.

For the rest—Brixia made herself look, refusing to be cowed—once she had gotten over her first astonishment—it was really but lines on stone—there was nothing more—just that mouth and the eyes. Perhaps the ones who had wrought that expected the viewers’ imagination to build the rest in their minds alone. Shame at being shaken by such a trick thing, Brixia struck the stone with her spear and then hurried on, in spite of the pain of her feet. She refused to look over her shoulder as she went, though she was troubled by a feeling that there was something in sly pursuit.

There was no doubt in her mind, that she now was traversing a place of the Old Ones. And, Brixia thought, of a species who were not inclined to favor any human encroachment on their territory. This was not, as that place Kuniggod had taken her to, a refuge. Rather it posed an abiding threat to those of her kind.

The narrow cut of the valley, as much as she could see of it in the dark, widened out into a much larger area. Once more the girl hesitated. To wander on into the night with no guide was perhaps folly. If those she sought followed a trail, she had seen no sign of such since she had descended the cliff stairway. But at least here the foot punishing gravel had given away to patches of grass.

Moving from one of those to the next she could not keep a straight line, but did save her feet from further torment. While ahead—Would those other two be foolish enough to light a fire again? Here in the open that could only center on them the attention of any prowlers abroad in the night.

The Waste had always had an evil name, and there were rumors of all kinds of non-human life which were to be encountered here. Its sinister barrenness formed a western border to the Dales which supported, of her own kind, only the outlaws and a few strange men who were attracted by remnants of what they thought they had discovered concerning the Old Ones. It was to the Waste that the lords of the Dales had, in their extremity of the seasons just past, gone for help against the invaders. And from the Waste had come that help—the wereriders—whom all men knew were not men at all but a daunting combination of man and feral beast. That story had spread even to the few contacts Brixia had dared to make, landmen in hiding, as surly and suspicious as she herself had become but sometimes willing to exchange a handful of salt for a brace of leaper skins.

She had in her drifting, her fleeing and hiding, during the past two years skirted the Waste many times. Mainly because human enemies continued to lurk between her and what refuges might still exist farther east. She had watched the swarming of outlaws to and from its borders. But she had never ventured out into its depths.

That the Lord Marbon with his disordered wits might do this—that could be expected. But that she need follow him—Brixia dropped to crouch on one of the patches of grass, rubbing at her feet, her eyes wide, her ears alert as she looked and listened—The dark hid most of what was to be seen, but there were sounds out of the night here, not that frightening silence which had held the valley.

While—she held her head high—Into her nostrils Brixia drew air scented with a fragrance which could be at the other end of a balance from the rotting stench of the narrow upper path. Sweet, fresh—she thought of meadow grass lying in the early morning, webs on it pearled with dew—flowers just opening to the day. There was a garden—open to the sun of mid-morning—its blossoms ready to be harvested and dried for the sweetening of bed clothes and body linen—It was—

Without being quite aware of what she did Brixia got once more to her feet—moved on into the night, drawn by that scent which grew ever the stronger. So she came to the foot of a tree—Oddly twisted were its branches, and those lacked leaves. But it was aflower and the flowers were white. Seeming to extend from the tip of each petal—like the glow of a small candle—was a wisp of light.

Brixia put out her hand, but did not quite dare to touch petal or branch. She was standing in awe and wonder when a hoarse croak aroused her.

The girl faced about, her spear at ready. Faint as was the light diffused by the flowers she caught a glimpse of what lurked there. Though they were little, the noise they made when they saw her mindful of them was loud as something twice their size could have raised. Small, yes, but in them lay horror.

If a toad might rise upon its hind legs, show evil intelligence in its bulbous eyes, fangs within its gaping mouth—then that might approach in appearance these croaking things. Save that these toad creatures had no smooth skin—rather that was covered with ragged patches of very coarse hair—hair—or fine tendrils. A longer growth weaved from each corner of their mouths, matching similar ones set one above each eye. These were in constant motion as if the unwholesome threads had a separate life of their own.

Brixia set her back against the tree trunk. They did not move in upon her as she had expected them to do. That their purpose was utterly evil she had no doubt at all. For there beat into her mind a cold hatred of all she was and they were not. Instead of an open attack, they began to circle to the right, moving one after another at a lurching gait—a ghastly parody of one of the round dances mankind indulged in at feast times.

They were silent now, but as each passed her, knowing eyes were turned in her direction, and in each she read the foulness of their desires. Round, they must be making a circle of the tree. Brixia herself slipped around its bole, keeping that ever within touching distance of her shoulders, striving to see if she were entirely ringed about.

What they desired, the girl could not guess. But she knew well there was a purpose to this capering. Faint memories of some of Kuniggod’s stories came to her. There was a way of working magic by the repetition of ritual words, or in the performance of certain acts in a set pattern. Was that what was happening here and now?

If so—she must break their pattern before their magic was complete. How to do that—?

Holding her spear ready, Brixia dashed from the tree towards the nearest portion of the circle. The things gave before her, but they merely drew back a fraction, to continue their circling just beyond the reach of her spear. While from them came a feeling of malicious amusement. She was sure they did not fear her, that they intended to prance so until their purpose was achieved.

If she was to break through that circle, over leap them, or use her spear to hinder them long enough to be free—would she truly be free at all? To venture away from even the meagre light given forth by the tree flowers was to be caught dark-blind in their own territory where they could hunt her down with ease.

Brixia backed once more under the branches and the upstanding blossom lights. She was sure that the circle narrowed slightly with each revolution that the dancers made. Soon she would have to make up her mind firmly and keep to it. Either break free or suffer whatever they wished to happen. Such indecision was not usually hers but neither was she accustomed to facing an enemy so far removed from all she knew.

Under the tree there was a sensation of safety. Which might be only a suggestion born from her need and hope. Brixia touched the back of the trunk, gave a start. She might then have fingered warmth of flesh. In that instant of contact there had sped a message into her mind. Had that really happened? Or again was she bemused and misled—perhaps by the same magic the creatures evoked?

There was one way of making sure of that. Setting her spear in the crook of her arm Brixia gently pulled down a branch only a little above her head. Again, out of nearly forgotten years, she recalled something of those words Kuniggod had always used when she went harvesting among the garden plants. What she said to each shrub, bush or smaller green things, before she culled its blossoms. For Kuniggod had firmly believed that growing life had a spirit also which should be recognized and appeased by any gleaner.

“For my use spare me of your bounty, green sister. Rich is your store, the fruit of your body. Beauty is yours and sweetness—and that which you free give, that alone shall I take.”

The girl placed her hand above a flower. The light its petals shed erased the wind and sun browning of her flesh, instead gave the soft lustre of a water gem to pearl her fingers. She did not need to exert any strength to free the blossom from its parent stem. No, it was as if it loosed itself, to settle gently in her grasp.

For a long moment she hesitated, even forgetting the dance of the toad things, expecting that, once free of its branch, the wonder she held upon the flattened palm of her hand would fade, lose its gentle radiance. But it did not, and there grew in her such a sense of peace, of rightness with the world as she had not remembered since that morning she had awakened in the place of the Old Ones.

Once more she spoke to the tree—or maybe not to a tree but an entity she could not see, could not touch with any sense, save that stir within her.

“My thanks to you, green sister. Your free gift is my treasure.”

Moving, not by any conscious will, but as one who is asleep, and, within a dream acts out some deep hidden desire, Brixia let fall the spear, leaving herself defenseless by the standards of her kind.

Flower in hand she walked from the shelter of the tree toward that circle which had narrowed to a point just beyond where the outmost branches overhung the ground. Towards the whirling figures, whose dance had grown even faster, she went confidently, grasping the blossom. A cloud of fragrance moved with her.

There was a croaking screech and the toad immediately before her stopped short. Its mouth stretched as it uttered hoarse gibbering sounds which might have been speech but none known to mankind. Brixia stretched out her hand. The flower’s light streamed between her fingers.

The toad thing cowered away, crying out in anger. For a moment only it faced her defiantly. Then it turned to pelt away, still gibbering, into the dark. Those who had flanked it in the dance broke line also. They did not beat such a quick retreat, rather snarled and gabbled at her, moving their paw hands in awkward gestures. Though those paws held no weapons it was plain they threatened.

Between them and the girl the flower held its constant light, not bright, but not dimming either. The creatures edged backwards. Brixia made no move to follow them beyond the line their dance had set—the limit of the tree’s overhanging branching. She knew, though not how, that the canopy of that growth represented a barrier of a sort, and for her a refuge.

There was an attempt to begin the dance once again. But, though those a little beyond her croaked and gestured, none would pass where she stood flower in hand. At last they broke in earnest, pattering off into the dark. Though they did not altogether desert the battlefield, for, as she returned to settle under the tree she could hear croaking calls, gibbering, arising through the darkness, and guessed that she now lay besieged.

She was hungry and she was thirsty. Another brief thought of the pack she had left in the dale at the beginning of this adventure made her sigh at her folly. But both hunger and thirst were muted—they might have tormented another part of her, detached from the person who sat under the tree, nursing the bloom, its petals as fine and firm as if carved of some treasured gem stone.

On impulse Brixia breathed more deeply of that fragrance. Nor was she fully conscious of what she did then as she turned to the tree behind her shoulder. Placing the flower carefully on the ground, she knelt and embraced the trunk with her arms, setting her mouth to its smooth bark. Her tongue touched that bark, swept back and forth across its surface. Though her flesh did not have the rasping abilities of Uta’s, it would seem that she did so fret the wood. For there was moisture now rising to her licking. Drops oozed out which she could suck.

Neither sweet nor sour, having a taste she could not honestly give any name to, that moisture dribbled, flowing faster as her tongue continued to lick the bark, answering the sucking of her lips. She swallowed, sucked, swallowed.

Thirst was gone, and hunger. Brixia was filled, revived. A murmuring enveloped her, blotting out the calls of the toad folk. Brixia lifted her head, laughed joyfully.

“Green mother you truly are! For your strength do I give thanks, Lady of the flowers! Ahhh—but what thanks can such as I render unto you?”

There was a sadness born in her. This was the emotion someone might know if she looked through a doorway into a place of great joy and yet dared not enter therein. If this was magic (and how could it be else than that?) let no man hereafter decry such magic in her hearing. The girl leaned once more against the tree and set her lips to the bark, not now for filling and comforting, but in wonder and joy.

Then she turned and curled up, the flower beside her face, her spear lying forgotten. With perfect faith in her safety she slept.

BRIXIA AWOKE softly and happily. The sun had arisen far enough to send gold fingers into the Waste. She lay looking up drowsily, wrapped in a strange content, into the meeting of branches over her.

Those flowers which had been candles in the night were now tight closed in sheathing of red-brown outer casing. None had faded, fallen from the branches. As she turned her head a little the girl saw the one she had plucked resting on the ground beside her, no longer wide open, but changed into a cylinder of brown as were its sisters on the tree.

She was not hungry, nor did her feet ache now. Instead she felt alert, strong. And—

Brixia shook her head. Did dreams hold over into waking hours? She could blink, close her eyes, and see, somehow with her mind, a pathway. There was growing in her a sense of compulsion, a restless feeling that she was needed somewhere—for a task she did not yet understand.

She picked up the tightly encased flower, putting it into the front of her shirt where it might ride safe against her skin. Once more on her feet the girl looked to the tree and spoke softly:

“Green mother, what magic you have worked for me I am not wise enough to understand. But I do not doubt that it will smooth my path. In your name from this time forth shall I go not unmindful of all which grows from roots, lifts stems or branches to the sky. We share life truly—this lesson have I learned.”

That was so. Never again would she look upon forms of life different from her own without heeding their wonder. Did one who was blind and suddenly gain sight view the world with such sharp clarity as was hers in this early morning?

Each twist of coarse grass, rise of stunted and twisted bush in the land beyond, was transformed for her into a thing rare and strange. All stood differently from its fellow, offered an infinite variety of shape.

Brixia picked up the spear. As the world of green growth had come to a new life for her, so had there also been set in her mind the way she must go. In that going she must no longer tarry. There was a need for her.

On she sped at a steady trot. Those toad things that had striven to use their sorcery to her defeat were gone. Without being told the girl knew that sunlight raised a barrier against them.

Now and then, on some patch of earth, she saw tracks; boots had pressed here. Woven in and out among those markings were the pad prints left by Uta. The three she followed had come this way.

In one place Uta’s tracks were to one side, a number together. Brixia nodded, though there was no other there to see her acknowledgment of what the cat had done. Uta, she was very sure, had deliberately set those signs for her, Brixia—in a way as clear as any road sign of the Dales.

The girl no longer questioned the purpose of her own actions. Dimly she understood that she could not turn aside now from this trail.

There was life in the Waste—but none which this morning appeared threatening. Leapers jumped once or twice before her, streaking away with speed in those great bounds which had given them their country name. Brixia sighted an armor clothed lizard, its reddish scales matching the sand about the rock on which it sat. Jeweled eyes surveyed her as she passed. It did not share the leapers’ fear.

A flock of birds called and fluttered up from the earth, to fly only a short distance and then light again, searching for insects. They were dun in color, as was much of this land, for there were no sharp and brilliant greens, no flowers to star the grass. The vegetation was as dusty as the soil. One or two plants with fleshy, grey-red leaves stood isolated. Around the roots of those lay shellcases of beetles, horny legs, debris of feasts dropped from the stems ending in thorned leaf pairs ready to close on new prey.

This part of the Waste did not lie level, rather possessed a number of rounded hills—like dunes of shore sand—save that these were of earth, not so easily wind-shifted. Thus the trail Brixia now followed did not run straight, but wove a way back and forth among those. As they rose higher the less far she could see.

The feeling of Tightness with the world which had been hers upon awakening under the shelter of the tree had ebbed little by little as Brixia penetrated further into the maze of the mound country. Coarse grass grew on the sides of those—but the clumps did not resemble true vegetation, rather they appeared more like rank fur covering the bodies of crouching beasts who allowed her to venture in so far amidst their herd so she would prove easy prey when they ceased to toy cruelly with her and sprang—

Fancies—yes, but such as were not normally like her to dwell upon. Brixia even paused twice to thud her spear point into a mound side just because she must so reassure herself that this was indeed only dank earth and grass and no such menace as creeping thought suggested.

A portion of her mind arose to question. These fear-forms—surely they were not hers. Fear she had long known, but that was all of tangible things, wolves of her own breed, cold, hunger, sickness—all which was ready to assault the helpless or the careless. Never had she drawn upon fancy to supply new enemies.

Brixia wanted to run blindly, in any direction which would take her free of this weaving way. Better a parched, dry desert than this! But she fought hard against these fancies; instead of taking flight as her pounding heart urged, she deliberately slowed her pace, set herself to concentrate upon one thing alone—the watching for those signs of a trail which the others had left her.

It was only then when she concentrated fully on that Brixia discovered that, while here and there was a boot mark plainly to read, a more important sign was missing. Here Uta had left no paw print.

Brixia came to a sharp halt. The lack of those paw prints rang a stout warning signal in her mind. She did not understand why it was so necessary that she be sure she followed where the cat led, but it was—enough to send her facing around.

She did not like the idea of retracing the way she had come. Nor, she argued with herself, might it be needful. But—her hand sought without thinking the furled flower bud pressed against her breast, safe so within her clothing—But—she was as certain as if a command which must be obeyed had rung out of the air over her head—this she must do.

Even more did the mounds take on unlikely, eerie shapes. Brixia felt that they were solid earth only when she faced them squarely, fighting down her fear. From eye corner they seemed to swell, to diminish, to take on strange outlines—

She broke into a trot, one hand still pressing the flower tightly above her heart, the other holding the spear at ready. Then—

There was a mound directly before her, as if it had arisen full humped out of the ground to box her in. The marks her own feet had left ran on—and vanished against the rise of the mound. This could not be—was it illusion? Some of Kuniggod’s half remembered tales flitted back from far memory. Brixia raised the spear and, without truly thinking of what she did, hurled it with full force of arm.

The point sank into soil, the shaft quivered a little. That was no illusion! Solid earth did block her retreat. She had been sucked into some kind of trap, the bait those tracks. Brixia put out her hand and retrieved her spear.

She must not panic. Though she was shaking a little, her hand so damp as it closed about the haft of her weapon that the wood turned a fraction in her grasp. She hated to turn her back on that mound which should not have been there. But she had to make a choice. To linger where she was would solve nothing at all. That courage, which she had learned as a matter of self preservation, argued that, now warned, she could do no better than go on and face what she must face—better sooner than later when fear had longer to gnaw at her resolution.

Once more she strode along the trail she had followed earlier. The boot marks were easy to read. Where had those three really gone? How long since she had been enticed from the real trail? It was useless to raise such questions now. She had no one to depend upon but herself.

But whoever had arranged that trap seemed in no hurry to announce its, or their, presence. She found that wearing, too. To be ever ready for an attack which did not come took the fine edge from her preparedness even as the edge could be blunted on a blade.

Around one mound and then another and then—

It was like stepping from a curtain darkened room into the full light of day. Earlier she had wished for desert, to be rid of the shadow throwing mounds. Now Brixia found her wish answered, but she liked the prospect far less than she believed she would.

Before her stretched open country, bare of even the tattered bushes and clumps of grass which had marked that lying on the edge of the Waste. Here was only yellow, red streaked, earth, worn by a network of channels which ran in so many opposing directions Brixia could not believe they had ever been cut by the water of some past flood.

Outcrops of stone, of a sullen red with thick veins of black, raised like protesting fists towards the sky in which hung a sun that gave a blazing heat to meet Brixia like a wave from the open door of a keep bread oven.

She gasped. To go into that, set her bare feet on that parched and furance-hot soil—such an act was impossible. Much as she distrusted the mound maze, she must return to that. Turn she did—

But where was that gap through which she had just come?

Brixia swayed, clung to the spear, set butt against the earth, as her support. She shook her head, shut her eyes, held them so closed for a long moment and then opened them once again.

What she saw must this time be truly illusion! Great weights of earth could not shift in the space of a few breaths to close the path down which she had come. Yet now, though she turned her head to look right and then left, there was nothing but a towering earthen wall, no break in its length.

Brixia flung herself at that rise which should have been a gap. She dug the spear point into the earth with one hand, with the other she grasped at a handful of the grass to pull herself up. If there was no longer any way through, then her answer was to climb up and over.

The edges of the grass were as sharp as the blade on which she had set a new edge—was it only a day ago? She gasped, and brought her fingers to her mouth, licking the blood which appeared in bright lines to drabble down her palm and wrist. And she jerked away lest her feet also have such cruel cuts.

Hunkering down where the dank earth of the mound’s foot met the bare earth, she tried to think sensibly. That something had happened which was not of human logic, there was no doubt. That it was a threat, that she must accept also. In a way totally alien to all she had ever known, Brixia had been herded, by drifts of the earth itself, to this place.

Bleakly she understood that there was no retreat. She might be able to walk along the foot of the mound wall either north or south, but there was a growing doubt that she would be allowed to so postpone whatever fate had harried her this far. This had taken on all the evil sensation of a dream out of the always to be feared DARK.

That she would remain where she was and tamely await disaster—no, she summoned her determination with that encouragement she had used many times before.

“I live,” she told the empty desert before her fiercely. “I have arms, legs, a body—I have a mind—I am me, Brixia! And I serve no will save my own!”

There came no answer to her defiance—unless the far off, harsh cry of what might have been some hunting bird provided that. She licked her dry lips. It seemed a very long time since she had drunk of the tree’s bounty. And there was no chance of water in that red and yellow land.

But into it she would go—by her own will and choice of time—not that of the intelligence which had set her to this trail. Now she pulled off her skin jacket and set to work with her knife to cut apart those strips she had so laboriously laced together. The resulting pile of skin bits she began to fashion into foot coverings, shredding the hides into lengths which could be wrapped about her feet ankle high, and secured there with the tightest knotted thongs she could improvise.

Having finished the only protection she could manage, the girl arose to her feet, and, shading her eyes against the sun’s glare with her hand, looked on across the riven land. The many sharp edged gullies formed such a network that to steer a straight course would be impossible. There were those outcrops of rock and the possibility of some shade from such. But a haze held the distance well curtained and she could not be sure what might rise, or fall, ahead.

Brixia shrugged. To wait would gain her nothing. She judged that it was well after nooning, she could hope that twilight might come with a measure of coolness. With the spear ready to use as a staff if she might have need of its support, Brixia started out into the desert.

There was enough difference in the outline of one outcrop from another that she could pick a guide ahead and so make sure she did not wander in circles. Here was one in a rounded pinnacle as if a single stumpy thumb pointed skyward. She chose that as her first objective.

Twice she had to detour because of a gully too broad for her to jump. It was like making a journey where one took three steps forward and two back. Though there were patches of bare earth here, and such were marked with tracks, none of the boot prints appeared.

The clearest of such tracks was a print with four toes, each as long as her own foot. It could be the sign of a bird—but one with such a foot—it must then stand as tall as she, even larger!

However where there were signs of life, then there must also be the means for maintaining that life. Brixia knew of no living creature which might exist without water—therefore this land could not be as dead as it looked. She stooped and chose a small red ball of a pebble and set it in her mouth, using the craft of a wanderer to serve her need.

Beside the thumb pillar she paused in the small patch of shade that provided to choose ahead another goal.

It was then that the silence of this burning waste was shattered by a scream from the air overhead. Brixia pushed back until her shoulders scraped against the sun heated rock of the outcrop. She looked up—

Across the sky wheeled a bird, not close enough yet for her to distinguish through the haze of the heat whether it was some oversize hawk such as she had often witnessed at the hunt among the hills, or a carrion eater whose domain this was.

The scream was answered. Another one of its kind planed into view. Together they circled the thumb rock and Brixia was certain that she was their quarry. As they dropped lower she gasped.

Even the gold eagle that ruled majestically in the heights of High Hallack would be as a grass warbler compared to these. If they alighted she was certain their heads with those threatening beaks agape as they now shrieked might be on a level with her shoulders.

She held her stance against the rock which at least would protect her back if she had to defend herself from an out and out attack, and gripped the haft of her spear until her hands ached.

They swooped, and glided, keeping her pent here by circling, even as the toad things had striven to imprison her under the tree. There was a third, then a fourth cry as two more joined their fellows.

That they were hunters she knew. Their beaks and the vicious talons on their feet proclaimed the threat. Had she been caught in the open they might have borne her down easily. But they seemed in no hurry to close in as yet.

More of the birds appeared until she was besieged by six, while a seventh kept above its fellows. It was that which now uttered the piercing cries, while the rest fell silent. Brixia began to speculate that her position was now that of a snowcat who had been brought to bay on some mountain ledge, hounds baiting it while they waited for the arrival of their master.

Who—or what—controlled the birds? The feeling of being entranced in an evil nightmare grew stronger. Was it that she still lay in slumber back under that tree which had seemed such a welcoming refuge, that this was some dream to bring about her undoing?

Dream or no she was able to feel heat, thirst, and fear which was not that of a dream, but of a waking mind. Ever alert, she watched the birds, unable to do anything else. But she did go down on one knee to grub out of the baked earth about the foot of the rock some stones of a size to fit well into her palm. If she could bring down a leaper, then there was a chance she might also astound an over-confident bird, given a fair chance.

Brixia made a careful choice of her stones, weighing each in her hand, studying its shape. She knew the value of such caution. At length she had nine to suit her, too heavy to be considered pebbles, yet shaped well enough to throw.

The birds still coasted silently about, their shadows sweeping back and forth across the ground. While that one farther aloft continued to shriek. That answer Brixia had come to expect broke just as she arranged her last choice of stone well to hand in a hollow in the rock, a pocket from which she could scoop her ammunition and still remain standing.

That long drawn cry was not quite a match to the screams of the bird. And, as far as the girl could judge, it sounded from ground level not the air above. She fingered her spear and studied the stretch of desert immediately before her.

The stone escarpments were in greater numbers farther on, one melting in the haze against another, so sometimes she wondered if they did not, in truth, form a series of rock hills to match the mounds from which she had come. Now there was a flutter of movement by one to her left, angling up from the southwest.

That lone bird on sentry-go winged away, out toward what moved there. And again that call sounded. A human cry? Brixia could not be sure. While, even if what came to finish the hunt wore human shape, in this place such a familiar body could well encase a very alien entity. The Waste was never to be trusted to conform to the standards of Dalesmen.

Whatever did come traveled at a pace which was close to a run. And it looked human. True enough it seemed to speed upright on two legs and in form it was man-like—

Then—it took to the air. Being confronted by one of those gullies, the runner launched upward in a huge leap, throwing wide the upper limbs. Those appeared to expand, take on a wing-like outline. So supported the thing arose well into the air, flapped the arm wings, gained so a good distance, the bird flying ever above it.

It was close enough now so that the haze no longer cloaked it and Brixia knew her half-guess was right. This was no outlaw who had somehow managed to train birds as a hawker did his hunters, rather this was one of the legendary monsters of the Waste, some remnant of the Old Ones, either servant or master descended now to a seeker of meat in a heat riven land.

Master—no, mistress!

That lean body coming across the land in those huge sailing leaps, which were half short flights, was grotesquely female, there being no clothing to cover the heavy breasts, their scarlet nipples ringed about with a fringe of grayish feathers. Patches of feathers grew elsewhere on the body, aping the hair which so appeared on human frames. The head had a crest of pinions now erect. While broad, strong looking, flight feathers began at each wrist, extending rapidly in length size until at the shoulder they were near the length of the arm itself.

The features on the face were more avian than human. Eyes were deep set and the mouth and nose were united into a huge, wickedly curved, beak of a flame red color. The four fingered hands, at the ends of the wing arms, were mainly long talons well armed for rending, while the thing touched not feet to the ground between those leaps, but the true claws of a bird.

In height it topped Brixia, but its body was thin and both arms and legs merely bone with skin stretched across. As it drew nearer she could see that it also had a tail, the trailing feathers of which rippled through the air at its darting movements.

A last bound brought it to earth at a stand beyond the reach of Brixia’s spear. There it paced back and forth, its head slightly on one side like that of a bird when its curiosity concerning some strange object had been thoroughly aroused.

The bird which had escorted the thing settled on a stone the size of a boulder and folded its wings. But the other six continued on sentry duty around Brixia. Now the Waste creature opened its beak and cried out—not the scream, or even the song of a bird. No, Brixia thought that the thing spoke. But to her the words, if they were such, were unintelligible.

At least it had not attacked on sight. Could it be that as alien, yes, and frightening, as this thing appeared, it might still be brought to understand that Brixia meant it no harm and was willing to go her own way? Most of the greater beasts of the wild dales, unless driven by hunger or believing that their hunting grounds were invaded, were willing to preserve an uneasy peace with a traveler who gave no overt threat. If the same held true here—At least there was no harm in trying.

Brixia tried to forget the talons, the sharp bill. She kept her spear in her right hand, attempting to make it seem that that was a staff only. Her left she raised palm out in the sign of peace which was instinctive with her own kind.

Her voice was hoarse with thirst but she used it as clearly as she might:

“Friend—friend—” she repeated the word as distinctly as possible.

THE BIRD-WOMAN’S head still turned from one side to the other as if she must do so in order to focus on Brixia with one eye at a time. Now her bill-mouth opened. From it came not the earlier call but a mocking screech of what sounded close to malicious human laughter. She raised her arms high, the feathers fringing them extended so that more than ever these appeared like wings. Her talon fingers spread to their widest extent and quivered, as if eager to rake into defenseless flesh. While there was nothing remotely human in the gaze she held steadily on Brixia.

Now the seventh bird which had been perched on the tall rock a little behind its mistress arose into the air and headed straight for the girl. Brixia groped behind her with a reflex action years of facing danger had taught. Her finger closed about one of the stones she had laid ready there and she hurled it with the best aim she could summon.

There was another screech. A noisome feather loosed from the bird, as it veered and circled on up into the air, joining those others still in their besieging ring about the outcrop.

Brixia brought the spear into readiness, expecting now to meet a forward dash from the bird-woman. But the creature delayed. Rather she hopped from one clawed foot to another in an odd jerky dance. But she no longer laughed. Nor did any of the birds drop to dive in upon Brixia.

Why they hesitated to attack the girl could not tell. Unless—her hand went to the breast of her shirt, the bud—Would the now closely closed flower of the tree which had given her shelter again provide some kind of a guard here?

Continuing to hold the spear at ready, she worked the bud out into the open. It was still tightly encased as it had been this morning, the shiny brown outer petals sealing all which had given light and perfume in the night.

But when her hand closed about it Brixia was startled. Though, instead of loosing grip because of what she had felt, rather her fingers tightened the more on it. The bud was warm—not only warm, but it pulsated in her hold. She might well have clasped a slowly beating heart!

Keeping her eyes on the bird-woman, Brixia brought the bud out and then dared to give it a quick glance. No, there was no sign of it opening. It remained tightly enfolded.

Again the bird-woman fanned her arm wings, sending the heated air of the desert to raise a portion of sand and grit, blew that, with the foul scent of her own body, directly into Brixia’s face. Her jiggling dance grew faster, the claw feet in turn stirring up the surface soil in spurts of dust.

One such kick sent flying to Brixia’s own face the feather which had fallen from the wing of the bird. And that did not fall back to earth. Rather it arose in the air like an arrow shot from a bow with a definite target in view.

Brixia dodged. But it was not aimed at her face as she had first thought. Instead it shot up, to lay across the fist which was shut around the bud. The strangeness of that was no natural happening, of that the girl was certain.

But did the feather come to serve some purpose of these desert hunters? She shook her hand vigorously, striving to send it flying. It did not flutter away, but remained balanced across her fist as if fastened there. And she dared not set down her spear to pluck it off—such a move might be just what these others awaited.

A feather—

Its touch was so light on her flesh she could not be aware of its presence visually. Why—why had it come to her and in such a fashion?

The black length of it was like a giant evil finger laid across to seal the bud from the light of day.

The black length of it—

Brixia’s breath caught in a gasp. Black—no! The color along the quill was changing—The black faded, became gray—

Now the bird-woman screamed, and her throat-wracking cry was picked up and echoed by all those wheeling above. The sound made Brixia jerk her head, cower back against the stone. She watched for the attack she believed that clamor must signal.

But, save for her dance, the bird-woman did not move. While the feather grew lighter and lighter. Now it was the shade of fine ashes, nearly white—

Brixia flipped her hand frantically from side to side, up and down, hoping to shake it off. To no avail. The feather was now a pearly white. Not only white, but it seemed to draw light to it in an odd way, as if a very pale radiance curved along it to be diffused at the edges. The radiance—how could one be sure of such a thing in this blaze of desert sun?

At the same time there was movement within Brixia’s tight hold upon the bud as if something now struggled there for freedom. She found that a will beyond her own commanded her muscles so that her fingers began to loose the protecting grip.

Her hand moved in a high jerk, though she had not consciously ordered that. The feather loosed at last, spun upward and out and—

A bird flew up into the air. In form it was as large and of the same shape as those which beleaguered her. But in color this was the pearl-white of the tree flowers. Once in the air it darted forward straight at the head of the bird-woman.

The creature from the Waste struck at it with outspread wings, screamed in rage. While the birds which served her broke their circle and came spiraling down to where she battled with the darting flyer.

Brixia dropped her spear. Holding the bud tight to her breast she snatched up her stones, one after another, and flung them at the wheeling birds, and their furiously dancing and screeching mistress. Some thudded home. There were two of the birds fluttering on the ground. The bird-woman gave a great cry as one wing dropped to her side and she did not seem able to raise it again.

But there was other movement out on the desert land. Brixia had been so intent upon her own struggle that she had not been conscious that a new force was drawing in. Things scuttled about stones, moved so quickly she could not be sure of where they went. She only knew that this battle was now a focus for interest and she could not hope that what came would be any help to her.

The white bird had not attacked with either claws or beak, thought it was as well equipped with both. Rather it appeared to attempt to confuse and mislead the black flock and their mistress. Illusion? There could be no other answer Brixia thought. But whose illusion? It had not been born of any sorcery she had worked. She was no Wise Woman, no dealer in the forgotten magics of the Old Ones. She—

In her mouth there was a faint taste of the healing, nourishing bounty of the tree. And closing her in came the scent of its flowering. She had drawn into her being what it had had to offer—not by conscious knowledge, but because it had seemed the natural thing to do. What had flowed into her then?

“Green Mother,” her voice was hardly more than a croak, “I do not know what I have done—If I only knew!”

Once more the bud within her hand gave a great beat, so strong a one that it made the flesh and bone which encased it quiver. Was that in a measure some answer? Some reassurance? Brixia did not know what was happening to her—nor did she have time to set her mazed thoughts in order.

But the screaming of the birds had brought another sound, not as an echo—rather an answer. Creatures flashed into view, able to move so quickly that Brixia had only a fleeting impression of supple, lengthy bodies, either bare of any haired covering, or else scale set. These leaped out so that the bird-woman, with a great squawk of rage, turned to give battle. She was not backward about action now as she had hesitated when fronting Brixia. It was as if she had not been sure of what armament the girl might bring to bear while what she wrought with now she knew well and classed as an ancient enemy.

Escape! Was this her chance? Brixia could not tell, but she was sure in that moment while she viewed the whirling battle between the two parties of the desert dwellers that she might never have another such opportunity. As she made up her mind to move so, once more the bud gave a throb as if urging her on to that course. Or it might have been in warning—But as long as she was Brixia she was determined to follow her own will.

Back still to the stone, she edged to the left, turning slowly to put the outcrop between her and the struggle. At last that knob of rock did hide the skirmish from her. Bud in one hand, spear in the other she ran—not out into the desert but back towards the dark line of the mounds. Whether she would bring up against the mound wall, pursued by the desert creatures to her death, she did not know. But that she had a chance if she was driven farther into the unknown she was sure could not be so.

Above her the mounds loomed, bare and dark under the westerning sun which was now well on its way down the sky behind her. There was little comfort in viewing the humps of this range. To spend a night in close contact with them was not a thing she wanted. But better that than the desert.

She passed over the rim of sand and gravel and saw before her the unyielding rise of the coarse-grassed slope. In spite of the menace of those cutting blades she would have to win up and over, put at least one of the mounds between her and the open desert. Whether the bird-woman and her flock, always supposing that they did win out in their struggle with those other things, could follow her here she did not know.

Her side pained from running as she lurched along. Hunger was a dull ache and thirst was even worse. How long she could continue to keep going she had no idea. She was not even sure that this was the place where she had come through to enter the desert—or had been herded through at a dark and alien will.

Up then—she would have to make it. Exerting what strength she had left, Brixia dug the spear deep into the mound a little above the height of her own shoulder, prepared to pull on that up the side.

She sprawled forward, slamming down on her face, so that the ill smelling soil filled her nose, squeezed between her lips. For a long moment her dazed mind could not understand what had happened. But as she fought to brace herself up she could see—

The mound she had prepared to climb—was gone! She lay in a narrow way between two arching rises of dank earth where the dying sun did little to show anything ahead but gathering shadows. The road—or a road—had opened again!

Brixia was too winded by her retreat and her fall to do more now for a moment or two than to huddle where she was, gasping for breath, smearing her hand across her muck stained face to clean it as best she could.

She had been herded through this way before—was she now going to once again follow a path which would lead her to some other trap such as the desert had nearly proven to be? If that was the truth of it—why should she hurry into some unknown danger?

So Brixia continued to stay where she was as the last rays of the sun disappeared at her back, and the shadows grew even darker and longer, to reach for her with their hungry fingers. She was trying to marshall her thoughts in order, to understand what had happened to her—if she could ever do that!

It seemed to her now that, ever since she had gone down into the ruins of Eggarsdale and been caught there in the affairs of its mind-ruined lord, she had not been herself, or the person she had learned to be in order to keep on living.

Did some Will now move her without her consent, even without her clear knowledge, to suit a purpose which was not even part of the affairs of her kind? She was all daleblood, no part of her had a trace of the Old Ones—she was not like Lord Marbon who might indeed be pliable to ensorcellment of one kind or another.

Dalesmen—and women—had been caught up, true enough, in some of the sorcery laid traps which were scattered here and there across the country to work alien wills even after the passage of centuries. Brixia from her childhood had had in plenty warnings based on those old tales, rife in any keep, concerning what might happen to any one foolish or reckless enough to go exploring in forbidden places. Men had entered for treasure and came forth blasted, dying, or were not seen again. Some with a curiosity which rode them as strongly as the greed of others pushed them, went seeking knowledge. A few found it—and then discovered that their own kin feared them and they were set apart.

Kuniggod—Not for the first time during her long wandering Brixia thought of the mystery of her old nurse. Kuniggod had been a woman of authority, ruling the House of Torgus as mistress, for Brixia had not the age nor the experience to manage the keep, and her father was cut off in one of the first battles with the invaders—his true fate never known. Since her mother had died at her birthing there was no other lady of the dale.

But—who was Kuniggod? She was—how old had she been? Brixia held memories of her nurse from her own earliest years, and Kuniggod had never seemed to age—she was always the same. Though she did not claim to be a Wise Woman with all the hidden knowledge, she had been a healer and a grower of herbs. Her garden had been the finest Brixia had ever seen. That judgment was not delivered because she herself had seen but little then beyond the boundaries of the dale.

No, travelers had marveled at it. While over the years before the invasion merchant peddlers had brought Kuniggod roots and seeds from far places. Twice a year she had gone to the Abbey at Norsdale, taking Brixia with her when she was of an age to travel. And there Kuniggod had spoken with the Abbess and her Mistress of Herb lore as an equal.

She had, as the landspeople said, “green fingers”, for her plantings thrived and flourished. And at each time of sowing in the fields Kuniggod had thrown always the first handful of grain, uttering the blessing of Gennora of the Harvests as she so gave seed to the waiting ground.

Now Brixia guessed Kuniggod had had her own secrets which she, her nurseling, had never even thought existed. Was it because she remembered something of Kuniggod’s learning that the tree had welcomed her last night, given her the bud—? For that had been freely given to her Brixia was now sure.

The bud had had something to do—probably everything to do—with the change of the feather into bird. Perhaps if she were only more learned she could use it for better protection than the spear, the stones, she had come to depend upon.

Now she opened her hand and looked at the bud. But it was no longer so tightly enrolled. Those dark outer sheath petals were loosening. Through the cracks there issued a small glow. From it also came the fragrance—faint now, but still rising from the bud in her hold.

It had not withered nor faded. Clearly it was not a normal growth such as she might have picked at random from any bush or tree known to the Dales. And it was opening swiftly, the petals springing back even as she watched. While the heady perfume soothed somehow both Brixia’s hunger and thirst.

She looked over the soft glow of the flower back into the desert. The clamor of the struggle there had died away without her noticing it. She could see nothing stirring between her and the outcrop which had been her shelter.

Now, leaning on her spear as a support, she got to her feet and resolutely turned to gaze at the dark way between the mounds which had so strangely opened at her return. She went slowly, keeping moving by will alone, as her aching body answered weakly to the demands she made. But she wanted to be out of sight—and perhaps of the reach of any prowler—of the desert country before she sought shelter for the night.

As it had done when she entered the country of the mounds, so now did the open path between them twist and turn. Sometimes Brixia believed she was going north in the general direction the tracks—when Uta’s paw sign had been a part of them—had led. But at other times she feared that she lost more ground in such twisting than she had gained.

However there was always a way open. While in the twilight the flower in her hand beamed the brighter, saving her from being swallowed altogether by the encroaching dark. She longed to find her way back to the tree, though she feared that that might be impossible. At length she was stumbling so badly that she knew, with a stab of uneasiness, she was nearly done.

She dropped down, a mound at her back, and stretched her aching legs out before her. The spear lay across her knees, but both of her hands, cupped, rested in her lap, and there lay the flower, now fully open, with a glimmering life of its own, pulsating as if it breathed in a fashion not unlike that which kept the air flowing in and out of her own lungs.

How long could she keep on—without food or water? She did not want to think of what it would be like to crawl on in the morning no better provided for than she was tonight. Resolutely she set her mind to the old discipline of living for the moment only and not anticipating what disappointments or perils might lie ahead.

That she could flog her tired and fasting body to any sentry duty this night was impossible. The sleep which now weighted her lids, made her body lie limply back, could not be denied. Brixia closed her eyes on the humped mounds looming about her.

The flower lay flat open on her breast. Did its flow of light fit itself to the beating of her heart? If it did Brixia did not rouse enough to mark that. But it slowed the flare and fade of light, and the breathing, the heart beat of the sleeping girl grew calmer as she rested in a relaxation deeper than she had known for a long time.

Did she dream? Brixia could not have said yes or no. There was a confused trace of memory afterwards—of seeing Kuniggod lying in the place of the Old Ones—not dead, no—but sleeping—sleeping as to her tired body—but awake in another and more important way. And Kuniggod—or the essence of her which was more important than any body—saw Brixia. Whether she wished her good—again Brixia could not hold any dream born memory of that. But that there was something of import that passed between them—yes. Of that she was certain.

She opened her eyes. The darkness of the night was held at bay just beyond her body by the radiance of the flower. Now the sky overhead was cloud filled and curtained against even the distant sparks of the stars.

For a long moment Brixia lay so. Then whatever summons had drawn her out of slumber once more insinuated itself into her mind. She got to her knees, groped with one hand for the spear. Her body did not seem a part of her anymore—it was the need to get on which mattered.

On her feet, she started down the way. The glow of the flower only showed a step or two beyond. What might be waiting there was hidden. Yet she must go this path and there was a reason for haste. Brixia searched for that reason within herself. Was it so needful that she catch up with those others? Or was this a subtle warning that she must not linger in a dangerous territory? What had made a trap for her once might well so work again.

There were odd sounds to be heard out of the darkness. At first she thought of the birds—and their mistress—and then of the half seen serpent-like things which had done battle with those. There were also the night ranging toads—There could be dangers in the dark so countless that no man could list them in days—and nights—of time.

Only, as she listened, the main part of what she heard came more and more to puzzle her. It was as if someone, just beyond the reach of hearing intelligible words, spoke—some one? Many voices, some high, some low and with more force. Brixia strained more and more in the hope of making out a single word, of learning whether she did catch the muted speech of her own kind. Yet if there was such company she approached it no closer even though she was walking faster, drawn on in spite of herself by the hope of finding perhaps the three that she sought.

This was as if the busy life of a dale flowed about her just beyond her ability to touch it, to make contact with what lay forever in shadow. Or was she the shadow—trapped in that fashion from the real world?

One could imagine anything in the night. Especially if one were light-headed from lack of food and water. The scent of the flower might even have addled her mind somewhat—even as the juice or fruit of some growths could drug and even send mad the unwary.

Still Brixia walked, and listened to the voices always just beyond her understanding. Once she nurse a fancy that the mounds about her covered the ruins of some keep and those who filled the dark with whispering sound were the soul-shadows of those who had lived there. Such things had been known among the legends of her people.

Oddly enough she no longer felt any fear. It was as if the purpose which had sent her on also enveloped her spirit, encasing her with a sense of protection. Right, then left, the way would turn, and her feet with it. And all around ever the darkness.

Did she walk all the rest of the night? Brixia could never afterwards be sure—nor did she know how long she had lain in exhausted sleep before she had started on. One foot was set before the other mechanically now. She did not even try to see what lay ahead, the will which moved her superseded her own.

Nor was she aware at first that the country around her was changing. The mounds were growing fewer, but such as remained gave her, though she could see little of them through the dark, a feeling of being much higher. Then the butt of the spear which she used for a support thudded home not on soil but on something hard, which gave forth a ringing sound that stirred her out of the half dream in which she moved.

Brixia raised her head. There was a dull gray in the sky. She dropped to her knees, released a little from the compulsion to keep on. So the light of the flower fell directly on the ground about her. There was a wide stretch of blocks, fitted one to the other in a manner which could only mark a road. Across the nearest ran a drift of soil. While planted in the midst of that, with the firmness of something stamped with a purpose, was the clear mark of a cat’s paw.

ALMOST TIMIDLY BRIXIA put out a finger tip to touch that track. It was real, not some trick played by her eyes in the very dim early light. Uta—if Uta had left this sign—then she herself must have won through the trickery—at least for a time—which had been played on her. If she hurried—then surely she could find the others, she would not be lost alone in a place of witchery against which she had only a flower to use in her own defense.

Brixia wavered again to her feet and staggered forward. The flower itself was once more closing, but more slowly than it had opened. Enough light still spread from it to give her a clear sight of the path. So she continued to spy other markings surely left by Uta wherever there was patch of soil to play her guide.

The mounds no longer closed her in. Also here was something else—a stand of thorned bushes, growths she recognized. Though protected with long thorns as was the fruit still clinging to those branches, Brixia was ready to fight to fill her mouth, know the relief of the tart juice from crushed berries to ease the torment of both thirst and hunger. She ate ravenously, paying no attention to scratches as she jerked whole handfuls of the dark globes from their stems at once. They were poor fare, sour and small. But at that moment she thought them better than any banquet of a high feast day.

Not only did she eat until she was unable to swallow more, but she pinned together some of the leaves, plucking the thorns to do so, and filled as best she could the unsteady bag which resulted from her labors. There was no promise that she might have such overwhelming luck again.

The first streamers of the sun were painting the sky when she had done what she could to assemble her supplies. So having recruited her strength somewhat, she now gave a more detailed survey to the land around her.

Whether or no the mounds through which she had come had been the remains of some ancient ruins, there was evidence enough around that she did follow a way of the Old Ones. Traces of walls projected here and there, and it was plain that a paved road stretched ahead to where some heights greater than the mounds, stood dark against the sky northward.

Since Uta’s tracks pointed in that direction it was where she must go, much as her fast awakening distrust of everything to do with the Waste made her wary. There was no “feel” to this place, however—she sensed neither the peace and welcome which lay about some of the old remains, nor the warning shrinking which was the foretaste of evil to come. The road ran straight ahead, its blocks easy to see, though covered in parts with soil in which grass, even bushes, had taken root to cloak it.

By the clear light of day Brixia faced those higher hills and went forward, but not without such caution as she had learned, until she reached those hills. Like the mounds they were covered with grass, dull green and rather withered looking. While these were only the first of a barrier of rises which grew taller and taller ahead. The road headed straight towards a break between two of the hills.

On either hand stood a pillar of stone. These towered high enough to match the crowns of the wailing hills. The pillars were square with eroded corners, bearing the same signs of great age as had the carvings on the cliff she had descended into the Waste. On the tops had been set figures.

To the right, in spite of the wear of wind and weather, was a representation of a toad thing. It had been fashioned, with unmistakable menace and perhaps warning, in a crouching position as if about to leap from its post to bar the path.

While opposite, not facing outward, as did the threatening toad, but across the gap, staring slit-eyed at its fellow, was a cat. The figure was seated in the same quiet fashion which Uta often chose, the tip of its tail folded neatly over forepaws. It displayed no dark promises similar to the toad’s threat, rather a suggestion of curious interest.

Viewing the toad Brixia’s hand went to her breast, to press against the now closed blossom from the tree. She was not surprised at an answer to that pressure, the feeling of gentle warmth against her skin.

Once beyond the pillars, the road narrowed so that if she stretched her arms as far apart as she might, her finger tips would brush, on either side, the sides of the hills.

Brixia was aware of something else. Though she tried to keep to her steady pace, here she went more slowly. Not by any desire, but with the odd feeling that, with each step she took, she was wading through unseen, adhesive muck which sought to detain her. So shortly her effort to advance became more and more of a struggle.

The hunger which the berries had only in part stilled was again gnawing at her, thirst as well. Her bruised feet hurt, the crude sandals having not protected them over well. Water—food—the hurt of her feet—her body sagged more and more, demanding relief for its needs.

At the same time that other sense of clarity, of oneness with the world, which had been with her from the mornings she had awakened under the tree, was returning to be a spur. Perhaps it was a warning that the needs of her flesh must in no way master her now.

Brixia continued on with dogged stubbornness. Above her the slice of sky was clear of any cloud. But full beams of the morning sun were shut out and a chill spread from the hillsides. The girl shivered, and often she glanced behind her. A feeling that she was being followed grew stronger with every breath she drew. Perhaps some creature from the desert dogged her just out of sight. She looked often to the sky, fearing to see a sweep of black wings there. Always she listened—sure that sooner or later she might hear the gibbering of the toad things, or that confused muttering which had accompanied her through the mound land.

As she watched so intently for what lay both before and behind her, Brixia sighted more paw signs left by Uta. Always they were on the hillside to her left, stretching behind cat marker.

What part had Uta’s people long ago played in the Waste? Brixia had seen from time to time fragments of Old Ones’ working—small figures, grotesque, few of them beautiful—some amusing, but many disturbingly ugly, most of species unknown to the Dales people. There had been a few representations of horses, one or two of hounds (though with odd peculiarities which no Dale dog matched), but never had she seen a cat. In fact Brixia had always believed those had been, as the Dales people themselves, newcomers into a land the Old Ones had largely deserted.

Still it was plain that the sculptured cat on the pillar must be as old as its toad companion. Therefore Uta herself might have come, from no pillaged homestead or keep as Brixia had believed, but out of the Waste. If so—To trust anything out of the Waste was folly.

Slower and slower grew the girl’s pace, for with each step that struggle against the unseen pressure sharpened. Her mouth was dry again so much so a handful of the bruised berries brought no ease. Water—a spring—a brook—Could such be found here? Or was the Waste indeed mostly desert, its sources of water secrets known only to the life which crept, flew, walked here?

The thought of water strengthened its hold upon her mind. She had vivid mental pictures of small pools, of a spring breaking out of the earth.

Water—

Brixia’s head came up, turned sharply right. She was sure she could not mistake that tantalizing sound. Water—running—just over the hill. She faced the steep rise. Just over the hill, or she certainly could not hear it so clearly! Water—her tongue rasped across her dry lips.

Then—

Heat—heat as searing as a glowing iron laid upon bare flesh. She uttered a small cry, clutched at her breast. Under the shirt—

Tearing upon her clothing she examined her body. The flower! Though the tight bud it had returned to this morning had not again opened, it was once more emitting a light which she could see in this dusky way. Not only light, but a strong heat which she had not felt even when she had fronted the bird-woman.

Brixia brought out the bud. The heat it generated did not lessen. Light streamed from the very tip where the ends of the petals folded against each other, a small thread of light reminding her once again of the wick of a burning candle.

On impulse she held the bud closer to the slope she had been about to climb. The light flared, and with that came a surge of heat so intense she might have dropped the bud had she not half suspected such a reaction might occur.

The girl bit her lip. The heat—a warning? She had asked a question in her mind, and that burning flare seemed to leave answered that peril awaited there. But was there water? Now she strained to hear that sound which had been so loud and luring—

It had ceased. Bait for another snare—a trap—? With the bud in the open where she could look upon it so, that reassuring feeling of oneness with the world took an upsurge. Yes, her confidence grew as might a plant in rich earth, well fostered by care.

So the water sound was a trap! Set by whom for whom? Brixia did not think this one set for her—rather it must be one placed long ago—perhaps forgotten, but still working, though the trapper had departed.

She thirsted still; only when she held the bud before her eyes her desires lessened—flesh did not command spirit. The bud must not be hidden but used as the spear, the worn knife, a defense as powerful as either.

However, Brixia discovered that even if the flower could reveal the trap, it was less efficient against that curious pull which kept her walking against the counter feeling of unseen obstruction. Though all men knew magic was both lesser and greater. Some spells, they declared, might move mountains and change the world, and others could scarce lift a pebble. Thus the bud might be a talisman against one danger and little or no aid against another.

The light from its tip did not die. That fact heartened her as the hills grew higher, the way between more and more shadowed. To see the sky now she must strain her head far back on her shoulders and stare directly up.

Ahead the rearing hills came together, forming a high wall. But the path did not end, rather it fed into a dark opening. The arch over that was of stone, set and fitted as if to support a door. No such barrier hung there, however. The way was wide open, yet it did not welcome.

Brixia paused. Her flesh tingled, the light of the bud was brighter, flaring up. This was—a place of Power! Though she had no training as a Wise Woman, she was able to sense that even without such learning—one could feel the out-reaching of this kind of Power in one’s body.

But there were powers and powers. All the world was balanced, light against dark, good against evil. So it was with the Powers—and the Dark could be as powerful and conquering in some places as the Light was in others. Which did she face now? She sniffed for the taint of evil—tried to open some illusive inner sense to give her warning.

She had only the flower on which to build her frail hopes. It and the tree from which it sprung had saved her before. That the toad things who tried to net her with their sorcery were of the Dark Brixia had not the slightest doubt. And the flower had been her defense in the desert as well as protecting her only a short time ago from the enchantment of the promised water, working even here in a place which she had begun to think was tainted with a trace at least of evil.

In truth she had no choice—that compulsion which had brought her into the Waste grew ever stronger as she journeyed. Try as she might now she could go no way except ahead.

Step by halting step Brixia approached the mouth of the doorway. If the light of the bud only continued—the bud? In her hold the flower was once again opening. The girl hurriedly flattened her palm, allowing it room for the petals to unfurl. From those arose that clean and cleansing scent, while the light grew ever stronger.

Still engrossed in the wonder of that new blooming, she passed beneath the stone arch, into a way which would have been as utterly dark as the secret passage of the keep had she not had the flower to hearten her.

The walls were of dressed stone. Within a few paces of the entrance these became dankly damp with trickling moisture. Thirsty as Brixia was, she could not bring herself to attempt to catch that. For the drops were thick and oily, as if formed by unwholesome liquid oozing through the crevices.

Fighting against the dank smell was the fragrance of the flower. Not for the first time Brixia wondered how long the blossom might last before withering. She marveled that such fading had not yet begun.

Deeper and deeper bored the passage. By the light of her flower-torch she saw paw marks on the floor. So the others or at least Uta, were still before her.

What did Lord Marbon seek? To his disordered wits had that old doggerel he had sung become a truth he must prove? If so he might push on, uncaring, until he dropped, worn out by the demands of a body which he did not rest nor tend. Or would the boy be able to break through that web of confusion, and, sooner or later, rescue his lord?

Zarsthor’s bane—Brixia shaped the words with her lips but did not repeat them aloud. What was Zarsthor’s Bane? There were tales a-many about lost talismans—things of power which could grant their possessors this or that favor—or in turn bring about this or that fate. It would seem that Zarsthor’s Bane was of the latter sort. Then why did Marbon seek it? To bring revenge on his enemy?

The war was over. Even to such wanderers as Brixia had drifted the news that the invaders had been driven back until, caught between the bitter hatred of the Dalemen and the sea, they had been ground into nothingness. Outlaws there were in plenty, and scavengers out to loot and kill where no lord could marshall a force to beat them off. This was a blasted land in which each man’s hand was raised in suspicious against his fellow. There might be many reasons for a man to long for a “bane” to use as a weapon.

She wondered how far ahead of her the others now were. If man and boy and cat had pushed on they might be a whole day’s tramp ahead. But surely they must have rested—

There was a scuttling noise. The thin radiance of the flower was reflected by two sparks of greenish light near the floor. Brixia paused, took a firmer grip on her spear. She held the flower out, stooping a little, striving to catch a glimpse of what moved there.

A narrow head upraised. This creature was not unlike the lizard she had seen perched upon the rock when she first entered the Waste. It was not one of the foul toads to be feared. When the beam of flower light touched it, the thing did not flee, as she had half expected. Rather it strained to hold its head higher, and that weaved back and forth on a supple neck. Its jaws parted and a tongue flickered at her. There sounded a hiss, as it backed a little away. Keeping always the same distance from her, it made no other move to either advance or retreat.

“Haa—” she uttered that, hoping her voice might banish it when light did not. Though the creature did not seem large enough to be a threat, she could not tell if it were poisonous.

Her voice did not send it into hiding either. Instead the lizard paused and reared. Now she could see it was six-legged—different from a lizard of the outer world. It balanced on the four hind feet, lacking any length of tail save a stub jutting from the hind quarters. The two forepaws were oddly shaped—more like her own hands, the clawed digits resembling fingers. These dangled over its lighter underbelly as it watched her.

Brixia stood still. Lizards could move with lightning speed. She doubted whether she could counter any attack with her spear. Though when it was erect it stood no taller than her knee, so size and weight were in her favor. Her best hope was perhaps the flower.

“I mean no harm—” Why she spoke to the creature the girl did not know, the words came from her much as those others had when she addressed the tree. “I only wish to pass this way, seeing that it is set upon me that I must. Remain free from any harm from me, scaled one.”

The tongue no longer flickered. Instead the narrow head cocked a little to one side, the unblinking beads of eyes regarded her, as Uta was wont to do, with a measuring stare.

“I am no unfriend to you and your kin. By this gift of the Green Mother,” she stooped farther, holding the flower still lower and closer to the lizard one, “see that I am without harm.”

A tongue, seeming so long that it could not be furled within the space of the creature’s mouth, lashed forward, held for a moment but finger distance from the flower, snapped back into hiding once more. Still balanced upon the two pair of hind feet, the thing edged away to the left wall of the passage, leaving open the way immediately before her. Brixia believed she understood.

“My thanks to you, scaled one,” she said softly. “Whatever you desire—may that thing be yours.”

She walked by the upright creature, schooling herself to show no apprehension. To it she must convey that she accepted without question what it offered, free passage without harm.

Nor did she allow herself to quicken her pace. If the creature was of the true Dark, then the flower had again proven its worth as a safeguard. If the lizard were allied perhaps to the Light, the blossom must have been her passport.

The way continued and Brixia wondered how large a hill she did traverse, for the way had neither dipped nor arisen, but ran straight. Though there was no gravel here to cut the sadly worn wrappings on her feet, the soles burned and ached, and she was tired. Still, to rest in this dark pocket—no, that she could not bring herself to do.

At last she limped once more into the open. What she saw was a valley shaped like a huge basin, high lands marking its rim, sloping gently downward. Nor could she detect from where she now stood any visible break in that wall of the heights.

What meant the most to her was that the center of the vale cupped a stretch of water. On that part of the bank closest to her burned a fire from which a thin thread of smoke arose. Up from the edge of the water came the boy. Of Lord Marbon she could see nothing—unless he lay in the tall growing grass.

Water more than company drew her stumbling on. She halted once to tuck the closing flower back into hiding under her shirt. Then again using her spear as a support she went on; gaining some relief from the soft grass underfoot.

She was half the distance toward the lake when Uta appeared out of the grass beside her. The cat mewed a loud welcome before, turning, she matched pace with Brixia’s, escorting her toward the small camp. But the boy did not equal Uta’s friendliness.

“Why do you come?” His hostility was as open as it had been at their first meeting.

The words with which Brixia answered him came not from any conscious thought at all. It was almost as if they had been dictated by another.

“There must be three—three to search—and one—one to find and lose.”

Lord Marbon heaved himself up from where he had indeed been lying near, concealed in the grass. He did not look to her, rather replied as if her words had stirred him again into either partial memory or coherent thought:

“Three must be—and the fourth—It is so. Three to go—one to reach outside—It is truly so.”

THE BOY SNARLED.

“Do you dare to strengthen him in this haunted dreaming then?” he spat at Brixia. “No word of reason from me has reached him since he came through the escape way. He would have only the Bane and will drive himself to death for it.”

No word of reason had reached him, perhaps, yet Lord Marbon’s face no longer was empty, vacant. But his eyes were not for them at all, rather he watched the lake eagerly—almost demandingly. A frown of puzzlement drew his dark brows closer together.

“It is here—yet it is not—” There was a querulous note in his voice. “How can a thing be and yet not be? For this is not of idle legend, I do stand in Zarsthor’s land!”

The boy continued to scowl at Brixia. “See?” he demanded. “Through the night and day he would come here, as if he knew this place as well as once he knew Eggarsdale. Now it is as if he seeks some place he knows well—but he will not tell me what!”

Uta left the girl, padded forward to the edge of the lake. The water was not rimmed by any growth of weed or plant. There was only a sharp line of light sandy earth enclosing it as far as they could see—an oval green-blue gem set in an unnaturally clearly marked tarnished casing of silver.

The cat looked back over her shoulder at the three of them. Daintily, as if urging them to watch her action, she advanced a paw, dabbled it fastidiously in the water, sending ripples out across the quiet surface. For nothing troubled that mirror of water. No insect skated across its surface, no fish sent bubbles upward to break.

Brixia limped around the boy to the cat’s side. She dropped her spear, knelt to view herself in that liquid mirror. But there was no reflection to be seen.

At first glance the water was turgid, unclear below its quiet surface. It was not muddied, for the color was not brown or yellow. Brixia cautiously advanced her own hand, felt the liquid, which was slightly warm, wash up around her fingers. Withdrawing those quickly she examined them. There was no staining of any kind left on her sun-browned skin. And, when she held her hand close to her noise, there was no smell either that she could detect.

Yet it was plain the lake was not normal, judged by Dale standards. As she leaned forward again, striving to see what might indeed lie below, the bud fell out of her shirt. Though she grabbed, it had already floated just beyond her reach.

She had lifted her spear in an effort to hook it back to her when the boy cried out.

“What—what is happening?”

For, as the bud floated out upon the water, it did not appear to drift at random. Rather it moved steadily away from the shore, spinning in a spiral path. Where it passed the water cleared. The color remained, but the depths beneath could now be seen.

Below that now transparent surface were rising walls, domes. Caught within the filled cup of the lake there lay some settlement, or perhaps only a single spreading edifice, of strangely shaped building.

Out and on swirled the bud, and clearer grew what its passage uncovered. There were carvings on the sunken walls and the glint of other colors subdued by the hue of the water. Farther in towards the center the building stretched. Nor did it show any sign of ruin or erosion.

“An-Yak!”

Brixia, startled by the shout, only saved herself from falling forward into the embrace of the lake by clutching at the long grass.

“Lord!”

Marbon passed her in a single long stride, halting only when the water washed waist high about him, his hands stretched towards lay beyond. The boy splashed after, trying to drag him back.

“No, Lord!”

Marbon fought to wade deeper into that flood. He did not even look at his companion, his attention was all for what the floating bud had disclosed.

“Let me go!” He flung the boy away. But Brixia, who had found her balance, came to seize the man’s shoulders from behind. In spite of his fight to free himself, she held on as the boy came to aid her.

Somehow they dragged him out of the lake. Then he collapsed so that they had to support him between them, pull him back to the fire. Over his now inert body Brixia spoke to the boy.

“It is only because he is weak that we could master him,” she pointed out. “I doubt if we can force him away from this place.”

The boy had gone down on his knees to touch his lord’s face.

“I know. He—he is ensorcelled! What was that which you threw into the water? It was that which caused—”

Brixia stood away. “I threw nothing. It fell from my shirt. As to what it was—a flower. One which served me well.” She told him curtly of what aid she had had from the tree, and, in turn, its blossom.

“Who knows what manner of thing is to be found in the Waste?” she ended. “Much of the Old Ones’ owning and rearing may be here still. Your lord named that,” she waved towards the water. “Is it what he has sought then? The place of the Bane in truth?”

“How do I know? He has been one possessed, giving me no choice but to follow after. He has walked without rest, would not eat or drink when I tried to stop him. He is walled away in his own thoughts, and who may guess what those may be?”

Brixia glanced back at the lake. “It is plain that he cannot easily be kept from what lies there. Nor do I think that together we can carry him away while his senses have left him.”

The boy’s hands tightened into fists, and with them he pounded on the ground, his face twisted with both fear and concern.

“It is true—” his voice was very low as if he did not want to acknowledge that to her but the words were forced from him. “I do not know what I can do. Before he has been as a child I could lead, not my lord. I brought him to Eggarsdale for I thought that there his wits might return to him. Now he has brought me here—and within his mind he is as far from me as if the sea runs between us. He is ensorcelled, and I know not how to break this bond upon him. I know nothing which is of any use. Only what he has said of this Bane. Though the matter of that is still his secret.” He covered his face with his hands.

Brixia bit her lip. It was close to nightfall now. She looked around with a wanderer’s sharp valuation of the land. Here there stood no trees, nothing to give them any shelter at all. The fire burned on a stretch of gravel, but there were not even rocks to provide a barricade. She could no longer see the bud—if it still floated it must now be near the center of the lake.

The girl did not like the thought of being in the open when dark at last closed in. But she could sight no better camp than where they now were. Slowly she went back to the side of the lake.

Thirst parched her throat. Though she feared that stretch of water, and perhaps even more what it covered, Brixia knelt and scooped up a palm’s hold of it, setting her lips gingerly to the liquid. It had no taste, no scent her human senses could detect. Uta crouched beside her and was busy lapping. Dared she depend upon the cat to point out danger here?

The few drops she had sucked from her hand were not enough. With a fatalistic shrug the girl scooped up more and drank, then splashed handfuls to wet the tangled hair on her forehead, drip from her chin. It refreshed her, in a way renewed her determination to withstand whatever might come.

Gazing over the lake she half expected to see that the murkiness had returned, to once more hide the structures below. But that was not so, she could still trace wall, dome, roof, on and on outward. Nearly below her lay a paved way which ran straight ahead into the heart of the walls.

A smell of roasting meat drew her back to the fire. There the boy tended a skinned and quartered leaper he had impaled on sticks to sizzle over the flames.

“Is he asleep still?” Brixia nodded at Lord Marbon.

“Asleep—or entranced. Who can say which? Eat if you wish,” he spoke roughly, not facing her.

“You are of his House?” she asked turning the nearest of those chunk loaded sticks to roast its burden more evenly.

“I was fostered in Eggarsdale.” He still looked into the flames. “As I told you, I am younger son to the Marshal of Itsford—my name is Dwed.” He shrugged. “Perhaps there remains none now to call me by it. Itsford was long since swept away. You have seen Eggarsdale—it is dead as the man who marched from it.”

“Jartar—?”

Both their heads turned. Lord Marbon had raised himself on one elbow. His eyes were fixed on Brixia. She would have denied at once that she was whom he looked to see there, but Dwed’s hand shot forth and his fingers closed with crushing pressure on her wrist. She guessed then what he would have her do—let her pretend to his lord, and, perhaps through such a pretense, Marbon might be drawn away from the trap of the lake. Or else be led to explain his preoccupation with it. Making her voice as low as she could, Brixia replied:

“My lord?”

“It is even as you said it might be!” His face was eager, alight. “An-Yak! Have you seen it—within the lake?” Lord Marbon sat up. There was a new youth in him, and Brixia realized how much this animation made of him a different man.

“It is there,” she kept her answers as short as possible, lest some mistaken word of hers return him again to the state that had held him for so long.

“Just as the legend—the legend you spoke of,” Marbon nodded. “If it is there—then also within it must lie the Bane—and with that—yes, with that!” He brought his hands together with force. “What shall we do with it, Jartar? Call down the moon to give us light? Or the stars? Be as the Old Ones themselves? Surely there is no limit for he who can command the Bane!”

“There is still a lake between us and it,” Brixia said softly. “There is ensorcellment here, Lord.”

“Surely,” he nodded. “But there must also be a way.” He glanced up at the steadily darkening sky. “Anything which is of value does not come easily to a man. We shall find a way—with the coming of light we shall do so!”

“Lord, without strength a man may do nothing,” Dwed had withdrawn one of the meat laden sticks and held it out to Marbon. “Eat and drink. Be ready for what you would do with the day.”

“Wise words,” Lord Marbon took the stick, then he frowned slightly, studying the boy’s face, revealed as it was by the firelight. “You are—are—Dwed!” He brought out the name with triumphant emphasis. “But—how—” He shook his head slowly, a measure of the old lost emptiness returning. “No!” now his voice was sharp again, “you are in foster ward—you joined us last autumntide.”

Dwed’s scowl was gone, he wore an eager, hopeful expression.

“Yes, my lord. And—” He caught himself nearly in mid-word. “And—” it was obvious he strove to change the subject, “since we came here, lord, you have not made plain what the nature of this ‘Bane’ is we seek.”

Brixia was pleased at his cleverness. As long as Marbon appeared shaken out of his apathy it was well to learn as much as they could.

“The Bane—” Marbon replied slowly. “It is a tale—Jartar knows it best. Tell the lad, brother—” He turned his attention to Brixia.

So her would-be cleverness had been a mistake after all. She tried to think of the words of the doggerel song she had heard in the keep courtyard of Eggarsdale.

“It is a song, Lord, an old one—”

“A song, yes. But we have proved it true. There lies An-Yak, water buried, it proves the truth. We have found it! Tell us of the Bane, Jartar. It is the story of my House and yours, you know it best.”

Brixia was trapped. “Lord, it is your tale also. You have claimed it.”

He watched her narrowly from across the fire. “Jartar,” he did not answer her question but asked one of his own, “why do you call me ‘lord’? Are we not foster-kin?”

To that Brixia could find no answer.

“You are not Jartar!” Marbon flung the spitted meat from him. Before she could get to her feet he was around the fire, moving with a cat’s grace, a cat’s leaping speed. His hands had closed on her shoulders, jerking her up to face him.

“Who are you?” He shook her with force, but now she resisted. Her own hands closed about his wrists and she exerted all the strength she could summon to break his hold. “Who are you!” he demanded the second time.

“I am myself—Brixia—” She kicked at his shin and gasped at the pain in her bruised foot. Then she gave a quick sidewise fling of the head and set her teeth in his wrist with the same wild fury Uta might have shown when resenting rough handling.

He yelled and hurled her from him so that she fell into the grass. But there was enough outrage and strength in her to roll frantically away, scramble to her feet. Her spear lay beside the fire, but she had her belt knife ready in her hand.

Only he had not followed her. Instead he swayed, and he held up his wrist, eyeing the marks her teeth had left. Now he looked at Dwed who was beside him.

“I—where is Jartar? He was here—and then—sorcery! There is sorcery—Where is Jartar—why did he wear the look of—of—”

“Lord, you have slept and dreamed! Come and eat—”

Brixia saw Dwed’s hold tighten on him. Perhaps the boy could soothe Marbon. In any case she had better stay well beyond the fire lest the sight of her again cause trouble. She eyed the meat hungrily.

Dwed succeeded in calming Marbon. He persuaded the man to reseat himself, got him to pulling the seared meat from the stick to eat. Indeed the awareness had ebbed out of Marbon’s eyes, his mouth became loose and slack—the forceful person he had been vanished.

Brixia watched the boy persuade his lord to settle once more to sleep. And when some time had passed without any movement in that recumbent figure the girl crept back to reach for the charred meat, gulping it down only half chewed. Dwed’s voice came cold:

“He will not accept you. Why do you not go your own way—”

“Be assured that I shall,” she snapped. “I tried to play your game, that good would come of it. If evil has chanced instead it is through no fault of mine.”

“Good or ill—we are better apart. Why did you follow—you are no liege of his.”

“I do not know why I followed,” she said frankly. “I only know that something I do not understand willed it.”

“Why did you speak of the three together when you came?” he persisted.

“Again I cannot answer. The words were not mine, I did not know what I said until I spoke so. There is sorcery in old places—” She shivered. “Who may say how that will influence the unwary?”

“Then be not unwary!” he snapped. “Be not here at all! We do not want you—and he may be beyond my control if he thinks you keep Jartar from him in some fashion.”

“Who is this Jartar—or was he—for I heard you name him dead—that he so moved your lord?”

Dwed shot a quick glance at the sleeping man as if he feared his lord might wake to hear, then he answered:

“Jartar was my lord’s foster brother—they were closer than many who are blood-kin. I know not from what House he came—though he was a man who was used to authority of his own. How can I find words to say so another can understand if that other knew not Jartar? He was no master of any Dale, yet anyone meeting with him gave him the honor name of ‘lord’ upon their first speaking. I think there was something strange about his past. My lord, too—men said of him that he was of mixed blood—that he had ties with the Others. If that was so of him, then it might be doubly so of Jartar. He knew things—strange things!

“I saw him once—” Dwed swallowed and paused, “if you say this is not possible,” now he stared at her fiercely, “you give me the open lie for I saw it. Jartar spoke to the sky—and there came a wind which drove upon the enemy, forcing them into the river. Afterwards he was white and shaking, so weak my lord needs must hold him in his saddle.”

“It is said that those of Power when they use it to a great degree are so weakened,” Brixia commented. Nor did she doubt that Dwed had seen exactly what he reported. There were many stories of what the Old Ones could do when and if they wished.

“Yes. And he could heal—Lonan had a wound which would not close, but kept ever breaking open. Jartar went out by himself and came back with leaves which he crushed and laid upon the raw flesh. Then he sat with his hands upon the leaves, holding them there, and he stayed for a long time thus. The next day the slash began to close—there was no foul odor. It healed without even a scar. My lord could do so also—it was a gift which made him different from other men.”

“But Jartar died—” Brixia said.

“He died like any other of us—by a sword thrust through the throat. For he stood above my fallen lord beating off that scum who spilled rocks into the pass to stun us. He took a wound, blood ran as it would from any man, and he died, my lord unknowing. From a rock blow on the head, my lord came back to me with disordered wits—as you see him. Only he spoke of Jartar as one who waited somewhere for him, and that he must gain the Bane. First he said that it was because of Jartar he must do this thing—now—you have heard him! I know no more of what he seeks than that song he will sing and some scattered words.

“When he came to this place he walked as does a man who is so intent upon what he must do that he looks neither right nor left, but presses forward that it be speedily finished. Now it seems he has taken it into his head that what he seeks lies out there—” Dwed motioned to the lake now hidden in the night. “I know not how to deal with him any more. At first he was weak of body from the head wound and I could lead him, take care of him. Now his strength has returned. At times it is as if I am not with him at all—he thinks only of something I do not know and cannot understand.”

Dwed’s words spilled out as if he found relief in talking of the burden he carried. But that he expected any response or sympathy from Brixia—no, he would probably resent that she had heard so much after he had obtained relief from such unguarded speech.

“I cannot—” she began.

“I need no help!” Dwed was quick to refuse what she might offer. “He is my lord. As long as he lives, or I do, that will not alter. If he is under some spell—this damned land may well have set its shadow upon him forever, weak and open as his mind is. If that is so I must find what I can to break him free.”

He turned his back on her and went to settle beside his lord, pulling over Marbon the journey cloak. Brixia huddled on her own side of the fire. She was very tired. Dwed might want her gone, her own sense of self preservation might agree. But tonight she could not summon strength to move on.

There was no feeling this night of being guarded, or lying safe, as there had been under the trees. The girl curled in the grass and suddenly there was a warm and purring body next to hers. Uta had come to share her bed once again. Brixia stroked the length of the cat’s body from prick-eared head to smooth furred haunch.

“Uta,” she whispered, “what sort of a coil have you led me into, for indeed the first meeting with these two was of your doing and I may be undone because of it.”

Uta’s purring was a song to weight the eyelids of the listener. Though all she had learned in the past dark years urged her to caution and to the safeguards she had always depended upon, Brixia could not rouse herself again. She slept.

“Where is he?”

She struggled out of deep sleep, a little dazed. Hands pawed at her, shook her. She opened her eyes. Dwed had hold upon her. His look was that of an enemy peering at her over a battle shield.

“Where is he—you outlaw slut!”

His hand rose, cracked against her cheek, rocking her head.

Brixia jerked back.

“Mad—you’re mad!” she gasped and clawed farther along the ground, away from him.

When she was able to sit up she saw him running from the burnt out ashes of the fire down to the edge of the lake.

“Lord—Lord Marbon—!” His cry arose like a wounded man’s scream. He splashed into the water, beating out frantically with his arms.

Brixia began to understand. Only Dwed and she—both Marbon and Uta were not in sight. In the same instant she knew the reason for Dwed’s present fear. Had his lord awakened—walked on into that stretch of water as he had tried to do last night—walked out to death beneath the surface?

She followed Dwed to the lake’s edge. That clarity which the water had gained from the passage of the bud was lost again. There was no sighting of what lay beneath its surface, smooth and quiet as a mirror save for where Dwed splashed and sought to swim. Swim he could not—just so far was he able to win into the water—then, as frantically as he struggled, he could go no further.

He was fighting in that fruitless manner when Uta broke from the grass and came unto the narrow strip of sand shore. The cat meowed, loudly and demandingly, a cry Brixia knew of old. Uta sought attention.

“Dwed—wait—!”

At first he might not have heard her, then he turned. Brixia pointed to the cat.

“Watch!” she ordered, with, she hoped, enough force to make him obey.

Uta turned and bounded off, looking back now and then to see if she were indeed being followed. Brixia broke into a trot to keep up. There was no more splashing; she glanced back. Dwed had come out of the lake, was pounding after them.

So the three of them ran on through the grass until they came to where Lord Marbon stood in a channel, dry, but cut deep enough in the soil of the valley to hide his hunched figure from their view until they were directly upon him. By his side lay Brixia’s spear, earth stained, and in his hands was Dwed’s sword. With the point of that he pried at a wall of stones which stopped the end of the channel.

A dam—a dam set to lock up the lake! Now he glanced at them.

“Get busy!” his voice was sharp with impatience. “don’t you see—we must let the water flow. It is the only way to reach An-Yak now!”

“LORD MARBON!”

He looked around, his dark head bare, his face once more with the life of intelligence to bring back that aspect of youth. So he was able to understand her summons. Brixia pointed to the wall he assaulted. His efforts there were already being rewarded, for water oozed through between the stones in patches of wet.

“You pull those free without more thought,” the girl observed, “and it will be as taking a stopper from a filled water-skin. A whole flood will rush forth against you.”

Marbon glanced back at the wall, raised his arm to draw across over a face streaked with the sweat summoned by his efforts. Then he studied the dam with narrowed eyes. Now he had the appearance of a man who might be moved by sorcery, but one who could also think for himself in some things and with judgment.

“It is true, Lord,” Dwed jumped down into that same long dry channel to stand beside him. “Break that through and you may be swept away.”

“Perhaps—” there was force in Marbon’s answer. He tapped the spear butt hard against the stones.

By Brixia’s guess there were already more patches of moisture than there had been even seconds ago.

“Lord Marbon—Dwed—get out—!” she cried. “It is beginning to give!”

Hardly knowing what she did, the girl went to her knees, leaned down to catch at Marbon’s arm—since he was the nearer—snatching her spear from him. Then, throwing the weapon behind her, she tightened her hold on the man himself. Dwed moved in on his other side, exerting his strength to urge his lord towards the bank.

For a moment Marbon resisted them both. His attention was all for the wall. Then he shook free of Dwed, pulled himself up beside the kneeling girl.

“Up with you!” Marbon, too, was on his knees, reaching out to catch at Dwed’s mail shirt near the neck. Setting his hold firmly, he jerked the boy towards them both. Together they pulled Dwed out of the channel just in time.

The patches on the stones thickened to trickles of water. Then one, and a second, spouted out as pressured streams to shoot beyond the foot of the dam, dashing on into the channel.

“Away—!” Marbon’s arms swept out, sweeping both Brixia and Dwed with him, back from the lip of the cut. They stumbled, dragged themselves farther off. There was a sound—Brixia, edging around without getting to her feet, saw water fountain up above the banks. The whole dam must have given away suddenly.

Lord Marbon was on his feet, striding back toward the foaming river he had unloosed, Dwed close behind him. Even Uta crouched near the rim of the channel, peering down at the rushing waters.

That flood did not go far, Brixia saw as she joined the rest of the party. The rise in the slope of the valley might well have sent the draining water back towards the lake. Instead the new stream disappeared not far away. Lord Marbon had moved to that point, was looking down at the swirling, foam topped whirl pond.

“Underground,” he murmured— “a river underground.”

However, he spared but little attention to that. Rather he hurried back to the lake itself.

The water poured away in a steady, rushing outflow. Already a pinnacle arose out of the lake. The top of a dome showed, then another.

“An-Yak, the long-hidden—” Lord Marbon’s loud cry of triumph arose above the rushing of the water. “Three and one—we have come to find what has long been lost and vainly sought!”

Still the water drained. Walls rose clear and dripping. Brixia could see that what stood here was unlike any other structure she had ever seen. Those walls now coming into view enclosed spaces for which there was no indication roofs had ever existed. There were two domes at the heart of that maze of walls, between them a slender tower, standing not very tall—perhaps less than the height of a manor watchtower. As the waters fell to disclose more and more, Brixia blinked and rubbed her eyes.

There was something very curious about what Lord Marbon named An-Yak. The sprawling structures were small—they might have been viewing it from a distance so perspective reduced the normal size. She could not explain this strangeness—only she herself felt large—too large—a giant near buildings devised for a much shorter race.

The toad people had been small—and a statue of their kind had guarded the way to An-Yak. Was this some ancient dwelling of theirs—a temple perhaps? Brixia half expected to see one of those warty, tendril haired heads break above the surface of the rapidly dwindling water.

Matching the color of flood itself, the hues of those buildings were both green and blue. Nor were those colors constant in shade. Rather, across the wet surfaces those rippled, light and dark, dark and light.

Wide bands of metal of a deep green encircled the domes. Those were set with what might be gem stones; for, catching the sun’s full light, they flashed with fire. It would seem that long immersion had in no way either eroded or encrusted what had been built here.

The flood dwindled at long last. There was still a cupping of water in the middle of the lake, washing about the foundations of the walls, but no more fed on into the channel.

“An-Yak’s heart—!!” Marbon leaped from the rim of the lake. As he moved purposefully forward water washed about his ankles, then arose half way to his knees.

Brixia cried out. Claws struck her shoulders, pierced her shirt, to catch in her flesh. She put up her hands to grasp Uta, settling the cat into her arms. Dwed was already splashing after his lord and it seemed that Uta urged her to follow, perhaps looking to Brixia to provide a way for the cat to reach the once drowned building dry footed.

Her feeling that the proportions of the building before them (for she had decided that it was indeed joined together to form a single structure) were wrong continued. Its small size seemed to be normal, her own in relation to it, too large and clumsy. Water washed lazily around her feet and—

A small wavelet, set up by the passing of the two ahead, broke against her own legs. In it—Settling Uta more securely in the crook of her left arm, Brixia stooped. She was right! Her fingers closed upon the tight bud which had swept over the lake to reveal what lay under its surface. To hold the enfolded blossom once more was comforting. Under the sun it was tightly shut as if it had never opened. Nor did it feel any more as if it pulsed with some life of its own. Brixia tucked it into her shirt, glad of its cool wetness against her skin.

There appeared to be no gate or other opening to lead through the cluster of walls about the two domes. The three splashed their way completely around the outer edge to discover none such. The road they had seen from the bank came to a dead end against one wall. Those partitions arose in a height slightly above Lord Marbon’s head, well above Dwed’s. Brixia thought she might just be able herself to reach a hand to the top of one while standing on tiptoe.

Marbon was not be baffled. He had made the complete circlet, now he turned to face the nearest stretch of wall. Reaching, he hooked his hands over the top and pulled himself up. He had not spoken since they had come down into the basin of the lake, nor had he shown any sign of realizing he was not alone.

Though the vacancy in his face had gone, his new expression of deep concentration walled them away as completely. he saw only what lay before him—continued with urgency in every movement.

Up and over he went, to drop from sight.

“Lord—!” Dwed must know the futility of such a call as he voiced it. The boy sprang in turn. His first leap fell short so his crooked fingers only drew lines down the still wet surface of the barrier. Before Brixia came up, he jumped again, and this time caught and held, scrambling to the top by a determined effort.

The girl loosened Uta’s claw grip on her shoulder and held the cat up. Like it or not Uta would have to take to her own feet now, Brixia could not climb one-handed. And it would seem Uta was willing enough to do just that.

She joined cat and boy on the top of the wall. From here the odd architecture of the building was even more clear. The walls enclosed spaces which jutted out from the double domed center like—like the petals of a flower. They tapered somewhat inward, the space each guarded roughly oval, narrower at the dome end. There was nothing within these enclosures save more water, washing higher here since it had been retained by the walls.

Marbon, water waist high about him, had nearly reached the narrowed end of the space into which he had swung. Now Dwed dropped, heading doggedly after his lord. Brixia hesitated.

Curiosity alone, or so she had thought, had brought her this far. Now, as she crouched on the wall top, she was in two minds about continuing. All the old distrust of sorcery and ancient Powers moved in her. Dwed was drawn by his fierce loyalty to his lord—no such tie moved her. While the alien feeling of the place made her more and more uneasy.

Uta ran lightly along the top of the wall. The cat had already caught level with Marbon, now passed him, heading for the double-domes. Brixia shook her head. This venture was none of hers. She remained perched where she was, unwilling to go on, yet somehow also unable to go back.

The water washing about on the section below was dim, murky. Anything might swim below its surface. Marbon and Dwed went with their feet and legs covered, she had no such protection. Go back—

But still Brixia could not bring herself to do that. Rather she arose, to balance carefully on the wall top, following Uta’s example. The wet surface of the stone was slippery and she advanced slowly, having no desire to slide over.

Lord Marbon reached the far end of the walled enclosure and climbed the wall there. She could see him standing before the nearest of the domes. Uta sprang—not for Marbon’s shoulders, but up and out, landing gracefully on the highest point of the dome itself. She leaned over to voice a loud mew as if addressing the man beneath her perch demandingly.

Brixia swayed, fought for her balance. That sound that the cat had made! Her hands flew up to cover her ears. Pain shot through her head like a knife sliding into her flesh. No—!

She could not hear that piercing cry now, she could only feel. While the pain stabs followed near every breath she drew.

There was a mist before her eyes—green-blue. As if the water which had washed here was rising to capture them in a heavy fog of moisture.

“Lord—!”

Dwed’s voice—thin—far away—despairing—

The pain stabs came less hard. Brixia strove to see through the mist—

Uta on the dome—Marbon beneath it—The girl uncovered her ears to rub her eyes. She teetered on the wall but made herself edge forward, one fearful step after another. What had happened? That blast of sound—then pain—

Her sight cleared slowly. She could see the dome. See it—and at its crown a dark spot. Uta was gone. Lord Marbon jumped and reached—leaped again, only to slip back. He was striving to gain the place Uta had stood.

Brixia was dizzy, light headed, a little sick. In order to go on she was forced to seat herself on the wall top, hitch along there. Lord Marbon, with a mighty effort, had somehow reached the top of the dome. Then—he was gone! She saw Dwed now leaping vainly to follow, only to slide back again.

“Lord—Lord—!” his voice rang out, but this time the sound of his voice brought no after pain such as had answered Uta’s cry.

There was no sight of Marbon or the cat. Brixia reached the end of the wall. Dwed stood against the foot of the dome, his chest heaving. He pounded on the surface before him with his fists. Gingerly Brixia arose to stand upright.

Now she could see more plainly that puzzling alteration in the crest of the dome. There was an opening there! But how to reach it—? She called to Dwed—

“Climb up here. There is a door above there.”

He was not long in joining her, still breathing hard from his attempts to scale the dome.

“He’s gone—!” Dwed gasped.

Brixia seated herself again, her legs dangling over, hands braced in a tight hold on either side of her body.

“We can’t get to him now.”

Dwed turned on her fiercely. “Where he went, I will follow!” he said between set teeth.

Let him solve the problem then, Brixia thought. Dwed kicked at her with one foot.

“Move,” he ordered. “If I take a run and then jump—”

The girl shrugged. Let him try such tricks. Why she had come this far and involved herself in such madness, she could not understand. She hitched away along the wall, rounding the slightly curved end to allow Dwed room to maneuver.

The boy backed up. Hands on hips, he stood a long moment to measure by eye the wall, the space beyond, the rise of the dome. Then he sat down and pulled off his boots, thrusting their tops under his belt. Feet bare he retreated farther back on the wall.

Turning, he ran, and Brixia watched him, caught in spite of herself in a hope that he would succeed. He leaped out and beyond, his body slamming against the side of the dome. One of his hands caught in the hold he sought, the edge of the opening.

Scrambling against the dome with feet and other hand, he fought until he was able to hook a second hold. Then he drew himself up and disappeared in turn. Brixia sat alone.

Her gaze centered on the dome. Well, they had done it—let the broken-witted lord and his stubborn fosterling seek whatever they believed might lie there. It was none of hers to hunt. Her hands moved restlessly on her knees.

What was Uta’s part in all this? That the cat had sought the dome first—had cried out in such a way as to be answered by that frightening sound (or had Uta’s cry itself somehow been expanded into that?) Brixia could not deny. But the purpose—?

“Zarsthor’s Bane—” she spoke the words aloud. They sounded curiously deadened and far away. Even the water had ceased to wash about the walls and lay almost frighteningly mirror still. And there was a feeling of—of loneliness!

Brixia had long known loneliness. She had endured, come to accept that state as not only safe but natural. But this was a loneliness beyond—beyond what? Once more she was aware of that clarity of sight, that feeling of being claimed by something outside—beyond—

She shook her head, striving to shake loose the grasp of those half feelings—half thoughts—make them leave her alone. Alone—Brixia gazed up into the arch of the sky. No bird crossed it. This whole valley seemed a deserted, forsaken place. Silence closed about her.

Against her will she gazed once again at the dome—at that opening in the crest which she saw from there only as a shadow against its surface. It-was—none—of—her—desire—She gripped the wall on either side until her fingers were numb with the force she put upon them.

She fought. No—she would not! It—they—nobody could make her do this! She would turn—go back—this was no trap of her seeking.

Trap! Memory stirred.

Traps which had beckoned or compelled and which the flower had broken for her. Could the blossom work again? The girl loosened one hand, her fingers stiff, to search within her clothing, to bring the closed bud into the light.

It seemed even more tightly furled now than she remembered it. The flower was dead—it must be—nothing could live this long after being picked.

Brixia raised her hand until the dried looking bud rested just below the level of her chin. There was still a faint scent clinging to it. Somehow sniffing that gave her a shadow of hope.

She breathed deeply once, again—Then lifted her head to gaze to the dome and that opening. She could do as well as Dwed in reaching that, perhaps better. And she was going to! She was not one alone—she was a part of three—

Stowing the bud away again, Brixia got confidently to her feet. As Dwed had done she retreated along the wall, measured the distance with care—ran—and jumped!

Her hands caught on the edge of the opening as they had upon the wall top. Then she heaved up and over. Down into the dark she plunged as one might dive into a lake. But she did not fall far and she landed somehow with a roll she had not consciously planned.

Around her was no complete dark. Rather there shone a blueish gleam which her eyes quickly adjusted to. The chamber was bare, but facing her was a doorway which led in the direction of where the outer tower must stand. Towards that she headed as soon as she regained her feet.

There was a passage beyond opened into another room. Here she found those who had come before her. And—

Brixia gave a cry and dashed forward.

Uta crouched on a pillar her mouth half opened, for between her jaws she held a small box. The hair along the cat’s spine stood erect, one forepaw was raised in either threat or warning, while her tail lashed in rage.

Knife in hand Marbon circled the cat, while Dwed crept in on the other side, also with a drawn blade. Uta saw the girl. With one of those leaps such as launched her on prey, she cleared Dwed’s shoulder and landed, claws out, against Brixia, ripping the girl’s clothing and scratching the flesh beneath as she fought for a more secure hold.

One arm about the cat, her own knife now in hand, Brixia faced the other two. Their expressions chilled her. In the past Marbon had shown a face without life, then one filled with driving eagerness. What looked out of his eyes now was worse than any toad thing’s malice. For this emotion dwelt within her own kind—or the likeness of her kind. While Dwed’s features had gone slack. He seemed as lacking in consciousness as his lord had earlier been, yet still he moved with cruel purpose. Uta was the quarry for them both.

Brixia backed as Dwed got between her and the door through which she had come. Her shoulders met the wall of the chamber and she slipped along with that at her back even as she had stood at bay before the bird-woman. For some reason they did not rush her. Had they done so they surely could have pulled her down. But, though she was sure they meant to kill her if she did not yield them the cat, they did not yet close in.

The near insane rage in Marbon’s eyes spread to twist his features into a mask of cruel purpose. He took a quick step forward. But the result was as if he had tried to walk through the wall itself. Brixia was startled when the man slammed to a full stop, unable to pass some barrier she could not see. Uta’s head moved against her. The box was still clamped in the cat’s jaws. But Uta’s attention remained fixed on Marbon.

Dwed lingered before the door, knife in hand, guarding that exit, leaving the active hunt to his lord.

Marbon’s mouth worked, his lips moved. It he spoke Brixia could hear no sound. Only she felt the cat stiffen against her. Into her own head, burst small thrusts of pain, sharp enough to set her gasping, building up strength with every stab. It was as if some spell the man uttered soundlessly was so translated to her torment.

Around the pillar where Uta had crouched curled a gray mist, wreathing up the length of that as a vine might grow. Marbon continued to attempt to reach at Brixia, pressing first this side and then that. The mist about the pillar towered beyond the crest of that aiming towards the roof of the chamber. There it spread out in long wisps—a shadowy tree putting out branches. Those spread evenly, save directly above the girl and there they did not gather. Whatever protection was about her was present there also.

Uta nudged against her demandingly. The box—did Uta want her to take the box? Brixia reached for it—Uta’s head snapped away. What then—?

The cat nosed against the opening of her shirt. Brixia, knife still ready in her hand, pulled open the neck of that. Uta straightway dropped the box within. Now the cat fought against the girl’s hold so ruthlessly Brixia dropped her, blood threading along her scratched hands. A moment after landing on the floor, Uta made another spring—she was back again on her pillar perch.

Marbon wheeled. His attention was still for the cat. His lips moved steadily, Brixia now caught a mutter of words.

“Blood to bind, blood to sow, blood to pay. So is it demanded!”

He reached out his left hand and, with his knife, he scored his own flesh. Without a single wince he waved the wounded hand, flinging a sprinkling of blood drops at the pillar. Dwed walked forward from the door as one walks in a trance.

“Blood to pay—” his lighter, higher voice repeated the words. Now he cut at his hand also and watered the foot of the pillar.

Tendrills of the fog spread out, to fasten on those drops where they had fallen. Brixia could see dark streaks rising from each drop as if the mist drew that into its own substance, fed upon it.

The color of the mist changed. As it darkened it also became more and more opaque. She thought now the illusion was that of stout vines clinging about the pillar, rising to crawl out upon the ceiling. As she raised her eyes, she saw that those were at last moving on over her head, thickening, darkening as they grew. From those stalks above drooped thinner tendrils which swayed, casting back and forth through the air.

She glanced anxiously at Uta, fearing that the cat might have been already netted by the thicker growth about the pillar. But there was a clear space there within which Uta crouched, snarling.

“We are nothing—but the Power lasts forever!” Marbon cried.

“Fate has written,” he continued, “that our kind shall run, has run, beyond all seas. We shall reach earth’s last boundaries and shall end as dust shaken from a traveler’s boot. But ahead in the heavens still lies Power, and those there are the Lords of outer space!”

There were powers and powers, Brixia thought wildly. What gathered here gave off a stench, ever thickening as the evil tree thing took on substance. The same noisome smell she had met with the toad things and the birds filled her nostrils. Her knife fell from her hand. Its too often sharpened blade shattered against the stone floor. But she did not heed those splinters of metal. Rather she groped for the bud dead and brown. When she held that safe within her hand she became only a door, a mouth—a way for another presence to enter her world. It was true, at least she knew what part she had in this—she was a servant and now full service was demanded of her.

BRIXIA MOISTENED her lips with tongue tip. She felt strange—as if there was now a veil between her and the past—Who or what invaded her now, used her for a mouthpiece—or a tool? Whatever force of personality possessed her (and she could not detect the nature of the compulsion present in control) it was not born of her own will, thought, or being.

“Hatred does not last forever, no matter how hot or how deep it has run,” that other will brought the words out of her now. “If those who gave it birth are gone it dwindles and dies. But in the brilliant light of the past may lie the seeds of future glory—for those secrets rest hidden in the minds of man.” So did that presence give tongue.

Marbon stared at her. Once more he appeared fully awake, conscious, the man he once had been, might again be, coming into part life once more. This vigor which blazed up in him centered in his eyes. Those appeared cored by a ruddy spark of hunger. Brixia felt as if his demanding gaze dug and pried at her, as one might strive to hunt from its safe protection some shell dwelling creature.

“That was the thoughts of Jartar!” He hissed the name. “I know not how or why I can swear this! But Jartar—” his voice died away, there was a flush across his high cheekbones.

That which possessed Brixia spoke again. Her voice sounded different in her own ears, deeper, harsher.

“Hate dies—but while it lives it can twist and torment the unwary who summon its aid. However old the hates—even those backed by a Power can lose their strength—”

“Lord!”

Dwed’s cry, one of amazement and fear, cut across her speech. The boy had come a step or two forward from the doorway. He was no longer blank of face, rather seemed one who was but an extension of a stronger will.

Around his body twined a dark tendril loosed from the vine of mist. He struggled to throw that off, slashing furiously at it with his free hand. To no purpose, for the mist, which seemed more and more a tangible thing, clung and could not be loosened.

His face was stricken with fear as he writhed more and more vigorously against the whispy stuff. But thin as it looked it appeared well able to keep him in thrall.

“Lord!” his repeated cry was a frantic plea.

Marbon did not even turn his head to glance at his fosterling. Rather his gaze centered and narrowed upon Brixia, even as a man about to match sword against sword watches his enemy.

“Eldron, if you are here to protect the Bane,” he challenged sharply, “then I am also! I am of Zarsthor’s line—ours the ancient quarrel—if you do not sulk within your Power—then show yourself!”

“Lord!” The mist arose farther about Dwed. He was enwrapped by it save for his white and stricken face, now a mask of fear. “Lord, by your powers—save me!”

That which was still Brixia, not entirely possessed by the entity which made use of her as a vessel for other thought and emotions (Jartar’s or Eldor’s, who could tell) knew what held Dwed was surely beyond the boy’s strength to resist. That his courage had already so broken before the lord he worshipped must seem to him black defeat.

“The Bane!” Still Marbon gave no heed to his fosterling.

He strode to advance upon the girl, beat with his hand in rage against that invisible barrier between them. He even slashed the air with his knife as if he could tear that asunder as he might fabric tight stretched.

“Give me the Bane!” he shouted.

Now about his feet the mist tendrils gathered in turn, puddled and thickened. The fog drew about him, crept upward along his body. It lapped his knees, clung to his thighs but he did not seem to notice.

Only Dwed hung in the stuff as a spider’s prey is enwrapped in web, helpless, motionless. The horror on his face was stark as wavelets of the mist touched his cheeks, clung to his chin.

“The Bane!” Marbon mouthed.

Uta stood tall on her hind feet. She slapped out viciously at a tongue of the mist reaching for her. At that same moment Brixia was—emptied. She had no other word to describe that sensation of release. Something had withdrawn. She was now alone, open to whatever Marbon might use against her. Even her knife lay shattered at her feet.

Her hand closed convulsively as if she could still grip the haft of that weapon. But what she held was the bud. And it moved! As her fingers spread flat, the flower began to open.

The dull brown outer husks split. From the heart within came that glow which had lightened her path, heartened her, during her journey through the night in the Waste.

Powers and powers, she thought frantically. Now her other hand went to that box Uta had entrusted to her, closed on it where it lay within her shirt.

Marbon stirred. His face was no longer that of the man she knew—slack or conscious either one. Could it be possible that features could writhe in that intolerable fashion—resettle into an entirely different countenance? Even if this change was only illusion, it was surely never meant for any one sane to witness. She was icy cold, now filled with such terror that she could not will herself to the slightest movement towards escape, even though Dwed now left the door open for her going.

The man fronting her flung high his arms. His face turned up to the twining, squirming snakes of fog above them. He called:

“Jartar—sle—frawa—ti!”

The mist whirled in a pattern which made one dizzy to watch. Brixia, now that Marbon’s gaze no longer held and commanded hers, closed her eyes lest she lose her senses watching the vortex of the fog. Then the fragrance of the flower wafted upward to clear her head.

What he might have called on she could not guess. But—something answered. It was here—with her—for, though she did not open her eyes to look, she was sure this new presence loomed near her—reached out—

Box and flower—she did not know why the two came together in her mind and that combination seemed right—needful. Flower and box—Do not look! What is here had come to cloud her thoughts, lessen what she might do to defend herself. There was a tugging which she must not yield to.

Once more the cry arose from her, the appeal to the only thing which seemed to promise safety in this shifting and alien world.

“Green mother, what must I do? This is no magic of my own—in these ways am I lost!”

Did she in truth cry that aloud, or was it only thought so intense that it seemed open speech, a plea made perhaps fruitlessly to a power she could not understand? Who were the gods—those great sources of power who were reputed to use men and women as tools and weapons? And did those so used have any defenses at all? Was this struggle now centering on her as battle between one alien power and another?

Open!

An order—delivered by whom—or what? The thing Marbon had summoned? If so she was indeed in danger. Brixia still kept her eyes tightly closed, tried to do the same for her mind. As the mist had made a prisoner of Dwed, so did the will she sensed strive to enmesh her—not in body but in mind.

“By what I hold,” Brixia cried aloud, “let me stand fast!”

Box and flower—

Her hands moved, bringing together the two objects she held. She could not be sure whether she acted by the commands of the Light, or the Dark. But it was done. And at the same moment she opened her eyes.

There was—

She was not in the mist curtained room of the pillar, rather she stood before the high seat in the feast hall of a keep. There were torches blazing high in the rings fastened to the stone of the walls. A cloth woven of many colors, each hue fading or deepening into the next, lay down the center of the board. And on that cloth were drinking horns of gleaming crystal, of the rich green of malachite, the warm red-brown of carnelian, such a display as only the greatest of the dale lords might hope to equal.

Before each place was a platter of silver. And there were many dishes and bowls set out—some bearing patterned edges, or set with the wink of gems.

At first Brixia thought that she stood in a deserted hall and then she discovered that there was indeed a company there, but those who sat to feast were but the faintest of shadows, mere wisps so tenuous that she could not be sure which was man and which woman. It was as if that which was inert could be clearly seen, but life to her eyes was that of those shades which some dalespeople said clung to old, ill-omened places and were inimical to the living out of jealousy and despair at their own unhappy state.

Brixia cried out. She swayed, fought to move from where she stood directly before the high seat where he or she who ruled this shadow company might mark her presence in a moment. But she could not flee, no, she was fast held to face what might come.

A black flash—if light could be dark instead of white, slashed between her and the high seat, as a sword might swing to set a barrier of moving steel. Crooked and controlled, a will which was not wholly evil, yet carried with it the stigmata of the dark, was like a blow as it strove to seize upon her. It flailed at her like a harshly laid on lash. And now it seemed that the ghost shape in the high seat did indeed turn upon her visible eyes of red flame.

The shadow deepened even as Marbon’s features had appeared to move and change, grew to be more substance. It seemed to the girl that what crouched now in that high backed chair was no noble lord such as might rule this hall. Rather that which leered at her with those flame eyes, which might have been wrought from the coals of hell itself, was an outlaw, foul, the very worst of the brutes she had in the past fled, or hidden from, knowing well what would happen to her were she to fall into their hands.

Gone!

Crouched on the high seat now was a toad thing from the Waste—obscenely bloated, its toothed jaws agape, its clawed paws outstretched. A giant among its kind, fully as large and menacing as the outlaw shape it had replaced. It gabbled in distorted speech:

“Bane—the Bane!”

Box and flower—

Brixia came aware that she was pressing both of these with bruising force against her breast. Box and flower—

The toad thing winked out. Now it was the bird-woman. Her cruel bill clicked, she held high her arm wings, the talons crooked, and it would seem she was on the very point of hurling herself into the air, launching an attack on Brixia.

Illusions? The girl could not be sure. For as each appeared it was as solid, seemingly as substantial as the seat in which it sat or squatted. Box and flower—

Now—now it was Dwed! Still enwrapped in the mist he lay limply rather than sat in the high seat. All was hidden save a portion of his face. He raised his head weakly, looked at her with eyes which were dulled with horror and yet held in them a desperate plea:

“Bane—” The single word was a tortured whisper which echoed hollowly all through that hall.

Then—he was gone. In his place Uta—Uta firmly visible but in the grip of a monster shadow thing, twisting, fighting vainly to free herself ever as the misshapen paws netted tight about her furred throat to squeeze all life from her.

“Bane!” the cat squawked.

As had the others Uta vanished. For a long moment the high seat seemed empty. Then—no more shadow—here was a man as visible and as real as Marbon had been when he fronted her in the bubble room.

He wore mail, not the silken robe of a feaster, and a helmet overshadowed his face.

“Marbon!” Brixia near spoke that name aloud and then she saw that this was not the stricken Lord of Eggarsdale, though there was surely some close kin line linking them one to the other. But on this man’s face a harsh and arrogant pride had set an unbreakable seal. And there was a twist about his lips as if he bit upon something sour and unpalatable which poisoned any pleasure of this feasting.

Like their lord the others ranged there became the clearer. Nor were they all, Brixia realized with a shiver, of the human kind. There was a lady robed in the green of new spring leaves who sat upon the right hand of the lord. But her flowing hair was as delicately and freshly green as the gown which she wore, and her face, beautiful as it was, was not that of a human woman. On the other seat, to the lord’s left, a cat’s head arose not so far above the level of the table. In color it might have been Uta but Brixia believed, could she see it better, this strange feline would have been half again as large.

There were others—a young man wearing a helm on which the crest was a rearing horse, and whose face had an unhuman cast—not as pronounced as that of the green woman, but unmistakable. There was another woman plainly robed in cloth the color of steel, girdled with metal plates each of which was centered by a milk-white gem. Her hair, as white as those gems, was braided about her head so that it itself formed a crown of presence. And her calm face held strength and assurance. Yet there was about her some of the feeling that she was apart from this company, an onlooker at what might pass here, and yet not a partaker in any action. On her breast rested an intricately fashioned pendant of the same white stones. And Brixia felt that served its owner for as powerful a weapon as any war blade.

At the far end of the table, where the other feasters appeared to have withdrawn a little to give them room (as if they were not entirely welcome), were two others. Brixia, seeing them dearly, caught her breath.

That grotesque and attenuated creature who had been served by birds—This was not quite her double. The half female figure was more rounded, closer to that of a woman, though unclothed save for the feathers. Also the avian creature wore a gemmed belt. While more jewels sparked from a wide collar-like necklace. But that she was of the same breed as the Waste creature there could be no doubt.

Next to her squatted one of the Toads—save there was a closer, near blasphemous link between this monstrosity and—a man? Brixia loathed the thought, yet she could not escape it as her gaze, in spite of all her efforts, were drawn to the creature.

Its eyes glittered with malice and she could guess that, though it appeared to be here in acceptance if not in friendship, it liked its present company no more than the company welcomed it.

It would seem that Brixia’s own presence aroused no interest in the feasters. Not one pair of eyes sought her out in surprise, nor even appeared to rest on her long enough to recognize that she was not truly of them. What purpose had brought her here she did not understand. Then—

She no longer stood helplessly fixed before the high seat. After a moment of startlement she realized that she now, by some feat of power (or the will of that which had sent her here) appeared to hang in the air above the feasters, in a manner which enlarged her view of the whole hall and those in it.

The high chair of the lord faced, as was still the dales custom in any keep of pretension, the great double outer door of the hall itself. Now, with a crash which brought instant silence to the murmurs which Brixia had been able to hear only as a faint sighing of sound, that portal not only burst open, but the two leaves were sent flying back to slam against the wall. It was as if a thunder clap had been wrested out of some summer storm to resound through the hall.

Within the cavernous opening of the door (for that portal might well have admitted without difficulty near a full company of fighting men in marching order) there stood a single man. As the lord of the hall he was not dressed for feasting, but also wore mail and a helmet. While thrown back on his shoulders was a cloak lying in folds as if he had tossed it so impatiently to free his arms for some meeting of swords.

Yet the blade which he wore was still in its scabbard and he held no weapon. No weapon save the hate which was naked in his face. And Brixia who had near called “Marbon” upon her first sighting of the hall lord, was now almost convinced that she would make no mistake in giving that name in truth to this newcomer.

He did not advance at once into the hall but waited, as if he must have some invitation, or at least recognition, from the man in the high seat. While he so stood quietly, surveying the company at large, there was an ingathering of followers behind him.

It was if he were a man standing amid a company of children. For these who stepped forward to flank him, massed in place at his back, were of the size to make him seem a giant. Yet they had the seeming, not of the children whose size they aped, rather of being well matured and perhaps even of some unusual age.

They did not have the stocky bodies of dwarves, but were slender and well shaped. Only their small hands, their finely featured faces, were uncovered. For the rest they wore a mail which had the pearling of the interior of a shell, made in small plates which overlapped. While their helmets were unmistakably either giant shells, or else faithfully fashioned in that pattern.

“Greeting, kinsman—”

It was the lord of the hall who broke the uneasy silence that had fallen upon the echoing of the door crash. He was smiling a little, but it was an unpleasant smile with a gloating in the curve of his lips.

The man at the door met him eye to eye. He wore no smile, rather there was that in faint lines about his nostrils and his lips which said that only with great effort did he hold his emotions under tight rein. Nor did he come any farther into the hall.

“You did not signify that you intended to honor us with your presence,” continued the lord. “But there is always room for a kinsman in Kathal—”

“Such room as is in An-Yak?” for the first time the newcomer spoke. His voice was low but Brixia had an odd sense that she could feel within herself the strain he was under to keep his rage in bonds.

“A strange question, kinsman. What may you mean by it? Have you and your water people then some trouble lying upon you?”

The man at the door laughed. “A proper question, Eldor! Trouble you ask? And why must you ask that? Surely with your eyes and ears, your readers of the wind, and listeners to the grass, the birds, all else able to bear rumor or report the truth, you already know what has happened.”

The lord shook his head. “You credit me with many powers, Lord Zarsthor. Had I but a fraction of such I need question no man—”

“Then why do so?” snapped Zarsthor. “Trouble—yes, we know trouble. It is the kind which comes from ill wishing, from the meddling with forces which darken a man to touch upon. I have not such great reach as you can muster, Eldor, still have I heard of certain Callings, of bargains, and trysts, and stirrings in strange place. They speak to me of a Bane—”

Another silence fell as he said that last word—such a silence as was more potent than a battle cry shouted aloud. There was not even a stir among the company. They might have been frozen, each one, into instant and lasting immobility.

It was the woman of the white gems who broke that silence.

“You speak in anger, Lord Zarsthor—a hasty speech cannot be recalled for even one word.”

For the first time his eyes flickered away from Eldor, touched upon the woman, and were instantly back upon the lord, as if he needed to keep him ever in sight for a very necessary reason of his own. He spoke respectfully but he did not look at her again as he so answered:

“Your grace, I am angry, yes. But a man can be angered by truth and so armored against injustice, and creeping evil. My friends have also certain powers. There has been a Bane laid upon me, upon An-Yak—I am willing to swear this on oath at your very altar, under the fullness of your moon!”

Now the woman turned her head and looked directly at Eldor.

“It has been said that there is a Bane raised against a lord and his land. To this there must be an answer—”

Eldor’s smile grew wider. “Do not trouble yourself, your grace. Is it not true that what lies between kinsman and kinsman are private things, resting alone on them?”

Now it was the youth wearing the horse-topped helm who broke in. Under the shadow of his elaborate helmet his dark brows drew close in a deep frown.

“Between kin and kin no one but a sworn liegeman may raise his voice, such is in truth the custom, Lord Eldor. But a Bane is not such a light thing as to be used without due consideration. I have been asking myself since we gathered here why certain ones have been honored among us for the first time.” He nodded and that inclination of his head clearly indicated both the toad creature and the avian woman at the other end of the table.

Now there was a low murmur, which seemed to Brixia to be mainly one of assent, spreading from one to the next among the other guests. Yet neither the bird-woman nor the Toad—if their features could indeed register any real emotion—seemed to show either surprise or irritation at being so singled out.

The green haired lady’s voice, as light and delicate as a breeze rustling among river reeds, followed fast upon that spreading murmur:

“Lord Eldor, unmeet as it is for guests to make such comments, yet so is this land now arrayed, one power fronting against the next, that it might be wise for you to forget the lack of proper courtesy and answer—”

“WELL DO YOU SAY, Lady Lalana, it is not courtesy to question the arrangements of your host at a feasting. But since this is now a matter of openness in our company—why, I do not stand under any shadow with a need for hiding what I have done, or will do.” His confidence was high with arrogance at that moment.

“It is true that there is a separation among us of Arvon and this grows the wider—mainly because no one raises a voice to ask why does this happen? We are not of one blood or one kind, yet for long we have managed to dwell peaceably side by side—”

The woman of the white gems arose. Her calm face was in a manner, Brixia sensed, a rebuke to the speaker. Her hand came up breast high between them and her fingers moved in a gesture which the watching girl was not able to follow. But what was a marvel was that those movements left drawn on the air itself a symbol as if white fire, not springing from any tangible source, blazed there.

For a moment out of time that symbol stayed white—as pure as the light of the full summer moon. Then it began to shade as if blood itself seeped in from an unknown space to taint and corrupt it. From a flushing of pink it turned ever darker, though still its outlines remained intact and sharp to the eye.

Full crimson it became. But the change was not yet over—darker and darker—now it held a blackness which at last was entire—Then the symbol itself began to writhe in the air, as if the change brought about some weird torment to substances which lived and could suffer pain.

So at last the white symbol was now a black one and its whole character was changed. While those around the feast board stared at it with grave faces which grew even more disturbed and uneasy. Only the avian woman and the toad creature seemed utterly undisturbed and unimpressed.

Even Eldor took a step backward. Now his own hand half lifted as if he would reach out to erase from sight that sullenly glowing stain upon the air of the hall. But his fist fell back to his side again. However his face was stern set with purpose.

It was not he, however, who broke the silence in which all those within the hall seemed to be holding their breath waiting for some catastrophic event. Rather the woman who had drawn the symbol spoke:

“So be it—” Her three words rang out as might judgment in some court whose pronouncement could alter the fate of whole nations.

Apparently in answer to those words the major part of that company arose from their places, turning to Eldor faces which were set and accusing. But he held his head high and gazed back with a defiance as protective as the armor he wore.

“I am lord in Varr.” He also spoke with emphasis as if the words had a double meaning.

The woman of the white gems inclined her head a fraction.

“You are lord in Varr,” she agreed in a neutral voice. “Thus do you affirm your lordship. But also must a lord answer for that land of which he is warden—in the end.”

He showed teeth in a wolfish grin. “Yes, lordship is a burden to be accounted for. Do not think, your grace, that I did not consider that before—”

“Before you wrought with them!” Zarsthor came a few steps farther into the hall. His arm was raised as if he would hurl the spear he did not hold, the index finger of his hand pointing to toad and bird-woman.

Eldor snarled. “I said I would settle with you, kinsman! You laid shame on me, now worse shall lay on you and your land, and those fish men with whom you lair! Eaters of filth, dwellers in mud, profaners of the world—” his voice arose into near a shout. “You have spit upon the name of your House and brought our blood near to the dust—”

As Eldor’s rage showed the hotter, Zarsthor’s expression became one of emotionless calm. The warriors in scaled armor who had followed him into the hall drew closer about him. Their sword hands hung now close to the hilts of their scabbarded weapons and Brixia saw them glancing swiftly right and left as if they expected to have enemies leap forward from the walls of the chamber.

“Ask of yourself, Eldor.” Zarsthor spoke as the other paused for breath, “with whom you have consorted. What price have you paid for the Bane? To surrender Varr perhaps—”

“Ahhhh—” his answer was a howl of pure rage. But a movement at the far end of the table drew Brixia’s attention, as small as that shifting of position had been.

The avian woman held up her goblet, was looking down into the cup with intense concentration. What she saw there might be of far more interest to her at this moment than the exchange before the two lords. Her head bent forward in a sudden bob. Had her vile mouth dipped into the liquid, or had she, on the contrary, spat into it? Brixia could not tell. But moving with almost a blur of speed she now hurled the cup from her directly into the center of the table before Eldor’s high seat.

There was a flash of—could flame be black?—which flared up as the goblet smashed against the board and spattered its contents outward. There were cries. People reeled back and away from the outward curling black flames which continued to blaze.

Even Eldor staggered in retreat, his arm flung up before his face to protect himself. While those others, the green lady, the rest, fled as the fire licked out viciously as if to lash them.

Darker grew the flames and higher. They blotted out the scene for Brixia. She caught a glimpse of some of the company in flight through the door, Zarsthor and his shell-helmed followers mixed with them.

At the same time she was aware that the box she held in her hand—that which Uta had given her—was warm—no, hot—until the heat grew close to torment. Still she could not loose her hold and drop it.

The hall was gone—with it the black fire. The girl was caught in a place of gray nothingness. She found herself breathing in great gasps as if there were little air here and she could not find enough to fill her laboring lungs.

Then the grayness became a stretch of ground—barren—rift by furrows—but not the furrows set by any landman’s plow. No, this was as if some great sword had hacked and hacked again—its cutting blade driving all vestiges of life out of the wastage of leached earth.

Farther the mist lifted to show more and more of the gray and ravaged land. Yet Brixia knew by some means that this had once been a fair country before the shadow had fallen on it. She saw tumbled blocks, stained by time, and with the faint shadows of fire scorch laid across them, and believed that once there had stood here some great keep, proud and fine.

Now—out of the curtain of mist which had withdrawn only a short way—there came from either side—two men. About them hung a visible cloud which the girl realized was the hate which corroded and ate at them until they had naught else to keep them living. Though this place was not of their world, (How did she know that also, Brixia wondered fleetingly) rather a hell that they had made for themselves through time itself. No matter who had had the right of it when this had begun, both now were tainted, defiled by the war which had held them, turning in desperation and rage to the Dark when the Light would not support them. Now they were entrapped—always to wander in their hell.

Their mail was hacked, rusted with blood. Though they still wore sword belts, neither had a blade. Only their hatred remained as their weapon.

Now one raised a hand and hurled a ball of force of rage and hate at his adversary. That broke against the other’s breastplate in a rain of dark sparks. He reeled back a step or two, but did not fall.

Instead he who had been struck clapped his hands together. There followed no sound. But the man who had thrown the ball shook from head to foot as might a young tree in the full blast of a winter storm.

Brixia, without any volition on her part, against her will, moved forward until she stood halfway between the two of them. Their heads came slowly around so she could see their faces in the shadow of their battered helms. Their features were withered, scored by passion, yet she knew them for Eldor and Zarsthor—old in hate.

Each held forth a hand, not imploringly, but in command. They spoke together so that it sounded to her like a single sharp order.

“Bane!”

Nor did they after fade as had the others—the outlaw, the toad—Uta—Rather their figures looked even clearer, in a way brighter. Eldor spoke again when she did not move:

“Give it to me, I say! It is mine, I labored in its making, I made a pact with those I distrusted, I gave much to have it! If you will not yield it willingly, then I shall call and what will come to my aid will serve you as you choose—for the choice is yours!”

Zasthor spoke as urgently:

“It is mine! Since it was wrought to break me, and all those who stood with me, then by the very right of Power, I have now the need to defeat it, and him—give him back from my own hand that which he raised to damn me. I must have it!”

In Brixia’s hand the box glowed warm. And in her other hand lay the flower. It seemed to her oddly that each weighed much, but the weight was the same, and in her way she was a balance appointed to hold them so. This was in manner a judgment she did not understand, to be delivered to those whose causes she could not know. One had threatened her—Eldor. Zarsthor’s words might have been taken as a justification and a plea.

“I wrought it!”

“I fought it!”

That they cried together.

“Why?” Her question seemed to startle both of them. How could she hope to render judgment when she knew so little of the rights of the matter which had brought them at each other’s throats?

For a moment they were silent. Then Eldor moved a step closer, both his hands out as if to take the box from her by force if he must.

“You have no choice,” he told her fiercely, “what I shall summon shall surely answer. And that coming shall be your bane!”

“Give it to him if you are fearful! But you will never then know how empty his threats may be,” Zarsthor broke in. “Give it to him, thereafter you shall walk in the shadow of fear for as long as you live—and even after! Even as we two now must walk in this place because of the Bane.”

Box and flower—

Brixia found she could break the gaze with which they had held her, their eyes keeping her prisoner. Now she looked down at her two hands—at what those held in balance.

The box was open! Tight held within it lay an oval stone—light pulsed weakly from its visible surface. That light was gray, like a film of shadow—if shadow and light could be one. The flower had also opened to its greatest extent and the light which came from it was not the pure white which she had always before seen, but rather a green glow which was soft and soothing to her eyes.

“This is the Bane, then,” she said slowly. “Why was it wrought, Eldor—truly—why?”

His face was grim and hard.

“Because I would deal with my enemy as I must—”

“No,” Brixia shook her head. “Not as you must—but rather as you chose, is that not so? And why was he your enemy—?”

The harsh face grew even sterner. “Why? Because—because—” His voice trailed away, she saw him bite upon his lower lip.

“Is it that you no longer know?” the girl asked as he continued to hesitate.

He frowned at her fiercely but he did not answer. She turned to Zarsthor.

“Why did he so hate you that he had to make this evil thing?”

“I—I—”

“You also no longer know.” She did not ask this time. “But if you cannot remember why you are enemies—what does it really matter who holds this? You no longer need it, is that not the truth?”

“I am Eldor—the Bane is mine to use as I see fit!”

“I am Zarsthor—and the Bane has brought me this—” he flung out his arms, his hands clasped into fists, to indicate the ravaged world about them.

“I am Brixia,” the girl said, “and—I am not sure what else at this time. But that which abides in me says—let it be thus!”

She brought the flower above the box, made the dim light of that greenish glow fall upon the gray stone within.

“Power of destruction—power of growth and life. Let us now see which is master—even here!”

The gray film on the stone no longer appeared to move. Rather it lay like a still crust over the surface. And, as the light continued to bathe that crust, it broke, flaked away to reveal new radiance. While the flower slowly dimmed, its petals drew in, began to wither. Brixia wanted to jerk it away from that devouring stone, but her hand would not obey. More and more the flower shriveled, the stone in turn glowed and pulsed. It was no longer the gray of death—of this land which was a trap—rather it now had a green spark at its heart, it could have been a seed ready to break through its protective casing and put forth new life.

Of the flower all which was left was a wisp, a frail skeleton of a blossom. Then there was nothing at all. Her hand was bare. But in her other palm the box was also crumbling, loosing its hold on the stone. Bit by bit it powdered away into dust.

There was no longer any warmth in the stone. If any energy dwelt within it, that was more isolated than had been the Power in the flower. But its beauty was such that Brixia was awed by what she held. Then she looked beyond it from Eldor to Zarsthor.

She held the stone out towards Eldor.

“Do you wish this now? I think it is no longer what you once wrought, but would you have it?”

The frown had been smoothed from his face and with it many of the hard lines which had aged and ravaged it. Dignity was still there and authority but behind those emotions—a freedom. His eyes were alight, but he snatched back his hand hurriedly as hers, holding the stone, approached the closer.

“This I did not make. No Power granted me fills it. I can no longer demand it by right for my own.”

“And you?” Brixia offered it now to Zarsthor.

He gazed at the stone absorbedly, not looking to her. Then, without raising his eyes, he answered:

“That which was meant to be my Bane—no. this is not it. Green magic is life, not death. Though death has brought to me through that as it was once. But I cannot break this as I would have the Bane—loosed its evil upon all. This is yours, lady, do with it as you will. For—” he raised his head and looked about him, there was peace in his face, underlying a great weariness. “The geas which bound us in this world of our own making is broken. It is time we take our rest.”

Together they turned away from Brixia, Zarsthor moved up beside Eldor shoulder to shoulder. As if they had long been shield brothers and not deadly enemies, they marched on, following some road only they could see, into the mist.

Brixia cradled the stone in her two hands. As if she awakened from some absorbing dream she looked about her with the beginning of new uneasiness.

That this place was not of any time or world she had known she was sure. How might she now return to her own place? Or could she? Panic began to grow from the seed of that first uneasiness. She called loudly:

“Uta! Dwed!” And finally— “Marbon!”

Then she listened, hoping against all hope that there would be an answer to guide her. A second time she shouted, this time more loudly—only to hear nothing when her own voice died away.

Names—as all knew names had a power of their own—they were a part of one—as much as skin, hair, or teeth. They were given to one at the birth hour and were thereafter something which could be threatened by evil, used to strengthen good. Now all she had to aid her were names. Still two of those she called upon had no ties with her, nor perhaps held any wish to aid, and the third was an animal, alien to her own kind. Perhaps she had no ties to draw her back at all.

Brixia lifted her cupped hands, stared at the stone. This was truly a thing of Power. It had been wrought to bring evil, even as Eldor (or the part of him who had existed here) had claimed and Zarsthor in turn had agreed. But its evil had somehow been discharged by the flower. Could it serve her, she who had no command over any force, no training as a Wise Woman?

“Uta"—this time she did not shout that name aloud into the mist, rather spoke it softly to the stone. “Uta, if you have any fair feeling for me now—if I am granted any desire of yours for my salvation—Uta—where are you?”

The light glow began to pulse in ripples from the stone. A deeper green sparked in its heart—grew and spread. Brixia strove to keep her thoughts fixed on Uta.

That dark spot put out pricked ears, opened slits of eyes, became a head. The head in turn pushed out of the surface of the stone. Brixia, almost beyond wonder now, crouched down, held her hand closer to the earth. The tiny image of the cat was three dimensional as it arose from the stone. When it was fully clear it leaped to the ground.

Mist which had been encroaching ever since Eldor and Zarsthor had gone, curled back from where the cat stood. Uta’s image turned its head up to the girl, its tiny mouth opened. But if it mewed she caught no sound. Then it began to trot away and Brixia scrambled to follow it.

The fog swirled in, covering her own body to knee level. But it did not hide the cat, a clear space continued to encircle and move with it. She hurried to catch up as the illusion—if that was what it was—moved faster.

How far they had come across the hidden land Brixia could not tell. Then her guide slowed, and, to her despair, began to fade.

“Uta!” She screamed. She could see through the small body now—it was fast becoming a part of the mist.

Brixia went to her knees. Without Uta she was lost—and now Uta was nearly gone. Only an outline in the fog remained. If she could only bring it back! Now—Uta had come when she called her name and concentrated on the stone—but perhaps the cat’s powers were not strong enough to hold her here until her mission could be accomplished.

What of Marbon—Dwed? The man might be counted her enemy—at least he had seemed so before she had been caught into this place. While the boy then had been entrapped in enchantment. Even if she could reach them—dared she hope for any help?

Dwed—Marbon—which should she try?

The man had been free when last she saw him—except for the obsession which had ridden him. Brixia raised the stone to eye level.

“Marbon!” she summoned.

There was no darkening of the stone heart, nor any sign that her call had reached him, whether or not he would answer her plea.

“Marbon!” Because she thought it now her only hope she called again.

A rippling in the stone, yes, but faint and with nothing centered in it. However, as she dropped her hand in despair, she saw Uta a little beyond her again!

From and clear, larger—seemingly substantial, Uta was watching her impatiently, her mouth opening and closing in soundless mews. Brixia jumped to her feet, ready to follow. Had Marbon in some way strengthened the cat? She did not know—but that Uta was here again gave her a lighter heart.

Uta began to run and Brixia after her. The sense of urgency spread from cat to girl. On—

Then a huge, dark pillar loomed out of the mist, rising so suddenly that Brixia felt it had not been there long, but rather risen abruptly to front her. Uta stood on hind legs, pawed with her forefeet at its surface, plainly urging on the girl the need to climb.

She tucked the stone within her shirt once more for safe keeping, then she sought on the pillar some holds for fingers and toes. Uta—vanished. She had not faded slowly as before, but simply winked out.

Brixia found by touch irregularities in the pillar her eyes could not detect. With effort she began to climb. The holds were small and the higher she went the slower her progress became. Yet she was winning upward, if it were only a matter of a few fingers length at a time.

Up and up, she knew better than to look down. Her fingers ached and then grew numb. Her whole body was tense as it pressed against the pillars. Fear was a heavy burden resting on her. Up and still up—

How long had she climbed? There was no counting of time in this place—moments might have spun out into days—perhaps months. Always above her the pillar reached higher still and there were hanging drapes of mist to hide its crest—if it had a crest!

Brixia felt as if she could not seek another hand hold, the pain in her shoulders was intense. Up—ever up! She could not lift her hand again, the effort was too great. Soon her grip would break and she would fall—back—to be swallowed up in the mist and forever lost.

“Uta!” her voice was a croaked whisper which she had no hope would be answered.

OUT OF THE MIST cloaking what lay above her there reached—A giant paw! The claws were unsheathed, extended in threatening curves just above her as that paw swung down in menace. Brixia clung despairingly to the pillar. But her hold was not tight enough. The claws hooked into her shirt over the shoulders and she was torn loose from her precarious grasp on the shaft, brought up through the mist ceiling. Up—and down—for she was released and fell, scraping her arm against stone, a wild yowl ringing in her ears.

The pillar was still by her. But this was not the pillar she had climbed—this was small—she could span it with her outflung arm. It formed a pedestal on the crown of which crouched Uta—a normal sized Uta—The cat stared down and Brixia realized she was back in her own time and space.

This was the same chamber in the once drowned building of the lake. But there was no mist-vine choking walls and ceiling now. Those walls, blue-green and gleaming, were as bright as if newly scoured. On the floor, just a little beyond where she was crouched, lay Dwed, his head and shoulders supported by Lord Marbon!

There was no slackness in Marbon’s face as he gazed distractedly at her over the boy’s body. Nor was he under the hold of any power now. She sensed he was truly human, with his own mind unlocked to free him from the shadow as well as the obsession which had imprisoned him.

“Dwed—dies—” He gave her no other greeting, nor did he act as if he had been a part of what had happened to her. His eyes were haunted by fear, not for himself she knew, but for the boy.

What he said might be true—but she was not willing to accept such a despairing judgment. Brixia did not get to her feet, rather she crept closer on her hands and knees. That vast fatigue which had settled on her during her climb out of that other place still weighed her body. Reaching the two she fumbled in her shirt and brought out the stone.

“This is a thing of power,” she said slowly. “I do not know how to use it—but when I called with it—Uta answered. I called upon you also—did you then hear?”

He frowned. “I had—it was a dream—I think.”

“No dream.” Her hands shook as she cupped the stone. “Perhaps—perhaps—if Dwed has not gone too far, him also we can call. Look upon this, lord, and call your fosterling!” Her words had the sharpness of an order as she thrust the stone into his full view, holding it directly above Dwed’s body.

As if she had left him no choice Marbon’s intent gaze dropped to the stone. Animation was once more gone from his features, his face appeared drawn and wasted—near as old as had been the countenance of Zarsthor in that other world. He, too, might have fought some age long battle of mind and spirit—his eyes alone seemed alive.

Brixia hesitated. Dwed had no friend or liege tie with her. Would a call shaped by her thought reach him, be strong enough to halt his march into those shadows which enclosed the Last Gate of all? But if Marbon did such calling, could she not in turn fortify him in some way—her will alone perhaps giving him additional strength?

“Call!” she ordered once more. At the same time she summoned all she knew of concentration and aimed her will, not at the motionless, scarcely breathing body, but into the heart of the stone she held now near touching his breast.

“Call Dwed!”

Perhaps Marbon did—silently. Was it the stone which drew Brixia then into a state of being which no voice might reach? She—or a part of her holding her strong will and innermost spirit—was engulfed, swept on—not back into that place of mists from which she had brought the altered Bane. No, this was darker, more threatening, cold, dreary—a place of despair.

“Dwed!” Now she herself shaped that name in her thought, not with her lips. And it seemed to her the soundless thought rang like an imperative shout.

Down—Brixia had a sensation of sinking further and further into this dead world. There was a swirl of dusky green light about her but it did nothing to make her less apprehensive.

“Dwed!” Not her thought-call this time. But when she caught it she hastened to echo it. Before her stretched a line of deeper green, a cord along which the color played, now light, now dark, rhythmically. The other end of that cord remained hidden. To see with the mind’s eyes, Brixia had heard of that but had never really believed it could be done.

“Dwed!”

The cord snapped taut. There was a need to save—to draw—But no one could lay hand on this. For where there was no physical body, neither did a hand exist.

Within herself Brixia fumbled, strove to master this new sense this awareness she had not known any could have—which she did not understand.

“Dwed!” Again that call in the other’s voice—or thought.

Though the cord remained taut, there was no more movement in it. There must be a way! In the past Brixia had known times when she had driven her body to a point where flesh, bone, and blood had been exhausted close to death. Now—she must so drive this other part of her. This was like using a new tool or weapon, for which she had no training—only desperation and great need.

“Dwed!” That was her call this time. And it seemed as if the name itself wove about the cord, thickened and strengthened it. Out flowed the wave of another force, not hers. For a moment Brixia flinched from uniting with that. Then, knowing that only together might come victory, she surrendered.

Draw—draw back the cord, guide so Dwed’s return! Be not only an anchorage holding him still to life, but prepare for him a road of escape.

The cord—in her vivid mental picture that was beginning to change. Small leaves of green-gold as brilliant as precious metal broke forth along it. Now it was a vine—Grow, pull—this way was life!

Thought closed about the vine in a grip as tight as willing hands might have. Draw—

“Dwed!”

Leaf by leaf the vine was moving, coming back and back. Pull!

“Dwed!”

The vine was gone—the cold, the dark broke like a bubble shattered from within. She was in the light once more, back in time and place. Dwed lay still in Marbon’s arms. The boy’s face was very pale, the green light of the stone gave it an overcast like that of the touch of death.

“Dwed!” Marbon’s hand cupped the boy’s chin, raising his head.

There was a flutter of eyelashes. Dwed’s lips parted in a slow sigh. Slowly the eyelids lifted. But the eyes were blank, unfocused.

“Cold—” he whispered faintly. A shudder shook his limp body. “So very cold—”

Brixia’s hands shook as she still cupped the stone. On impulse, and because she felt she had hardly any strength left in her now to continue to hold it, she placed the Bane on Dwed’s breast, brought up his flaccid hands to rub between her own. His flesh was clammy and chill.

“Dwed—” Marbon called his name loudly as the boy’s eyes once more closed. “Do not leave us. Dwed!”

Again the boy sighed. His head turned a little on his lord’s arm so that his face was half hidden.

“Dwed!” the name was now a cry of fear.

“He sleeps—he has not gone.” Brixia fell back rather than moved away. “Truly he is with you again.”

With you, she thought. Not with us. What part had she now in their lives?

“Only by your grace and favor, Wise Woman.” Marbon settled the boy gently on the floor.

She had seen this man’s face vacant, enraged, absorbed by the obsession of his quest. But now he looked very different somehow. She could not read the meaning behind his eyes. She was too tired, too drained in mind and body.

“I—am—no—Wise-woman—” She spoke slowly out of the overwhelming ache of that tiredness. Uta pressed against her, purring, rubbing her head along Brixia’s arm in one of her most meaningful caresses. The girl half put out her hand for the Bane, but she never completed that action. Instead a wave of darkness arose and swept her away.

Flowers around her, she lay in a scented nest of blossoms. Others hung from the branches which curtained her around. She could see only the pearl white of their petals, the carved perfection of them. Among them wound vines brightly green. Brixia thought drowsily that the rustling she heard was the whisper of flower and vine together.

Louder grew that whispering—and with it a murmur like the sweet plucking of lute strings. The flowers, the vines, sang:

“Zarsthor’s land fallow lies,

His fields stark bare.

No man may guess in aftertime

Who held the lordship there.

Thus by the shame of Eldor’s pride

Death and ruin came to bide.

The stars have swung—

The Time is ripe.

They face once more

The doom of night.

Broken now in dark and shame

Is the force of Zarsthor’s Bane.

Green grow the fields,

The circling hills.

Lost in years past

All ancient ills.

Who holds this land

Under the day,

Will follow in peace

Another way.”

Only jingling rhymes—no polished songsmith’s lay.

The flowers swung to it, the vine leaves whispered and waved. Languidly Brixia closed her eyes, content to rest in this fragrant bed which was so far from labor, fear and pain. But through the song, the lute’s murmur, a voice called imperiously:

“Brixia!”

“Who holds this land

Under the day,

Will follow in peace

Another way—”

“Brixia!”

Once more she opened her eyes. This was not her place of peace and flowers. She lay under the open sky. Under her, as her hands moved aimlessly, at her sides, was the softness of grass cut and heaped to make a bed. She was not alone. To her right Lord Marbon sat cross-legged, to her left was Dwed still white faced. Uta arose from by her feet, stretched and yawned.

Brixia frowned. Certainly she had not been here—no, rather in that domed place of the lake city—when last she remembered.

“You—did you sing that song?” she asked slowly, looking once more to Marbon.

“No.” He shook his head. With his lips shaping such a smile she thought she could understand, seeing also that which dwelt in his eyes, softened his features, that tie which had led Dwed to follow and serve his stricken lord—even to the edge of death. If this man offered friendship it was a gift worth the taking.

“It was you who sang—in your sleep.” He told her. “Or did you really wander in another place, lady where dreams are more real and this life but a dream? Though I find the promise in your song good. ‘Who holds the land under the day!’ —who holds the land,” he repeated softly as if he found in that a promise.

“What land, lord?” Dwed cut in.

“That which the Bane once destroyed, which is now free again. Look, lady, and see how your song comes true!”

Before Brixia could move Marbon was at her side, his arm slipped beneath her shoulders. He lifted her with a gentle concern which she had forgotten one of her kind might ever show to another. She needed his strength for her support for she felt very weak, as one who arouses after a serious illness.

So resting against him she looked beyond. Uta pranced in a circle about the growing spear of a plant Grass lay in a waving, lush crown of green about that spear, taller, richer in color than that growing elsewhere. And, half way up that spear of shining red-brown there was a bulge in the bark.

Brixia had never seen growth in action before. Even as she watched that swelling on the trunk cracked, opened to release a pod also red-brown, perhaps the size of her little finger. While before her eyes that shoot which had given birth to the pod grew visibly taller, thicker, put out two branches, and still grew.

The fresh grass spread out in ripples of vivid green on and on from the roots of the plant, shooting up to replace the duller blades which had been there. There were now smaller pods on the two branches. This—this was a tree—a tree growing the sum of years’ thickening, spreading, reaching, in only moments of their time!

“What—where—?” Brixia clutched at Marbon’s nearer hand.

“It grows from the seed you brought out of An-Yak, lady. There we planted Zarsthor’s Bane. But what springs from it is no longer evil. Green magic, Wise Woman.”

She moved to shake her head, brushing so against his shoulder.

“I have told you—I am no Wise Woman.” She was a little afraid now—afraid of anything she could not truly understand.

“One does not always choose power,” he answered quietly. “That sometimes chooses you. Do you think that you could have plucked the flower of the White Heart had you not had within you that which green magic inclined to! I—I sought the Bane for its power, and that dark shadow over-reached me—for I am of Zarsthor’s doomed House and what was evil for him could also root in me, even as this tree has rooted here, its past blackness and evil destroyed.

“You sought no power, so it was freely given to you in your need. Did not even the Bane lose its threat in your hands? What you wrought then—that was greater magic than any I could aspire to do.”

Brixia shook her head again. “Not my doing—it was from the flower—also, it was in the end the choice of Eldor and Zarsthor—for when they came together in that place they had even forgotten what had tied them in hatred among the shadows.”

She remembered the two worn men as she had seen them last, how they had answered the questions that someone, or something, perhaps even the Bane itself, had put in her mind to ask.

“Zarsthor?” He made a question of the name.

Brixia told him of the two who had demanded the Bane of her, and of how they had at last gone away together, free of the bonds their own acts had laid upon them.

“And you say you have no power?” Marbon marveled. “How it comes to one does not matter—how one uses it does.”

The girl sat up, drawing away from his light hold. “I do not want it!” she cried aloud to all about her—more to the unseen than to him, Dwed, or Uta.

Now the swift growing tree was more than a sapling, ever thickening branches hung lower, burdened as they were with more and more swelling buds. Even as Brixia voiced her denial the first and largest of the buds split its casing. A flower opened—white and perfect. Though it was day and the sun was out over their heads—still the flower was in bloom.

Brixia blinked and blinked again. There was no denying what she could so plainly see. Fruit of the Bane Marbon had said. Brixia bit her lip. The flower she had carried—which had withered away in that fog-land—had it given its life to this? She must accept that such things could be when the evidence stood before her eyes. New thoughts, awakening emotions stirred in her—they were both fascinating and frightening. Perhaps she had been marked for this task in some way on that first night when Kuniggod had brought her into the refuge of that place of the Old Ones—the place of quiet peace.

“What must I do then!” she asked in a small voice, wishing no answer, but knowing she must listen to one.

“Accept,” Marbon stood up, his arms flung wide, his face raised to the sky. “This was the Bane killed land of Zarsthor. Perhaps it has lain too long under the shadow to truly awake again.” He turned his head to look at the walls in the sunken lake basin. “An-Yak is gone. But one can build anew—”

For the second time Dwed spoke. “What of Eggarsdale then, my lord?”

Marbon shook his head slowly. “We cannot go back, foster son. Eggarsdale lies behind—both in distance and time. This now is ours—”

Brixia looked from him to the tree. That stood taller than Marbon now. Unlike the one under which she had sheltered her first night in the Waste, the branches of this were not twisted nor interwoven among themselves, but lifted their tips upward, spread well apart from one another, as if to both welcome the clear sky and roof that portion of the earth covered with the thick fresh grass.

Theirs? Unconscious of what she did, she held out her right hand towards the tree. That first bloom to open broke from its stem. Though she felt no wind against her cheek, or ruffling her tousled hair, the flower drifted straightway to her, settled upon her hand. Did it come in answered to her unvoiced desire—even as Uta (when she chose, of course) would come to her call?

Theirs! Brixia cupped the flower and drew deep breaths of its fragrance. Like an outworn garment the past dropped from her. It was gone—the world was changed, even as Zarsthor’s Bane had become this wondrous thing.

The Crystal Gryphon

To S.A.G.A.

(Swordsmen and Sorcerers Guild of America)

In recognition of their encouragement
in our chosen field of

Ensorcelling.

1

Here Begins the Adventure of Kerovan, Sometime Lord-Heir in Ulmsdale of High Hallack.

I was one born accursed in two ways. Firstly, my father was Ulric, Lord of Ulmsdale in the north. And of his stock there were told dire tales. My grandfather, Ulm the Horn-Handed, he who led his people into this northside dale and chartered the sea-rovers who founded Ulmsport, had looted one of the places of the Old Ones, taking the treasure sealed within. All men knew that this was no ordinary treasure, for it glowed in the dark. And after that looting not only Ulm, but all those who had been with him on that fearsome venture, were visited by a painful sickness of body from which most of them died.

When I was born, my father was already in middle years. He had taken two ladies before my mother and had of them children. But the children had been either born dead or had quitted this world in their early years, sickly creatures one and all. He had sworn, however, to get him a true heir, and so he set aside his second lady in favor of my mother when it seemed as if he would get no son of her.

My mother’s lineage also laid me under a curse. She was the Lady Tephana, daughter to Fortal of Paltendale, which lies farther to the northwest. There are those who even now make off-warding signs at dalesmen from those parts, saying that, when our folk moved thither to settle, there were still Old Ones, seeming like ourselves; and that our people—the Borderers—entered into a blood-mixing with these, the offspring therefrom being not altogether human.

Be that as it may, my father was desperate for an heir. And Tephana, lately widowed, had borne already a goodly child who was now in his second year—Hlymer. My father was willing to forego dowry, to close his ears to any rumor of mixed blood, and to welcome the lady with full honor. By all accounts I have heard, she was willing, even unto risking the curse laid on my father’s family by their treasure theft.

My birthing came too early and under strange circumstances, for my mother was on her way to Gunnora’s shrine to give offerings for a son and a safe delivery. When she was yet a day’s journey away, her pains came on her very swiftly. There was no hall, not even a landsman’s dwelling near enough, and a mighty storm was brewing. Thus her women and guards took her for shelter into a place they would have normally shunned, one of those strange and awesome remains of the Old Ones, the people of uncanny power who held the dales in the dim past before the first of our blood wandered up from the south.

This building was in good repair, as is often true of the constructions left by that unknown race. For the Old Ones seem to have used spells to bind stones together in such a way that even time cannot devour them, and thus some buildings look as if they were abandoned only yesterday. What purpose this one might have served none could guess. But there were carvings of men and women, or those who had such seeming, on the inner walls.

My mother’s travail was hard, and her ladies feared that they might not save her. After I was born they half-wished that they had failed to, for asking to look upon the babe, she saw me full and gave a great cry, losing her senses and near her wits. She wandered in some mind maze for several weeks thereafter.

I was not as other children. My feet were not with toes, like unto human kind; rather they were small hoofs, split, covered with horn such as make up the nails upon fingers. In my face my eyebrows slanted above eyes that were the color of butter amber, the like of which are not seen in a human countenance. Thus, all gazing upon me knew that, though I seemed far stronger of wind and limb than my unfortunate half-brothers and sisters before me, in me the curse had taken another turning. I did not sicken and die, but thrived and grew.

But my mother would not look upon me, saying I was a demon changeling, implanted in her womb by some evil spell. When those about her brought me nigh, she became so disordered in her wits that they feared her state would be permanent. Soon she declared she had no true child but Hlymer—and later my sister Lisana, born a year after me, a fair little maid with no flaw. In her my mother took much pleasure.

As for me, I was not housed at Ulmsdale Keep, but sent out at nurse to one of the foresters. However, though my mother had so disowned me, my father was moved, not by any affection—for that I was never shown by those closest to me in blood—but rather by his pride of family, to see that my upbringing was equal to my birth. He gave me the name of Kerovan, which was that of a noted warrior of our House, and he saw that I was tutored in arms as became a youngling of station and shield, sending to me one Jago, a keepless man of good birth who had served my Lord as Master of Menie until he was disabled by a bad fall in the mountains.

Jago was a master of the arts of war, not only with the lesser skills that can be battered into any youngling with a strong body and keen eyes, but also those more subtle matters that deal with the ordering of bodies of men great and small. Crippled and tied to a way of living that was only a half-life for a once-active man, he set his brain to labor as he had once ordered his body. Always he searched for new lore of battle, and sometimes at night I would watch him with a strip of smoothed bark before him, patiently setting out in labored and crooked script facts concerning the breaking of sieges, the ordering of assaults, and the like, droning on to me the while, emphasizing this point or that by a fierce dig into the bark with the knife he used for a pen.

Jago was far more widely traveled than most dalesmen, who perhaps in a whole lifetime know little beyond four or five dales outside their own birthplace. He had been overseas in his first youth, traveling with the Sulcar Traders, those dangerous sea-rovers, to such half-fabled lands as Karsten, Alizon, and Estcarp—though of the latter nation he said little, appearing uneasy when I besought him to tell of his travels in detail. All he would say was that it was a land where witch spells and ensorcellment were as common as corn in a field, and that all the women were witches and held themselves better and apart from men, so that it was a place where one kept one’s eyes to oneself and walked very quietly and mum-tongued.

There was this which makes me remember Jago well and with gratitude. In his eyes I was apparently like any other youngling, and not a young monster. So when I was with him I could forget my differences from my fellows and rest content.

Thus Jago taught me the arts of war—or rather such as a dale heir should know. For in those days we did not know the meaning of real war, giving that name to our petty skirmishing between rival lords or against the Waste outlaws. And of those we saw many in the long winters when starvation and ill weather drove them against us to plunder our granaries and try to take our warm halls and garths. War wore a far grimmer face in later years, and men got full bellies of it. It was no longer a kind of game which was played by rules, as one moves pieces back and forth across a board on a winter’s eve.

But if Jago was my sword tutor, the Wiseman Riwal showed me there were other paths of life in the world. It had always been held that only a woman could learn the ways of healing and perform the spells my people draw upon in their time of need in body and spirit. Thus Riwal was as strange to his fellows as I. He had a great thirst for knowledge, which was in him as a longing for bread might be in a starving man. At times he would go roving, not only in the forest country, but beyond, into the Waste itself. When he returned he would be burdened by a pack like any peddler who carried his own stock in trade.

Being kin to the Head Forester, he had taken without formal leave one of the cots nearby. This he made snug and tight by the work of his own hands, setting above its door a mask carved of stone, not in the likeness of our people. Men looked askance at Riwal, yes—but let any animal ail, or even a man keep his bed in sickness that could not be named—then he was summoned.

About his cot grew all manner of herbs, some of those long-known to every housewife in the dales. But others were brought from afar with masses of soil bundled up about their roots, and he set them out with care. Everything grew for Riwal, and the farmer who had a wish for the best of crops would go cap in hand at sowing time and ask the Wiseman to overlook his land and give advice.

Not only did he bring green life, but he also drew that which wings over our heads or pads on four feet. Birds and animals that were hurt or ailing came to him of their own wills. Or else he would carry them to his place gently and tend them until they were able once more to fend for themselves.

This was enough to set any man apart from his fellows. But it was also well known that Riwal went to the places of the Old Ones, that he tried to search out those secrets our blood had never known. And for that, men did fear him. Yet it was that which drew me to him first.

I was as keen-eared as any child who knows that others talk about him behind their hands. And I had heard the garbled stories of my birth, of that curse which lay upon the blood of Ulm, together with the hint that neither was my mother’s House free of the taint of strange mixture. The proof of both was perhaps in my flesh and bone. I had only to look in the mirror of Jago’s polished shield to see it for myself.

I went to Riwal, boldly perhaps in outward seeming, but with an inward chill that, young as I was, I fought to master. He was on his knees setting out some plants which had long, thin leaves sharply cut, like the heads of boar spears. He did not look up as I came to him, but rather spoke as if I had already spent the morning in his company.

“Dragon’s Tongue, the Wisewomen call this.” He had a soft voice with a small tremor, not quite a stammer. “It is said to seek out the putrid matter in unhealing wounds, even as a tongue might lick such hurts clean. We shall see, we shall see. But it is not to speak of plants that you stand here, Kerovan, is it, now?”

“It is not. Men say you know of the Old Ones.”

He sat back on his heels to look me eye to eye.

“But not much. We can look and finger, search and study, but of their powers—those we cannot net or trap. One can only hope to brush up a crumb here and there, to speculate, to go on everseeking. They had vast knowledge—of building, of creating, of living—beyond our ken. We do not even know why they were near-gone from High Hallack when the first of our ancestors arrived. We did not push them out—no, already their keeps and temples, their Places of Power were emptied. Here and there, yes, a few lingered. And they may still be found in the Waste and beyond the Waste in that land we have not entered. But the most—they were gone, perhaps long before men, as we know them, arrived. Still—to seek what may still lie here—it is enough to fill a lifetime and yet not find a tenth of a tenth of it!”

In his sunbrowned face his eyes were alight with that same spark I had seen in Jago’s when he spoke of a trick of swordplay or a clever ambush. Now Riwal studied me in turn.

“What seek you of the Old Ones?” he asked.

“Knowledge,” I answered. “Knowledge of why I am as I am—not man—yet neither—” I hesitated, for my pride would not let me voice what I had heard in whispers.

Riwal nodded. “Knowledge is what every man should seek, and knowledge of himself most of all. But such knowledge I cannot give you. Come.”

He arose and started toward his dwelling with his swinging woodsman’s stride. Without further question I followed after. So I came into Riwal’s treasure house.

I could only stand just within the door and stare at what lay about me, for never before had I seen such a crowding of things, each enough to catch the eye and demand closer attention. For in baskets and nests were wild animals, watching me with bright and wary eyes, yet seeming, in this place, to feel such safety that they did not hide in fear. There were shelves in plenty on the walls. And each length of roughly hewn, hardly smoothed board was crammed with a burden of clay pots, bundles of herbs and roots, and bits and fragments that could only have come from the places of the Old Ones.

There was a bed, and two stools were so crowded upon the hearth that they sat nearly in the fire. The rest of the dwelling was more suited for storage than for living. In the middle of the room Riwal stood with his fists planted upon his hips, his head turning from side to side as if he tried to sight some special thing among the wealth of objects.

I sniffed the air. There was a mingling of many odors. The aromatic scent of herbs warred with the musky smell of animals and the suggestion of cooking from a pot still hanging on the boil-chain in the fireplace. Yet it was not in any way an unclean or disgusting smell.

“You seek the Old Ones—look you here, then!” Riwal gestured to one shelf among the many.

I skirted two baskets with furry inhabitants and came closer to see what he would show me. There I found set-out fragments, one or two being whole, of small figures or masks—bits which in some instances Riwal had fitted together to form broken but recognizable figures.

Whether these indeed represented various beings among the Old Ones, or whether they had had life only in the imagination of their creators, no one might know. But that they had beauty, even when they tended toward the grotesque, I could see for myself.

There was a winged figure of a woman, alas lacking a head; and a man of humanoid proportions, save that from the forehead curled two curved horns. Yet the face below was noble, serene, as if he were a great lord by right of his spirit. There was a figure with webbed feet and hands, plainly meant to suggest a water dweller; and a small one of another woman, or at least a female, with long hair covering most of her body like a cloak. These Rival had managed to restore in part. The rest were fragments: a head, crowned but noseless, the eyes empty pits; a delicate hand that bore an intricate ring of metal on both thumb and forefinger, those rings seemingly a part now of the hand, whose substance was not stone but a material I did not know.

I did not touch; I merely stood and looked. And in me was born a longing to know more of these people. I could understand the never-ending hunger that kept Riwal searching, his patient attempts to restore the broken bits he found that he might see, guess, but perhaps never know—

So Riwal also became my teacher. I went with him to those places shunned by others, to search, to speculate; always hoping that some find might be a key that would open to us the doors of the past, or at least give us a small glimpse into it.

My father made visits to me month by month, and when I was in my tenth year, he spoke to me with authority. It was plain he was in some uneasiness of spirit when he did so. But I was not amazed that he was so open with me, for always he had treated me, not as a child, but as one who had good understanding. Now he was very sober, impressing me that this was of import.

“You are the only living son of my body,” he began, almost as if he found it difficult to choose the words he must use. “By all the right of custom you shall sit in the High Seat at Ulmskeep after me.” He paused then, so long I ventured to break into his musing, which I knew covered a troubled mind.

“There are those who see it differently.” I did not make that a question, for I knew it to be a statement of fact.

He frowned. “Who has been saying so to you?”

“None. This I have guessed for myself.”

His frown grew. “You have guessed the truth. I took Hlymer under my protection, as was fitting when his mother became Lady in Ulm. He has no right to be shield-raised to the High Seat at my death. That is for you. But they praise me now to hand-fast Lisana with Rogear, who is cousin-kin to you.”

I was quick enough to understand what he would tell me and yet loath to hear it. But I did not hesitate to bring it into the open myself.

“Thus Rogear might claim Ulmsdale by wife-right.”

My father’s hand went to his sword hilt and clenched there. He rose to his feet and strode back and forth, setting his feet heavily on the earth as if he needed some firm stance against attack.

“It is against custom, but they assault my ears with it day upon day, until I am well-nigh deafened beneath my own roof!”

I knew, with bitterness, that his “they” must be mainly that mother who would not call me son. But of that I did not speak.

He continued. “Therefore I make a marriage for you, Kerovan, an heir’s marriage so that all men can see that I do not intend any such offense against you, but give you all right of blood and clan. This tenth day Nolon rides to Ithkrypt, carrying the proxy axe for your wedding. They tell me that the maid Joisan is a likely lass, lacking two years of your age, which is fitting. Safe-married, you cannot be set aside—though your bride will not come to you until perhaps the Year of the Fire Troll.”

I counted in my mind—eight years then. I was well content. For marriage had no meaning for me then, save that my father deemed it of such importance. I wondered, but somehow I did not dare at that moment to ask, whether he would tell this Joisan, or her kinsmen who were arranging our match, what manner of lord she would meet on her true bride-day—that I was what I was. Inside I shrank, even in thought, from that meeting. But to a boy of my years that fatal day seemed very far away, and perhaps something might happen to make sure it would never occur.

I did not see Nolon set forth to play my role in axe marriage, for he rode out of Ulmskeep where I did not go. It was only two months later that my father came to me looking less unhappy, to tell me that Nolon had returned, and that I was indeed safely wed to a maid I had never seen, and probably would not see for at least eight more years.

I did not, thereafter, think much of the fact that I had a lady, being well-occupied, with my studies and even more with the quests on which I went with Riwal. Though I was under the guardianship of Jago, he made no protest when I spent time with Riwal. Between those two came to be an odd companionship, in spite of their being so dissimilar in thought and deed.

As the years passed, that stiffness which had come from my tutor’s old hurt grew worse, and he found it difficult to face me in open contest with sword or axe. But with the crossbow he was still a skilled marksman. And his reading of maps, his discussion of this or that battle plan, continued. Though I saw little use then for such matters in my own life, I paid him dutiful attention, and that was to be my salvation later.

But Riwal did not appear to age at all, and his long stride still carried him far distances without tiring. I learned early to match his energy. And, while my knowledge of plants was never as great as his, yet I found a kinship with birds and animals. I ceased to hunt for sport. And I took pleasure in the fact that his wild ones did not fear me.

Best of all, however, were our visits to the places of the Old Ones. Riwal prospected further and further over the borders of the Waste, seeking ever to find something intact from the ancient days. His greatest hope, as he confided in me, was to discover some book roll or rune record.

When I suggested that the reading of such could well be beyond his skill, for surely the Old Ones had not our tongue, he nodded in agreement. Still I felt he opposed that thought, sure that if he did find such, the Power itself would aid him to understand it.

It was in the Year of the Spitting Toad that I had been wed. As I came closer to manhood, the thought of that distant lady began now and then to trouble me oddly. There were two lads near my years in the foresters’ hold, but from the first they had not been playmates, or later companions. Not only did rank separate us, but they had made me aware, from the beginning of my consciousness of the world about me, that my non-human appearance cut me off from easy friendships. I had given my friendship to only two men—Jago, old enough to be my father, and Riwal, who could have been an older brother (and how I sometimes wished that was the truth!).

But those forester lads went now to the autumn fair with lass-ribbons tied to the upper latches of their jerkins, whispering and laughing about the adventures those led them to. This brought to me the first strong foreboding that when it did at last come time to claim the Lady Joisan in person, she might find me as ill a sight as had my mother. What would happen when my wife came to Ulmsdale and I must go to bide with her? If she turned from me in open loathing—

Nightmares began to haunt my sleep, and Riwal at last spoke to me with the bluntness he could use upon occasion. When he demanded what ill thought rode me, I told him the truth, hoping against hope that he would speedily assure me that I saw monsters where there were only shadows, and that I had nothing to fear—though my good sense and experience argued on the side of disaster.

But he did not give me that reassurance. Instead he was silent for a space, looking down at his hands, which had been busied fitting together some of his image fragments, but now rested quiet on the table.

“There has ever been truth between us, Kerovan,” he said at last. “To me who knows you well—above all others would I choose to walk in your company. But how can I promise you that this will turn to happiness? I can only wish you peace and—” he hesitated. “Once I walked a path that I thought might end in hand-fasting and I was happy for a little. But while you bear your differences to others openly, I bear mine within. Still, there they be. And the one with whom I would have shared Cup and Flame—she saw those differences, and they made her uneasy.”

“But you were not already wed,” I ventured, when he fell silent.

“No, I was not. And I had something else.”

“That being?” I was quick to ask.

“This!” He spread out his hands in a gesture to encompass all that was about him under that roof.

“Then I shall have this also,” I said. Marry I had, for the sake of custom and my father’s peace of mind. What I had seen and heard of marriages among the dale lords did not set happiness high. Heirs and lords married to increase their holdings by a maid’s dowry, to get a new heir for the line. If inclination and liking came afterward, that was happiness, but it certainly did not always follow so.

“Perhaps you can.” Riwal nodded. “There is something I have long thought on. Perhaps this is the time to do it.”

“Follow the road!” I was on my feet, as eager as if he meant to set out upon that beckoning mystery this very moment. For a mystery it was, and beckon it did.

We had come across it on our last venture into the Waste, a road of such building as put any dale’s effort to shame, making our roads seem like rough tracks fit only for beasts. The end of the road we had chanced upon was just that, a sharp chopping-off of that carefully laid pavement, with nothing about the end to explain the why-for. The mystery began nearly on our doorstep, for that end point was less than a half day’s journey from Riwal’s cot. The road ran on back into the Waste, wide, straight, only a little cloaked here and there by the drift of windborne soil. To find its other end was a project we had indeed long held in mind. The suggestion that we set out on this journey quite pushed from my mind the thought of Joisan. She was just a name anyway, and any meeting between us was still years ahead, while the following of the road was here and now!

I was answerable to none but Jago for my actions. And this was the time of year when he made his annual trip to Ulmskeep, where he kept festival with old comrades-in-arms and reported to my father. Thus I was free to follow my own wishes, which in this case meant the road.

2

Here Begins the Adventure of Joisan, Maid of Ithkrypt in Ithdale of High Hallack.

I, Joisan of Ithkrypt, was wed at harvest time in the Year of the Spitting Toad. By rights that was not considered a year for new beginnings; but my uncle, Lord Cyart, had the stars read three times by Dame Lorlias of Norstead Abbey (she who was so learned in such matters that men and women traveled weary leagues to consult her), and her report was that my wedding was written as a thing needful to my own fortune. Not that I was aware of much more than the stir the question caused, for I was thereupon the center of long and tiring ceremonies that brought me close to tears for the very tiredness they laid upon me.

When one has no more than eight years, it is hard to judge what occupies most the thoughts and plans of those in the adult world. I can remember my wedding now mostly as a bright picture in which I had a part I could not understand.

I remember wearing a tabard stiff with gold-thread stitchery that caught up a pattern of fresh-water pearls (for which the streams of Ithdale are rightly famous). But I was more occupied at the time with keeping to Dame Math’s stem warning that I must not spot or wrinkle my finery; that I must be prudent at the feast table lest I spill and so mar the handiwork of long and patient hours. The robe beneath was blue, which did not please me over-much as it is a color I do not fancy, liking better the dark, rich shades such as hue the autumn leaves. But blue is for a maiden bride, so it was mine to wear.

My new lord was not present to drink the Life Cup and light the House Candle with me hand to hand. In his place stood a man (seeming ancient to me, for his close-cropped beard was frost-rimmed with silver), as stern as my uncle in his look. His hand, I remember, bore a scar across the knuckles that had left a raised banding of flesh of which I was acutely aware as he clasped my fingers in the ceremony. And in the other hand he held a massive war axe that signified my true lord who was about to twine my destiny with his—though that lord was at least a half-dozen years or more away from being able to raise that axe.

“Lord Kerovan and Lady Joisan!” The guests shouted our names together, the men unsheathing their knives of ceremony so that the torchlight flashed upon the blades, vowing to uphold the truth of this marriage in the future, by virtue of those same blades, if need be. My head had begun to ache with the noise, and my excitement at being allowed to attend a real feast was fast ebbing.

The elderly Lord Nolon, who stood proxy at the wedding, shared a plate with me politely throughout the feast. But, though he asked me with ceremony before making a choice from all offered platters, I was in too much awe of him to say “no” to what I liked not, and his choices were mainly of that nature. So I nibbled at what my taste rebelled against and longed for it to come to an end.

It did, much later, when the women with great merriment laid me, wearing only my fine night shift, in the great, curtained bed. And the men, headed by my uncle, brought in that awesome axe and bedded it beside me as if it were indeed my lord. That was my wedding, though afterward it did not seem too strange, just one of those things difficult for a child to understand, something to be dismissed to the back of one’s mind.

Only that axe, which was my partner in place of a flesh-and-blood bridegroom, was a stark prophecy of what was to come—not only to me but to all the country that was my home: High Hallack of the many dales.

After the departure of Lord Nolon, life soon returned to what I had always known, for by custom I would continue to dwell under my birthroof until I was of a suitable age for my lord to claim me.

There were some small changes. On high feast days I sat at the left hand of my uncle and was addressed ceremoniously by my new title of Lady of Ulmsdale. My feast-day tabard also no longer bore only one House symbol, but two, being divided in the center vertically with a ribbon of gold. To the left, the leaping Gryphon of Ulmsdale was worked in beads that glittered like gems. On the right was the familiar Broken Sword of Harb, that mighty warrior who had founded our line in High Hallack and given all his kin fame thereafter when he had defeated the dread Demon of Irr Waste with a broken blade.

On my name-day, or as near to that as travel conditions permitted, would come some gift sent by my Lord Kerovan, together with proper greetings. But Kerovan himself was never real to me.

Also, since my uncle’s lady was dead, he looked to his sister Dame Math for the chatelaine’s duties in Ithkrypt. She took over the ordering of my days, to secret sighs and stifled rebellion on my part. This and this and this must be learned, that I be a credit to my upbringing when I indeed went to order my lord’s household. And those tasks, which grew with my years, induced in me sometimes a desire never to hear of Ulmsdale or its heir; a longing in all my being to be unwed and free. But from Dame Math and her sense of duty I had no escape.

I could not remember my uncle’s lady at all. For some reason, though he lacked an heir, he made no move through the years to wed again. Perhaps, I sometimes thought, even he dared not think of lessening in any part Dame Math’s authority. That she was an able chatelaine, bringing peace and comfort to all she had dominion over, could not be denied. She kept those about her in quiet, sobriety and good order.

In her long-ago youth (it was almost impossible to think of Dame Math as ever being a maid!) she had been axe-wed in the same fashion as I to a lord of the south. But before he could claim her, the news came that he had died of a wasting fever. Whether she thereafter regretted her loss, no one ever knew. After the interval of mourning she retired to the House of Dames at Norstead, an establishment much-revered for the learning and piety of its ladies. But the death of her brother’s lady had occurred before she took vows of perpetual residence, and she had returned to the mistress’s role at Ithkrypt. She wore ever the sober robe of Dame, and twice a year journeyed to Norsdale for a period of retreat. As I grew older, she took me with her.

My uncle’s heir was still undecided, since he had made no binding declaration. He had a younger sister also—one Islaugha, who had married and had both son and daughter. But since that son was heir to his father’s holding, he was provided for.

I was the daughter of his younger half-brother, but not being male, I could not inherit save by direct decree—the which my uncle had not uttered. My dowry was such to attract a husband, and my uncle, should he wish, had also the right—no, even duty, to name that husband heir, but only when he declared it so would it be binding.

I think Dame Math would have liked to see me in the House of Dames, had the marriage with Kerovan not been made. And it is the truth that I did find my visits there pleasant. I was born with an inquiring mind and somehow attracted the notice of Past-Abbess Malwinna. She was very old, but very, very wise. Having talked with me several times, she directed that I be given the right to study in the library of the House. The stories of the past which had always enchanted me were as nothing to the rolls of chronicles and travels, dale histories, and the like, that were on the shelves and in the storage boxes in that room.

But what held me most were the references to the Old Ones, those who had ruled this land before the first of the dalesmen came north. I knew well that such accounts as I found were not only fragmentary, but perhaps also distorted, for the larger numbers of the Old Ones had already withdrawn before our forefathers arrived. Those our ancestors had contact with were lesser beings, or perhaps only shadows, left as one would discard a threadbare cloak.

Some were evil as we judged evil, in that they were enemies to humankind—like the demon Harb had slain. There were still places that were filled with dark enchantment, so that any venturing unwisely into such could be enwebbed. Other such beings could grant prayers and gifts. Such was Gunnora—the Harvest Mother—to whom all women were loyal, and whose mysteries were as great in their way as the Worship of the Cleansing Flame to which the House of Dames was dedicated. I myself wore an amulet of Gunnora—her sheath of wheat entwined with ripened fruit.

Yet others seemed neither good nor ill, being removed from the standards of humankind. At times they manifested themselves capriciously, delivering good to one, evil to another, as if they weighed men on some scales of their own and thereafter dealt with them as they saw fit.

It was chancy to deal with any of the Old Ones save Gunnora. The accounts I found at Norstead were full of instances where humans had awakened from long slumber powers that never should have been disturbed. At times I would seek out Abbess Malwinna in her small garden and ask questions, to which she gave answers if she could. If she could not, she admitted her ignorance frankly. It was on my last such meeting with her that I found her sitting with a bowl upon her knee.

The bowl was of green stone, wrought so finely that the shadow of her fingers about it showed through the substance. It had no ornamentation but its beauty of line, and it was very beautiful indeed. Within was enough wine to cover the bottom and come a bit up the sides.

I knew it was wine, for the heady smell reached me. The warmth of her fingers about it was releasing the scent of the grape. She turned it slowly around and around, so the liquid washed back and forth, but she did not watch it. Instead she looked at me so searchingly that I felt discomfort, as if I had been found wanting in some necessary quality. I searched my conscience hurriedly for any fault I might recently have shown.

“It is long,” she said, “since I have tried this, Joisan. But this morning I awoke with the need for doing so, and for you. In my youth I had the gift of farseeing—for gift it is, though some shrink from it. They are afraid of that which they cannot touch, see, taste, hear, or otherwise clearly perceive. It is a gift that cannot be controlled. Few who have it can summon it at will; they must wait until the time it draws them to action. But if you are willing, this day I can use it for you—for how much or how well, that I cannot tell.”

I was excited, for of farseeing I had heard. TheWisewomen could use it—or some of them could. But, as the Past-Abbess said, it was not a talent that could be sharpened for use and then put ready to hand like a man’s sword or a woman’s needle—it must be seized upon when it came, and there was no use in trying to control it. However, with my excitement there was also a tiny chill of fear. It was one thing to read, to listen to, stories of the Power. It was, I understood now, another to see it in action, and for one’s own self. Yet at that moment I do not think even panic would have kept me from saying “yes” to her offer.

“Kneel before me, Joisan. Take this bowl within your two hands and hold it level and steady.”

I did as she bade, cupping my palms, one on either side of the bowl, holding it as one might hold a firebranch that might be ignited at any moment. Then she leaned forward and touched the fingers of her right hand to my forehead.

“Look upon the wine; think of it as a picture—a picture—” Oddly enough her voice sounded farther and farther away. As I looked down into the bowl, I was no longer seeing only dark liquid. It was rather as if I hung suspended in the air above a wide, borderless expanse of darkness, a giant mirror with none of the brilliance a true mirror possesses.

There came a misting, a change on that surface. Tendrils of the mist became shadow forms. I saw a round ball that glinted and, entombed in that, a form familiar to me—that of a gryphon gleaming white.

At first the ball was very large, near filling the whole of the mirror. Then it shrank swiftly, and I saw it was fastened to a chain. The chain swung from a hand, so that the ball revolved. The gryphon in it sometimes faced me, sometimes faced away. But there grew in me the knowledge that this ball was of great importance.

It was very small now, for the hand that dangled it was also shrinking. The arm to which it was attached, and then the body belonging to the arm, appeared. Now a man stood there. His face was turned from me, hidden. He wore war mail, the hood drawn up about his throat. There was a battle sword girded to him, and over his shoulder I saw the arch of a crossbow. But he wore no House tabard, nothing to identify him, only that swinging ball. Then he left, tramping away as if he had been summoned elsewhere. The mirror was dark and empty; nor did any more shadows gather there.

Malwinna’s hand fell from my forehead. As I raised my eyes to blink and blink again, I saw a woeful pallor on her face. So I quickly set aside the bowl and dared to take her hands within mine, striving to help her.

She smiled weakly. “It draws the strength—the more when one has little strength left. But it was laid on me to do this thing. Tell me, my daughter, what did you learn?”

“You did not see it, then?” I was surprised.

“No. It was not a farseeing for me, that I knew. It was yours only.”

I told her what I had seen: the gryphon englobed and a man in battle dress holding it. And I ended, “The gryphon is the badge of the House of Ulm. Did I then see the Lord Kerovan to whom I am wed?”

“That may be so,” she agreed. “But it is in my mind that the gryphon is that which is of the greatest importance to your future. If such ever comes to your hand, my daughter, do you guard it well. For it is also to be believed that this is a thing of the Old Ones and a focus of some power they once knew. Now, call Dame Alousan, for I have need of one of her strengthening cordials. But speak not of what we have done here this morning, for farseeing is a private thing and not to be talked of lightly.”

I said naught to any of the Dames, nor to Math. And the Past-Abbess allowed them to believe that she was merely a little wearied, so they fussed about her, for she was greatly loved. No one paid any attention to me. I had taken the bowl with me into the guesting room and put it on the table there.

Though I continued to look into it now and again I saw nothing but the wine; no dark mirror, no shadows moving. Yet in my mind was so vivid a picture of the crystal gryphon that I could have painted it, had I any skill in limning, in every small detail. And I speculated as to what it might mean. The gryphon so enclosed had differences from the one that appeared as Ulm’s badge. A gryphon by rights had the wings and forepart of an eagle: its front legs end in a bird of prey’s strong talons. But the rear, the tail, the hind paws are those of a lion, one of the beasts known to the south alone. On its bird’s head a lion’s ears stand upright.

In the ancient learning the gryphon symbolizes gold: the warmth and majesty of the sun. Ofttimes in legends it is the guardian of hidden treasure.

Thus the gryphon is mainly pictured in red and gold, which are sun colors. Yet the one enclosed in the globe was the white of ice—a white gryphon.

Shortly after that farseeing, Dame Math and I returned home to Ithkrypt. But we did not remain there long. For in this Year of the Crowned Swan I had reached the age of fourteen, and Dame Math was already preparing my bride clothes and the furnishings I would take with me when Kerovan would send for me, as was the custom, in the next year or two.

So we went on to Trevamper, that town set at the meeting of highway and river where all merchants in the north show their wares upon occasion. Even the Sulcarmen, who are searovers and seldom come far from wind and wave, travel to Trevamper. For there is the interior trade. And by chance we met there also my Aunt Islaugha, her son Toross, and her daughter Yngilda.

She came to pay a call on Dame Math, but I felt it was one of duty only and there was little liking between these sisters. However the Lady Islaugha presented a smiling face and spoke us fair, congratulating me on the fine marriage that had united me to the House of Ulm.

Yngilda pushed closer to me when our elders had turned their attention back to their own concerns, and I thought she stared rudely. She was a stout girl, bundled in rich clothing down which her braids rippled, their ends bound in ribbons hung with little silver bells meant to chime sweetly as she moved. Such a conceit did not suit her broad, flatfish face, with its too-small mouth always pursed a little as if she chewed upon a spicy secret she debated over sharing.

“You have seen the likeness of your lord?” she asked almost abruptly.

I stirred uneasily under the probing of her eyes. I knew her then for unfriend, though why she should be so when we hardly knew each other, I could not guess.

“No.” As always when such uneasiness with others was in me, I was wary. But the truth is better than any evasion which may later trip one up. And for the first time I wondered.a little at a matter I had never considered before. Why had Kerovan not caused to be sent a likeness of himself? That such was done in axe marriages I knew.

“A pity.” Her gaze seemed to have some manner of triumph in it now. “Look you here—this is my promised lord, Elvan of Rishdale.” She brought out of her belt pocket an oblong of wood with a face painted on it. “He sent it with his bride gift two years ago.”

The painted face was that of a man of middle years, no boy. And it was not a pleasant countenance to my thinking, but perhaps the limner had either not been skillful or had some reason not to flatter this Elvan. That Yngilda was proud of it was plain.

“He would seem a man of authority.” I did the best I could in way of praise. My disliking for the pictured face grew stronger the longer I regarded it.

She took that, as I had hoped, as a compliment to her promised lord.

“Rishdale is an upper dale. They are wool people, and the trade is rich. Already my lord has sent me this and this—” She patted an amber necklace which lay above her tabard and thrust her hand out to me that I might look upon a massive thumb ring of a serpent with eyes that were flecks of red gem-fire.

“The serpent is his House badge. This is his own ring, sent for a welcome gift. I go to him next harvest time.”

“I wish you happy,” I answered.

Her pale tongue swept out over her lower lip. Again she was in two minds over some speech to make. At last she brought herself to it, bending her head even closer, while I had all I could do not to withdraw at her approach, for her close company did not please me.

“I would I could say the same to you, kinswoman.”

I knew I should not encourage her now, yet something made me ask, “And why not, kinswoman?”

“We are not so far from Ulmsdale as you. We have heard—much.” And she strove to give such a dire accent to that last word that she did indeed make an impression on me. For all my prudence and distrust, I could not now deny her this confidence.

“Much of what, kinswoman?” My tone made a challenge of that, one she was quick to note and that pleased her, I am sure.

“Of the curse, kinswoman. Did they not tell you that the Heir of Ulmsdale lies under a double cursing? Why, his own mother has refused to look upon his face since his birth hour. Have they not told you that?” she repeated with open relish. “Alack, that I should spoil your dreaming about a brave young lord. He is a monster thing, they say, sent to live apart because all men shrink from—”

“Yngilda!” That saying of her name was as sharp as a whip crack, and under it she flinched as if indeed some lash had bitten into her body. Dame Math stood over us, and it was plain in her face she had heard those words.

So open was her wrath that at that moment I knew Yngilda had indeed spoken the truth, or at least come so close to it as to shake my guardian. Only the truth could have aroused her ire so greatly.

She said no more, only eyed Yngilda menacingly until the girl edged back, her full cheeks blanching a little in her fright. She gave a kind of squeak and scrambled away. But I sat where I was and met Dame Math eye to eye. Within me the cold grew, setting me to shivering.

Cursed—a monster whom even his mother could not bear to look upon! By the Heart of Gunnora, what had they done to me, to give me in marriage to that? I could have screamed my terror aloud, but I did not. For in that much I kept my control. I only said slowly, forcing my voice to be level, determined to know the full of it here and now, “By the oath of the Flame you serve, Lady, tell me now the truth. Are her words that truth? Am I wed to one who is not like other men?” For I could not bring myself to say “monster.”

I think up until that moment Dame Math might have covered with fair words. But now she sat beside me, her face grave, as the flush of anger faded.

“You are no longer a child, Joisan. Yes, I will give you what truth I know. It is true that Kerovan dwells apart from his kin, but he is not a monster. There is a curse laid on those of the House of Ulm, and his mother comes from the updates, from a family rumored to have inter-wed with Old Ones. Thus he has such blood within him. But he is not monstrous—of this Lord Cyart made sure before he would consent to the marriage.

“Yet he dwells apart from his kin. Is it true that his mother will not look upon him?” The cold within me was such now I could hardly control myself.

Still she was frank with me. “That is true because of the manner of his birthing, and she is a fool!” Then she told me an unusual tale of how the Lord of Ulm had taken wives and had no living heir because of the curse. How he wed a third time with a widow, and how she had been taken on the road before her time with birth pains and had borne her son within the walls of one of the Old Ones’ buildings. And of how thereafter she had turned her face from him because she was so filled with fear that the babe was of the Old Ones’ sending. But he was sound and no monster. His father swore to that by the Great Oath for which there can be no breaking.

Because she told it all so plainly, I believed her and was less shaken.

Then Dame Math added, “Joisan, be glad that you take a young lord. Yngilda, for all her prating, goes to one already wed once, a man old enough to be her father, and one who will have little patience with any youthful follies. She will find him far less indulgent to her whims and laziness than her mother, and she will perhaps rue the day she left her own keep for his.

“Kerovan by all accounts is one you will well company with—for he is learned in rune scrolls as well as in sword-play, which so occupies the minds and bodies of most men. He has a liking for searching out old things, such as you have also. Yes, you have much to think right in your wedding, and little to see of shadows. You are a maid of good mind and not easily shaken. Do not let the envious words of this foolish wench overset your reason. I swear, if you wish it, by the Flame—and you well know the meaning of such an oath for me—that I would not stand by without protest and see you wed to any monster!”

Knowing Dame Math, that reassurance was indeed all I needed. Yet during the days that followed I did think again and again of the strange upbringing Kerovan must have had. That a mother had turned her face from her child was hard to believe. Still, giving birth in a place of the Old Ones might have poisoned her mind against the cause of her pain and fear as she lay therein. And I knew well from my reading at the Abbey that many such places had malignant atmospheres that worked subtly upon mankind. She could well have fallen prey to such influences during her hours of labor.

For the rest of our stay in town my aunt and her daughter did not come near us. Perhaps Dame Math had made plain her views on what Yngilda had told me. I was well content not to see her full face, her pursed mouth, and her probing eyes again.

3

Kerovan

To most dalesmen the Waste is a fearsome place. Outlawed men were driven to refuge there, perhaps coming to regard it in time as they had their native dales. And there are hunters, wild as any outlaws in their own fashion, ranging it to bring back packloads of strange furs as well as lumps of pure metal congealed into odd shapes: not native ores, but substances that had been worked and then reduced to broken pieces.

Such lumps of metal were greatly prized, though smiths had to rework them with care. Swords and mail made from this metal were stronger, more resistant to weathering. On the other hand, sometimes it had fearsome properties, exploding in vast configurations to consume all nearby—as if some power had struck it. A metal-smith both yearned to use it for the promise of fine craftsmanship and feared that each piece he brought to the forge might be one of the cursed bits.

Those who found such metal and traded in it were notoriously close-mouthed about the source. Riwal believed that they mined, not the earth, but places of the Old Ones wherein some ancient and unbelievably horrible conflict had fused metal into these lumps. He had attempted to win the confidence of one Hagon, a trader, who had twice passed through our forest territory. But Hagon refused to talk.

So it was not only the broken-off road that beckoned us. There were other secrets to be uncovered. And I found this venture well to my liking.

We reached the broken-off end of the road by mid-morning and stood studying it before we set foot on its earth-drifted surface. It was indeed a puzzle, for that break was as clean-cut as if some giant swordsman had brought down his blade to sever the masonry. Yet, if some such action had occurred, where was the rest? For beyond the break there was not even a trace of old rubble to suggest it had ever run beyond this point. And why would any road come to such a purposeless ending? It may be true that the purposes of the Old Ones were not the same as those of men, and we cannot judge their actions by ours.

“How long ago since men walked here, Riwal?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Who knows? If it were men who did so. But if the road ends thus, the beginning may be of more interest.”

We were riding the small, desert-bred horses used by Waste rovers, tough beasts with an inherited ability to go far on a minimum of drink and forage. And we led a third horse with our supplies in a pack. We went clothed as metal traders, so that any spying upon us could believe we were of the Waste ourselves. We traveled alert to sign and sound, for only he who is ever-watchful can hope to best the traps and dangers of such a land.

The Waste is not pure desert, though much is arid land with a scant covering of small, wind-beaten shrubs and sun-dried grass in ragged clumps. At times, dark copses of trees grow so thick they huddle trunk to trunk. And outcrops of stone stand like pillars.

Some of these had been worked, if not by man, then by creatures who used stone for monuments. But the pillars had been so scoured by years of winds that only traces of the working remained. Here a wall could be seen for a bit; there a pair of columns suggested a past building of some pride.

We passed such a place soon after we took to the road, but there was not enough left to explore. In the open there was silence, for this was a windless day. The clop-clop of our mounts’ feet on the pavement seemed to echo, making far too loud a sound, so that I found myself looking from side to side, and now and then over my shoulder. The feeling grew stronger that we were being watched—by outlaws?

In spite of myself I found my hand straying ever in the direction of the sword hilt, ready to defend against attack. Yet when I glanced at Riwal, I saw him riding easy, though he also watched right and left.

“I feel”—I urged my mount closer to his—“that we are watched.” Perhaps I humbled my pride to admit that, yet this was more his land than mine, and I relied on him.

“It is ever so—in the Waste,” he returned.

“Outlaws?” My fingers closed about the hilt now.

“Perhaps. But more likely other things.” His eyes did not quite meet mine, and I sensed he was at a loss to explain. Perhaps he, too, feared to display some weakness before me, a younger and less-tried venturer.

“Is it the truth then that the Old Ones left guardians?”

“What man among us knows?” He countered my question with another. “This much is so: when one ventures into their ways, there is often this feeling of being watched. Yet it has never been with me more than just watching. If they left guardians, as you say, those are now too old and tired to do more than watch.”

I found that hardly reassuring. And still I continued to watch—though nothing stirred out in that flat land across which the road hammered a straight and level path.

At nooning we drew to the side of the pavement, ate and drank, and gave our horses to drink also from the water skins we carried. There was no sun, and the sky over us was gray; still I could see no clouds gathering to threaten storm. But Riwal sniffed the air, his head up to the sky.

“We must seek shelter,” he said, and there was urgency in his voice.

“I see no storm clouds.”

“Storms come unheralded and swiftly in the Waste. There—” He had been surveying the countryside around, and now he pointed ahead to where there was a pile beside the road, perhaps another cluster of time-eroded ruin.

We pushed on, to discover that sight-distance was deceptive in this place. There was a haze that seemed to rise from the ground so that things appeared closer than they were. But at length we reached the spot he had appointed. And none too soon, for the sky was no longer the gray of a gloomy day, but had darkened now into twilight come hours too soon.

Chance had brought us to shelter. Though the ruins at the outset of the road had been so formless as to only suggest they had once had purpose, this ancient building was in better preservation. There was actually part of a room or hall among the jumble of stone blocks with a portion of roof over it. And into that we crowded both ourselves and our animals.

Now the wind blew, whirling up the grit, hurling it in marching columns to fill eyes, mouths, nostrils. We had to fight to gain the last few strides to cover. Once inside, when we turned to look out, it was to see a curtain of dust.

That did not last long. Overhead sounded the rumble of thunder as if an army with a siege train marched. And the lash of lightning followed with force enough to suggest it had struck not too far away. Then came rain—quickly beating down the dust, yet not clearing any path for our vision; rather providing a second curtain, this time of moisture, not grit.

Water ran in a stream across the pitted floor, so we crowded back into the farthest corner of the ruin. The horses whinnied and snuffled, rolling their eyes, as if they found this fury of nature frightening. But to me our corner gave an illusion of shelter, though I flinched when the lightning struck again.

Such fury deafened us. We were reduced to the point of simple endurance and we kept hold of the reins, lest our mounts break out into the storm. As they began to quiet, no longer tossing their heads or stamping, I relaxed a little.

The dark was close to that of true night, and we had no torch. So crowded were we that Riwal’s shoulder rubbed mine whenever he moved even slightly, yet the rain was so tumultuous we could not have heard each other without shouting, which we did not do.

What had been the original purpose of the ruin? Built so beside the road, could it have been an inn? Or was it a guard post for some patrol? Or even a temple? As Riwal had said, who knew the purposes of the Old Ones.

With one hand I explored the wall. The surface of the stone was smooth, not pitted as the more exposed portions were. My fingers could detect no seam or joining, yet those blocks had been set together somehow. Suddenly—

Men sleep and dream. But I will swear any oath I did not sleep. And if I dreamed, then it was unlike any dream I had ever known.

I looked out upon the road, and there were those moving along it. Yet when I tried to see them through what appeared to be a mist, I could not. They remained but shapes, approximating men. Could they be men?

Though I could not see them clearly, their emotion flowed to me. They were all moving in one direction, and this was a retreat. There was a vast and overwhelming feeling of—no, it was not defeat, not as if some enemy had pressed them into this withdrawal, but rather that circumstances were against them. They seemed to long for what they left behind, with the longing of those torn from deep rooting.

Now I knew that they were not all alike or of one kind. Some as they passed gave to me their sense of regret, or loss, as clearly as if they had shouted it aloud in words I could understand. But others were less able to communicate in this fashion, though their emotions were none the less deep.

The main press of that strange and ghostly company was past. Now there was only a handful of stragglers, or of those who found it the hardest to leave. Did I or did I not hear the sound of weeping through the rain? If they did not weep in fact they wept in thought, and their sorrow tore at me so I could not look at them any longer, but covered my eyes with my hands and felt on my dusty cheeks tears of my own to match theirs.

“Kerovan!”

The shadow people were gone. And so was the force of the storm. Riwal’s hand was heavy on my shoulder, as if he shook me awake from sleep.

“Kerovan!” There was a sharp demand in his voice, and I blinked at what I could see of him in the dusk.

“What is the matter?”

“You—you were crying out. What happened to you?”

I told him of the shadow people withdrawing in their sorrow.

“Perhaps you have the sight,” he said gravely when I had done. “For that might well have happened when the Old Ones left this land. Have you ever tried farseeing or tested a talent for the Power?”

“Not I!” I was determined that I would not be cut off from my fellows by a second burden. Different I might be in body because of the curse laid on me before my birth, but I needed not add to that difference by striving to follow those paths trod by Wisewomen and a few men such as Riwal. And he did not urge me, after my quick denial. Such a way must be followed by one wholly willing; not by one led into it by another. It has its disciplines that are in some ways more severe than any warrior training, and its own laws.

After the storm the day lightened again, and we were able to set out at a brisk pace. The water still settled in pools and hollows, and we refilled our smaller water bag, letting the horses drink their fill before we moved on.

I wondered, when we rode that way, if I would have the sensation of the company of those I had seen in the vision or dream. But that was not so. And shortly I forgot the intensity of the emotion that I had shared with them. For that I was thankful.

The road, which had run so straight, made a wide curve heading toward the north and the greater unknown of the Waste. Now ahead we caught sight of heights making a dark blue line across the sky of evening, as if we headed for a mountain chain.

Here also the land was more hospitable. There were trees where before had been mostly shrubs and stretches of grassland. We came to where the road arched in a bridge over a stream of some size. And it was beside that running water that we camped for the night. In fact Riwal settled us, not on the bank of the stream, but on a bar which thrust out into it. The water was high from the storm, and there was flotsam carried with it, piled around the rocks edging that bar.

I eyed his choice with some disfavor. To my mind he had deliberately selected a site which would give us little room and which appeared dangerous from the sweep of water. He must have read my expression for he said, “This is chancy land, Kerovan. It is best to take the common precautions when within it—some uncommon ones too.”

“Common precautions?”

He gestured at the stream. “Running water. That which is ill-disposed to us, if it be of the Power and not human, cannot cross running water. If we camp so, we have only one front to defend.”

So reasoned, it was common sense. Thus I pushed rocks and pulled loose drift to clear a space between for us and the horses. Nor did Riwal deny us a fire made from the driest of the drift. The river was falling, but the current was still swift. It held life also, for I saw a dark shape of a length to suggest that the fish of this country were of a huge size, though I was teased by the disturbing suggestion that that shadow beneath the surface did not altogether resemble any fish I knew. I decided that in the Waste it was better not to probe too deeply into the unknown.

We set a watch, as we would in enemy country. At first, during my tour of duty, I was so uneasily alert that I found myself peopling each shadow with an intruder, until I took my fancies in hand and forced control over them.

Though the day had been sunless, we did not lack a moon. Its rays were particularly strong, making the landscape all black and silver—silver in the open, black in the shadows. There was life out there, for once I heard the drum of hoofs, and our horses nickered and tugged at their tethers, as if some of their wild kin had pounded by. Once I heard a distant, mournful cry, like the howl of a hunting wolf. And something very large with wings planed noiselessly over our camp as if to inspect us. Yet none of these were frightening in themselves, for all men know that there are wild horses in the Waste, and wolves run through the dales as well. And there are winged night-hunters everywhere.

No, it was not those sounds that disturbed me. It was what I did not hear. For I was as certain as if I could see it that out there in the black and silver land lurked something, or someone, who watched and listened with the same intensity that I did. And whether it was of good or ill I could not guess.

Sun and morning banished such fancies. The land was open, empty, in the daylight. We crossed the hump of the bridge and headed on, while before us the mountains grew sharper to the sight.

By nooning we were in the foothills, which were ridges sharper than our dales, more like knife slashes in soil and rock. No longer was the road straight. It narrowed to a way along which two of us might still ride abreast, but no wider, and it twisted and curved, ran up and down, as if its makers had followed always the easiest route through this maze of heights. Here, too, the Old Ones had left their mark. Carved on the walls of rock were faces, some grotesque, some human-seeming and benign, and often bands of runes that Riwal busied himself to copy.

Though no one could read the script of the Old Ones, Riwal had hopes that someday he would be able to do so. We had dawdled so while he copied the runes that noon found us in a narrow vale where we took our rest under the chin of a vast face that protruded strongly from the parent cliff of which it had been carved.

I had studied it as we came up, finding it in something vaguely familiar, though what that was I could not say.

Oddly enough, though we were here surrounded by the work of those who had vanished, I felt free of that watching, as if whatever had been here once was long gone and had left no trace. And my spirits rose as they had not since the storm caught us.

“Why all these carvings?” I wondered. “The farther we go, the more they are clustered on the walls.”

Riwal swallowed a mouthful of travel bread in order to answer. “Perhaps we now approach some place of importance; a shrine, even a city. I have gathered and sifted the stories of traders for years, yet I know of none who have come this way, into the foothills of the mountains.”

That he was excited I could see, and I knew that he anticipated some discovery that would be far greater than any he had made during his years of wandering in the Waste. He did not linger over his food, nor did I, for his enthusiasm grew to be mine also. We did not pause beneath that giant chin for long, but rode on.

The road continued to weave through the foothills, and the carvings grew more complex. There were no more heads or faces. Now runes ran in complex patterns of lines and circles. Riwal reined in before one.

“The Great Star!” His awe was plain to see.

Surveying the complexity of that design, I could at last make out a basic five-point star. But the star was overlaid with a wealth of other curves and bits, so it took careful examination to make it out at all.

“The Great Star?” I asked.

Riwal had dismounted and gone to the rock face in which that pattern was so deeply chiseled, running his fingers along the lines as far up as he could reach, as if he wished to assure himself by touch that what his eyes reported was true.

“It is a way, that much we know, of calling upon one of the highest of the Powers,” he said, “though all save the design has been lost to us. Never before have I seen it in so complex a setting. I must make a drawing of this!”

Straightway he brought out his horn of ink, tight-capped for journeying; his pen; and a fresh piece of parchment on which he began to copy the design. So lost was he in the task that I grew restless. At last I felt I could no longer just sit and watch his slow stroke upon stroke as he studied each part of the design to set it down.

“I shall ride on a little,” I told him. He grunted some answer, intent upon his labors.

Ride on I did, and the road took a last turning—to the end!

Before me a flat rock face bore no sign of any gateway or door. The pavement ended flush with that cliff. I stared in disbelief at such an abrupt and seemingly meaningless finish to our quest. A road that began nowhere and ended thus—? What had led to its making? What could its purpose have been?

I dismounted and went to run my fingertips along the surface of the cliff. It was real, solid rock—die road ran to it and ended. I swung first to one side and then to the other, beyond the boundaries of the pavement, seeking some continuation, some reason. There were two pillars standing, one on either hand, as if they guarded some portal. But the portal did not exist!

I advanced to lay hand upon the left pillar, and, as I did so, at its foot I caught a glimpse of something. It was a faint glimmer, near-buried in the gravel. Straightway I was on my knees, using first my fingers and then the point of my knife, to loosen my find from a crack in which it had been half-buried.

The gleaming object I had cupped in my hand was a strange find. It was a ball, a small globe of crystal, a substance one might have thought would have been shattered among these harsh rocks long since. Yet it did not even bear a scratch upon its smooth surface.

Within it was a tiny image, so well-wrought as to be the masterpiece of some gem-cutter’s art—the image of a gryphon, the beast that was my own House symbol. The creature had been posed with one eagle-clawed foot raised, its beak open as if it were about to utter some word of wisdom to which it bade me listen. Set in the globe directly above its head was a twisted loop of gold, as if it had once been so linked to a chain for wearing.

As I stood with it cupped in my hand, the glimmer of light that had led me to its discovery grew stronger. And I will swear that the crystal itself became warm, but only with such warmth as was pleasing.

I held it on the palm of my hand, level with my eyes, that I might study the gryphon closely. Now I could see that there were small flecks of crimson in the head to mark the eyes. And those flecks sparkled, even though there was no outer light to reflect within them, almost as if they had life of their own.

Long had I been familiar with all the broken bits on Riwal’s shelves, but never before had such a thing been found intact—save for the brokers loop at the top, and that, I saw, could be easily repaired. Perhaps I should offer it to Riwal. And yet as I felt its warmth against my flesh, saw the gryphon’s stance of wisdom and warning within, I had the belief that this was meant for me alone and that its finding was not by mere chance but by the workings of some purpose beyond my knowledge. If it were true that my mother’s House had intermated with Old Ones, then it could well be that some small portion of such blood in my own veins made me find the crystal globe familiar and pleasant.

I took it back to Riwal. When he saw it, there was vast amazement on his face.

“A treasure—and truly yours,” he said slowly, as if he wished what he said were not so.

“I found it—but we share equally.” I made myself be fair.

He shook his head. “Not this. Is it mere chance that brings a gryphon to one who wears that badge already?” Reaching forth, he touched the left breast of the jerkin above my mail, on which was discreetly set the small gryphon head I always wore.

He would not even take the globe into his hand, though he bent his head to study it closely.

“This is a thing of Power,” he said at last. “Do you not feel the life in it?”

That I did. The warmth and well-being that spread from it was a fact I could not deny.

“It will have many uses.” His voice was low, and I saw that his eyes were now closed, so he was not viewing it at all. “It shall bind when the need is for binding; it shall open a door where there is want of a key; it shall be your fate, to lead you into strange places.”

Though he had never said he could farsee, in that moment I knew that he was gripped by a compelling force which enabled him to envision the future uses of the thing I had found. I wrapped it within a scrap of his parchment and stowed it against my flesh within my mail for the greatest safety that I could give it.

About the bare cliff Riwal was as puzzled as I. All the signs suggested a portal of some importance, yet there was no portal. And we had, in the end, to be content with what we had discovered and to begin the trek back from the Waste.

Never during that journey did Riwal ask to see the gryphon again, nor did I bring it forth. Yet there was no moment during the return that I was not aware of what I carried. And the two nights that we lay encamped on the return road, I had strange dreams, of which I could remember very little save that they left an urgency upon me to return to the only home I had ever known, because before me lay a task of importance.

4

Joisan

Though I had little liking for Yngilda, I found her brother Toross unlike her. In the autumn of that year, soon after we returned to Ithkrypt, he came riding over the hills with a small escort, their swords all scabbarded with peace-strings, ready to take part in the fall hunt that would fill our winter larder after the kills were salted down.

Differing from his sister in body as well as in mind, he was a slender, well-set youth, his hair more red than the usual bronze of a dalesman. He possessed a quick wit and a gift of song that he used to advantage in the hall at night.

I heard Dame Math say to one of her women that that one, meaning Toross, could well carry a water horn through life to collect the tears of maids sighing after him. Yet he did nothing to provoke such admiration; never courted their notice, being as ready in riding and practice of arms as any of the men, and well-accepted by them.

But to me he was a friend such as I had not found before. He taught me the words of many songs and how to finger his own knee-harp. Now and then he would bring me a branch of brilliant leaves clipped at their autumn splendor, or some like trifle to delight the eye.

Not that he had much time for such pleasures, for this was a bustling time when there was much to be done for the ordering of supplies against the coming of cold days. We stewed some fruits and set them in jars with parchment tied firmly over the mouths; dried other such; brought forth heavy clothing and inspected it for the need of repairs.

More and more of this Dame Math left to my ordering, as she said that now I was so nigh in years to becoming the lady of my lord’s household I must have the experience of such ways. I made mistakes, but I also learned much, because I had no mind to be shamed before strangers in another keep. And I felt more than a little pride when my uncle would notice with approval some dish of my contriving. He had a sweet tooth, and rose and violet sugars spun artfully into flowers were to him an amusing conceit with which to end a meal, and one of my greater triumphs.

Though I busied myself so by day, and even a little by lamplight in the evening when we dealt with the clothing, yet I could not altogether thrust out of mind some of the thoughts Yngilda had left with me. Thus I did something in secret that otherwise only a much younger maid would have thought on.

There was a well to the west in the dale that had a story about it—that if one went there when the full moon was reflected on its water surface and cast in a pin, then luck would follow. Thus, not quite believing, yet still drawn by some small hope that perhaps there was luck to be gained by this device, I stole away at moonrise (which was no small task in itself) and cut across the newly harvested fields to the well.

The night was chill, and I pulled high the hood of my cloak. Then I stood looking down at the silvered reflections in the water and I held out my pin, ready to drop it into the disk mirrored there. However, before I released it, the reflection appeared to shiver and change into something else. For a long moment I was sure that what I had seen there had been far different from the moon, more like a crystal ball. I must have dropped the pin without being aware, for suddenly there was a troubling of the water, and the vision, if vision it had been, was gone.

I was so startled that I forgot the small spell-rhyme I should have spoken at that moment. So my luck-bringing was for naught, and I laughed at my own action as I turned and ran from the well.

That there is ensorcellment and spell-laying in the world we all know. There are the Wisewomen who are learned in such, as well as others, such as the Past-Abbess, who have control over powers most men do not understand. One can evoke some of these powers if one has the gift and the training, but I had neither. Perhaps it is better not to dabble in such matters, Only—why at that moment had I seen again (if I had in truth seen it) that englobed gryphon?

Gryphon—beneath the folds of my cloak my fingers sought and found the outlines of that beast as it was stitched upon my tabard. It was the symbol of the House of Ulm, to which I was now bound by solemn oath. What was he like, my thoughts spun on, this unseen, unknown lord of mine? Why had he never sent to me such a likeness of himself as Yngilda carried? Monster—Yngilda had no reason to speak spiteful lies, there must lie some core of truth in what she had said to me. There was one way—

Gifts came yearly from Ulmsdale on my name-day. Suppose that when they were brought this year, I sought out the leader of the party bringing them, asked of him a boon to be carried to his lord: that we exchange our likenesses. I had my own picture, limned by uncle’s scribe, who had such a talent. Yes, that was what I would do!

It seemed to me in that moment that perhaps the well had answered me by putting that thought into my head. So I sped, content, back to the hall, pleased that none there had marked my absence.

Now I set to work upon a project of my own. That was making a suitable case for the picture drawn on parchment. As deftly as I could, I mounted it on a piece of polished wood.

For it I then worked a small bag, the fore-part embroidered with the gryphon, the back with the broken sword. I hoped my lord could understand my subtle meaning: that I was dutifully looking forward to Ulmsdale; that Ithkrypt was my past, not my future. This I did in secret and in stolen moments of time, for I had no mind to let others know my plan. But I had no time to hide it one late afternoon when Toross came upon me without warning.

The mounted picture lay before me in the open, as I had been using it to measure. When he saw it he said sharply, “There is one here, kinswoman, who sees you well as you are. Whose hand limned this?”

“Archan, my uncle’s scribe.”

“And for whom have you had it limned?”

Again there was that sharp note in his voice, as if he had a right to demand such an answer from me. I was more than a little surprised, and also displeased, that he would use such a tone, where before he had been all courtesy and soft speeches.

“It is to be a surprise for my Lord Kerovan. Soon he will send my name-day gifts. This I shall return to him.” I disliked having to spread my plan before him, yet his question had been too direct to evade.

“Your lord!” He turned his face a little from me. “One forgets these ties exist, Joisan. Do you ever think what it will mean to go among strangers, to a lord you have never seen?” Again that roughness in his speech, which I could not understand. I did not think it kind of him to seize so upon a hidden fear this way and drag it out before my eyes.

I put aside my needle, took up the picture and the unfinished case, and wrapped them in the cloth wherein I kept them, without answering him. I had no intention of saying “yes” or “no” to that question which he had no right to ask.

“Joisan—there is the right of bride-refusal!” The words burst from him as he stood there with his head still averted. His hands were laced upon his sword belt, and I saw his fingers tighten and press.

“To so dishonor his House and mine?” I returned. “Do you deem me such a nothing? What a poor opinion you carry of me, kinsman! What have I done to make you believe I would openly shame any man?”

“Man!” He swung around to face me now. There was a tautness to his mouth, an expression about his eyes I had never seen before. “Do you not know what they say of the heir of Ulmsdale? Man—what was your uncle thinking of when he agreed to such a match? Joisan, no one can hold a maid to such a bargain when she has been betrayed within its bonds! Be wise for yourself and think of refusal—now!’’

I arose. In me anger grew warm. But it is in my nature that when I am most in ire I am also the most placid seeming outwardly. For which, perhaps, I should thank fortune, for many times has it given me good manner.

“Kinsman, you forget yourself. Such speech is unseemly, and I know shame that you could think me so poor a thing as to listen to it. You had better learn to guard your tongue.” So saying I left him, not heeding his quick attempt to keep me there.

Then I climbed to my own small chamber and there stood by the northward window, gazing out into the dusk. I was shivering, but not with the cold; rather with that fear I thought I had overcome in the weeks since Yngilda had planted it in my mind.

Yngilda’s spite, and now this strange outburst from Toross, who, I had not believed, could have said such a thing to me! The right of bride-refusal, yes, that existed. But the few times it had been invoked in the past had led to death feuds between the Houses so involved. Monster—Yngilda had said that. And now Toross—repeating the word “man” as if it could not be applied to my lord! Yet my uncle would not wish to use me ill, and surely he had considered very well the marriage proposal when it had first been made to him. I had also Dame Math’s solemn oath.

I longed all at once for the garden of the Past-Abbess Malwinna. To her alone could I speak of this matter. Dame Math’s stand I already knew; that my lord was a victim of misfortune. This I could believe more readily than that he was in any way not a man. For after sworn oaths between my uncle and his father, such a thing could not be. And I heartened myself by such sensible council, pinning additional hope on my plan to send Kerovan the picture.

But thereafter I avoided Toross as much as I could, though he made special attempts several times to have private conversation with me. I could claim duties enough to keep me aloof, and claim them I speedily did. Then there came a day when he had private conversation with my uncle, and before the day’s end he and his men rode out of Ithkrypt. Dame Math was summoned to my uncle, and thereafter Archan came to bring me also.

My uncle was scowling as I had seen him do at times when he was crossed in some matter. And that scowl was turned blackly on me as I entered.

“What is this boil of trouble you have started, wench?” His voice was only slightly below a roar, aimed at me when I was scarcely within the doorway. “Are you so light of word that you—”

Dame Math arose from her chair. Her face was as angercast as his, but she looked at him, not me.

“We shall have Joisan’s word before you speak so!” Her lower tone cut across his. “Joisan, this day Toross came to your uncle and spoke of bride-refusal—”

It was my turn to interrupt; my anger also heated by such an accusation from my uncle, before he had asked my position in the matter.

“So did he speak to me also. I told him I would not listen; nor am I an oath-breaker! Or do you, who know me well, also believe that?”

Dame Math nodded. “It is as I thought. Has Joisan lived under your eyes for all these years without your knowing her for what she is? What said Toross to you, Joisan?”

“He seemed to think evil concerning my Lord Kerovan, and that I should use bride-refusal not to go to him. I told him what I thought of his shameful words and left him, nor would I have any private speech with him thereafter.”

“Bride-refusal!” My uncle brought his fist down on the table with the thump of a war drum. “Is that youngling mad? To start a blood feud, not only with Ulmsdale, but half the north who would stand beside Ulric in such a matter! Why does he urge this?”

There was frost in Dame Math’s eyes, a certain quirk to her lips which suggested that she was not altogether displeased at his asking that.

“I can think of two reasons, brother. One stemming from his own hot blood. The other placed in his mind by—”

“Enough! There is no need to list what may or may not have moved Toross to this folly. Now listen, girl,” he swung on me again. “Ulric took oath that his heir was fit to be the lord of any woman. That his wife was disordered in her wits when the lad was born, that all men know. She so took such a dislike to the child she named him monster, which he is not. Also Ulric spoke with me privately upon a matter which has much to do with this, and which I tell you now, but you shall keep mum-mouthed about it hereafter—remember that, girl!”

“I shall do,” I gave him my promise when he paused as if expecting that assurance from me.

“Well enough. Then listen—there is always something behind such wild tales when you hear them, so learn in the future to winnow the true from the false.

“The Lady Tephana, who is your lord’s mother (and a fine mother she has been to him!), had an elder son Hlymer, by her first marriage. Since he got no lands from his father, she brought him with her to Ulmsdale. In addition she has had a daughter—Lisana—who is but one year younger than your lord.

“This daughter she has seen betrothed to one of her own House. And the daughter she dotes upon with all the affection to equal her distaste for Kerovan. Thus Ulric of Ulmsdale has reason to believe that within his own household the seeds of trouble for his heir—for Hlymer makes common cause with Lisana’s betrothed, and they see a lord to come who is not Kerovan. Ulric can make no move against them, for he has no proof. But because he would not see his son despoiled when he could no longer protect him, he wished some strong tie for Kerovan, to unite him with a House that would support him when the time comes that he needs shields raised for him.

“Since no man can sit in the high seat of a keep who is not sound of body and mind, how better create doubt in possible supporters for a threatened heir than by bending rumor to one’s use, spreading tales of ‘monsters’ and the like? You have seen what happens when such tales come into the hearing of those who do not guess what may lie behind their telling. Toross came to me with such a story—he is filled with it. Since I am sworn not to reveal, save to the parties most deeply concerned, any of Ulric’s fears for the future, I bade Toross ride forth if he could not hold his tongue. But that you might have listened to him—”

I shook my head. “It was he who came to me with it. But I had already heard such a tale in greater detail from his sister in Trevamper.”

“So Math told me.” The flush had faded from my uncle’s face. Now I knew he was slightly ashamed of the way he had greeted me, not that he would ever say so. But such things had always been understood between us.

“You see girl,” he continued, “how far this story has spread. I do not think Ulric is altogether wise in not better ordering his household. But each man is lord in his own keep and needs must face his own shadows there. But know this—your wedded lord is such a man as you will be proud to hand-fast when the time comes—as it will soon now. Take no heed of these rumors, knowing their source and purpose.”

“For which knowing I give thanks,” I replied.

When Dame Math and I left his company together, she drew me apart into her own chamber and looked at me searchingly, as if by that steady gaze alone she could hunt out every unspoken thought within my mind.

“How chanced Toross to speak to you on this matter? He must have had some reason—one does not so easily break custom. You are a wedded lady, Joisan, not an unspoken-for maid who allows her eyes to stray this way or that.”

So I told her of my plan. To my surprise she did not object nor seem to think what I was doing was beneath the dignity of my station. Instead she nodded briskly.

“What you do is fitting, Joisan. Perhaps we should have arranged such an exchange ourselves long ago. That would have broken such rumors. Had you had a picture of Kerovan in your belt-purse when Yngilda spoke to you, it would have answered well. So Toross was angered at what you did? It was past time when that youth should have returned to those who sent him to make trouble!” She was angry again, but not with me. Only what moved her now she did not explain.

So I finished the picture case, and Dame Math approved its making as an excellent example of my best needlecraft. Making all ready, I laid it away in my coffer against the arrival of the party from Ulmsdale.

They were several days late, and the party itself was different from the earlier ones, for the armsmen were older, and several of them bore old, healed wounds which would keep them from active field service. Their leader was crooked of back and walked with a lurch and a dip.

Besides a casket that he delivered with ceremony to me, he bore a message tube sealed with Ulric’s symbol for my uncle and was straightway taken into private conversation with him, as if this were a matter of great import. I wondered if my summons to Ulmsdale had come at last. But the nature of the bearer was such that I could not accept that. My lord would have come himself as was right, and with a retinue to do me honor through those lands we must cross to his home.

Within the casket was a necklet of northern amber and gold beads, with a girdle to match. Truly a gift to show me prized. Yet I wished it had been just such a picture as I had ready to return to him. I knew that Dame Math would make opportunity to let me speak alone with this Jago who commanded the Ulmsdale force, that I might entrust him with my gift. But it appeared he had so much to say to my uncle there was little time for that, for he did not come out of the inner chamber until the hour for the evening meal.

I was glad he was seated beside me, for it gave me a chance to say that I would see him privately, that I had something to entrust to him. But he had a speech in return.

“Lady, you have had Ulmsdale’s gift, but I have another for you from the hand of Lord Kerovan himself which he said to give to you privately—”

Within me I knew then a rise of excitement, for I could conceive of nothing save that we had been of one mind, and what Jago had for me was also a picture.

But it was not so. When Dame Math saw that we came together in a nook between the high seat and the wall, what he laid in my eager hand was not a flat packet, but a small, round one. Quickly I pulled away the covering of soft wool to find that I held a crystal globe and within it a gryphon—even as I had seen it at the House of Dames! I nearly dropped it. For to have something of the Power touch into one’s life so was a thing to hold in awe and fear. Set in its surface just above the gryphon’s head was a ring of gold, and there was strung a chain so one could wear it as a pendant.

“A wondrous thing!” Somehow I found my tongue and hoped that I had not betrayed my first fear. For to no one could I explain the momentary panic I had felt. The more I studied it now, the clearer became its beauty, and I thought that it was truly a treasure, finer than any that had ever been sent to me in any casket of ceremony.

“Yes. My lord begs you accept of this, and perhaps wear it sometimes, that you may know his concern for you.” That sounded like some set speech which he had memorized. And I decided swiftly to ask no questions of this man. Perhaps he was not too close to my lord after all.

“Tell my lord I take great joy in his gift.” I found the formal words easier than I would have done a moment earlier. “It shall abide with me night and day that I may look upon it, not only for my pleasure in its beauty, but also because of his concern for me. In return,” I hurriedly brought forth my own gift, “do you place this in my lord’s hand. Ask of him, if he wills, to send its like to me when he may.”

“Be sure that your wish is my command, Lady.” Jago slipped it into his belt-purse. Before he could say more, if there was more to be said between us, there came one of my uncle’s men to summon him again to that inner room, and I did not see him further that night.

Nor did we have more than formal speech together during the two remaining days that he was at Ithkrypt. I gave him ceremonious farewell when he rode forth, but by then all within the keep knew of the news that had come with the men from Ulmsdale.

By birth and inclination dalesmen are not sea-rovers. We have ports for trading set up along the coast, and there are villages of fisherfolk to be found there. But deep-sea ships do not sail under the flag of any dales lord. And those who trade from overseas, such as the Sulcarmen, are not of our blood and kin.

News from overseas is long old before it reaches us. But we had heard many times that the eastern lands were locked in a struggle for power between nation and nation. Now and then there was mention of a country, a city, or even some warlord or leader whose deeds reached us in such garbled form they were already well on the way to becoming a tale more fancy than fact.

Of late, however, there had been new ships nosing along our shores. The Sulcarmen had suffered some grievous defeat of their own two years since in the eastern waters. And so we had not the usual number of their traders coming for our woolen cloth, our wonder-metal from the Waste, our freshwater pearls. But these others had put in to haggle, driving hard bargains, and they seemed over-interested in our land. Often when they had discharged a cargo, before taking on another, they would lie in harbor, and their crews would ride north and south as if exploring.

Our thoughts of war never encompassed more than the feuds between dale and dale, which could be dark and bloody at times, but which seldom involved more than a few score of men on either side. We had no king or overlord, which was our pride, but also in a manner our weakness, as was to be proven to us. Sometimes several lords would combine their forces to make a counter-raid on Waste outlaws or the like. But such alliances were always temporary. And, while there were several lords of greater following than others (mainly because they held richer and more populous dales), none could send out any rallying call all others would come to.

This must have been clear to those who spied and went—that we were feeble opponents, easy to overrun. However, they misread the temper of the dales, for a dalesman will fight fiercely for his freedom. And a dalesman’s loyalty to his lord, who is like the head of his own family, is seldom shaken.

Since Ulmsport lay at the mouth of that dale, it had recently been visited by two ships of these newcomers. They called themselves men of Alizon and spoke arrogantly of the size and might of their overseas land. One of their men had been injured inland. His companion from the ship had been killed. The wounded man had been nursed by a Wisewoman. By her craft she could tell true from false. And, while he wandered in a fever, talking much, she listened. Later, after the coming of his comrades to bear him away, she had gone to Lord Ulric. He had listened carefully, knowing that she knew of what she spoke.

Lord Ulric was prudent and wise enough to see that there was that to it which might come to overshadow our whole land, as it did. Speedily he sent accounts of what had been learned to all the neighboring dales, as well as to Ithkrypt.

It seemed from the babbling of the wounded man that he was indeed a spy, the scout of an army soon to be landed on us. We realized that those of Alizon had decided that our rule was so feeble and weak in its nature they could overrun us at their pleasure, and this they moved to do.

Thus was the beginning of the great shadow on our world. But I nursed the crystal ball in my hand, uninterested in Alizon and its spies, sure that somehow the Lord Kerovan would do as I willed, and I would look upon the picture of a man who was no monster.

5

Kerovan

To my great surprise I discovered Jago had returned before Riwal and I came out of the Waste. His anger with me was such that, had I been younger, I think he would have cut a switch from the nearest willow and used it for my discipline. I saw that that anger was fed, not wholly from my supposedly ill-advised foray into the dubious territory, but also from something he had learned at Ulmskeep. Having spoken his mind hotly, he ordered me to listen, with such serious mien that I lost the defiance his berating had aroused.

On two occasions in the past I had been to Ulmskeep, both times when my mother was away visiting her kin. So it, and the lower part of the dale, was not unknown to me. Also on those times when my father had come to me, he had taken patience to make me aware of the spread of our lands, the needs of our people, those things that it was necessary for me to know when the day came for me to take his place.

But the news Jago brought I had not heard before. For the first time I learned of the invaders (though they were not termed so then, being outwardly visitors on leave from their ships at Ulmsport).

With what contempt they regarded us we quickly learned, for we are far from stupid—at least in that way. Dalesmen may insist too much upon their freedom, having a strong disliking for combining forces, save in time of immediate and pressing need. But we can sniff danger like wild things when it treads our land.

They had first come nosing into our ports, up river mouths, a year or so earlier. Then they had been very wary, circumspect, playing the roles of traders. Since the stuffs they had to offer in return for our native wool, metal, and pearls were new and caught the eye, they found a welcome. But they kept much to themselves, though they came ashore in twos and threes, never alone. Once ashore they did not linger in port, but journeyed inland on the pretext of seeking trade.

As strangers they were suspect, especially in those districts lying near the Waste, even though it was known that their origin was overseas. Men met them courteously and with guest right, but as they looked and listened, asked a question here, another there with discretion, so did others watch and listen. Soon my father, gathering reports, could see a pattern in their journeying which was not that of traders, but rather, to his mind, the action of scouts within new territory.

He sent privately to our near neighbors: Uppsdale, Fyndale (which they had visited under the pretext of the great fair held there), Flathingdale, and even to Vastdale, which also had its port of Jorby. With all these lords he was on good terms, for we had no feuds to separate us. And the lords were ready to listen and then set their own people to watching also.

What grew out of all this was the now-strong belief that my father had judged the situation rightly, and these overseas strangers were prowling our country for some purpose of their own, one meaning no good to the dales. It was soon to be decided whether or not the lords would make common cause and forbid hew landings to any ship from Alizon.

However, to get the lords to make common cause on any matter was a task to which only a man with infinite patience might set himself. No lord would openly admit that he accepted the will of another. We had no leader who could draw the lords under one banner or to one mind in action. And this was to be our bane.

Now there were to assemble at Ulmskeep five of the northern lords to exchange their views upon the idea. They needed some excuse for such a gathering, however, for it must be a festival of a kind to keep people talking in such a way that the strangers might hear a false excuse. My father had found a cause in the first arming of his heir, bringing me now into the company of my peers as was only natural at my age.

So far I followed Jago. But at his flat statement that I was to be the apparent center for this gathering, I was startled. For so long had I accepted my lot apart from the keep and from the company of my kin, that this way of life seemed the only proper one to me.

“But—” I began in protest.

Jago drummed with fingertips upon the table. “No, he is right, Lord Ulric is. Too long have you been put aside from what is rightly yours. He needs must do this, not only to give cover to his speech with the lords, but for your own sake. He has learned the folly of the course he has followed these past years.”

“The folly of—?” I was astounded that Jago spoke so of my father, since he was so stoutly a liegeman of Ulric’s as to think of him with the awe one approached an Old One.

“Yes, I say it—folly!” The word exploded a second time from his lips, as might a bolt from a crossbow. “There are those in his own household who would change matters.” He hesitated, and I knew without words what he hinted at: that my mother favored my sister and her betrothed for the succession in Ulmsdale. I had never closed my ears to any rumor brought to the foresters’ settlement, deeming I must know the worst.

“Look at you!” Jago was angry once more. “You are no monster! Yet the story spreads that Lord Ulric needs must keep you pent here in chains, so ill-looking a thing, so mind-damaged, that you are less than a man, even an animal!”

His heat struck a spark from me. So this was what was whispered of me in my own keep!

“You must show yourself as you are; be claimed before those whose borders march with Ulmsdale as the proper heir. Then none may rise to misname you later. This Lord Ulric now knows—for he has heard some whispering, even challenged those whisperers to their faces. And one or two were bold enough to tell him what they had heard.”

I got up from the table which stood between us and went to Jago’s great war-shield where it hung upon the wall. He spent long hours keeping it well-burnished so that it was like a mirror, even though the shape distorted my reflection.

“As long as I keep on my boots,” I said then, “perhaps I will pass as humankind.”

Those boots were cunningly made, being carefully shaped so my cloven hoofs appeared normal feet. When I went shod, no man might be aware of the truth. The boots had been devised by Jago himself and made from special leather my father sent.

Jago nodded. “Yes, you will go, and you will keep your boots on, youngling, so you can prove to every whisperer in the dales that your father sired a true heir, well able to take lord’s oath. With weapons you are as good, perhaps even better, than those who are keep armsmen. And your wit is keen enough to make you careful.”

Which was more praise than he had ever given me in our years together.

Thus mailed and armed (and most well-booted) I rode with Jago out of the exile which had been laid upon me and came at last to take up life in my father’s keep. I did so with inner misgivings, having, as Jago pointed out, some store of wit, and well-surmising that I was far from welcome by some members of that household.

I had little chance to speak again with Riwal before I went—though I longed for him to offer to go with me, knowing at the same time that he never would. In our last meeting he looked at me in such a way that I felt he could somehow see into my mind and know all my uncertainties and fears.

“You have a long road to ride, Kerovan,” he said.

“Only two days,” I corrected him. “We but go to Ulmskeep.”

Riwal shook his head. “You go farther, gryphon bearer, and into danger. Death stalks at your shoulder. You shall give, and, in giving, you shall get. The giving and the getting will be stained with blood and fire—”

I realized then that he was farseeing, and I longed to cover my ears, for it seemed to me that his very words would draw down upon me the grim future he saw.

“Death stalks at the heels of every man born,” I summoned my courage to make answer. “If you can farsee, tell me what shield I can raise to defend myself.”

“How can I?” he returned. “All future is fan-shaped, spreading out in many roads from this moment. If you make one choice, there is that road to follow; if you make another yet a second path, a third, a fourth—But no man can outstride or outfight the given pattern in the end. Yours lies before you. Walk with a forester’s caution, Kerovan. And know this—you have that deep within you, if you learn to use it, that shall be greater than any shield or sword wrought by the most cunning of smiths.”

“Tell me—” I began.

“No!” He half-turned from me. “So much may I say, but no more. I cannot farsee your choices, and no word of mine must influence you in their making. Go with the Peace.” Then he raised his hand, and, between us in the air, he traced a sign. I half-started back, for his moving finger left a faint glimmering which was gone almost as quickly as I marked it. And I realized then that in some of his seeking Riwal must have been successful, for his sign was of the Power.

“Until we meet again then, comrade.” I spoke friend-farewell.

He did not face me squarely, but stood, his hand still a little raised to me. I know now that he understood this was our last meeting and perhaps regretted it. But I was not cursed with that sight which can hurt far more than it shields. What man wishes to see into the future in truth when there are so many ills lying there in wait for us?

As we traveled to Ulmskeep, Jago talked steadily, and that this was of purpose, I shortly understood. He so made known to me the members of my father’s household, giving each his character as he himself saw it, with unspoken shadings which allowed me to perceive that this one might be well-disposed, that one not. I think he saw me as a child fated to make some error that would bring about disaster and was doing what he could to give me some manner of protection against any outspoken folly.

My elder half-brother, who had come to Ulmskeep as a very young child, had, when he reached the age suitable for instruction in arms, been sent to our mother’s kin. But within the past year he had returned, riding comrade-in-arms to our kinsman Rogear who was my sister’s betrothed. I could well guess that he was to me an unfriend and with him I must be wary.

My mother had her followers among others at the keep, and Jago, with what delicacy he could summon, named those to me, giving short descriptions of each and of the positions they held. On the other hand my father’s forces were in the greater number, and among those were the major officers—the Master of Armsmen, the marshal, and others.

It was a divided household, and such are full of pitfalls. Yet on the surface all seemed smooth. I listened carefully, asking some questions. Perhaps these explanations were Jago’s idea; perhaps my father had suggested that I be so cautioned before I came to face friend and unfriend, that I might tell one from the other.

We rode into the keep at sunset, Jago having blown a signal with his approach horn so that we found the door guard drawn up to do us honor. I had marked the residence banners of Uppsdale and Flathingdale below our gryphon on the tower, and knew that two of those my father had summoned were already here. Thus, from the beginning, I would be under the eyes of the curious as well as those of the covertly hostile.

I must play my role well, seemingly unaware of any cross-current; bear myself modestly as became a candidate for arms, yet be far from a fool. Was I able to do this? I did not know.

The guards clanged swords together as we dismounted. My father, wearing a loose robe of ceremony over his jerkin and breeches, came forth from the deep shadow of the main portal to the hall. I fell to one knee, holding out my sword by the point that he could lay fingers lightly on its hilt in acknowledgment.

Then he drew me to my feet in a half-embrace, and, with his hand still on my arm, brought me out of the open into the main hall where a feasting board had already been set up, and serving men and maids were busied spreading it across with strips of fair linen and setting out the plates and drinking horns.

There were two other men of early middle age, robes of ceremony about their shoulders. My father made me known to Lord Savron of Uppsdale and Wintof of Flathingdale. That they regarded me keenly I was well aware. But I was strengthened in my role by the knowledge that I made, in my mail and leather over-jerkin, no different appearance than their own sons might display. At this moment no man might raise the cry of monster. They accepted my proper deference as if this were an ordinary meeting and I had been absent from Ulmskeep for perhaps only an hour or two, not for all my life.

Since I was still considered but a boy and, by custom, of little importance, I was able speedily to withdraw from the company of my elders and go to that section of the barracks where the unmarried men of the household were quartered. In deference to my heirship, I was given a small room to myself—a very bare room in which there was a bed, narrow and hard, two stools, and a small table, far less comfortable than my room in die forester’s holding.

A serving lad brought in my saddle bags. I noted that he watched me with open curiosity when he thought I did not mark him, lingering to suggest that he bring me hot water for washing. When I agreed, I thought that he was determined to make the most of his chance to view the “monster” at close quarters and perhaps report his discoveries to his fellows.

I had laid aside my jerkin and mail by the time he returned, standing in my padded underrcoat, sorting through my clothing for my best tabard with its gryphon symbol. He sidled in with a ewer from which steam arose, watching me as he placed it and a basin on the table, and twitched off a towel he had borne over one shoulder to lay beside it.

“If you need service, Lord Kerovan—”

I smoothed out the tabard. Now I deliberately unhooked my undercoat, letting it slide from my body, which was thus bared to the waist. Let him see I was not misshapen. As Jago said, if I clung to my boots, no man could miscall me.

“You may look me out a shirt—” I gestured toward my bags and then saw he was staring at me. What had he expected? Some horribly twisted body? I glanced down and saw what had become so much a part of me I had forgotten I still wore it—the crystal gryphon. Lifting its chain over my head, I laid it on the table as I washed and saw him eyeing it. Well enough, let him believe that I wore a talisman. Men did so. And one in the form of the symbol of my House was proper.

He found the shirt and held it for me as I redonned the gryphon. And he hooked my tabard, handed me my belt with its knife-of-pride before he left, doubtless with much to tell his fellows. But when he had gone, I drew the gryphon from hiding and held it in my hand.

As usual when I held it so, it had a gentle warmth. With that warmth came a sensation of peace and comfort, as if this thing, fashioned long before my first ancestor had ridden into the south dales, had waited all these centuries just to lie in my hand.

So far all had gone as it should. But before me still lay that ordeal from which my thoughts had shied since first I had known that I must come to Ulmsdale, the meeting with my mother. What could I say to her, or she to me? There lay between us that which no one could hope to bridge—not after all these years.

I stood there, cupping close the crystal ball and thinking of what I might do or say at a moment which could be put off no longer. Suddenly it was as if someone spoke aloud—yet it was only in my mind. I might have looked through a newly unshuttered window so that a landscape hitherto hidden lay before me.

The scene was shadowed, and I knew it was not mine to ever walk that way, just as there could be no true meeting between us which would leave us more than strangers. Yet I felt no sense of loss, only as if a burden had been lifted from me, to leave me free. We had no ties; therefore I owed her no more than she willed me to. I would meet her as I would any lady of rank, paying her the deference of courtesy, asking nothing in return. In my hand the globe was warm and glowing. But a sound at the door made me slip that into hiding before I turned to face who stood there.

I am only slightly over middle height, being slender-boned and spare-fleshed. This youth was tall enough that I must raise my eyes to meet his. He was thick of neck and shoulder, wide of jaw. His hair was a mat of sandy curls so tight he must battle to lay it smooth with any comb. He had a half-grin on his thick lips. I had seen such an expression before among the armsmen when a barracks bully set about heckling some simpleton to impress his standing upon his fellows.

His tabard of state was wrought with fine needlework and stretched tightly over the barrel of his chest. And now he was running his fingers up and down its stiff fronting as if striving to draw attention to it.

Big as he was, he did not altogether fill the doorway, for there was a smaller and slighter figure beside him. I was for an instant startled. The oval of that face was like enough to mine to stamp us kinsmen, just as his dark hair was also mine. His expression was bland, nearly characterless, but I guessed that behind it lurked a sharp wit. Of the two I would deem him the more dangerous.

From the first I knew these for the enemy. Jago’s descriptions fitted well. The giant was closer-kin to me than the other, for he was my half-brother Hlymer, while his companion was my sister’s betrothed, my cousin Rogear.

“Greetings, kinsmen.” I spoke first.

Hlymer did not lose his grin; it grew a little wider. “He is not furred or clawed, at least not as can be seen. I wonder in what manner his monster marking lies, Rogear.” He spoke as if I were a thing and not able to hear or sense his meaning. But if he meant to arouse some sign of anger he could play upon, he was a fool. I had taken his measure early.

Whether he would have carried on along that theme if left alone I was not to know, because Rogear then answered, not Hlymer’s comment, but my greeting, and courteously in kind, as if he never meant to do otherwise.

“And to you greeting, kinsman.”

Hlymer had a high voice that some big men own and a slight hesitancy of speech. But Rogear’s tone was warm and winning. Had I not known him to be what he was, I might have been deceived into believing that he had indeed sought me out to make me welcome.

They played my escort to the great hall. I did not know whether to count it as a relief or not when I saw that there were no chairs placed for ladies, that this meal at least was clearly intended only for the men. Undoubtedly my mother had chosen to keep to her own apartments. Since all knew the situation, none would comment on it.

I saw my father glance sharply at me now and then from his High Seat. My own place was down-table, between Hlymer and Rogear (though whether they had purposefully devised that or not, I did not know). If my father was not satisfied, there was little he could do without attracting unwelcome attention.

My companions’ tricks began early. Hlymer urged me to empty my wine horn, implying that any moderation on my part marked me in that company. Rogear’s smooth flow of talk was clearly designed to point up the fact that I was raw from some farmyard, without manners or wit. That neither accomplished their purposes must have galled. Hlymer grew sullen, scowling, muttering under his breath words I did not choose to hear. But Rogear showed no ill nature at the spoiling of whatever purpose he had in mind when we sat down.

In the end Hlymer was caught in his own trap—if he considered it a trap—and grew muddle-headed with drink, loud in his comments, until some of those around turned on him. They were young kinsmen of the visiting lords and, I think, frank in their desire for no trouble.

So began my life under my father’s roof. Luckily I did not have to spend much time within the range of Hlymer and Rogear. My father used the fact of my introduction and confirmation as his heir to keep me much with him, making me known to his neighbors, having me tutored in those details of the ceremony that occurred on the third day of the gathering.

I swore kin-oath before a formidable assemblage of dale lords, accepted my father’s gift-sword, and so passed in an hour from the status of untried and unconsidered youth to that of man and my father’s second in command. As such I was then admitted to the council concerning the men from Alizon.

Though all were agreed that there seemed to be some menace behind the coming of these men from overseas, there was sharp division as to how the situation was to be handled. In the end the conference broke, as such so often did in the dales, with no plan of action drawing us together after all.

Because of my new status in the household, I rode part way down the dale with the lord of Uppsdale to give him road-speed. On my way back my career as Heir of Ulmsdale was nearly finished before it had rightfully begun.

In courtesy to our guest, my sword was in peace-strings, and I had gone unmailed. But in the moment of danger I was warned. For there flashed into my mind such a sudden sensation of danger that I did not wait to loose the cords from my sword. Instead I plucked free my knife, at the same time throwing myself forward, so that the harsh hair of my mount’s mane rasped my cheek and chin. There was the sharp crack of a bolt’s passing, a burn across my shoulder—by so little I escaped death.

I knew the tricks the foresters used in savage infighting when the outlaws came raiding. So I threw my knife, to be answered with a choked cry from that man who had arisen between the rocks to sight on me a second time. Now I brought my sword around, charging a second man who had emerged, steel in hand. One of the battle-trained mount’s hoofs crushed down, and the man was gone, screaming as he rolled across the ground.

We had made an important capture, we discovered, for though these two wore the dress of drifting laborers who make their way from dale to dale at harvest time, they were indeed the very invaders we had been discussing at such weary length. One was dead; the other badly injured. My father called the Wisewoman of the dale and had her attend him, and light-headed with fever, he talked.

The purpose of their attack on me we did not learn. But there was much else of useful knowledge, and the threat lying over us grew darker. My father had me in with Jago and his trusted officers. Now he spoke his mind.

“I do not pretend to farseeing, but any man with wit in his head can understand that there is purpose and planning behind this. If we do not look ahead, we may—” He hesitated. “I do not know. New dangers mean new ways of dealing with them. We have always clung to the ways of our fathers—but will those serve us now? It may be that the day will soon come when we need friends to hold shields with us. I would draw to us now all assurances of those as we can.

“Therefore”—he smoothed out on the table around which we sat the map of the dalesside—“here is Uppsdale and the rest. To them we have already made clear what may come. Now let us warn the south—there we may first call upon Ithkrypt.”

Ithkrypt and the Lady Joisan. For long periods of time I had put her out of mind. Had the day now arrived when my father would order ours to be a marriage in fact? We had both reached an age when such were common.

I thought of my mother and the sister who had kept themselves stubbornly immured in their own apartments since I had come to Ulmskeep. Suddenly I knew that I would not have my Lady Joisan join them there as she would do if she came now. How could she help but be swayed by their attitude toward me? No, she must come willingly to me—or not at all!

But how could I make sure that she did so?

As that sudden warning of danger had saved my life, so again came an answer as clear and sharp as if spoken aloud.

Thus after my father had cautioned Jago as to what to say to Lord Cyart when he delivered the name-day gift to my lady, I spoke privately with my old tutor. I could not say why I had to do this; I did not want to; yet it was laid upon me as heavily as—a geas—is put upon some hero who cannot thereafter turn aside from it. I gave him the crystal gryphon, that he might put it in Lady Joisan’s own hand. Perhaps it was my true bride-price. I would not know until that moment when we did indeed at long last stand face to face.

6

Joisan

One difference did the news brought to my uncle from Ulmsdale make in my own plans for the future. It was decided that I would not be going there to join my lord this season as had been heretofore thought, but I must wait upon a more settled time. For if spies had been sent into Ulmsdale with such boldness, the enemies’ forethrust might soon be delivered. My uncle sent such a message with Jago. There came no protest from Lord Ulric or Lord Kerovan in return, so he deemed they agreed. Thereafter he sat sober-faced, talking with his armsmen and with messengers he sent in turn to Trevamper and those dales where he had kinship or old friendship.

It was a time of spreading uneasiness. We harvested more closely that year than any time I could remember, plundering all the wild berries from the field bushes, taking nuts from the woods trees, laying up what manner of stores we could. It was as if some foreshadowing of the starving years to come already lay across the land.

And in the next summer my uncle ordered the planting increased, with more fields cleared and sown. The weather was as uncertain as the threatening future, for there were a number of storms of great severity. Twice the roads were washed out, and we were isolated until men could rebuild them.

We had only ragged scraps of news when some lord’s messenger found his way to us. No more spies had come into Ulmsport. From the south there were rumors of strange ships that did not anchor openly in any dale port, but patrolled the coast. Then these were seen no more for a space, and we took a little comfort in that.

It appeared that my uncle feared the worst, for he sent his marshal to Trevamper, to return with two loads of the strange metal from the Waste and a smith who straightway set about fashioning arms and repairing the old. Much to my astonishment, my uncle had him take my measurements and prepare for me a coat of mail.

When Dame Math protested, he stared at her moodily, for his good humor was long since fled.

“Peace, sister. I would give the same to you, save that I know you would not wear it. But listen well, both of you. I believe that we face darker days than we have ever known. If word comes that these invaders come in force, we may find ourselves beaten from dale to dale. Thus—”

Dame Math had drawn a deep breath then, her indignation fading, another emotion on her face, an expression I could not read.

“Cyart—have—have you had then—?” She did not finish, but her apprehension was such that fear uncoiled within me.

“Have I dreamed? Yes, Math—once!”

“Spirit of Flame shelter us!” Her hands went to the set of silver hoops slung together at her girdle. She turned them swiftly in her fingers, her lips shaping those formal prayers that were the support of those in the House of Dames.

“As it was promised”—he looked at her—“so have I dreamed—once.”

“Twice more then to come.” Her coifed head came up, her lips firm. “It is a pity that the Warning does not measure time.”

“We are lucky, or perhaps cursed, to have it at all,” he returned. “Is it better to know there is blackness ahead and so live in foreshadow? Or be ignorant and meet it unwarned? Of the two I choose the warning. We can hold Ithkrypt if they come by river or over the hill ways—perhaps.” He shrugged. “You must be prepared at the worst to ride—not to the coast or southward—but to Norsdale, or even the Waste.”

“Yet no one has yet come save spies.”

“They will, Math. Have no doubt of that. They will come!”

When we were back in our own quarters I dared to ask a question. “What is this dream of which my lord speaks?”

She was standing by the window, gazing out in that blind way one does when one regards thoughts and not what lies beyond. At my words she turned her head.

“Dream—?” For a moment I thought she was not going to answer. Then she came away from the window, her fingers busy with her prayer hoops as if she drew comfort from them.

“It is our warning.” Obviously she spoke reluctantly. “To those vowed to the Flame such things are—ah, well, I cannot gainsay that it happens, and it is not of our doing. A generation ago Lord Randor, our father, took under his protection a Wisewoman who had been accused of dealing with the Old Ones. She was a quiet woman who lived alone, seeking out none. But she had a gift of tending animals, and her sheep were the finest in the dale. There were those who envied her. And as my lord has said concerning ugly stories, malice can be spread by tongue and lip alone.

“After the way of her calling she went alone into the wild places seeking herbs and strange knowledge. But if she knew much others did not, she made no parade of it, or used it to the hurt of any. Only the poisoned talk turned the dale against her. They arose one night to take her flock and drive her forth.

“Lord Randor had been in Trevamper, and they thought him still there, or they would not have dared. As they set torch to her roof place, he and his men came riding. He used his own whip on those who meant her harm; set her under his shield for all men to see.

“She said then that she could not stay, for her peace, so broken, could not be reclaimed. But she asked to see our mother, who was heavy with child. And she laid her hands upon the Lady Alys’ full belly, saying that she would have ease in the birthing—which was thankful hearing, for the lady had had one ill birth and a child dead of it, to her great sorrow.

“Then the Wisewoman said also that it would be a son, and he would have a gift. In times of great danger he would farsee by the means of dreaming. That with two such dreams he could take measures and escape whatever fate they foretold, but the third time would be ill.

“She went then from Ithkrypt and from the dale, and no man saw her go. But what she foretold came true, for our mother was safely delivered within a month of your uncle, the Lord Cyart. And your uncle did dream. The last time he dreamed, it was of the death of his lady, which happened when he was in the south and unable to come to her, though he killed a horse trying. So—if he dreams—we can believe.”

Thus I learned to wear mail because my uncle dreamed. And he taught me also how to use a light sword that had been his as a boy. Though I was not too apt a pupil with that, I proved myself apt with the bow and won the title of marksman. In days to come I was to thank my uncle for such skills many times over—when it was too late for him to know that he had truly given me life by his forethought.

So passed the Year of the Moss Wife, which should have seen me with my Lord Kerovan in Ulmsdale. Sometimes I took into my hands the crystal gryphon and held it, thinking of my lord and wondering what manner of man he was. In spite of all my hopes, no messenger riding between Ulmsdale and Ithkrypt brought me the picture that I desired. At first that angered me a little; then I made excuses, thinking that perhaps they had no one in Ulmsdale with the art of limning out a face, for such talent is not widely given. And in the present chancy times he could not seek afar for something of such small importance.

Though we had stores in plenty, we used them sparingly that winter, scanting even on the Yule feast as had never been done in the past, for my uncle was ever on guard. He had his own scouts riding the frontiers of our dale and awaited all messengers impatiently.

The Month of the Ice Dragon passed, and that of the Snow Bird in the new year was well begun when the news we had awaited came from the lips of a man who had battled through drifts to come to us, so stiff with cold he had to be lifted from a horse that thereafter fell and did not rise again.

Southward was war. The invasion had begun, and it was of such a sort as to startle even those lords who had tried to foresee and prepare. These devils from overseas did not fight with sword and bow after the manner of the dales. They brought ashore from their ships great piles of metal in which men hid, as if in monsters’ bellies. And these manmade monsters crawled ahead, shooting flames in great sweeps from their noses.

Men died in those flames or were crushed under the lumbering weight of the monsters. When the dalesmen retreated into their keeps, the monsters bore inward with their weight against the walls, bringing them down. Such a way of war was unknown, and flesh and blood could not stand against it.

Now that it was too late, the rallying call went forth. Those who lingered in their keeps to be eaten up one by one were the thick-headed and foolish ones. Others gathered into an army under the leadership of four of the southern lords. They had already cut off three of the monsters, which needed certain supplies to keep them running, and destroyed them. But our people had lost the coastline. So the invaders were pouring in more and more men, though their creeping monsters, happily, appeared not so numerous.

The summons came to the northern dales for men to build up a force to contain the invaders, to harass them and restrain them from picking off each dale in turn as one picks ripe plums from a tree.

Hard on the heels of that messenger came the first of the refugees, ones who had blood-claim on us. A party of armsmen escorted a litter and two women who rode, guided through the pass by one of my uncle’s scouts—the Lady Islaugha, Yngilda, and, in the litter, delirious with the fever of a wound, Toross, all now landless and homeless, with naught but what they could carry on their persons.

Yngilda, wed and widowed within two years, stared at me almost witlessly, and had to be led by the hand to the fire, have a cup placed in her fingers, and ordered firmly to drink. She did not seem to know where she was or what had happened to her, save that she was engulfed by an unending nightmare. Nor could we thereafter ever get any coherent story from her as to how she had managed to escape her husband’s keep, which was one of those the monsters had battered down.

—Somehow, led by one of her lord’s archers, she had made her way to the dale’s camp and there met the Lady Islaugha, come to tend her son, who had been hurt in one of the attacks against the monsters.

Cut off from any safety in the south, they had turned for shelter to us. Dame Math speedily took over the nursing of Toross, while his mother never left him day or night if she could help.

My uncle was plainly caught between two demands—that of the army battering the invaders and his inborn wish to protect his own, which was the dalesman’s heritage. But, because he had from the first argued that combination against the foe was our only hope, he chose the army.

He marshaled what forces he could without totally stripping the dale, leaving a small but well-trained troop to the command of Marshal Dagale. There was a thaw at the beginning of the Month of the Hawk and, taking advantage of that, he left.

I watched him alone from the gatetower (for Dame Math had been summoned to Toross, who had taken a turn for the worse), just as I had stood in the courtyard minutes earlier pouring the spiced journey drink from the war ewer into the horns of the men to wish them fair fortune. That ewer I still held. It was cunningly wrought in the form of a mounted warrior, the liquid pouring through the mouth of his horse. There was a slight drip from it into the snow. Red it was, like blood. Seeing it, I shivered and quickly smeared over the spot so that I might not see what could be a dark omen.

We kept Ithkrypt ever-prepared, not knowing—for no messengers came now—how went the war, only believing that it might come to us without warning. I wondered if my uncle had dreamed again, and what dire feelings those dreams had brought him. That we might never know.

There was one more heavy snow, closing the pass, which gave us an illusion of safety while it lasted. But spring came early that year. And with the second thaw a messenger from my uncle arrived, mainly concerned with the necessity for keeping the dale as much a fortress as we could. He said little of what the army in the south had done, and his messenger had only gloom to spread. There were no real battles. Our men had to turn to the tactics of Waste outlaws, making quick raids on enemy supply lines and camps, to do all the damage they could.

He had one bit of news: That Lord Ulric of Ulmsdale had sent a party south under the command of Lord Kerovan, but he himself had been ill. It was now thought that Lord Kerovan might return to take control at Ulmsdale if the invading army forced a landing at Ulmsport as they had at Jorby and other points along the coast.

That night, when I was free of the many duties that now were mine, I took up the crystal gryphon, as I had not for a long time. I thought on him who had sent it to me. Where did he lie this night? Under the stars with his sword to hand, not knowing when the battle-horn might blow to arms? I wished him well with all my heart, though I knew so little of him.

There was warmth against my palm, and the globe glowed in the dusky room. It did not in that moment seem strange to me; rather it was comforting, easing for a moment my burdens.

The globe was no longer clear. I could not see the gryphon. Rather there was a swirling mist within it, forming shadows—shadows that were struggling men. One was ringed about, and they bore in upon him. I cried out at the sight, though none of it was clear. And I was afraid that this talisman from my lord had now shown me his death. I would have torn the chain from my neck and thrown the thing away; yet that I could not do. The globe cleared, and the gryphon watched me with its red eyes. Surely my imagination alone had worked that.

“There you are!” Yngilda’s voice accused me. “Toross is very uneasy. They wish you to come.”

She watched me, I thought, jealously. Since she had come from behind the curtain of shock that had hidden her on her arrival, she was once again Yngilda of Trevamper. Sometimes I needed all my control not to allow my tongue sharpness in return when she spoke so, as if she were mistress here and I a lazy serving maid.

Toross mended slowly. His fever had yielded to Dame Math’s knowledge, but it left him very weak. We had discovered that sometimes I was able to coax him to eat or to keep him quiet when the need arose. For his sake I was willing to serve so. Yet lately I had come to dislike the way his hand clung to mine when I sat beside him and the strange way he looked at me and smiled, as if he had some claim on me that no one could deny.

This night I was impatient at such a summons, though I obeyed it, for I was still shaken by what I had seen, or imagined I had seen, in the globe. I willed myself not to believe that this had been a true farseeing. Though with men at desperate war, and my lord with them, I could well accept he was so struck down. At that moment I wished that I did have the farsight, or else that we had a Wisewoman with such skill. But Dame Math did not countenance the uses of that power.

That party of kinsmen had been only the first of the refugees to find their way hither. If my uncle had farseen that we might have to open our doors and supplies to such, he had not mentioned it. I wondered, marking each morn as I measured out the food for the day (which had become one of my more serious duties since Dame Math had the overseeing of the sick and wounded) whether we could eat even sparingly until harvest, if this continued.

For the most part the newcomers were lands-people, women and children, with a sprinkling of old or wounded men, few of them able to help us man any defense that might be needed. I had spoken with Dame Math and the marshal only the evening before, the three of us deciding that as soon as the weather lightened sufficiently, they would be sent on to the west, where there were dales untouched by war, even to the House of Dames at Norstead. We dared not keep the burden of useless hands here.

Now as I came into the chamber where Toross lay, I was trying to occupy my mind with plans for such an exodus, rather than allow myself to think of the shadows in the globe. About that I could do nothing. I must consider what I could do.

He was braced up by pillows, and it seemed to me that he looked better than he had since they brought him here. If this was so, why had they sent for me? Such a question was actually on my lips when the Lady Islaugha arose from a stool by the bed and moved away, he holding out his hand in welcome to me.

She did not glance in my direction, but took up a tray, and with a hasty murmur left the room.

“Joisan, come here where I may truly look upon you!” His voice was stronger also. “There are shadows beneath your eyes; you drive yourself too hard, dear heart!”

I had come to the stool, but I did not sit. Instead I studied his face closely. It was thin and white, with lines set by suffering. But there was reason in his eyes, not the cloudiness of a fevered mind. And that uneasiness I had felt with him filled me.

“We all have duties in plenty here, Toross. I do no more or less than my share.”

I spoke shortly, not knowing whether to comment on his using an endearment he had no right to give to me who was a wedded wife.

“Soon it will all be over,” he said. “In Norstead the war and its ugliness cannot touch you—”

“Norstead? What mean you, Toross? Those who go to Norstead are the refugees. We cannot keep them here, our supplies will not allow it. But our own people do not go. Perhaps you will ride with them—”

As soon as I said that, I felt again a slight lightening of burden. Life in Ithkrypt would be easier without these kinsfolk ever at my side.

“But you shall go also.” He said that as calmly as if there could be no question. “A maid has no place in a keep as good as besieged—”

Dame Math—surely she had not planned so behind my back? No, I knew her better. Then I lost that touch of panic—Toross had not the least authority over me. At my uncle’s orders, or at Kerovan’s, would I leave, but for no other.

“You forget, I am not a maid. My lord knows I am at Ithkrypt. He will come for me here. So I stay until that hour.”

Toross’ face flushed. “Joisan, do you not see? Why do you cling loyally to that one? He has not claimed you within the marriage term; that is already two months gone, is that not so? You can now give bride-refusal without any breaking of oaths. If he wanted you, would he not have come before this?”

“Through the ranks of the enemy, no doubt?” I countered. “Lord Kerovan leads his father’s armsmen in the south. This is no time to say that the days of agreement be strictly kept. Nor do I break bond unless my lord himself says he does not want me!” Perhaps that was not quite so, for I had as much pride as any woman. But I wished Toross to understand, not to put into blunt words what could not be unsaid. If he went farther, it would end all friendship between us, and I had liked him.

“You are free if you wish it,” he repeated stubbornly. “And if you are truthful, Joisan, you know that this is your wish. Surely that I—what I feel for you and have since first I saw you is plain. And you feel the same, if you will allow yourself to—”

“Untrue, Toross. What I tell you now is as strong as if I took Flame Oath—as I shall if you need that to make you understand. I am Lord Kerovan’s wife and so I will remain as long as we live and he does not deny it. As a wife it is honor-breaking and unfitting that I listen to such words as you have just said. I cannot come to you again!”

I turned and ran, though I heard him stir and give a gasp of pain, then cry out my name. I did not look back, but came into the great hall. There was the Lady Islaugha ladling broth from a pot into a bowl, and I went to her swiftly.

“Your son needs you,” I told her. “Do not ask me to go to him again.”

She looked up at me, and I could see in her face that she knew what had happened and that she hated me furiously because I had turned from him. To her he was her heart’s core, to which all must be allowed and given.

“You fool!” she spat at me.

“Not such a fool as I would be if I listened.” That much of a retort I allowed myself, and then stood aside as, with the slopping bowl still in her hands, she hurried towards Toross’ room.

I remained by the fire, stretching out my chilled hands to it. Was I a fool? What had I of Lord Kerovan to keep with me? A bauble of crystal—after eight years of marriage which was no marriage. Yet for me there had been no choice, and I did not regret what I had just done.

7

Kerovan

It seemed that I could hardly remember a time when there had not been war, so quickly does a man become used to a state of constant alarm, peril, and hardship. When the news of the invasion came, my father made ready to march southward at the summons of those most beset. But before he could ride, he thought better of it for two reasons. He still believed that Ulmsport was now one of the goals of the enemy fleet, and he was not well. He had taken a rheum that did not leave him, and was subject to bouts of fever and chills that were not for an armsman in the field.

Thus it was that I led those who marched under the gryphon banner when we went to the aid of our kinsmen. Jago pled to ride with me, but his old hurt was not such as would allow it, and I went with Marshal Yrugo.

My half-brother and Rogear had returned to the dale of my mother’s kin, as their true allegiance was to the lord there. I was not sorry to see them ride before I left. While there had never been an open break, nor had Hlymer, after the first few days of my coming to Ulmsdale, sought to provoke me, yet I remained uneasy in their company, knowing they were no friends.

In fact I had lain but little in Ulmskeep in those days; rather moving about the dale, staying in Ulmsport, collecting information for my father while he was confined to his bed. And in this I served two purposes: not only to act as his eyes and ears, but to learn more of this land and its people where, if fortune favored, I would some day govern.

At first I was met by covert hostility, even a degree of fear, and I knew Jago’s warnings had deep roots; the rumors of my strangeness had been used to cause a stir. But those who saw me during my casting up and down the dale, who reported to me, or took my orders, soon were as relaxed in my presence as they would be with any marshal or master. Jago told me after a space that those who had been in such contact now cried down any mutterings, saying that anyone with two eyes in his head could see I was no different in any manner from the next lord’s heir.

My half-brother had already done some disservice to any cause he might have wished to foster by his own defects of character. I had marked him as a bully on our first meeting, and that he was. To his mind no one of lesser rank had any wit or feelings and could be safely used as a man uses a tool. No, not quite, for the expert workman has a respect for a good tool and treats it carefully.

On the other hand Hlymer was able with weapons, and, for all his bulk, he was an expert swordsman with great endurance. He had a long reach, which put him to advantage over a slighter opponent such as myself. And I do not think in those days I would have cared to meet him in a duel.

He had a certain following within the household whom he relished parading before me now and then. I never went out of my way to attach any man to me, keeping to the circumspect role that I had taken when warned by Jago. Having been reared to find my company mainly in myself, I knew none of those small openings for friendship that could have led to companionship. I was not feared; nor was I loved. Always I was one apart.

I sometimes wondered during those days what my life might have been had not the invasion come. Jago, returning from his mission to Ithkrypt, had sought me out privately and put in my hand an embroidered case less than the length of my palm, made to contain a picture. He told me that my lady begged such of me in return.

Giving him my thanks, I waited until he was gone before I slipped the wooden-backed portrait out into the light and studied the face. I do not know what I expected—save I had hoped perhaps oddly, that Joisan was no great beauty. A fair face might make her the more unhappy to come to such a one as I was after being flattered and courted. There are certain types of beauty that attract men even against their wills.

What I looked upon now was the countenance of a girl, unmarked as yet, I thought, by any great sorrow or emotion. It was a thin face, with the eyes over-large in it. And those eyes were a shade that was neither green nor blue, but a mixture of both, unless he who had limned that picture had erred.

I believed that he did not, for I think he had not flattered her. She must be here as she was in life. No, she was no beauty, yet the face was one I remembered, even when I did not look upon it. Her hair, like my own, was darker than usual, for the dalesmen tend to be fair and ruddy. It was the brown of certain leaves in autumn, a brown with a red undernote.

Her face was wider at the brow than the chin, coming to a point there, and she had not been painted smiling, but looking outward with sober interest.

So this was Joisan. I think that holding her portrait so and looking upon it made me realize in truth and sharply, for the first time, that here was one to whom my life was bound and from whom I could not escape. Still that seemed an odd way to regard this thin, unsmiling girl—as if in some manner she threatened to curb my freedom. The thought made me a little ashamed, so I hurriedly slipped the picture back into its case and thrust it into my belt-pouch to get it both out of sight and out of mind.

Jago had told me she wished one in return. Her desire was natural. But even if I desired—which somehow I did not—to honor her request, there was no way of doing so. I knew no one in the dale who had the talent for limning. And somehow I did not want to ask any question to discover such a one. So to my lady’s first asked boon I made no reply. And in the passing days, each with a new burden of learning or peril, I forgot it—because I wanted to, perhaps.

But the picture remained in my pouch. Now and then I would look upon its casing, even start to slide out the picture, yet I never did. It was as if such looking might lead me to action I would later regret.

By all custom Joisan herself should have come to me before the end of the year. But custom was set aside by the rumors of war. And the next season found me fighting in the south.

Fighting—no, I could not claim to so much! My forester training made me no hero of battles, but rather one of those who skulked and sniffed about the enemy’s line of march, picking up scraps of information to be fed back to our own war camp.

The early disasters, when keep after keep along the coast has fallen to the metal monsters of Alizon, had at last battered us into the need of making a firm alliance among ourselves. That came very late. In the first place, the enemy, showing an ability to farsee and outguess us that was almost as superior to ours as their weapons were, had removed through murder several of the great southern lords who had personal popularity enough to serve as rallying points for our soldiers.

There were three remaining who were lucky or cautious enough to have escaped that weeding out. They formed a council of some authority. Thus we were able to present a more united front and we stopped suffering defeat after defeat, but used the country as another weapon, following the way of battle of Waste outlaws who believe in quick strikes and retreats without losing too many of their men.

The Year of the Fire Troll had seen the actual beginning of the invasion. We were well into the Year of the Leopard before we had our first small successes. Yet about those we dared not be proud. We had lost so much more than any gain, save slamming the invaders back into the sea again, would mean. The whole of the southern coast was theirs, and into three ports poured ever-fresh masses of men. It would seem, though, that their supply of such fearsome weapons as they had used in the first assaults—those metal monsters—was limited. Otherwise we could not have withstood them as long as we did, or made our retreat north and west any more than the disorganized scramble of a terrified rabble.

We took prisoners, and from some of those learned that the weapons we had come to fear the most were not truly of Alizon at all, but had been supplied by another people now engaged in war on the eastern continent where Alizon lay. And the reason for the invasion here was to prepare the way in time for these mightier strangers.

The men of Alizon, for all their arrogance, seemed fearful of these others whose weapons they had early used, and they threatened us with some terrible vengeance when the strangers had finished their own present struggle and turned their full attention on us.

But our lords decided that a fear in the future might be forgotten now. It was our duty to defend the dales with all we had, and hope we could indeed drive the invaders back into the waves. Privately I think none of us in those days was sure that we were not living in the last hours of our kind. Still no one spoke of surrender. For their usage of captives was such that death seemed more friendly.

I had returned from one of my scouts when I found a messenger from the battle leader of this portion of the country—Lord Imgry—awaiting me with an urgent summons. Bone-weary and hungry, I took a fresh mount and grabbed a round of dried-out journey bread, without even a lick of cheese to soften it, to gnaw on while I rode.

The messenger informed me that a warning of import had been flashed overland by the torch-and-shield method, and at its coming he had been sent to fetch me.

At least our system of placing men in the heights to use a torch against the bright reflection of a shield to signal had in part speeded up the alerts across country. But how I could be involved in such a message I could not guess. At that moment I was so achingly tired my wits were also sluggish.

Of the lords who comprised our war council, Lord Imgry was the least approachable. He was ever aloof. Still his planning was subtle and clever, and to him we owed most of our small successes. His appearance mirrored what seemed to be his inner nature. His face wore a cold expression. I do not think I ever saw him smile. He used men as tools, but did not waste them, and his care for his followers (as long as they served his purposes) was known. He saw there was food for their bellies and shelter if possible, and he shared any hardships in the field. Yet he had no close tie with anyone in his camp, nor, I believed, with any of the other lords either.

Imgry was respected, feared, and followed willingly by many. That he was ever loved I could not believe.

Now, as I came into his camp, a little dizzy from lack of sleep, long hours of riding, and too little food, I tried not to stagger as I dismounted. It was a point of honor to face Imgry with the same impassive front as he himself always presented under the most harrowing conditions.

He was not as old perhaps as my father, but he was a man one could never conceive of as having been truly young. From his cradle he must have been scheming and planning, if not for his own advancement (which I suspected), then for the advancement of some situation about him. There was a fire in the landsman’s rude cottage where he had his headquarters, and he stood before it, gazing into the flames as if there lay some scroll for his absorbed reading.

The men of his menie were camped outside. Only his armsman sat on a low stool polishing a battle helm with a dirty rag. A pot hung on its chain over the flames, and from it came a scent to bring juices into my mouth, though in other days I might have thought such a stew poor enough fare.

He turned his head as I shut the door behind me, to regard me with that sharp, measuring look that was one of his principal weapons against his own kind. Tired and worn as I was, I stiffened my will and went to meet him firmly.

“Kerovan of Ulmsdale.” He did not make a question of that, rather a statement.

I raised my gloved hand in half-salute as I would to any of the lords commanding.

“Herewith.”

“You are late.”

“I was on scout. I rode from camp at your message,” I returned levelly.

“So. And how went your scout?”

As tersely as I could, I told him what my handful of men and I had seen.

“So they advance along the Calder, do they? Yes, the rivers make them roads. But it is of Ulmsdale that I would speak. So far they have only landed in the south. But now Jorby has fallen—”

I tried to remember where Jorby might lie. But I was so tired it was hard to form any map picture in my mind. Jorby was port of Vastdale.

“Vastdale?” I asked.

Lord Imgry shrugged. “If it has not yet fallen it cannot hold out. But with Jorby in their hands they can edge farther north. And Ulmsport is only beyond the Cape of Black Winds. If they can strike in there and land a large enough force, they will come down from the north and crack us like a marax shell in a cook’s chopper!”

This was enough to push aside the heavy burden of my fatigue. The force I had brought south with me was a small one, but every man in it had been a grievous loss to Ulmsdale. And since then there had been five deaths among our number, and three so sorely wounded they could not raise weapons now, if ever. If the enemy invaded at Ulmsport, I knew that my father and his people would not retreat, but neither could they hope to hold for long against the odds those of Alizon would throw against them. It would mean the ruinous end of all I had known.

As he spoke, Lord Imgry took a bowl from the table, scooping into it with a long-handled ladle some of the simmering stew. He put the steaming bowl back on the table and made a gesture.

“Eat. You look as if you would be the better for it.”

There was little grace about that invitation, but I did not need much urging. His armsman rose and pushed his stool over for me. On that I collapsed rather than sat, reaching for the bowl, too hot yet to dip into, but, having shed my riding gloves, I warmed my chilled hands by cupping them about its sides.

“I have had no news out of Ulmsdale for—” How long had it been? One day in my mind slid into another. It seemed that I had always been tired, hungry, cold, under the shadow of fear—and this had gone on forever.

“It would be wise for you to ride north.” Imgry had gone back to the fire, not turning his head toward me as he spoke. “We cannot spare you any force of men, not more than one armsman—”

It rasped my pride that he would deem me fearful of traveling without an escort. I thought that my services as scout must have proved that I could manage such a ride without detaching any force save myself from his company.

“I can go alone,” I said shortly. And began sipping at the stew, drinking it from the bowl since there was no spoon offered me. It was heartening and I relished it.

He made no protest. “Well enough. You should ride with the morn. I shall send a messenger to your men, and you can remain here.”

I spent the rest of the night wrapped in my cloak on the floor of the house. And I did indeed ride with the first light, two journey cakes in a travel pouch, and a fresh mount that Lord Imgry’s armsman brought to me. His lord did not bid me farewell, nor did he leave me good-speed wishes.

The way north could not be straight, and not always could I follow any road if I would make speed, taking mainly sheep tracks and old cattle paths. There were times when I dismounted and led my horse, working a way along steep dale walls.

I carried a fire torch with me and could have had a fire to warm and brighten the nights I sheltered in some shepherd’s hut, but I did not. For this was wild country, and we had already heard rumors that the wolves of the Waste were raiding inland, finding rich pickings in the dales where the fighting men had gone. For my mail and weapons, my mount, I would be target enough to draw such.

Mainly I spent the nights in dales, at keeps where I was kept talking late by the leaders of pitiful garrisons to supply the latest news, or in inns where the villagers were not so openly demanding but none the less eager to hear.

On the fifth day, well after nooning, I saw the Giant’s Fist, that beacon crag of my own homedale. There were clouds overhead, and the wind was chill. I thought it well to speed my pace. The rough traveling was wearing on my horse, and I had been trying to favor him. But if I dropped down to the trader’s road, I would lose time now, so I kept to the pasture trails.

Not that that saved me. They must have had their watchers in the crags ready for me to walk into a trap. And walk into it I did, leading my plodding horse, just at the boundaries of Ulmsdale.

There was no warning given me as there had been that other time when death had lain in ambush. So I went to what might have been slaughter with the helplessness of a sheep at butchering time.

The land here was made for such a deed, as I had to come along a narrow path on the edge of a drop. My horse threw up its head and nickered. But the alert was too late. A crashing blow between my shoulders made me loose the reins and totter forward. Then, for a moment of pure horror, I was falling out and down.

Darkness about me—dark and pain that ebbed and flowed with every breath I drew. I could not think, only feel. Yet some instinct or need to survive set me scrabbling feebly with my hands. And that urge worked also in my darkened mind, so that even though I could not think coherently, I was dimly aware that I was lying face-down, my head and shoulders lower than the rest of me, jammed in among bushes.

I believe that my fall must have ended in a slide and that those bushes saved my life by halting my progress down to the rocks at the foot of the drop. If my attackers were watching me from above, they must have thought I had fallen to my death, or they certainly would have made a way down to finish me with a handy rock.

Of such facts I was not then aware, only of my pain of body and a dim need to better my position. I was crawling before I was conscious of what I must do. And my struggles led to another slide and more dark.

The second time I recovered my senses it was because of water, ice cold with the chill of a hill spring as it washed against my cheek. Sputtering, choking, I jerked up my head, trying to roll away from that flood. A moment later I was head-down once more, lapping at the water, its coldness adding to my shivering chill, but still clearing my head, ordering my thoughts.

How long I had lain in my first fall I did not know, but it was dark now, and that dusk was not a figment of my weakened brain I was sure. The moon was rising, unusually bright and clear. I pulled myself up to a sitting position.

It had not been Waste outlaws who had attacked me, or they would have come to plunder my mail and weapons and so finished me off. The thought awoke a horror in me. Had Lord Imgry’s suggestion already come to a terrible conclusion here? Had the invaders moved in to occupy Ulmsdale, and had one of their scout parties met me?

Yet that attack had so much of an ambush about it, had been delivered in so stealthy a fashion, that I could not believe it had been launched by the enemies I had faced in the south. No, there was something too secret in it.

I began to explore my body for hurts and thought I was lucky that no bones seemed to be broken. That I was badly bruised and had a lump on my head was the worst. Perhaps my mail and the bushes in which I had landed had protected me from worse injury. But I was shaking from shock and chill, and found when I tried to drag myself to my feet I could not stand, but had to drop down again, clutching to a rocky spur to steady myself.

There was no sign of my horse. Had it been taken by those who had thrown me over? Where were they now? The thought that they might be searching for me made me fumble to draw sword and lay it, bare-bladed, across my knee. I was not too far from the keep. If I could get to my feet and get on I would reach the first of the pasture fields. But every movement racked me so with pain that my breath hissed between my teeth, and I had to bite down upon my lower lip until I tasted my own blood before I could steady myself.

I had been much-favored by fortune in escaping with my life. But I was in no manner able to defend myself now. Therefore, until I got back a measure of strength, I had to move slowly and with all caution.

What I heard were the usual night sounds—birds, animals, such as were nocturnal in their lives. There was no wind, and the night seemed to me abnormally still, as if waiting. Waiting for what—or whom?

Now and then I shifted position, each time testing my muscles and limbs. At last I was able to struggle to my feet and keep that position, in spite of the fact that the ground heaved under me. The quiet, except for the continued murmur of the water, continued. Surely no one could come near without revealing himself.

I essayed a step or two, planting my boots firmly on the rocking ground, looking ahead for hand-holds to keep me upright. Then I saw a wall, the moon making its stones brightly silver. Toward this I headed and then along it, pausing ever to listen.

Soon I reached a section without cover, and there I was to my hands and knees, creeping along the stones, still alert to all around me.

Some distance away sheep grazed, and that peaceful sight was reassuring. Had there been raiders in the dale, certainly this field would have been swept bare. Or were those real sheep? The wintertime tales of the landsmen came to mind, of phantom sheep and cattle coming to join the real. And of how on certain nights or misty mornings, no herder could get the same count twice of his flock. If that were the case, then he could not, above all, return them to the fold; for to pen the real and the phantom together was to give the phantom power over the real.

I pushed aside such fancies and concentrated on the labor at hand: to win the end of the field and wall. And then to head for the keep.

When I did reach the end of the wall I could look directly at the keep where it stood on its spur base jutting out over the road to Ulmsport. In the moonlight it was clear and bright, light enough to let me see the lord’s standard on its tower pole.

That did not seem to be as it should. And then, as if to make all plain, there came a light wind from the east, lifting the edge of what hung on the pole, pulling out to display the standard widely if only for a long moment—but enough to let me see.

I do not know whether I uttered any sound or not. But within me there was a cry. For only one reason would a lord’s banner ever hang at night, tattered, in such ragged strips. And that was to signify death!

Ulmsdale’s banner slashed, which meant that my father was—

I caught at the wall against the weakness that strove to bring me to my knees.

Ulric of Ulmsdale was dead. Knowing that, I could guess, or thought I could, why there had been an ambush set up in the hills. They must have been expecting me. Though if my father’s death had been sent as a message, it had missed me on the way. Those who wanted to prevent my arrival must have had men at every southern entrance to the dale to make sure of me.

To proceed now might well be to walk into dire danger which I was not yet prepared to face. I must make sure of my path before I ventured along it.

8

Joisan

Though I had willed Toross and his kinswomen to be out of Ithkrypt, their going was not so easily accomplished, for Toross still kept to his bed. Nor could I suggest that he be taken away by litter. But I did avoid his chamber. That I had garnered the ill will of Islaugha and Yngilda went without saying. Luckily there were duties enough to keep me out of their way.

In riding skirt, with a packet of cheese and bread for my nooning, I rode with an armsman in the morning, inspecting the fields; visiting our outposts in the hills. I wore mail now and that sword my uncle had given me, and none raised their voices to say such a guise did not become me, for these were times when each turned hand to what must be done.

A sickness had come upon us without warning, bringing fever and chills and deep, racking coughs. By some favor of the Flame I escaped the worst of this, and so into my hands came more and more authority. For Dame Math was one of the early stricken. And, while she also left her bed among the first, she was plainly weakened, though she attended to her duties with little care for herself.

Marshal Dagale was also among the sick, and during those days his men turned to me for orders. We manned the lookout posts as best we might and tried also to get in the crops. It was a hard season, for there was much to be done and few on their feet for the doing of it. Days and nights were lost to me in a general sea of weariness from which there was no rest.

All who could labor, did. Even the little children dropped seeds into the waiting furrows left by plows their mothers guided. But we could only do so much, planting less than the year before. By midsummer day, instead of celebrating by a feast, I rather selected those who must leave us for Norsdale and saw them off, mainly afoot, for we could not spare mounts.

Toross did not go with them. His hurt had mended now enough so he could get about, and I hoped he would have the courtesy to leave. But he did not. Rather he fell into companionship with Dagale, acting as his second in command when the Marshal once again took up his duties.

I was never happy during those weeks. Though Toross did not seek me out, yet I felt his eyes ever upon me, his will like an invisible cord striving to draw me as he wished. I could only hope that my will to resist was as strong. I liked Toross for himself, as I had from our first meeting. In those days he had had a gaiety of temper that was in contrast to the somber life I had always known. He was gentle and considerate and talked amusingly. His face was comely, and he knew well how to make himself agreeable in company. I had seen the eyes of the maids in the household follow him and had also felt his charm.

His wound had sobered him somewhat. Still he lightened our hearts in those days, and I did not deny that he had much to give. But his quiet confidence that I would go to him, yield—that I could not understand.

I know that dalesmen look upon women as possessions, perhaps to be wooed and indulged for a season, and then, once won, to be a part of the household like a hawk, hound, or horse. We are bartered by our kin for our dowry rights, for alliances between dales. And in such matters we have no voice to oppose what we may fear or hate.

For a woman to set herself up in opposition to any alliance made for her is to suggest she may have some commerce with a dark power. And if accused of that she can be in dire danger, even from those to whom she has the closest blood ties. But this does not make it an easy portion to swallow.

My way had been relatively easy in such matters—until now. First, Dame Math was a woman of presence and spirit, one of the Dames who had the respect of men and a place of her own in the dales. Her brother had made her the head of his household and deferred to her, taking her counsel in many matters.

Being discreet, she had worked within the frame of custom, not in open opposition to it. She had seen to it that I learned much that was forbidden or deemed unnecessary for most maids. I could read and write, having been tutored at the House of Dames. And I had not been set to small tasks elsewhere when she and Lord Cyart conferred about important matters, but had been encouraged to listen. Dame Math sometimes thereafter quizzed me as to the decision I might have made on this matter or that, always impressing on me that such knowledge was needful for a lady of a keep.

My uncle had taken obedience to his decrees as his right, but in addition he had often explained the reason for them, not given orders only, though he had a nasty temper and could be sharp. But as I grew older, he asked my will in small matters, and allowed me to have it.

I knew that there was speculation among the dalesmen concerning me. I had heritage from my father, but not in land, as he was second son and half-brother to Cyart. Cyart could, by custom, name me heir, even though I was a girl, but the choice could also fall on Toross because of his sex.

Until the southland had been overrun, Toross had been heir in the direct line to his father’s dale. Now he was as lacking in lordship as any second or third son. And his continued assumption that I would come to him was, a small nagging doubt told me, perhaps not because he was moon-struck with my person (for I had no such vanity) but that he might so have a double claim upon Cyart as heir-to-be.

Perhaps I did him wrong in that, but that this thought moved in Islaugha I am sure. It made her try to veil her dislike of me and strive rather to throw us together and foster a closer relationship. I began to feel much as a hare coursed by two hounds during those summer days, and clung closer and closer to duties I could use as a screen.

The leaving of the first refugee party at midsummer was a relief, though not as great a one as I had hoped for. I had an additional worry concerning Dame Math. Though she kept to her tasks, I was well aware that she tired very easily; that beneath her coif her face grew thinner, her skin more transparent. She often kept her hands clasped tight about her prayer hoops now, and, in spite of that tight grip, her fingers shook in a way she could not control.

I spent all the time I could with her, between us a question that neither of us, I believe, wanted to ask or answer. But she talked more than she had in all the years before, as if she had a very short time left in which to impart to me so much. The lore of healing and herbs I already knew a little, since that had been a part of her lessons since my childhood. Besides that she spoke of other things, some of it strange hearing, and so I learned much of what perhaps was seldom shared between one generation and the next.

That we lived in a haunted land we all knew, for a person need only turn head from one side to another to sight some remnant of the Old Ones. They were old dangers that could be stirred into life by the unwary—that, too, all knew. Children were warned against straying—venturing into places where there was an odd stillness, more like waiting than abandonment.

I was drawn into the edge of a secret that was not of my seeking, nor of Dame Math’s save that duty, by which she ordered her life, urged it on her. The Flame to which the Dames gave homage was not of the Power as the Old Ones knew it. And at most times those who professed the Flame shunned what lay in the hills, invoking their own source of Power against the alien one. But it seemed that even one of the House of Dames could be driven in times of stress to seek aid elsewhere.

She came to me early one morning, her poor face even more worn and haggard as she stood plucking nervously at her prayer hoops, gazing over my head at the wall as if she did not want to meet my eyes.

“Joisan, all is not well with Cyart—”

“You have had a message?” I wondered why I had not heard the way horn. In those days such were always used between friend and friend on the approach to any keep.

“None by word of mouth, or in runes,” she answered slowly. “I have it here.” She allowed the hoops to dangle from her belt-chain and lifted her thin fingers to smooth the band across her forehead.

“A dream?” Did Math share that strange heritage?

“Not as clear as a dream. But I know ill has come to him, somewhere, somehow. I would go to the moon-well—”

“It is not night, and neither is it the time of the full moon,” I reminded her.

“But water from that well can be used—Joisan, this I must do. But—but I do not think I can go alone—that far—”

She swayed and put her hand to the wall to steady herself. I hurried to her, and her weight came against me so I had trouble guiding her to a stool.

“I must go—I must!” Her voice rose, and there was in it an undercurrent of alarm that frightened me. When one who has always been rock-firm becomes unstable, it is as if the very walls are about to topple.

“You shall. Can you ride?”

There were beads of moisture showing on her upper lip. Looking at her straightly in that moment I saw that Dame Math had become an old woman. As if overnight all the weight of years had crushed down upon her, which was as frightening as her unsteadiness.

Some of her former determination stiffened her shoulders, brought her head upright again.

“I must. Get me one of the ponies, Joisan.”

Leaning on me heavily, she came out into the courtyard, and I sent a stable boy running for a pony: those placid, ambling beasts we kept mainly for the carrying of supplies. By the time he returned, Dame Math was as one who has sipped a reviving cordial. She mounted without too much difficulty, and I led the pony across the fields to that very well where I had once slipped in the nighttime to ask a question of my own.

If any marked our going, they left us alone. The hour was early enough so that I think most were still at their morning food. As I tramped beside the pony, I felt the pinch of hunger at my own middle.

“Cyart—” Dame Math’s voice was hardly above a whisper, yet it was as if she called and hoped to have an answer to her calling. I had never thought much about the tie between those two, but the ring of that name, uttered in her voice, told me much at that hour. For all their outward matter-of-fact dealing with each other there was deep feeling too.

We came to the well. When I had been there at night before, I had not seen clearly those traces by which others had often times sought out a sign of the Power that was said to be there. There were well-worn stones rimming in the well, and beyond those, bushes. To the bushes things were tied. Some were merely scraps of ribbon, color lost through the action of wind and weather. Others were crudely fashioned of straw or twig—manikins or stick horses, sheep—all twirling and bobbling within sight of the water, perhaps set there to signify the desire of the petitioners.

I helped Dame Math from the pony’s back, guiding her forward a step or two until she pulled free from my aid and walked as might one who needed no help. With her goal in sight, a semblance of strength flowed back into her.

From a deep skirt pocket she brought forth a bowl no larger than could be fitted into the hollow of her hand. It was of silver, well-burnished. And I remembered that silver was supposed to be the favorite metal of the Old Ones, just as opals, pearls, jade, and amber were their jewels.

She gestured me to stand beside her and pointed to a plant that grew at the lip of the well itself. It had wide leaves of dark green veined with white, and I did not remember ever seeing its like before.

“Take a leaf,” she told me, “and with it dip to fill this bowl.”

The leaf, pinched, gave forth a pleasant aroma, and it seemed to twist almost of its own will into a cup, so I might spoon water into the bowl. The water in the well was very high, its surface only a little below the level of its stone rim. Three times did I dip and pour before she said, “Enough!”

She held the bowl between her hands and raised it, blowing gently on the liquid within so it was riffled by her breath.

“It is not water of the Ninth Wave, which is the best of all for this purpose, but it will do.”

She ceased to puff, and the water was smooth. Over it she gave me one of those compelling looks that had always brought my obedience.

“Think of Cyart! Hold him as a picture in your mind.”

I tried to draw a mind picture of my uncle as last I had looked upon him, and when he had drunk the stirrup cup of my pouring before riding south. I was surprised that the months between had dulled my memory so quickly, because I found it hard to recall him with any clarity. Yet I had known him all my life long.

“There is that about you”—Dame Math looked at me narrowly—“which gainsays this. What do you have on you, Joisan, which obstructs the Power?”

What did I have about me? My hand went to my bosom where the crystal gryphon lay in hiding. Reluctantly, urged to this by the stern eyes of Dame Math, I brought forth the globe.

“Hang it over there!”

Such was her authority that I obeyed her, looping the chain near one of those straw people lashed to a branch. She watched and then turned her gaze again to the bowl.

“Think of Cyart!” she demanded once again.

Now it was as if a door opened and I could see him, clear in every detail.

“Brother!” I heard Dame Math cry out. Then there were no more words, only a desolate sound. She stared down into the small bowl, her face very bleak and old.

“So be it.” She took one step and then another, turned over the bowl and let the water splash back into the well. “So be it!”

Harsh, startingly clear, a sound tore the morning air, the alarm gong from the keep tower! That which we had feared for so long had come upon us—the enemy was in sight!

The pony whinnied and jerked at its tether, so I reached for the reins. As I struggled to control the frightened animal, the gong continued to beat. Its heavy ring sounded in echoes from the hills like the thunder of a rising storm. I saw Dame Math hold out the bowl as if offering it to some unseen presence, allowing it to drop into the well. Then she came to me.

The need for action was like youth poured into her frail body. Yet her face was one knowing hope no longer, looking forward into a night without end.

“Cyart has dreamed his final dream,” she said, as she mounted the sweating pony. Of him she did not speak again; perhaps because she could not. For a moment or two I wondered what she had seen in the bowl. Then the alarm shook everything from my mind save the fact that we must discover what was happening at the keep.

The news was ill indeed, and Dagale broke it to us as he marshaled his men for what all knew could be no defense, only a desperate attempt to buy time for the rest of us. The invaders were coming upriver, the easiest road to us from the coast. They had boats, our scouts reported, that were not sailed or oared, but still moved steadily against the current. And we of Ithkrypt had little time.

We had long ago decided that to remain in the keep and to be battered out of it was deadly folly. It was better for those who could not fight to take to the hills and struggle westward. So we had even rehearsed such retreats.

At the first boom of the gong, the herdsmen had been on the move, and the women and children also, riding ponies or tramping away with their bundles, heading west. I went swiftly to my chamber, pulled on with haste my mail coat and my sword, and took up my heavy cloak and the saddle bags in which I had packed what I could. Yngilda was gone, garments thrown on the floor, her portion of our chamber looking as if it had already been plundered.

I sped down the hall to the short stairs up to Dame Math’s room. She sat in her high-backed chair, resting across her knees something I had never seen in her hands before, a staff, or wand. It was ivory white, and along its surface were carven runes.

“Dame—your cloak—your bag—” I looked about me for those that we were to have ever-ready. But her chamber was as it had always been; there was no sign she meant to quit it.

“We must be off!” I hoped she was not so weak she could not rise and go. I could aid her, to be sure, but I had not the strength to carry her forth.

She shook her head very slowly. Now I saw her breath came in gasps as she could not draw enough air into her laboring lungs.

“Go—” A whispering voice came with visible effort from her. “Go—at once—Joisan!”

“I cannot leave you here. Dagale will fight to cover our going. But he will not hold the keep. You know what has been decided.”

“I know—and—” She raised the wand. “For long I have followed the Flame and put aside all that I once knew. But when hope is gone and the heart also, then may one fight as best one can. I do now what I must do, and in the doing perhaps I may avenge Cyart and those who rode with him.” As she spoke, her voice grew stronger word by word, and she straightened in her chair, though she made no effort to rise from it.

“We must go!” I put my hand on her shoulder. Under my touch she was firm and hard, and I knew that, unwilling, I could not force her from her seat.

“You must go, Joisan. For you are young, and there may still be a future before you. Leave me. This is the last command I shall lay upon you. Leave me to my own reckoning with those who will come—at their peril!”

She closed her eyes, and her lips moved to shape words I could not hear, as if she prayed. But she did not turn her prayer hoops, only kept tight hold on the wand. That moved as if it had the power to do so of itself. Its point dropped to the floor and there scratched back and forth busily as if sketching runes, yet it left no marks one could see.

I knew that her will was such she could not now be stirred. Nor did she look up to bid me any farewell when I spoke one to her. It was as if she had withdrawn into some far place and she had forgotten my existence.

Loath to go, I lingered in the doorway, wondering if I could summon men and have her carried out by force, sure she was not now responsible in word or deed. Perhaps she read my thought in my hesitancy, for her eyes opened wide once again, and in her loose grip the wand turned, pointed to me as a spear might be aimed.

“Fool—in this hour I die—I have read it. Leave me pride of House, girl, and let me do what I can to make the enemy sorry he ever came to Ithkrypt. A blood-debt he already owes me, and that I shall claim! It will not be a bad ending for one of the House of the Broken Sword. See you do as well when your own time is upon you, Joisan.”

The wand twirled as it pointed to me. And I went, nor could I do otherwise, for this was like a geas laid upon me. A will and power greater than my own controlled me utterly.

“Joisan!” The gong no longer beat from the watch-tower, so I heard that call of my name, “Joisan, where are you?”

I stumbled down the steps and saw Toross standing there, his war hood laced in place, only a portion of his face visible.

“What are you waiting for?” His voice was angry and he strode forward, seized me by the shoulder and dragged me toward the door. “You must mount and ride—as if the night friends themselves were upon us—as well they may be!”

“Dame Math—she will not come—”

He glanced at the stair and then at me, shaking his head.

“Then she must stay! We have no time. Already Dagale is at arms on the river bank. They—they are like a river in flood themselves! And they have weapons that can slay at a greater distance than any bolt or arrow can fly. Come—”

He pulled me over the doorsill of the great hall and into the open. There was a horse there, a second by the gate. He half-threw me into the saddle.

“Ride!”

“And you?”

“To the river, where else? We shall fall back when we get the shield signal that our people are in the upper pass. Even as we planned.”

He slapped my mount upon the flank so that the nervous beast made a great bound forward and I gave all my attention to bringing it once more under control.

I could hear far-off shouting, together with other sounds that crackled, unlike any weapon I could imagine. By the time I had my horse again under control, I could see that Toross was riding in the opposite direction toward the river. I was tempted to head after him, only there I would have been far more of a hindrance than a help. To encourage those who fled, to keep them going, was my part of the battle. Once in the rougher ground of the heights, we would split apart into smaller bands, each under the guide of some herder or forester and so, hopefully, win our way westward to whatever manner of safety would be found in High Hallack now.

But before I came to the point where the trail I followed left the dale bottom a stab of memory caught me. The crystal gryphon—I had left it snared on the bush beside the well! And I had to have it. I swung my mount’s head around, sending him across a field of ripe grain, not caring now that he trampled the crop. There was the darker ring of trees marking the well-site. I could pick up the gryphon, angle in a different direction, and lose very little time.

Taking heed of nothing but the trees around the well and what I had to find there, I rode for it and slid from the saddle almost before the horse came to a full halt. But I had enough good sense to throw my reins over a bush.

I pushed through the screen of growth, setting jogging and waving many of those tokens netted there. The gryphon—yes! A moment later it was in my hand, safe again. How could I ever have been so foolish as to let it go from me? I could not slip the chain over my mail coif and hood, but I loosened the fastening at my throat long enough to thrust my treasure well within.

Still tugging at the lacings to make them fast, I started for my horse. There was a loud nicker, but I was too full of relief at finding the gryphon to pay the heed I should have to that. So I walked straight into danger as heedlessly as the dim-witted.

They must have seen me ride up and set their trap in a short time, favored by the fact that I was so intent upon the bauble that had brought me here. As I reached for the reins of my horse, they rose about me with a skill suggesting this was not the first time they had played such a game. Out of nowhere spun a loop that fell neatly over my shoulders and was jerked expertly tight, pinning my arms fast. I was captive, through my own folly, to those of Alizon.

9

Kerovan

So my father was dead, and I had been left for dead. Who now ruled in Ulmskeep? Jago—my mind fastened on the only friend I might now find within those walls ahead. During the months I had spent here as my father’s deputy, I had acceptance but no following to which I might look now for backing. But I must somehow learn what had happened.

I drew into a screen of brush at the fence corner. The night wind was chill, and I shivered, being unable to stop that trembling of my body any effort produced. The keep would be closed at this hour except for—

Now I could think more clearly. Perhaps the shock of seeing the tattered banner had cleared my head. There was the Escape Way—

I do not know what brought our forefathers up from the south. They left no records, only a curious silence concerning the reason for their migration. But the fortifications they built here, their way of life, hinted that they had lived in a state of peril. For the petty warrings they engaged in here after their coming could never have been so severe as to necessitate the precautions they used.

They did not have to fight against the Old Ones for the dales. Why then the keeps—one strong one built in each dale—with those secret exit points known only to each lord and his direct heir? As if each need look forward to some time of special danger when such a bolt-hole would be in need.

Therefore, Ulmskeep had an entrance open to me, my father having shown it to me secretly late one night. I had a way into the heart of what might now be enemy territory and, if I were to learn anything, that I must take. There was this also—I licked my lips tasting blood, a sorry drink for me—there was this: perhaps the last place they would search for me would be within that grim building with its tattered, drooping banner.

I took my bearings from the keep and began to move with more surety now that I had a goal in mind, though I did not relinquish any of my care not to be seen. It was some distance I must go, working my way carefully from wall to wall, from one bit of cover to the next. There were lights in the keep windows and in those of the village. One by one those winked out as I kept on at a snail’s pace, for I had schooled myself to patience, knowing that haste might betray me.

A barking dog at a farmhouse, well up-slope, kept me frozen with a pounding heart until a man shouted angrily and the brute was still. So it took me some time to reach the place I hunted.

Ulmsdale was freer of those relics of the Old Ones than most of the northern dales. In fact it was only here, in the shadow of the Giant’s Fist, that there were signs any had found their way into this valley before the coming of my own race. And the monument to the past was not an impressive one—merely a platform leveled among the stones of these heights, for what purpose no man might say.

The only remarkable thing about this smoothed stretch of stone was that deep-carven in it was that creature from which the first lord of Ulmsdale had taken his symbol—a gryphon. Even in this uncertain light the lines of the creature’s body were clear enough to give me the bearings I needed.

So guided, I scrambled up the slope a little farther, my bruised, stiff body protesting every action, until I found that place in the wall of the valley where care had been taken generations ago to set stones about a cunningly concealed break.

I edged past those into a dark pocket. Until that moment I had not realized the difficulties of this path without a light. Drawing my sword, I used it to sound out walls and footing, trying to remember as clearly as I could what lay before me now.

All too soon the sword met empty space, and I had found my destination. I sheathed my blade and crouched to feel about with my bare hands. Yes, this was the lip of the vent down which I must go. I considered the descent. In the first place the boots fashioned to hide my feet were built only for ordinary service. I distrusted them when I had to use toe holds in the dark. In fact I was not even sure my hoofed feet would serve there, but at least they would be better free. So I wrested off my boots and fastened them to my belt.

The substance of my hoofs was not affected by the chill of the stone, seeming not to have the sensitivity of flesh, and somehow with my feet free I felt secure enough to swing over and test beneath me for footholds. I need not have worried; my hoofs settled well into each and, heartened, I began the descent. I could not recall how deep I must go. In fact when my father had brought me hither we had not climbed this; he had only shown it to me from below.

Thus I went down into the dark, and the space seemed to be endless. It was not. A reaching hoof touched solid surface, and very cautiously I placed the other hoof beside it. Now—a light—

Fumbling in my pouch, I brought out my strike-light, keeping it ready in one hand while I felt along the wall with the other. My fingers caught at a knob of wood. I snapped the light, and the torch flared, dazzling me with sudden illumination.

Not stopping to put on my boots, for I relished more and more the freedom of my hoofs, hitherto so cramped by concealment, I started along a downward-sloping way which would bring me under the dale-floor to the keep. It was a long way and, I think, more than half of it was a natural fault, perhaps the bed of some stream diverted by nature or man. The roof was low, and in several places I went to hands and knees to pass.

But here I did not have to fear discovery, and I made the fastest pace I could over the sand and gravel. The slope went sharply downward for a space; then it leveled out, and I knew that I was now in the valley. The keep could not be too far ahead.

My torch shone on a break in the wall of the passage, crude steps going up at a steep angle—though the passage kept on—into a sea-cave of which my father had told me. I thus had two ways of escape.

I began to climb, knowing this stair was a long one. It went up not only through the crag on which the keep was built, but within the wall of that to my father’s own chamber. Halfway up I paused and rubbed out the torch on the wall. Now I needed both hands for the holds here, and there were peepholes along the way where light might betray me.

The first of these was in the barracks. A cresset burned low against the far wall, leaving the room much-shadowed. There were some men asleep here, but only a handful.

I climbed again and looked now into the great hall from a position somewhere behind my father’s high seat. There was a fire on the hearth which was never allowed to go out. A serving-man nodded on a bench near it and two hounds were curled up there—nothing else. This was normal enough at this hour.

The end of the passage was before me, and I could no longer put off reaching it—though I dreaded what might lie ahead.

Men freely use the word “love” to cover both light emotions, such as affection and liking, and viler ones such as lust, or strong attachments that last through life. I had never been one to use it at all—for my life in youth had been devoid of much emotion—fear, awe, respect were more real to me than “love.” I did not “love” my father. In the days that I had spent with him after he had given me public acknowledgment, I respected him and was loyally attached to his service.

Yet there always stood between us the manner of my upbringing; that I had been hidden away. Though he had come to see me during those years, had brought me small gifts such as boys delight in, had provided well for me, yet I had always sensed in him an uneasiness when we were together. I could not tell if that came from his reaction to my deformity, or whether he reproached himself for his treatment of me and yet could not bring himself to defy my mother’s feelings to name me openly son. I knew only, from very early years, that our relationship was not akin to that of other fathers and sons. And for a long time I thought that the fault was mine, so I was ashamed and guilty in his presence.

Thus we built a wall stone by stone, each adding to it, and we could not break it down. Which was a great loss, I know, for Ulric of Ulmsdale was such a man as I could have “loved,” had that emotion ever been allowed to grow in me. Now as I went to his chamber through the dark of this hidden way, I felt a sense of loss such as had never emptied me before. As if I had once stood at the door of a room filled with all the good things of this world and yet had been prevented from entering in.

My hand was on the latch of the panel that opened inward, concealed by the back of the huge, curtained bed. I inched this open, listening. Almost I swung it shut again, for I heard voices and saw the gleam of lamplight. But I remembered that so well-concealed was this way, that unless I crawled around the bed to boldly confront the speakers, they would not know of my presence. And certainly this was a chance to learn exactly what might be going on. Thus I squeezed through the door and edged around the head of the bed, the stiff, embroidered folds of the curtains providing excellent cover, until I found a slit to let me see as well as hear.

There were four in the room, two using for a seat the long chest against the wall; one on a stool; and the last in the high-backed chair in which my father had sat when I bid him farewell.

Hlymer and Rogear. On the stool a girl. I caught my breath, for her face—leaving out those points of difference that were due to her sex—could have been my own! And on the chair—I had no doubt that for the first time in my life I was looking upon the Lady Tephana.

She wore the ashen gray robes of a widow, but she had thrown back the concealing veil, though the folds of it still covered her hair. Her face was so youthful she could have been her daughter’s elder sister by only a year or two. There was nothing in her features of Hlymer. By her cast of countenance I was indeed her son.

I felt no emotion, only curiosity, as I looked at her. Since I had reached the age of understanding, I had been aware that for all purposes of living, I was motherless, and I had accepted that fact. She had not even kin-tie to me as I watched her now.

She was speaking swiftly. Her hands, long-fingered, and with a beauty that drew the eyes, flashed in and out in quick gestures as she spoke. But what I saw and resented, was that on her thumb was the gleam of my father’s signet, which only the ruler in Ulmsdale had the right to wear and which should have weighted my own forefinger at this moment.

“They are fools! And because they are fools, should we be also? When the news comes that Kerovan has been killed in the south, then Lisana will be heir, and her lord”—she nodded to Rogear—“will command here in her name. I tell you that these invaders offer good terms. They need Ulmsport, but they do not want to fight for it. A fight will gain nothing for us, for we cannot hold long against what they can land. Who gains by death and destruction? The terms are generous; we save this valley by such bargaining—”

“Willingly will I be Lisana’s lord and Ulmsdale’s,” Rogear answered, as she paused for breath. “As to the rest—” He shook his head. “That is another matter. It is easy to make a bargain. To keep it does not always suit the one in power. We can open gates but not close them again thereafter. They know just how weak we are.”

“Weak? Are we? Say you that, Rogear?” Lady Tephana gazed at him directly. “Foolish boy, do you then discount the inherited might of our kin? I do not believe that these invaders have met their like before.”

He was still smiling, that small, secret smile which had always led me to think that he carried within him some belief in himself that far outreached what others saw in him. It was as if he could draw upon some secret weapon as devastating in its way as those the invaders had earlier sent against us.

“So, my dear lady, you think to invoke those? But take second thoughts or even third upon that subject. What may answer comes as its own whim and may not easily be controlled if it takes its own road. We are kinsmen, but we are not truly of the blood.”

I saw her face flush, and she pointed her finger at him. “Do you dare to speak so to me, Rogear!” Her voice rose higher.

“I am not your late lord, my dear lady.” If she threatened him with that gesture, he did not show it. “His line was already cursed, remember, thus making him easily malleable to anything pertaining to them. I have the same countermeasures bred in me that you have. I cannot be so easily shaped and ordered. Though even your lord escaped you in the end, did he not? He named his body-heir in spite of your spells and potions—”

Her face changed in a subtle way that made me suddenly queasy, as if something had sickened my inner spirit. There was evil in this room. I could smell it; see it sweep in to fill that vessel waiting to hold it—that form of woman I refused to believe had ever given me life.

“What did you deal with, my dear lady, in that shrine when you bore my so-detested cousin, I wonder?” Rogear continued, still smiling, though Hlymer drew away along the bench as if he expected his mother to loose some blast in which he did not want to be caught. “What bargain did you make—or was it made before my cousin’s birth? Did you cast a spell to bring Ulmsdale’s lord to your bed as your husband? For you have had long dealings with them, and not with those on the White Path either. No, do not try that on me. Do you think I ever come here unprotected?”

Her pointing finger had been drawing swift lines. Just as Riwal, when he bade me farewell, had gestured in the air, and as I had seen thereafter a faint gleam of light marking the symbol he had traced in blessing, so did her finger leave behind a marking, or pattern. The marking was smoky-dark. Still it could be seen in the subdued light of the chamber, as if its darkness had the evil, black quality.

Rogear’s hand was up before his face. He held it palm-out, and all those hand lines that we bear from birth and that are said by the Wisewomen to foretell our futures stood out on his flesh as if they had been traced in red. Behind that hand he still smiled faintly.

I heard a short, bitten-off cry from the Lady Tephana, and her hand dropped back into her lap. On her thumb the ring looked dull, as if its honest fire had been eaten out by what she had done moments earlier. I longed to free it from her flesh.

“Yes,” Rogear continued, “you are not the only one, my dear lady, to go seeking strong allies in hidden places. It is born into us to have a taste for such matters. Now, having made sure that we are equally matched, let us return to the matter at hand. Your amiable son—” He paused and nodded slightly at Hlymer, though Hlymer looked anything but amiable. He sat hunched-over, darting glances first at his mother and then at Rogear, as if he feared one and had begun to hate the other.

“Since your amiable son has rid us of the other barrier standing in the way of possession of Ulmsdale, we must indeed make our plans. But I do not altogether agree that we should deal with the invaders.”

“And why not?” she demanded. “Do you fear them? You, who have that”—she nodded to his hand—“to stand to your defense?”

“No, I do not fear them personally. But neither do I intend to give tamely into their hands any advantage. I believe, my dear lady, that you can indeed summon thunder from the hills to counteract any treachery that they might plan. But that which can be so summoned will not take note of selective destruction, and I do not propose to lose Ulmsdale in defending it.”

“You will lose it anyway then.” For the first time Lisana broke silence. “Also, dear Rogear”—there was little liking in her voice as she named him so—“we are not yet handfasted. Are you not a little beforehand in naming yourself lord here?”

She spoke coolly, and regarded him straight-eyed, measuringly, as if they were not betrothed but, rather, opponents at a gamingboard.

“True spoken, my sweeting,” he agreed amiably. Had I been Lisana I would not have found that amiability pleasing, though. “Do you intend to be lord as well as lady here?”

“I intend not to be any piece in your gaming, Rogear,” she returned swiftly, and there was no sign of uneasiness in her.

He stared at her as one who studied some new and perhaps unaccountable thing. I thought I saw his eyes narrow a fraction. And then he looked not to her but to her mother.

“Congratulations, my dear lady. So you have made sure of your power this way also.”

“Naturally. Did you expect any less?” She laughed. Then he echoed that laughter.

“Indeed not, my dear lady. Ah, what a happy household we shall be. I can see many amusing evenings before us, trying this spell and that, testing each other’s defenses.”

“There will be no evenings at all,” growled Hlymer, “unless we unite upon what is to be done to hold Ulmsdale. And I see little chance of that where the great lords have failed. Ulmsport is open—they need only to bring up a goodly force and land. The keep can hold out for a day, mayhap two—but—” He shrugged. “You have heard all the tales; we shall end like the rest.”

“I wonder.” Rogear had lost that shadow-smile. He glanced from Lady Tephana to Lisana and back again. “What if they cannot land? Wind and wave, wind and wave—”

Lady Tephana was intent, regarding him in the same searching way he had earlier looked upon Lisana.

“That takes the Power.”

“Which you have in part, and my sweeting”—he nodded to the girl—“has in part, and to which I can add. Wind and wave have this advantage also. It will seem a natural catastrophe and one they will not fault us for. We shall be blameless. Follow in part your suggestion, my dear lady, but do not treat, only seem to treat. Then wind and wave—”

She moistened her lips with tongue tip. “It is a mighty summoning.”

“Perhaps one beyond your powers?”

“Not so!” She was quick to answer. “But it will take the three of us truly united to do such a thing, and we must have life force to draw upon.”

He shrugged. “It is a pity that we cleared the path so well of your lord’s devoted followers. Hate can feed such a force, and we could have used their hatred. That grumbler Jago, for example.”

“He drew steel on me!” Hlymer shrilled. “As if a broken man could touch me!”

“A broken man, no,” Rogear agreed. “Had he been the man he once was—well, I do not know, brother-to-be. At any rate there are others to lend us life force. If we decide—”

Lisana had lost her cool withdrawal. I saw her eyes shine with an avid hunger.

“We will!” she cried out. “Oh, we will!”

For the first time Rogear showed a faint shadow of uneasiness, and he spoke to the Lady Tephana rather than to her daughter.

“Best curb your witchling, my dear lady. Some rush where prudence walks with double care.”

Lisana was on her feet so suddenly, her stool spun away as her skirts caught it.

“Do not lesson me, Rogear! Look to your own Power, if you have as much as you claim!”

“We shall all look to our Power,” Lady Tephana replied. “But such a plan takes preparation, and that we must turn to now.” She arose, and Hlymer went quickly to her side, offering his arm in clumsy courtesy. It was almost, I thought, as if he would rather be in her company than Rogear’s. Lisana followed, and Rogear was left alone.

My hand went to my sword hilt. What I had heard here filled me with horror, though it explained much. That these were working with Dark Power was plain, and they were not fresh come to such dealings either. That they—or at least the Lady Tephana (for never again in my mind did I think of her as my mother)—were old in such work, they had admitted. If my father had been ensorcelled, as Rogear had hinted, that explained much, and I could now forgive him all. The wall was broken—too late for me to tell him so.

What they would enter upon now was some great summoning of the Power. Perhaps it could save Ulmsdale—for their own purposes. But dared I set my own love of country against them? If they aroused some of the ancient forces of this brooding land against the enemy successfully, then, even though I hated them, still I must count them allies at this moment. So I watched Rogear go out from that chamber, and I did not challenge him.

There was one thought only in my mind. I had no idea what might be the consequences of the act they spoke of. In spite of the signs set on me at birth, I had none of the talent those three appeared to possess. There was only one in this land now from whom I could seek enlightenment, to learn whether I must let them do this to keep the dale free, or else turn what I could set against them to ensure that they fail. Which was the greater danger—the summoning of the Power or allowing the invaders foothold here? I could not judge, but perhaps Riwal, with his learning in those matters, might.

There was nothing in my father’s keep now but a trap, and the sooner I was out of it the better, not only for my own safety, but perhaps for the future safety of the dale itself. However, as I went, I cherished in my mind those words concerning Jago. That Hlymer had forced him to a fight I did not doubt. And someday he would account to me for that.

By the time I reached the gryphon-marked stone on the hillside, the night was far-advanced. Weariness added to the pain of bruises and of my aching head, yet I was driven by time. The sooner I reached Riwal the better. To do so on foot would be a lengthy journey, and hunger gnawed at me.

How I might have fared had I not met the trader, I do not know. But as I skulked along the dale rim, I came upon one of those traces, not really a road, but in the summer seasons were used by hunters and traders—especially those bound for the Waste.

I had taken to cover when I heard the clip-clop of hoofs on the stone outcrop that comprised part of the trail, since I was fairly sure that, even if he who came were not an enemy, he might report me where it would do the least good. Only when I saw the manner of man who rode one rough-coated pony and led another, was I a little easier.

He did not pass, but halted directly opposite the thicket wherein I had taken cover and raised a peeled branch he carried in his hand. Not quite a staff, nor yet a whip, for it was too thick for that.

“Lord Kerovan—” He did not raise his voice. In fact he spoke in a low tone, yet the words carried clearly to where I lay.

He wore the leather and rough wool of a poor traveler. Now he pushed back his hood as if in revealing himself fully he would make himself known to me. Yet I did not recall seeing his face before.

Unlike most of the traders he was clean-jawed, his skin showing little beard-marking. And his features had a slightly strange cast, not quite those of a dalesman. His hair was clipped short and stood out from his skull very thickly, more like the fur of an animal pelt than any hair I had ever seen. Also it was brindled in color, neither gray nor brown nor black, but a mixture of those colors.

“Lord Kerovan!” He repeated my name and this time he beckoned with his wand.

I could not resist that gesture. Whether I would or no, I had to go to him, rising to my feet and pushing through the bushes that I might show myself to one who might be a deadly enemy.

10

Joisan

Captive to Alizon! All those tales of dark horror that the refugees told made me expect to be surrounded by demons as I was jerked farther into the open by the rope that bound my arms to my body. Still, these were only men, save that there was that in their faces which made my mouth go dry with fear. A quick death can be faced, but there are other things—

They spoke among themselves, laughing, and their tongue was strange. He who seemed leader among them came to me and pulled at the still-loose neck-thongs of my mail, bringing off my hood so my hair, loosened by his roughness, spilled out across my shoulders. He stroked that, and I longed for a dagger in my hand. But they were careful to make fast their noose, and I had no chance.

Thus they brought me back to Ithkrypt, or nearly there. Before we entered the courtyard where the enemy clustered, there was a flash of light from the tower, followed by a thunderous sound. Then, my head ringing from the fearful noise, near-shaken to the ground, I saw such a thing as I would not have believed. Ithkrypt’s walls began to sway; great gaps appeared between the blocks of which they were built. And the walls toppled outward, catching and crushing many of the enemy, while a choking dust arose.

I heard screams and cries through that cloud, and I tried to run. But fortune was against me, for the end of the rope that bound me kept me helplessly anchored.

Had this been the work of those monsters the invaders commanded? I was sure not, for they would not so have killed their own men.

Dame Math! But how had she done this? I was dumbstruck by the evidence of such Power as I believed only one of the Old Ones could conjure; the Old Ones or some Wisewoman who had had dealings with the forbidden. Wisewoman—Dame—such were opposed. But before she had surrendered her will to the Flame and the Sisterhood that paid it homage, what else had Math been? At any rate the blood-price she had taken here was worthy of our House, as she had promised. In spite of my own fear I rejoiced that this was so. Valiant had our men always been. My own father had fallen facing five Waste outlaws, taking four of them with him. And now these from overseas would know that our women could fight also!

But this was my only chance to get away. I tugged against the rope. The murk of the dust was clearing, enough to show what held me prisoner. He who had led me here lay with the rope about his own waist, and he was face-down, a broken hunk of stone between his shoulders.

I thought him dead, and that made me more frenzied in my attempt to free myself. For to be bound to a dead man was the last horror. Yet the cord held, and I was as well-tethered as a horse at an inn door.

So they found me when they came reeling out of the rubble of Ithkrypt and pounding up from the river. Of our men there were no signs, save for three bodies we had passed on our way here. I could only believe that Dagale’s force had paid for our escape time with their lives.

Only for a short space were the enemy so disorganized. I regretted bitterly that we could not have taken advantage of that; wreaked more damage among them while they were shocked by what happened. Now I did not doubt that any prisoners they might take would pay for this unexpected slaughter. Such fear rode me as to freeze my body, half-stupify my mind.

Dame Math had had the best of it. She had gone to her death, yes, but in a fitting manner. It was plain I would not be allowed such an ending, though they did not strike me down when they came upon me still bound to my captor. Instead they slashed through the rope and dragged me with them out of the ruin of Ithkrypt down to the river where there was a group of officers.

One among them had the speech of the dales, though he mouthed words gutturally. I was still so deafened by that terrible blast that I could hardly hear him. When I did not reply to his questions, he slapped my face viciously, one side and then the other.

Tears of pain spilled from my eyes and I knew shame that these should see them. I summoned what small pride was left me and tried to face them squarely and with my head up, as became a daughter of my House.

“What—was—there?” He thrust his face close to mine, and his breath was foul. He had a brush of beard on his chin, and his cheeks above that were splotched with red, his nose veined and swollen. His eyes were keen and cruel, and he was not, I was sure, a stupid man.

There was no need to conceal what I thought I knew, perhaps more reason to say it, since even these invaders must know that High Hallack held many secrets, most of them not to be plumbed by humankind.

“The Power,” I said.

I think he read in my face that I spoke a truth I believed. One of his companions asked a question in that other tongue, and he made answer, though he did not look from me to the questioner. A moment later came his second demand.

“Where is the witch?”

Again I told him the truth. Though we did not use that term, I understood his meaning.

“She was within.”

“Well enough.” Now he did turn away and make his report to the others, and they spoke for some time among themselves.

I felt very weak and tired and wished I could drop to the ground. My head hurt still, as if the assault of sound upon my ears had injured something far inside my skull, and the despair of my captivity was a leaden cloak about me. Yet I held as well as I could to my resolve to keep my pride.

He faced me again, this time looking me up and down searchingly. In his beard his thick lips grinned in some ways like those men who had first taken me.

“You are no farm wench, not with mail on your back. I am thinking we have caught us a prize. But more of that later.”

So I was allowed a respite, for at his orders I was left on the river bank, where their boats clustered and men were still leaping ashore. To my eyes they seemed as many as the stalks of grain in the fields, and there was no end to them. How could our small force have hoped to halt them even for an instant, any more than a single pebble might halt the flow of a spring flood.

There I also saw what had happened to our men. Some had fallen in battle. Those were the lucky ones. For the rest—no, I shall try to hold the doors of memory against what happened to them. I believed now the invaders were not humans but demons.

I think they took pains for me to see all this in order to break me. But in that they judged me wrong, for it stiffened rather than bent me to any will of theirs. It is not how a man dies, but how he bears that final act that has meaning. And the same is true for a woman of the dales. In me grew a coldness like the steel from the Waste, twice-forged and stronger than any other thing in our world. I swore that Dame Math was right, and I must contrive to make my own passing count against the enemy.

But it seemed they now forgot me. I was still bound, and they made the rope fast to one of the boat-chains. Men came and looked at me from time to time as if I were a prisoned beast. Their hands were on my hair and my face, and they jabbered at me in their own tongue, doubtless warning of much I would certainly rue. But none did more than that. It was coming night, and they had set up a line of campfires and were driving in sheep and cattle, slaughtering some of them.

A mounted party had gone down-dale in pursuit of our people. I besought the Flame that those fleeing had won the rugged land where their guides could lead them by routes only dalesmen knew.

Once I saw a small party return, heard women screaming for a while, and knew that some of our people had been run down. I tried to close my ears, shut off thought. This was that place of Outer Darkness come to earth, that place to which evil crawls and from which it issues forth again—and to that evil there is no end.

I tried to plan my own ending before they could turn to me for amusement. The river—could I hurl myself into the waters there? If I could edge along the chain to which my rope had been tied, surely there was a chance.

Toross—dully I wondered what had become of him. I had not seen his body with those others. Perhaps he had escaped at the last. If so, I could still find a small, unfrozen part in me that wished him well. Oddly at that thought his face was vivid in my mind, as sharp as if he stood before my eyes. Within my mail and under my jerkin something was warm.

The gryphon. That unlucky bauble which had doomed me to this state. The gryphon was growing ever warmer, almost like a brand laid to my skin. From it flooded not only that heat, but something else, a strength, a belief in myself against all the evidence that reason provided for my outer eye and ear. It was like some calm voice assuring me that there was a way out, and that my delivery was at hand, though I knew this could not be.

Fear became a small, far-off thing, easy to put aside. My sight was more acute, my hearing keener. My hearing—!

Even through the clamor of the camp I detected that sound. There was something coming—down-river!

How I knew this, I could not have told. But I knew I must be ready. Perhaps I was only dazed by fatigue, by my fear and despair. Yet I was as certain of this rescue as I was that I still lived and breathed.

“Joisan!” A thread of whisper, but to my alerted ears so near a shout, I feared all the camp might hear it.

I was afraid to answer aloud, but I turned my head a fraction in the direction from which they had come, hoping the gesture would signal my recognition.

“Edge—this—way—” The words came from the river. “If—you—can—”

Torturous and slow were my efforts to obey. I kept watch on all about me, my back to where that voice whispered, lest I somehow betray this hope. Now I felt wet hands reach up to mine, the swing of a knife against the rope. That fell away, my stiffened hands were caught and held; my rescuer was half in the water.

“Slip over!” he ordered.

I wore mail and the dragging skirt. I could not hope to swim so burdened. Yet it would be better to meet death cleanly. Now I waited as a party of the invaders tramped along the path. They did not glance in my direction. Then I rolled over and down into the water, felt hands catch and drag me even as I gulped air and went under.

We were in the grip of the current where the stream ran the swiftest, and my struggles would not surface me for long. I choked and thought this was the end. Still that other fought for me, with what poor aid I could give. We came against a rock where he clung and held my head above the flood.

His face was close to mine, and it was no surprise to see that Toross held me so.

“Let me go. You have given me clean death, kinsman. For that I thank you—”

“I give you life!” he replied, and there was stark determination in his face. “Hold you here, Joisan!” He set my hands to the rock and I held. He crawled and pulled himself up into the air, and then by main force, for I had little strength left, dragged me up beside him.

By fortune we had come across the river into rough pastureland, downstream from the ruins of Ithkrypt, and between us and the western hills was now the full invader force. Toross was shivering, and I saw he had stripped to his linen undershirt, his mail gone. There was a raw slash across his cheek where blood welled.

“Up!” He caught my arm, pulling at me. My long skirt, so water-soaked, was like a trap about my legs, and the mail was a deadweight upon me. But I stumbled forward, unable to believe that we had actually achieved this much and that the alarm for my escape had not yet sounded.

Thus we reached some rocks and fell, rather than dropped, behind them. I fumbled with the lacings of my mail, wanting to be rid of that, but Toross caught my hands.

“No, you may need that yet. We are far from out of the dragon’s jaws.”

Of that I needed no reminding. I had no weapon, and, as far as I could see, Toross carried none except the knife. Perhaps he had found a sword too weighty for that swim. We were reduced to that single blade and perhaps stones snatched from the ground if we were cornered.

“We must take the hills.” In the growing dark he gestured up-slope. “And try to work our way around those butchers to join our people. But we had better wait for full dark.”

Something in me urged action, to get as far from those fires, the noise across the river, as we could. Yet what he said made sense. To draw upon one’s patience was a new ordeal, I now discovered.

“How—how did you come alive from the river battle?” I asked.

He touched that slash on his face, which had now clotted again, giving him a bloody mask to wear. “I took this in the last charge. It stunned me enough to make them think me dead. When I realized that I must be dead to escape, I played that part. Then I got away—but I saw them bring you from Ithkrypt. What happened there, Joisan? Why did they turn their destruction against their own men?”

“That was not done by the invaders; it was Dame Math. She used the Power.”

For a moment he was silent and then he demanded, “But how can such a thing be? She was a Dame—a Dame of Norstead Abbey.”

“It seemed that before she swore to the Flame she had other knowledge. It was her choice to call upon that in the end. Do you not think we can move now, Toross?” I was shivering in my wet clothing, trying hard to control the shaking of my body. Though it was late summer, this eve brought with it the foretaste of autumn.

“They will be waiting.” He was on his knees, peering back to the river.

“The enemy—have they already climbed so high in the dale?” It appeared our small gift of fortune was fast-dwindling.

“No—Angarl, Rudo.” Toross named the armsmen who had come with him out of the south. “My mother sent them back, and they were to press me into going into the hills. Had I not seen you in the hands of our enemies, the Hounds of Alizon, I might have yielded to them.”

That we were not alone, if we could reach his men, gave me a spark of comfort, though both men were old, sour and dour. Rudo was one-eyed, and Angarl had lost a hand many years before.

So we began a stealthy withdrawal. I could not honestly understand why we were not sighted, though we took to all the cover the rough ground afforded. That there had come no outcry on my escape was also a mystery. I had expected them early on my trail—unless they believed I had perished in the river.

We found a narrow track winding upward, and Toross pushed the pace here. I would not admit that I found the going increasingly difficult, but strained my energy to the utmost to keep up. That he had laid me under debt to him weighed on me also. I was grateful, as anyone would be grateful for their life given back to them. Yet that Toross was the giver could cause future difficulties. But there was no reason to look forward to those—what mattered now was that we continued to claw our way through the dark.

Though I had lived in the dale all my life, I had only a general idea of where we might be heading. We needed to get west, but to do so and pass any enemy patrol, we must first head south. My wet boots became a torture to my feet. Twice I stopped and wrung out my skirt as best I could. Now it was plastered to my legs, chafing my skin.

Toross headed on and up with confidence, as if he knew exactly where he was bound, and I could only follow and trust in him.

We struck another track, faint, but at least easier footing than the way we had climbed, and this angled west. If the enemy had not combed this high, then we were heading around them. Once we heard more screams out of the night from the opposite bank of the river. Again I tried to close my ears to what I could in no way help. Toross did not falter in stride as those sounds reached us, but padded on. If they moved him to anger I did not know it. We did not talk as we went, saving all our breath for our exertions.

In spite of every effort, we could not move silently. There were scrapes of footfall on rock, the crack of a branch underfoot, the swish of our passing through brush. And after each of those small betrayals we froze to wait and listen.

Still our fortune held. The moon was rising—a full moon like a great lantern in the sky. It could show us the pitfalls before us, but it could also display us to a hunter. Toross halted. Now he caught my arm and drew me close to whisper in my ear. “We must cross the river at the traders’ ford. It is the only way to reach the hill-paths.”

He was right, of course, but to me that was our death blow. There was no way we could cross that well-known ford without being sighted. Even if by some miracle we could get across—why, then we had a long distance through open fields to traverse.

“We cannot try the ford; they will see us.”

“Have you a better plan then, Joisan?”

“None save that we keep west on this side of the river. It is all sheep pasturage and steep hillsides where they cannot ride us down without warning.”

“Ride us down!” He made a bitter sound that was not laughter. “They need only point one of their weapons at us from afar and we die. I have seen what I have seen!”

“Better such a death than to fall into their hands. The ford is too great a risk.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But I do not know this way. If you do, Joisan, it will be you who will lead us.”

What I knew of this upper dale was little enough, and I tried hard to call it to mind. My hope was a wooded section that was like a cloak. This had none too good a reputation with the dalesmen and was seldom entered, mainly because it had been rumored to cover some ruin of the Old Ones. Such tales were enough to ward off intruders, and, had we been fleeing any dales pursuit, to gain the edge of that wood would have given us freedom. But the invaders had no such traditions to stay them. Now I said nothing of the legend, only that I thought it would give us shelter. And if we could make our way through it, we might then continue about the rim of the dale and straight northwest to join our kin.

As we went, the effort slowed our pace. I fought the great weariness of my body, made bone and muscle answer my will alone. How it was with Toross I did not know, but he was not hurrying as we stumbled on.

The fires of the enemy camp were well behind us. Twice we lay face-down, hardly breathing, on the hillside, while men moved below, hoping we could so blend in with the earth. And each time, while my heart beat wildly, I heard them move on.

So we came to the edge of the wood, and there our luck failed us just when hope was the strongest. For there was a shout behind and a harsh crack of noise. Toross cried out and swept me on before him, pushing me into the underbrush of the ill-omened place. I felt him sag and fall, and turned to catch him by the shoulders, half-dragging, half-leading him on with me.

He stumbled forward, almost his whole weight resting on me. In that moment I thought of Dame Math. Oh, that I had her wand in my hand, the Power strong in me so that I could blast those behind.

Fire burned on my breast, so hot and fierce a flame, I staggered and loosed my grip on Toross so that he fell heavily to the ground moaning. I tore at the lacings of my mail shirt to bring out what was causing that torment.

The gryphon globe in my hand was burning hot. I would have hurled it from me, but I could not. Before me as I stood came the sounds of men running, calling out. The glow of the globe; that would reveal us in an instant! Yet I could not throw or drop it. I could only stand and hold it so, a lamp to draw death to us.

Still the running feet did not come. Rather they bore away, downhill along the fringe of the wood. I heard an excited shout or two from the lower slope—almost as if they harried some quarry. But how could they when we were here with the globe as a beacon?

My ears reported that they were indeed drawing off. I could hardly believe that was the truth. With the globe as a battle torch this thin screen of brush could not conceal us. But we were free, with the chase going away.

Toross moaned faintly, and I bent over him. There was a growing stain on his shirt, a thread of blood trickling from his half-open mouth. What could I do? We must not stay here—I was sure that at any moment they would return.

I dropped the globe to my breast, where it lay blazing. There were no burns on my flesh where I had cupped that orb against my will, though in those moments when I had held it I might have been grasping a red-hot coal.

“Toross!” To move him might do his wound great harm; to leave him here certainly meant his death. I had no choice. I must get him on his feet and moving!

The blaze of the globe lit his crumpled body. As I bent over him, setting my hands in his armpits, he stirred, opened his eyes and stared straight up, not seeming to see me at all.

As my hands tightened on him, I had a curious sensation such as I had never experienced before. Spreading out from that blazing crystal on my breast came waves of energy. They coursed and rippled down my arms, through my fingers—

Toross moaned again and coughed, spewing forth blood and froth. But he wavered upward at my pull. When he was on his feet I set my shoulder under his, drew his arm about me, and staggered on. His feet moved clumsily, and most of the weight of his body rested on me, but I managed to keep him moving.

What saved us was that, though a screen of brush ringed the wood, there was comparatively little undergrowth beneath the trees, so we tottered along, heading away from the dangers in the open. I did not know how far I could manage to half-carry Toross, but I would keep going as long as I could.

I am not sure when I noticed that we were following a road—or at least a walk of stones that gave us almost level footing. In the light of the globe, for it continued to blaze, I could see the pavement, moss-grown, but quite straight. Toross coughed again with blood following. And we came out under the moon’s rays, the woods a dark wall as we stood in a paved place into which that white-silver radiance poured with unnatural force, as if it were focused directly on us with all the strength the moon could ever have.

11

Kerovan

On the hill-slope I, Kerovan of Ulmsdale, faced the wayfarer in trader’s clothing, who was no trader, as I knew when his staff beckoned me out of hiding against my will. I put my hand to sword hilt as I came, but he smiled, gently, tolerantly, as one might upon a frightened child.

“Lord Kerovan, no unfriend faces you.” He dropped the point of the staff.

Instantly I was freed from that compulsion. But I had no desire to dodge back and away again, for there was that in his face which promised truth.

“Who are you?” Perhaps I demanded that more abruptly than courtesy allowed.

“What is a name?” he returned. The point of his wand now touched the ground and shifted here and there, though he did not watch it, as if he wrote runes in the dust. “A traveler may have many names. Let it suffice for now that in these dales I am called Neevor.”

I thought he gave me a quick, searching look, as if to see if I knew that name. But my want of understanding must have been plain to read. I thought he sighed, as if regretting something lost.

“I have known Ulmsdale in the past,” he continued. “And to the House of Ulric I have been no unfriend—nor do I stand aside when one of his blood needs aid. Where do you go, Lord Kerovan?”

I began to suspect who—or what—he might be. And I was awed. But because he stood in the guise he did I felt no fear.

“I go to the forest lodge, seeking Riwal.”

“Riwal—he was a seeker of roads, worshiping knowledge above all things. Though he never entered the wide door, he stood on its threshold, and those I serve did not deny him.”

“You say of him ‘was.’ Where is he now?”

Again that wand-tip, which had come to rest, scrabbled across the earth.

“There are roads amany. Understand only that the one he had taken hence is not yours to follow.”

I snatched at what might lie behind that evasion, believing the worst, because of all I had seen and heard, not only this night but in the months in the south.

“You mean he is dead! And by whose hand?” Once more that cold anger possessed me. Had Hlymer also taken this friend from me?

“The hand that dealt the blow was but an instrument—a tool. Riwal sought certain forces, and there were those who stood in opposition. Thus he was removed.”

Neevor apparently did not believe in open speech, but was fond of involvements that veiled the question rather than revealed it.

“He turned to the Light, not Dark!” I spoke for my friend.

“Would I be here otherwise, Lord Kerovan? I am a messenger of those forces he sought, to which he was guiding you before the war horns sounded. Listen well. You are one poised upon a mountain peak with before you two paths. Both are dark with danger; both may lead you to what those of your blood speak of as death. It is in your fate that you can turn to either from this night onward. You have it in you to become as your kin-blood, for you were born in the Shrine of—” Did he utter some name then? I believe that he did. Yet it was one not meant to be spoken by man. I cowered, putting my hands to my ears to shut out the awful echoes from the sky above.

He watched me closely, as if to make sure of my reaction. Now his wand-staff swung up, pointing to me, and down its length came a puff of radiance that floated from its tip through the air and broke against my face before I could dodge the touch, though I felt nothing.

“Kinsman,” he said, in his gentle voice, losing that majesty of tone he had held a moment earlier.

“Kinsman?”

“It seems that when the Lady Tephana wrought her bargain, she did not understand what she achieved. However, she sensed it; yes, she sensed it. You were a changeling, Kerovan, but not for her purposes. In that she read aright. She had set to fashion an encasement of blood, bone, and flesh for her use. Only the spirit it enclosed was not of her calling. It does not advantage one to take liberties with Gunnora. I do not know who looks through your eyes. I think that he yet sleeps, or only half-wakes. But the time will come when you shall remember, at least in part, and then your heritage shall be yours. No, not Ulmsdale—for the dales will no longer hold you—you shall seek and you shall find. But before that you must play out what lies here, for you are half dalesman.”

I was trying to understand. Did he mean that the Lady Tephana had worked with some Power before my birth, to make my body a vessel into which to pour some manifestation of the Dark? If so my hoofed feet might be the mark. But—what was I?

“Not what you fear in this moment, Kerovan,” he answered my unspoken thought swiftly. “Halfling you are, and your father’s son, though he was under ensorcellment when he begot you. But where that seeker of Dark Knowledge strove to make a weapon to be used for her own purposes, she gave entry to another instead. I cannot read the rune for you. The discovery of what you truly are, and can be, you must make for yourself. You can return now, ally yourself with them, and find she cannot stand against you. Or—”

His wand indicated the barren hillside. “Or you can walk into a world where the Dark and what you call death will sniff at your heels, ever seeking a way for which there is no guide. The choice is yours.”

“They speak of calling wind and wave to defeat the invader,” I said. “Is this good or ill for Ulmsdale?”

“To loose any Power carries great risk, and those who strive to follow the old ways but are not of the blood, risk double.”

“Can I prevent them then?”

He drew back. I thought his voice colder as he answered, “If you so wish.”

“Perhaps there is a third way.” I had thought of it once or twice as I climbed these slopes. “I can claim kin-right from Ithkrypt and gain a force to retake Ulmsdale before the enemy comes.” But even as I spoke, I knew how thin a chance I had. Lord Cyart was fighting in the south and must have stripped his dale of forces, save for a handful of defenders. There would be none there to be spared, even if I went as a beggar.

“The choice is yours,” Neevor repeated. And I knew he would give no advice.

My duty in Ulmsdale was part of my training. If I turned my back now upon my father’s land, made no attempt to save those dwelling in it from disaster, either by enemy hand or the spells of that witch and her brood, then I would be traitor to all bred in me.

“I am my father’s heir. I cannot turn my back upon his people. Nor do I take part in their witchery. There may be those to follow me—”

He shook his head. “Try not to build a wall out of shifting sand, Kerovan. That Dark biding within the walls of Ulmskeep has spread. No armsman will rise to your summons.”

I did not doubt that he knew exactly what he said. There was that about Neevor which carried full belief. So—it must be Ithkrypt after all. At least I would find shelter there from which to gather men and support. Also I must send a message to Lord Imgry.

Neevor thrust his wand-staff through his belt. Then he turned to his led pony, tumbling from its back the small pack that had been lashed there.

“Hiku is no battle charger, but he is sure-footed in the hills. Take him, Kerovan, with the Fourth Blessing.” Once more he reached for his wand and with it he tapped me lightly on the forehead, right shoulder, left, and over my heart.

Straightway then, I had the feeling my decision had pleased him. Yet I also knew that I could not be sure it was the right one. For it was laid upon me that I must choose my own road for myself and not by the advice of another.

I had forgotten my bare hoofs, but now as I moved toward the pony, my boots swung against my thigh and I caught at them. As I loosened them from my belt, ready to draw them on again, I had a strong revulsion against hiding my deformity—or was it so? It was a difference, yes, but what I had seen in my father’s chamber this night, a deformity of spirit, seemed to me the greater evil.

No, I was done with hiding. If Joisan and her kind turned from me in disgust, then I was free of them. I hurled the boots from me, holding to that sense of freedom I had had since I shed them.

“Well done,” Neevor said. “Be yourself, Kerovan, not ruled by the belief that one man must be like another. I have hopes for you after all.”

Deliberately he urged the second pony on a few paces and then, standing with one hand on its shoulder, he drew a circle on the earth around the animal and himself. Following the point of his wand there sprang up a thin, bluish haze. As he completed the encirclement, it thickened to hide both man and beast. As I watched, it faded, but I was not surprised to see that its going disclosed emptiness—that the trader and his mount were gone.

I had guessed that he was one of the Old Ones. And that he had come to me was not by any chance. But he left me much to think on. Half-blood was I then, having kinship to the mysterious forelords in this land? I was a tool of my mother’s desiring, though not to her purpose—yes, so much he told me fitted with the facts I knew and answered many questions.

I clung to the human part of me now: the fact that I was in truth Ulric’s son, no matter what that sorceress had done to set it awry. That thought I cherished. For in death my father had come closer and dearer to me than ever he had been in life. Ulmsdale had been his. Therefore I would do what I could to see it safe, which meant I must ride for Ithkrypt.

I could not even be sure that the pony was of the natural order of beasts, seeing by whose hand he had come to me. But he seemed to be exactly like any other of his breed. He was sure-footed. Still there were stretches where I must go afoot and lead him.

By dawn I was well into the heights. As I made a rough camp, I lifted off my gift-mount something Neevor had not removed along with the pack, a stout hide bag. In it was a water bottle of lamantine wood. But it did not contain water, rather a white drink that was more refreshing and warming than any wine I had ever tasted. There was also a round box of the same wood with a tightly fitting cover. I worked this off, to find inside journey cakes that had been so protected by their container they seemed fresh from the griddle. Nor were they the common sort, but had embedded in them bits of dried fruit and cured meat. One of them satisfied my hunger, as great as that now was, and the rest I kept for the future.

Though sleep tugged at my eyelids and my body demanded rest, I sat for a while in a niche between two rock teeth, thinking on all that had happened to me this night. My hoofed feet stretched before me. I studied them, trying to put myself in the place of one sighting them without warning. Perhaps I had been foolish to cast away my boots. No, in the same instant as that thought entered my mind, I rejected it. This I would do and so I would go—Joisan and her people must see me as I was and accept or deny me. There must be between us no untruths or half-truths, such as had filled my father’s house with a web of dark deceit and clung there now as a foul shadow.

I unlatched my belt-purse and for the first time in months brought out that case, deliberately opened it, and slid into my hand Joisan’s picture. A girl’s face, and one painted nearly two years ago. In that time we had both grown older, changed. What was she like, this maid with large eyes and hair the color of autumn leaves? Was she some subdued daughter-of-the-house, well-lessoned in the ways of women but ignorant of the world outside Ithkrypt’s stout walls? For the first time I began to think of her as a person, apart from the fact that by custom she was as much my possession as the sword at my belt, the mail on my back.

My knowledge of women was small. In the south I had listened to the boasting tales men tell around the campfires of any army. But I had added no experience of my own. I thought now that perhaps my mixed blood, my inheritance from the Old Ones, had marked me with more than hoofs; that it had set upon my needs and desires some barrier against the dale maids. If that was so, what would become of my union with Joisan?

I could break bride-oath, but to do such would be to lay a stain on her, and such a trick would be as evil as if I stood up before her assembled House and defamed her. That I could not do. But perhaps when we at last met face to face she would look upon me and make such a repudiation, and I would not gainsay it. Nor would I allow thereafter any dale-feud to come from my dismissal.

Yet at this moment when I looked upon her face in the dawn light, I wanted to see her, and I did not relish her breaking bride-oath with me. Why had I sent her the englobed gryphon? Almost during the past months I had forgotten that—but my interrupted journey to see Riwal brought it back to mind. What had lain so heavily on me then that I had sent that wonder to her, as if such a gift was necessary? I tried to picture it in my mind now—the crystal ball with its gryphon within, a warning claw raised—

But—

I was no longer looking at the dale below. I could no longer see the pony grazing. Rather I saw—her!

She was before me so clearly at that moment that I might have reached out and touched her skirt where she crouched. Her russet hair was in wild disorder over her shoulders, and through its straying strands I could see the gleam of mail. On her breast hung the gryphon, and it blazed with light. Her face was bruised, and there was fear in her eyes. Against her knee rested the head of a young man. His eyes were closed, and across his lips bubbled the froth of blood that marked a wound from which there was no healing. Her hand touched his forehead gently, and she watched him with a tenseness that meant his life or death had meaning for her.

Perhaps this was farseeing, though I had only once had such a gift or curse set upon me before. I knew that the face of the dying man was not mine, and her sorrow was for another. Perhaps therein lay my answer. Nor could I fault her if it was. For we were naught to each other but names. I had not even sent her the picture that had been her own asking from me.

That the gryphon blazed so clearly puzzled me a little after I had schooled myself to accept the meaning of what I saw. It was as if life had poured into that globe. So—perhaps now I knew the reason why I had been so strangely moved to send it to her. Though I had been the finder and had treasured it, it was not mine to have and hold, but was meant rather to lie where it now rested, and was truly hers and not mine. I must accept that also.

How long did that farsight or vision last? I did not know. I knew only that it was true. The strange youth was dying, or would die, and she would mourn him thereafter.

But such a death argued that Ithkrypt was not the refuge I had looked to find. It was not usual for a daleswoman to wear mail like a warrior, but we did not live in ordinary times. She was armored, and her comrade was dying; to that there could be only one explanation. Ithkrypt was either attacked or soon would be. Still that knowledge did not deter me. Rather it drew me—for I had a duty also to Joisan, whether or not she would ever now turn to me happily. If she were in danger, there was even more reason I should cross the ridges to her.

Ulmsdale, once my father’s and now under the hands of those I knew to be of ill intent; Ithkrypt perhaps overrun—I was traveling from one danger to another. Death was surely sniffing at my heels, ready to lay claw-hand on my shoulder. But this road was mine, and I could take no other.

The vision was gone, and with its going my weariness settled so heavily upon me that I could not fight it. I slept the day away in my hole, for when I roused it was already dusk. I wakened to die pony nudging against my shoulder, as if the beast were a sentry on guard.

Dusk—yes—and more. There was a gathering of thick clouds, such as I had seldom seen. So dark and heavy was that massing that I could not now sight the Giant’s Fist! And the pony crowded in against me as I scrambled to my feet.

The beast was sweating; the smell of it was rank. He pushed his head against my shoulder, and I gentled him with neck-stroking. This was fear the like of which I had seldom seen before in any animal. Emotion gripped me also: a vast apprehension, as if some force beyond understanding gathered, a force that was inimical to all my kind and could, if it would, sweep us like grains of dust from its path.

I backed against the rock wall, my hands still on the pony, waiting. I did not know for what, except I feared it as I never had feared anything before in my life.

There was no wind, no sound. That terrible stillness added to my fear. The dale, the world, cowered and waited.

From the east there was a sudden flash of light. Not the usual lightning, but rather a wide swath across all the heavens. Eastward—over the sea—

Power of wind and wave they had spoken of—were they about to summon that? Then the invaders’ ship must lie near to Ulmsport, and they had had little time to ready their plans. What would happen?

The pony uttered a strange sound such as I had never heard from any mount before. It was almost a whimper. And that oppression increased until it seemed that the very air about us was kept from our lungs and we could not breathe freely. Still there came no wind, but sheet lightning flashed seaward. Now came a long roll—as if a thousand war drums beat together.

Above the clouds was a night of such darkness I could see no more than if I were blindfolded. Surely this was no ordinary storm, at least like none I had seen before in my lifetime. My lifetime. Deep in me a thread of memory stirred—but it could not be memory—for it was not of this life but another.

But that was foolishness! A man had but one lifetime and the memories of that—one lifetime—

My skin, where it was exposed to the air, itched and burned as if the atmosphere were poisoned. Then I saw light—but not in the sky—rather auras about rocks as if they were palely burning lanterns, their light a foggy discharge.

For the third time, sheet lightning blanketed the east, and after it came the drum roll. Then followed the wind—

Wind, but such wind as I swear the dale had never felt before. I crouched between the rocks, my face buried in the trembling pony’s rough mane, the smell of the beast’s sweat in my nostrils. He was steaming wet under my hands. There was no way I could shut out the sound of that wind. And surely we would be scooped out of our small refuge by its force, whirled out to be beaten to death in the open.

I braced my hoofs deep in the ground, used the rock at my back and side as best I could to anchor me, and felt the pony, iron-tense in my hold, doing likewise. If the poor beast whimpered now, I could no longer hear him, for the sound of the elements was deafening. The drum beat had become a roar to which there was no end.

I could not think; I could only cower in dull hope of escaping the full fury. But as it continued I grew somewhat accustomed to it, as one can when the first sharp edge of any fear is dulled by a continuation of its source. I realized then that the wind blew from east to west, and its power must be directed from the sea upon Ulmsport.

What such a storm might do along the coast I could not imagine, save that it would utterly devastate everything within its hammer blows. If there had been an enemy fleet drawing to port, that must be completely overwhelmed. But the innocent would suffer with the invader. What of the port and those who dwelt there? If this storm was born of the Power those in the keep thought to summon, then they had either lost control of it or had indeed drawn hither something greater than they had planned.

How long did it last? I lost track of time. There was no night, no day—only black dark and the roaring—and the fear of something that was not of normal nature. What of the keep? It seemed to me that this fury could well shake even those great stones one from the other, splitting open the firm old building as if it were a ripe fruit.

There was no slacking off as would occur in a true storm. One moment the deafening roar, the fury—then silence, complete, dead. I thought at first that the continued noise, the pressure, had deafened me. Then I heard a soft sound from the pony. He pushed against me, backing into the open.

Above, it was once more dawn. The dark clouds, tattered as my father’s death banner, faded into nothingness. Had it been so long we had been pent there? I stumbled after the pony into the quiet open.

The air no longer held that acridness which had tortured our breathing, but was fresh and cool. And there was a curious—I could only define it as emptiness—in it.

I must see what had happened below. That thought drove me. Leading Hiku along the narrow rim of the dale, I headed back toward the Giant’s Fist. These heights had been scoured. Vast areas of trees and brush had been simply torn away, leaving scars in the earth to mark their former rooting.

So obvious were these signs of destruction, I was prepared in part for what I did sight at the foot of the heights. Yet it was far worse than I expected.

Part of the keep still stood, though its outline was not that of a complete building any longer. About it was water—a great sheet of water on the surface of which floated a covering of wreckage, perhaps part of it ships, part the houses of Ulmsport, but too tangled to be identified with any surety. And that water came from the east—the sea had claimed most of Ulmsdale.

Had those below escaped? I could see no signs of life. The village was under water save for a roof or two. So the disaster those below had wantonly summoned had fallen.

Were they caught up in the maelstrom of the force they could not control? That I hoped. But that Ulmsdale as I had known it was dead, was manifest. No man could have a future here. For I believed that what the sea had won, it would not surrender. If the invaders thought to use this as a foothold, they were defeated.

I turned my face from, that lump which had been the keep, and so from the past. In a way, I still had a duty laid upon me—I must learn how it fared with Joisan. And then—there lay the south and the long, long battles to come.

Thus I tramped away from the Fist with no desire to look again at the ruin in the dale, and my heart was sore, not for any loss of mine, for I had never truly felt that it was my holding, but for the wreckage of all my father had cherished and sought by every means he knew to protect. And I think I cursed as I went, though silently, those who I had done this thing.

12

Joisan

As we stood under the moon in that secret place of stone, the gryphon blazing on my breast, Toross slipped from my hold to the ground. I knelt beside him, drawing the garment from his chest that I might see his hurt. His head lay against my knee, and from his lips a stream of blood trickled. That he had come this far was a thing hardly to be believed when I saw the wound exposed. Enough of Dame Math’s healing knowledge was mine to know that it was indeed a death blow, though I slit my underlinen with his knife and made a pad to halt the seepage.

I gentled his head against me. In so very little could I ease the passing of this man who had given his life that I might live. In the light of the gryphon and the moon I could well see his face.

What twisting of fate had brought us two together? Had I allowed myself, I might have wanted to joyfully welcome Toross for my lord. Why had I not?

In the library of the Abbey I had found many curious pieces of lore not generally taught, perhaps considered mysteries of the Flame. And one such roll of runes I now remembered—that a man—or woman—does not live a single life, but rather returns to this world at another time for the purpose of paying some debt that he or she owes to another. Therefore in each life one is bound to some other by ties that are not of this life and time, but reach far back into a past no seer can delve. Toross had been drawn to me from the first, so much so that he had nearly dimmed the honor of his House to seek me out, to urge upon me a similar feeling.

Though I had held fast against him, yet he had come here to die in my arms, because my life meant more to him than his own. What debt had he owed me, if that old belief were true? Or had he now laid some debt upon me that must be paid in turn?

His head moved in my hold. I leaned close to hear his whisper:

“Water—”

Water! I had none. To my knowledge the closest lay in the river a long distance from us. I took up my skirt, still heavily dampened, and wiped his face, wishing bitterly that I could give him such a little thing. Then I saw in the dead-white radiance, which seemed so intense in this place, that plants grew about the paved space. Tall as my shoulder they stood, with great, fleshy leaves outspread in the moonlight. And on those were drops of silver. I recognized a plant Dame Math had used. Yet hers had been very small compared to these. These plants had the art of condensing water on their leaves with the coming of night’s cool.

Gently I laid Toross down and went to gather this unexpected boon, tearing off the largest leaves with care, lest I spill their precious cargo. And I brought them to wet his lips, eased a few drops into his mouth. So little it was that I despaired, but perhaps the leaves had some healing quality they imparted to those droplets, for these seemed to satisfy his thirst.

I took him up again, and as I settled his head against me, his eyes opened and he knew me. He smiled.

“My—lady—”

I would have hushed him, not for what he said, but that it wasted his strength, and of that he had so little left. But he would not have it so.

“I knew—my—lady—from—the—first—I saw you.” His voice grew stronger as he talked, instead of weaker. “You are very fair, Joisan, very wise, very—desirable. But it—” He coughed, and more blood came, which I wiped away quickly with the wet leaves. “Not for me,” he ended clearly.

He did not try to speak again for a while, and then,

“Not for the lordship, not ever, Joisan. You—must—believe that. I—would—have—come wooing if you had no dowry at all. Not the lordship—though they said it was the way to make sure of that. I wanted—you!”

“I know,” I assured him. That was true. His kin might have urged him to wed with me for Ithkrypt, but Toross had wanted me more than any keep. The great pity of it was that all I could feel for him was friendship, and such love as one might give a brother—nothing more.

“Had you not wedded—” He gasped and choked. Now speech was beyond him.

At the last I gave what I had to offer to ease him—a lie that I spoke with all the ring of truth I could muster.

“I would have welcomed you, Toross.”

He smiled then, such a smile as was a crossbow’s bolt in my heart. And I knew that my lie had been well said. Then he turned his head a little, resting his stained lips against my breast, and his eyes closed as if he would sleep. But it was not sleep that came as I held him so. After a space I laid him down and wavered to my feet, looking about me, unable for that moment to look upon him.

I set myself rather to view this place. That we had come to some site of the Old Ones I had realized. But then its shape had been of no importance, merely that it was the end to which I could bring Toross. Now, sharply defined in the moonlight, I could see all of it.

There were no walls, no remains of such, just the pavement, dazzling in the moonlight. For the first time I was aware that some of the light came from the ancient stones themselves, similar to the glow of the globe.

Still those stones, in spite of their gleam, appeared to be little different from the rocks that formed the walls of Ithkrypt. Only the light pulsated a little as if it came and went like the breathing of some great animal.

Not only the glow but the shape of the pavement astonished me. It was laid in the form of a five-pointed star. As I stood there, swaying a little, it seemed to force its form upon my eyes as if it had a meaning that was necessary for me to see and understand. But my knowledge of the Old Ones and their ways was so fragmentary that I could not guess into what we had intruded, save it had never been fashioned to serve a Dark Power, but Light, and that it had indeed been a place of forces, some remnants of which still clung.

Had I only known how to use those! Perhaps I could have saved Toross, saved the dalespeople who would now look to me for leadership. If I only knew more! I think I cried out then in my desolation of spirit, for the loss of something I had never had, but which might have meant so much.

There was something here— Suddenly I threw back my head and gazed upward, stretched wide my arms. It was as if I were trying to open some long-closed door within me, to welcome into starved darkness a filling of light. There was a need in me, and if I asked I would be given. Yet I did not know what I was to ask for, and so in the end my arms fell to my sides and I was still empty. I was gnawed also by the knowing that I had been offered something wondrous which I was too ignorant to take. The thought of my own failure was the bitterest of all.

With this loss still upon me I turned about to face Toross. He lay as if asleep, and the glow of the stone was all about him. There was no way I could entomb him after the manner of the dales, with his armor upon him, his hands folded on the hilt of his sword to show that he had fallen valiantly in battle. Even this I could not do for his honor. Yet in this place such seemed unnecessary, for he rested in such glory and peace as I did not think any of our tomb chambers held. And he slept.

So I knelt and took up his hands, crossing them, though not on any sword hilt. And, last of all, I kissed him as he slept, for he had desired and served me to the utmost, even if I could not be to him as he wished.

Then I went forth from the star place and I broke off ferns and sweet-smelling herbs which grew here as if in a Wisewoman’s garden. These I brought, and with them I covered Toross, save for his face, which I left open to the night. And I petitioned whatever Power lingered in this place that he indeed rest in peace. Then I turned and left him, knowing within my heart that with Toross now all was well, no matter what lay elsewhere in this war-riven and tormented land.

Beyond the edge of the star I hesitated. Should I retrace my way or strive to travel on, using the wood for cover, hoping beyond that to find some trail my people had taken? In the end I chose the latter.

Here the trees stood thicker and there was no path, nor could I be sure that I headed straight. I was no woodsman and I might be wandering. But I did my best.

When I came at last to that screen of thick brush which was the outer ring of the wood, my mouth was dry with thirst. I wavered as I walked from weariness, being faint with hunger. But before me was the narrowing end of the dale and the heights over which the refugees from Ithkrypt must have fled.

The light of pre-dawn was in the sky, my only lamp, for the glow had gone from the globe. It was dead, and I was alone, and the burden of a heavy heart weighed upon me as much as my weariness.

I reached a spur of rock behind which there was a hollow, and I knew I could go no farther. Around it grew sparse patches of berries, some of the fruit ripe. It was tart, mouth-twisting, what one would not usually eat without meat, for which it would be a relish. But it was food, and I stripped the ground-hugging bushes quickly, stuffing the fruit into my mouth as ravenously as anyone who knows bitter hunger.

That I could go on without rest I doubted; nor did I think I could find a better hiding place than this hollow. But before I crept within, I used Toross’ knife to change my clothing for this wilderness scrambling. My skirt was divided for riding, but the folds were so thick and long they had nearly proved my undoing. Now I slashed away, tearing off long strips. These I used to bind down the “legs” of my shortened skirt, narrowing the folds and anchoring them as tightly as I could above my boots. The garment was far more bulky than a man’s breeches, but I had greater freedom of movement than before.

Having done this, I huddled back into the hollow, sure my whirling thoughts would not let me sleep, no matter how deep my fatigue. My hands went to my breast, closing about the globe, without my willing.

It had no warmth now, yet there was something about the smooth feel of it that was comforting. And so, clasping it, I did fall asleep.

All men dream, and usually upon waking one remembers such dreams only in fragments—which may be of terror and darkness or, at long intervals, of such pleasure that one longs to hold on to them even as they fast fade. Yet what I experienced now was unlike any dream I had ever known.

I was in a small place, and outside swept storm winds—but winds of far more than normal fury. There was someone with me in that place. I caught a suggestion of a shoulder outline, a head turned from me, and there was a strong need that I know who this was. But I could not see a face or name a name. I could only cower as those racking winds beat by the opening of the crack in which we sheltered. As it had been in the place of the star, so was it here, the knowledge that had I only the gift, the ability, I could gain what I needed and that good would come of it. Yet I had it not, and the dream was gone—or else I could not remember more of it then or ever.

When I roused, the sun was almost down, and the shadows long about me. I sat up, still weary, still thirsty and longing for even as much water as I had shaken from the leaves in the wood. There was a dull ache in my middle, perhaps from the berries, perhaps from lack of food. I got to my knees and peered down-slope for any sign of the enemy.

Thus it was I spied those two making their way along as scouts do. My hand was at knife hilt in an instant. But in a moment I saw these were dalesmen. I whistled softly that call that we had learned for just such a use as this.

They flattened themselves instantly to the earth, then their heads rose at my second whistle. Seeing me, it took them only a few moments to join me, and I knew them for Toross’ armsmen.

“Rudo, Angarl!” They could have been my brother-kin, so rejoiced was I to see them.

“My Lady! Then the Lord Toross brought you forth!” Rudo exclaimed.

“He did indeed. Great honor he cast upon his House.”

The armsman looked beyond me into the hollow, and I saw that he guessed what dire report I must make now.

“The invaders have a weapon that can slay from a distance. As we ran, the Lord Toross was struck. He died in the safety to which he brought me. Honor to his name forever!” Did it help that at this moment I could use the formal words of a warrior’s last farewell?

Both these men were well past middle age. What Toross might have been to them, or what ties—perhaps of almost kin-friendship—he might have had with them, I did not know. They bowed their heads at my words and repeated harshly after me, “Honor to his name forever!”

Then Angarl spoke. “Where is he, Lady? We must see to him—”

“He lies in a holy place of the Old Ones. To that we were guided, and there he died. And the peace of that place shall be his forever.”

They glanced from one to the other. I could see their sense of custom warred in them with awe. And I added, “That which abides there welcomed him, yes, and gave him to drink in his final hour, and offered sweet herbs for his bedding. He rests as becomes a proud warrior, and on this you have my oath.”

That they believed. For we all know that while there are places of the Dark Power to be shunned, there are others that offer peace and comfort, even to interlopers. And if such a place welcomed and held Toross now, he was indeed laid to rest with honor.

“It is well, Lady,” Rudo answered me heavily, and I could see that indeed Toross had meant much to these two.

“You have come from the dalespeople?” I asked in turn. “And have you aught to eat—or drink?” My pride departed, and I wanted badly what they might carry.

“Oh—of a certainty, Lady.” Angarl used his good hand to unstrap a bag from his belt, and in it was a bottle of water and tough journey cakes. I had to use all my control to drink sparingly and eat in small bites, lest my stomach rebel.

“We are of the band that went with the Forester Borsal. My lady and her daughter were also with us. But they turned back to see Lord Toross. We have been hunting him, since he did not join us by moonrise—”

“You are on this side of the river then—”

“Those demons hunt over the dale. If our lord had lived, this would have been the only free way,” Rudo said simply.

“They are in all the dale now?”

Angarl nodded. “Yes. Two bands of our people were captured because they moved too slowly. Also, few of the flocks and herds got away. The beasts refused the climb to the pass, and the herders and shepherds could not force them to it. Those who tried too long—” He made a small gesture to signal their fate.

“You can find your way back?”

“Yes, Lady. But we had best be on our way quickly. There are parts that are hard going in the dark. Were it not summer and the dusk later in coming, we could not do it.”

Their food heartened me, and their company even more. Also I found that the precautions I had taken to turn my skirt into breeches aided my going, so I was able to set out at a pace I could not have held the night before. Before I went, I returned the gryphon into hiding under my mail, for to me it was a private thing.

Our way was rough, and even my guides had to pause and cast around at times to find landmarks by which they could sight their way, for here there was not even a sheep track for a road. We climbed as the night grew darker. It was colder here, and I shivered when the wind struck full on. We talked very little, they no more than giving me a word of guidance when the occasion arose. My weariness was returning. But I made no complaint and did the best I could, asking nothing from them. In this hour their companionship was enough.

We could not take the last climb through the pass in the dead of night, so once more I sheltered among rocks, this time with Rudo on my right, Angarl on my left. I must have slept, for I do not remember anything after our settling there until Rudo stirred and spoke.

“Best be on now, Lady Joisan. There is the dawn, and we do not know how high those murderers range in their search for blood on their swords.”

The light was gray, hardly better than twilight. I sighted gathering clouds. Perhaps we were to face rain—though we should welcome what washed away our tracks.

It did begin to rain with steady persistence. There was not even tree cover as we slipped and slid down from the pass into the valley beyond. I knew this country only vaguely. At the level of the dale, if one traveled through the lower pass, mere was a road—heading toward Norstead. Though the lords cared for it after a fashion (mainly by chopping back any undergrowth for three spear lengths on either side so that the opening might deter ambushes by outlaws), it was not a smooth track.

The river was too wide and shallow hereabouts to provide for any craft save when the spring floods were in spate. And this part of the country lacked settlers. It was grazing ground, and in winter the grasses on the lower lands helped to feed the stock. But no one lived here, save seasonally.

Our people are few in the western dales. And dalesmen cling to company. Those who do turn hunter, forester, or trader are misfits who do not rub well against their fellows and are usually looked upon as being but a grade or two above the outlaws, since they are wandering, rootless men of whom anything may be expected. Thus we largely keep to the richer lands and within arrow flight of our dales. Our people dales are scattered. Norsdale, perhaps five days’ journey westward by horse, more on foot, was the nearest settlement of which I knew.

But we did not descend to the road to Norsdale, being warned by fire smoke on the valley floor. Our people would not light such. Again we kept to the upper slopes, angling south. So we came near to being the targets of crossbow bolts from our own kin.

There was a sharp challenge from a screen of bush; then a woman came into the open to face us. I knew her for Nalda, whose husband had been miller at Ithkrypt, a tall woman of great strength in which she took pride, sometimes in her way seeming more man than woman when compared to the chattering gossips in the village. She held her bow at ready, the bolt laid on, and did not lower it as we came up. But on seeing me, her rough face lightened.

“My Lady, well come, oh, well come!” Her greeting warmed my long-chilled heart.

“Well come in truth, Nalda. Who is with you?”

She reached forth to touch my arm, as if she needed that to assure herself I did indeed stand there.

“There be ten of us—the Lady Islaugha and the Lady Yngilda, my dad Timon and—but, Lady Joisan, what of Stark, my man?”

I remembered that red slaughter by the river. She must have read it in my face. Her own grew hard and fierce in an instant.

“So be it,” she said then, “so be it! He was a good man, Lady, and he died well—”

“He died well,” I assured her speedily. I would never tell any dales woman the manner of dying I had seen. For the dead were our heroes, and that is all we needed to know to hold them in honor.

“But what do I think of! Come quickly—those demons are in the valley below. We would have moved on, but the Lady Islaugha, she would not go, and we could not leave her. She waits for the Lord Toross.”

“Who will not come now. And if the invaders are already hereabouts we must move on quickly. Ten of you—what men?”

“Rudo and Angarl.” She nodded to my companions. “Insfar, who was shepherd in the Fourth Section. He escaped over the rocks with a hole in his shoulder, for these thrice-damned hunters of honest men have that which kills at a distance. The rest are women and two children. We have four crossbows, two long bows, our belt knives and Insfar’s wolf spear. And among us food for mayhap three days, if we eat light and make one mouthful do the work of three.”

And Norsdale was far away—

“Mounts?”

“None, my Lady. We took to the upper pass and could not bring them. That was where we lost the rest Borstal guided—they went ahead in the night. There are sheep, perhaps a cow or two running wild—but whether we can hunt them—” She shrugged.

So much for all our plans of escape. I only hoped that some other parties of our people had gotten away sooner, been better equipped, and could get through to Norsdale. Whether they could rouse any there to come to our rescue, I doubted. In spite of my own need I could understand that those there would think a second time before venturing forth on such a search. They would be better occupied making ready their defenses against the invaders.

Thus escorted by Nalda, who seemed to have taken command of this small band, I came into their camp, though there was little about it of any camp. Seeing me, the Lady Islaugha was on her feet instantly.

“Toross?” Her cry was a demand. In her pale face her eyes glowed as the gryphon globe had glowed, as if within her was a fire.

My control was shaken. As I tried to find the right words, she came to me, her hands on my shoulders, and she shook me as if so to bring my answer.

“Where is Toross?”

“He—he was slain—” How could I clothe it in any soothing words? She wanted only the truth, and no one could soften that for her.

“Dead—dead!” She dropped her hold on me and stepped back. Now first there was horror in her expression, as if in me she saw one of the invaders bloody-handed from slaughter, and then a hardening of feature, a mask of hate so bitter it was a blow.

“He died for you—who would not look to him. Would not look to him who could have had any maid, yes, and wife, too, if he only lifted his finger and beckoned once! What had you to catch his eye, hold him? If he gained Ithkrypt with you, yes, that I could accept. But to die—and you stand here alive—”

I had no words. I could only face her storm. For in her twisted way of thinking she was right. That I had given Toross no encouragement meant nothing to her. What mattered was that he had wanted me and I had stood aloof, and he had died to save me.

She paused, and now her mouth worked and she spat, the spittle landing at my feet.

“Very well, take my curse also. And with it the oath of bearing and forebearing, for that you owe to me—and to Yngilda also. You have taken our kin-lord—therefore you stand in his place.”

She invoked the old custom of our people, laying upon me the burden of her life as a blood-price, which in her eyes it was. From this time forth I must care for her—and Yngilda—protect them and smooth their way as best I could, even as if I were Toross himself.

13

Kerovan

Once more I stood on heights and looked down to death and destruction. Wind and wave had brought death to Ulmsdale, but here destruction had been wrought by the malice of men. It had taken me ten days to reach the point from which I spied on Ithkrypt, or what remained of it. One whole day of that time had been spent in reaching this pinnacle from which I could see a keep battered into dust.

Oddly enough there were no signs of the crawling monsters that breached walls in this fashion. Yet there were few stones of the keep still stacked one upon the other. And it was plain an enemy force was encamped here.

They had come upriver by boats, and these were drawn up on the opposite shore of the river.

My duty was divided. This landing must be reported, yet Joisan was much on my mind. No wonder I had sighted her in that vision clad in mail and gentle with a dying man.

Was she captive or dead? Back in the trackless wilderness through which I had come, I had crossed trails of small groups moving westward, refugees by all evidence. Perhaps she had so fled. But where in all those leagues of wild land could I find her?

Lord Imgry had set me a duty that was plain. Once more I was torn between two demands, and I had one thin hope. There were signal posts in the heights. Messages could be flashed from peak to peak—in the sun by reflection from well-burnished shields; at night by torches held before the same backing. I knew the northern one of those, which could not be too far from Ithkrypt. If that had not been overrun and taken, Imgry would have his warning, and I would be free to hunt for Joisan.

Using scout skill I slipped away from the vantage point that had shown me Ithkrypt. There were parties of invaders out, and they went brashly, with the arrogance of conquerors who had nothing to fear. Some drove footsore cattle and bleating sheep back to slaughter in their camp; others worked to the west, seeking fugitives perhaps, or making out trails to lead an army inland even as Imgry had feared, that they might come down on us to crush our beleaguered force between two of theirs.

I found Hiku an excellent mount for my purposes. The pony seemed to follow by his own choice that country into which he could merge so that only one alerted to our presence there could have been aware of our passing. Also he appeared tireless, able to keep going when a stable-bred mount might have given out, footsore and blowing.

That these dales had their natural landmarks was a boon, for I could so check my direction. But I came across evidence that the invaders were spreading out from Ithkrypt. And I knew that I would not be a moment too soon. Perhaps I was already a day or so too late in sounding the alarm.

I found the crest on which the signal niche was located and there studied with dismay the traces of those come before me. For it was the order of such posts that there be no trail pointing to them; yet here men, more than two or three, had passed openly, taking no trouble to cover their tracks.

With bare steel in my fist, my war hood laced, I climbed to the space where I should have found a three-man squad of signal-men. But death had been before me, as the splashes of clotted blood testified. There was the socket in which the shield had been set so it could be readied to either catch the sun or frame the light of a torch—there was even a broken torch flung to earth and trampled. I looked south, able to make out the next peak on which one of our outposts was stationed. Had those attacked here been able to give the alarm?

Now I applied my forest knowledge to the evidence and decided that battle had been done in mid-morning. It was now mid-afternoon. Had they wings, perhaps the invaders could have flown from this height to the one I could see, but men, mounted or on foot, could not have already won to that second point in such time. If no warning had gone forth, I must in some manner give it.

The shield had been wrenched away. I carried none myself, for my activities as scout had made me discard all such equipment. Signal—how could I signal without the means?

I chewed a knuckle and tried to think. I had a sword, a long forester’s knife, and a rope worn as a belt about my middle. My mail was not shining, but coated over on purpose with a greenish sap which helped to conceal me.

Going forth from the spy niche I looked around—hoping against hope that the shield might have been tossed away. But that was rating the enemy too low. There was only one thing I might do, and in the doing I could bring them back on me as if I had purposefully lashed a nest of Anda wasps—set a fire. The smoke would not convey any precise message, as did the wink of reflection from the shield, but it would warn those ahead.

I searched the ground for wood, carrying it back to the signal post. My last armful was not culled from the ground under the gnarled slope trees, but selected from leaves on those same trees.

I used my strike light and the fire caught, held well. Into it then I fed, handful by handful, the leaves I had gathered. Billows of yellowish smoke appeared, along with fumes that drove me coughing from the fireside, my eyes streaming tears. But as those cleared I could see a column of smoke reaching well into the sky, such a mark as no one could miss.

There was little or no wind, even here on the upper slopes, and the smoke was a well-rounded pillar. This gave me another idea—to interrupt the smoke and then let it flow again would add emphasis to the warning. I unstrapped my cloak, and with it in hand went back to the fire.

It was a chancy business, but, though I was awkward, I managed to so break the column that no one could mistake it was meant for a signal. A moment or two later there came a flash from the other peak that I could read. They had accepted the warning and would now swing their shield and pass it on. Lord Imgry might not have exact news from the north, but he would know that the enemy had reached this point.

My duty done, I must be on my way with all speed—heading westward. To seek Joisan I could do no more than try to find the trail of one of those bands of refugees and discover from them what might have happened to my lady.

If so far fortune had favored me, now that was not true. For I learned shortly that the pursuit was up, and such pursuit as made my heart beat fast and dried my mouth as I urged Hiku on. They had out their hounds!

We speak of those of Alizon as Hounds, naming them so for their hunters on four legs, which are unlike our own dogs of the chase. They have gray-white coats, and they are very thin, though large and long of leg; their heads are narrow, moving with the fluid ease of a serpent, their eyes yellow. Few of them were with the invaders, but those we had seen in the south were deadly, trained to hunt and kill, and with something about them wholly evil.

As I rode from where that smoke still curled, I heard the sound of a horn as I had heard it twice before in the south. It was the summoning of a hound master. I knew that once set on my trail, those gray-white, flitting ghosts, which had no true kinship with our guardian dogs of the dale keeps, would ferret me out.

So I set to every trick I knew for covering and confusing my trail. Yet after each attempt at concealment, a distant yapping told me I had not escaped. At last Hiku, again of his own accord, as if no beast brain lay within his skull but some other more powerful one, tugged loose from my controlling rein and struck to the north. He half slid, half leaped down a crumbling bank into a stream, and up that, against the current, he splashed his way.

I loosed all rein hold, letting him pick his own path, for he had found a road which could lead us to freedom. It was plain he knew exactly what he was doing.

The stream was not river-sized, but perhaps a tributary to the river that ran through Ithkrypt. The water was very clear. One could look down to see not only the stones and gravel that floored it, but also those finned and crawling things to which it was home.

Suddenly Hiku came to a full stop, the water washing about his knees. So sudden was that halt that I was nearly shaken from my seat. The pony swung his head back and forth, lowering it to the water’s edge. Then he whinnied and turned his head as if addressing me in his own language.

So odd were his actions I knew this was no light matter. As he lowered his head once more to the stream I believed he was striving to call my attention to something therein and was growing impatient at my not understanding some plain message.

I leaned forward to peer into the water ahead. It was impressed upon me now that Hiku’s actions were not unlike those of someone facing an unsprung trap. Was there some water dweller formidable enough to threaten the pony?

Easing sword out of sheath, I made ready for attack. The pony held his head stiffly, as if to guide my attention to a certain point. I took my bearing from him in my search.

Stones, gravel—then—yes! There was something, hardly to be distinguished from the natural objects among which it lay.

I dropped from Hiku’s back, planting my hoofs securely in the stream bed against the wash of the current. Then I worked forward until I could see better.

There was a loop, not of stone, or at least of any stone I had ever seen, blue-green in color. And it stood upright, seemingly wedged between two rocks. With infinite care I lowered sword point into the flood, worked it within that loop, and then raised it.

Though it had looked firmly wedged, it gave to my pull so easily I was near overbalanced by the release. And I snapped the blade up in reflex, so that what it held could not slide back into the water.

Instead it slipped down the length of the blade to clang against the hilt, touch my fingers. I almost dropped it, or even flung it from me, for there was an instant flow of energy from the loop into my flesh.

Gingerly I shook it a little down my sword, away from my fingers, and then held it closer to my eyes. What ringed my steel was a wristlet, or even an archer’s bow guard, about two fingers’s wide in span. The material was perhaps metal, though like no metal I knew. Out of the water it glowed, to draw the eye. Though the overall color was blue-green, now that I saw it close, I made out a very intricate pattern woven and interwoven of threads of red-gold. And some of these, I was sure, formed runes.

That this had belonged to the Old Ones I had not the least doubt, and that it was a thing of power I was sure from Hiku’s action. For we dalesmen know that the instincts of beasts about some of the ancient remains are more to be relied upon than our own. Yet when I brought the armlet closer to the pony, he did not display any of the signs of alarm that I knew would come if this was the thing of a Dark One. Rather he stretched forth his head as if he sniffed some pleasing odor rising from it.

Emboldened by his reaction, I touched it with fingertip. Again I felt that surge of power. At length I conquered my awe and closed my fingers on it, drawing it off the blade.

Either the flow of energy lessened, or I had become accustomed to it. Now it was no more than a gentle warmth. And I was reminded of that other relic—the crystal-enclosed gryphon.

Without thinking I slipped the band over my hand, and it settled and clung about my wrist snugly, as if it had been made for my wearing alone. As I held it at eye level, the entwined design appeared to flow, to move. Quickly I dropped my hand. For the space of a breath or two I had seen—what? Now that I no longer looked, I could not say—save that it was very strange, and I was more than a little in awe of it. Yet I had no desire to take off this find. In fact, when I glanced at my wrist as I remounted, I had an odd thought that sometime—somewhere—I had worn such before. But how could that be? For I would take blood oath I had never seen its like. But then who can untangle the mysteries of the Old Ones?

Hiku went on briskly, and I listened ever for the sound of the hound horn, the yap of the pack. Once I thought I did hear it, very faint and far away, and that heartened me. It would seem that Hiku had indeed chosen his road well.

As yet he made no move to leave the stream, but continued to plow through the water steady-footed. I did not urge him, willing to leave such a choice to him.

The stream curved, and a screen of well-leafed bushes gave way to show me what lay ahead. Hiku now sought the bank of a sand bar to the right. But I gazed ahead in amazement. Here was a lake not uncommon in the dales, but it was what man—or thinking beings—had set upon it that surprised me.

The water was bridged completely across the widest part. However, that crossway was not meant for a roadway, but rather gave access to a building, not unlike a small keep, erected in the middle of the water. It presented no windows on the bridge level, but the next story and two towers, each forming a gate to the bridge, had narrow slits on the lower levels, wider as they rose in the towers.

From the shore where we were, the whole structure seemed untouched by time. But the far end of the bridge, reaching toward the opposite side of the lake, was gone. The other bridgehead was not far from us and, strange as the keep appeared (it was clearly of the Old Ones’ time), I thought it offered the best shelter for the coming night.

Hiku was in no way reluctant to venture onto the bridge, but went on bravely enough, the ring of his hoofs sounding a hollow beat-beat which somehow set me to listening, as if I expected a response from the building ahead.

I saw that I had chosen well, for there was a section of the bridge meant to be pulled back toward the tower, leaving a defensive gap between land and keep. Whether that could still be moved was my first concern. Having crossed, I made fast the end of my rope to rings there provided.

Hiku pulled valiantly and, dismounted, I lent my strength to his. At first I thought the movable bridge section too deeply rooted by time to yield. But after picking with sword point, digging at free soil and wind-blown leaves, I tried again. This time, with a shudder, it gave, not to the extent its makers had intended, but enough to leave a sizable gap between bridge and tower.

The gate of the keep yawned before me darkly. I blamed myself for not bringing the makings of a torch with me. Once more I relied on the pony’s senses. When I released him from the drag rope, he gave a great sigh and footed slowly forward, unled or urged, his head hanging a little. I followed after, sure we had come to a place where old dreams might cluster, but that was empty of threat for us now.

Over us arched the bulk of the tower, but there was light beyond, and we came into a courtyard into which opened the main rooms of the structure. If it had been built on a natural island, there was no trace of that, for the walls went straight down on the outer side to the water. In the courtyard a balcony, reached by a flight of stairs on either side, ran from one gate tower to the other, both right and left.

In the center of the open space there were growing things. Grass, bushes, even a couple of small trees, shared crowded space. Hiku fell to grazing as if he had known all along that this particular pasture awaited him. I wondered if he did; if Neevor had come this way.

I dropped my journey bag and went on, passing through the other tower gate out to the matching bridge. It was firm, uneroded. I thought of the wide differences among the Old Ones’ ruins. For some may be as ill-treated by time as those Riwal and I had found along the Waste road, and others stand as sturdy as if their makers had moved out only yesterday.

When I came to the cutoff end of the bridge, I found—not as I had half-expected now, a section pulled back—that the bridge material was fused into glassy slag. I stretched my hand to touch that surface and felt a sharp throb of pain. On my wrist the band was glowing, and I accepted what I believed to be a warning. I retreated to the courtyard.

Wood I found in the garden, if garden it had been. But I did not hasten to make a torch. I had no desire now to enter the balcony rooms to explore in the upper reaches of the towers. Instead I scraped up dried grass of an earlier season, and with my cloak, which still reeked of the signal smoke, I made a bed. In my exploration I found water running from a pipe that ended in a curious head, the stream pouring from both mouth and eyes into a trough and then away along a runnel. Hiku drank there without hesitation, and I washed my smut-streaked face and hands and drank my fill.

I ate one of my cakes, crumbled another, and spread it on wide leaves for Hiku. He relished that and only went back to grazing when he had caught up the last possible crumb with his tongue. Settling back on my cloak bed, my battle hood unlaced, and as comfortable as any scout can be in the field, I lay looking up at the stars as the night closed down.

One could hear the wash of water outside the walls, the buzz of an insect, and, a little later, the call of some night hunter on wings. The upper reaches of the tower could well house both owls and nighthawks. But for the rest there was a great quiet that matched an emptiness in this place.

I was heartened by what seemed to be the good fortune of this day—the fact that my signal had been read, the finding of the talisman—

Talisman? Why had my thoughts so named the armlet? I sought it now with the fingers of my other hand. It was slightly warm to the touch; it fitted my wrist so snugly, it did not turn as I rubbed it, yet I was aware of no punishing constriction. I felt, under my fingertips, that the designs upon it were in slight relief, and I found that I was trying to follow this line or that by touch alone. I was still doing it as sleep overcame me.

That sleep was deep, dreamless, and I awoke from it refreshed and with confidence. It seemed to me that I could face without fears all this day might bring, and I was eager to be gone.

Hiku stood by the trough, shaking his head, the water flying in drops from his muzzle. I hailed him happily as if he could answer me in human speech. He nickered as though he found this a morning to make one feel joyfully alive.

Even though I had daylight as an aid, I had no wish to explore. The driving need to know what had happened to Joisan was part of me. I waited only to eat, and then I readied to leave.

Whether the portion of the bridge that had moved at our urging last night could now be replaced, I began to wonder. When we came to the portion lying on top of the other surface, I examined it with care. In the bright light of day I saw, jutting up on the north side of the parapet, a rod as thick as my forearm.

This was too short to have been a support for anything overhead, but it must have a purpose, and I hoped it dealt with the controls on the bridge. In test I bore down on it with all my strength, and nothing happened. From steady pressure I turned to quick, sharp jerks. There was a hard grating, it loosened, and once more I applied pressure.

The bridge section we had worked with such infinite labor to drag back trembled and began, with screeches of protest, to edge forward. It did not quite complete the span again, but lacked only perhaps a foot of locking together. The gap was not enough to prison us.

Back on shore, before I mounted Hiku, I gazed back at the lake keep. It was so strongly built a fortress, so easily defended, that I marked it down to serve at some future time. With the bridge drawn back, even the crawling monsters of the invaders could not reach it. And its lower walls without breaks could safely hide a third of the army in the south. Yes, this was a fortress that we might make good use of.

Now as I turned Hiku north, planning to cut across refugee trails heading west, I saw that the land about this portion of the lake must once have been under plow. There were even patches of stunted grain still growing. I passed an orchard of trees with ripening fruit. This land must have fed the lake dwellers once. I would have liked to explore, but Joisan’s plight did not allow that.

A day it took me to cross that countryside to the next rise of hills. I saw animals in plenty, deer grazing, which meant no hunters. Among them, as I neared the hills, were some gaunt and wild-eyed cattle which I believed had been lost from some herd harried by the invaders. Those sighting me snorted and galloped away clumsily.

As I re-entered the hills, I found the cattle’s trail marked by hoof prints and droppings. It angled through a rift, and I followed it wearily, hoping for an easy passage, but also aware that the cattle might be hunted.

Yet I met no enemy. At length, a day later, I chanced directly on what I sought, tracks left by a small band who were not forest-trained enough to hide their going. There were only three horses, and most of the traces had been left by women and children. These must be fugitives from Ithdale, and though there was one chance in perhaps a thousand of Joisan being among them, I might learn something of her.

The tracks were several days old. They tried to head west, but the nature of the rough ground kept pushing them south instead. And this was wild country.

On the morning of the fourth day of trailing, I came to the top of a ridge and, smelling smoke, I crept up to make sure this was the party I sought and not a band of enemy scouts.

The valley was wider here, with a stream in its middle. By the banks of that were shelters of hacked branches covered with other branches and grass. A woman bent over a fire, feeding it one stick at a time. As I watched a second figure crept from one of those lean-tos and straightened to full height.

Morning light caught the glitter of mail that the newcomer was now pulling on. Her head was bare, her hair tied back in a red-brown rope falling between her shoulders. Fortune had favored me once again—that this was indeed Joisan, though I was too far to see her face, I was somehow sure.

My purpose was now clear. I must front her as soon as possible. And when she moved purposefully away from the fire and set off along the river, I was glad. I wanted to meet her alone, not under the staring eyes of her people.

If she were to turn from me in disgust at the sight of my hoofs, any relationship would end before it was begun. I must know that without witnesses. I slipped down-slope to intercept her, using the same caution I would have had she been the enemy.

14

Joisan

In our struggle westward during the flight from Ithdale, we had had a little luck in the finding of three strayed ponies, upon the backs of which our weaker ones could ride in turn. This I ordered—that all was share and share alike, with no deference to rank. Yngilda glowered at me, though the Lady Islaugha, after her first violent outburst, went silent as if I did not exist. I thankfully accepted that.

That there was no easy road to Norsdale, we learned within the second day of our journey. The invaders, either in pursuit of fugitives or animals, quartered the land, and we were driven far off our course.

Food was our great need, for luckily, this being summer, we could shelter in the open. But though our animals could graze, we could not live on grasses. And the distance we covered in a day became less and less, since we must also hunt to fill our bellies.

Insfar, who had been a shepherd and had knowledge of wild berries and edible plants, was our guide here. There were mushrooms, and every stream or pool was an invitation to try fishing.

Our arrows and bolts were too few to waste on hunting unless we could make very sure of the shot, and I forbade their being thrown away. Rudo, in spite of being one-eyed, had luck with a slingshot and carried it ever with him, along with a store of pebbles. Four times he added rabbits to the pot. But there was less than a mouthful of meat apiece when that was served out.

We had a second problem, one which had slowed this band of fugitives from the first. Martine, who had been wedded only last fall to the son of the village headman, was heavy with child, her time near upon her. I knew we must find, and shortly, a place wherein we could not only camp for a space, but also have food. Yet nowhere in this rugged land did there seem any welcome.

On the fifth day of our frighteningly slow travel, Rudo and Timon, scouting ahead, returned with brighter faces. We had not cut across any invader trail now for more than a day and so we had a faint ray of hope we had gotten beyond their ranging. What our scouts offered us was a camping ground. And none too soon, I believed, for Nalda, who had kept an eye on Martine, looked very sober.

If we turned a little south, Rudo reported, we would find a valley with not only water but game. He had also discovered a thicket of pla-plums fully ripe. And there was no sign of any visitors.

“Best foot in there, Lady Joisan.” Nalda spoke with her usual frankness. “That one”—she nodded at Martine, who sat on the nearest pony, her head dropping, her hands pressed to her swelling belly—“is nigh her time. I do not think she is going to get through this day before her pains come.”

We came into the valley. As Rudo promised, it had many advantages. And the men, though Insfar could use only one arm and Angarl one hand, set about hacking down saplings and setting up lean-tos—the first of which Nalda took for Martine.

She had foreseen rightly. By moonrise our party had gathered a new member, squalling lustily, and named Alwin for his dead father. Thus also our staying here for some time was ordered.

It was the next morning I set my will against Yngilda’s. If we were to survive, we must gather all the food we might find, keeping ourselves on spare rations while we dried or otherwise prepared the rest for the trail ahead.

I was learned in the provisioning of a keep, but here where there was no salt, no utensils with which to work—nothing but hands, my memory, and what I could improvise—it seemed I faced an impossible task. Yet it was one I must master.

The village women made no murmur, and even the two children did as they were bid at their mother’s side. It made me hot with anger when Yngilda did not bestir herself from the lean-to or make any move to join our foraging party.

I went to her, a bag roughly woven from grass and small vines in my hand. Coaxing would not stir her, that I was sure. This was a case for the rough of one’s tongue, and that, exasperated and driven as I was, I could easily give.

“On your feet, girl! You will go with Nalda and take heed of what she says—”

She looked at me stony-eyed. “You are bondswoman to us, Joisan. If you would grub in the dirt with fieldwomen, that is your choice. I do not forget my blood—”

“Then live upon it!” I bade her. “Who hunts not food does not eat by another’s labor. And I am no bondswoman.”

I threw the bag to her, and she spurned it with her foot. So I turned and tramped away to join the others. But I swore that I would hold to my promise. She was able-bodied and young—I would share with the Lady Islaugha, but not with her.

Of the Lady Islaugha I thought now impatiently. She had sunk into herself: for no better way could I describe her appearance since I had reported Toross’ death. As with Dame Math at the last, age had settled upon her in a single day; so, though she was still in middle years by reckoning, she was to all eyes an aged woman.

She had retreated into her own thoughts, and sometimes we could not rouse her, even to eat what was put into her hand, without a great effort. Now and then she muttered in whispers of which I could not catch more than a word or so, and from these I guessed that she spoke with those I could not see and who, perhaps, were long gone from this world.

I hoped that this was a temporary state born of shock and that in time she would be herself. But of that I could not be sure. If I could only get her to Norstead Abbey where the Dames were learned in nursing, perhaps she might be brought back to the world. But Norsdale seemed farther from us each day.

Yngilda had no such excuse, and she must take upon herself a share of our hardships. The sooner she learned that fact, the better! It was with no pleasant feelings that I went out to hunt.

I had a long bow and three arrows. At Ithkrypt in practice shooting I had proven myself marksman. But shooting at a target and at living prey were, I knew, two different matters, and I must not waste any more of those arrows. So my greater hope this morning was fixed on the river.

With patience and care I had worked at the edge of my mail shirt and broken off a couple of links, shaping them roughly into hooks, raveling my cloak hem and twisting together fibers for a cord. It was poor equipment for a fisherman, but the best I had. And as the foragers separated, the men heading for the grassland where rabbits might be found, the women for the plum thicket, I kept on along the river bank.

Only necessity made it possible for me to bait the first hook with a living insect. I had always shrunk from hurting any creature, and this use of a small life was to me another horror to be added to those of the immediate past.

I found a place where I could wade out to a square rock around which the water washed. There were trees here, and it was cool, shadowed from the sun. But it was still so warm that I shed my mail and the padded jacket under that, keeping on only my undershift; but wishing I might drop that also and slide into the water to wash clean, not only from the dust and sweat of our journeying, but from memory also.

The gryphon swung free, but it held none of the life it had shown the night when Toross and I fled together. I studied it now. It was marvelously wrought. Where had it come from? Overseas—a fairing bought from some Sulcar trader? Or—was it a talisman of the Old Ones?

Talisman—my mind played with that thought. Had it served us as a guide on our flight from Ithkrypt to the star place in the wood? That had been of the Old Ones, and this—could it be, I speculated, that such baubles as this had connection with remains of the Old Ones?

It was an interesting thought, but not one to produce food. I had best attend to the reason for my being here. I dropped my baited line into the water.

Twice I had a strike, but the fish got away. And the second time it took my hook. I had never possessed great patience, but that morning I forced myself to cultivate it as I never had before.

I gained two fish with the second hook. But neither was large. And I feared that unless luck changed, this was no way to replenish our supplies. Leaving my rock, I trudged farther along the stream and, to my joy, found in a side eddy a bed of watercress I plundered.

As the sun turned westward, I turned back to camp. I had eaten some berries and chewed on a handful of my watercress. But I ached with hunger as I went, hoping that the rest had had better luck. When I struck away from the river, I came across the first piece of real fortune I had had all day.

There was a snarl and a deeper answer. Dropping my bag of fish and watercress, I put arrow to bow string and stole forward past a screen of brush.

On the body of a fresh-killed cow crouched a half-grown snow cat, its ears flattened to its skull, its teeth bared in a death-promising grin. Facing it was a broc-boar.

These grim scavengers were meat eaters, but this one must have either been wild with some private fury, or ravening with hunger, or it would not have challenged the cat over its own kill. And it would seem that the cat was wary of the boar, as if it sensed that the other’s challenge had a double element of danger.

The boar was digging its tusks into the earth already softened by its pawing forefeet, tossing bits of sod into the air and squealing in a rising crescendo of sound.

Side by side on the ground the boar would outweigh the cat, I thought. I had seen only two broc-boars in my life, and both had been well under the weight and shoulder height of this monster.

The cat screamed in fury as it sprang, not at the boar, but back from the prey it had cut down. And the boar moved after it with a nimbleness I would not have guessed possible. With another protest of feline rage, the snow cat leaped to a crag and up, soon gaining the heights. From there I could hear its hissing and growling growing fainter as it left the field to the boar who stood, its head cocked, listening.

Almost without planning, I moved then. It was dangerous. Wound that tight package of porcine fury, and I might be horribly dead. But as yet the boar had not winded me, and I saw in it such a promise of food as I could not, in my hunger, resist. Also it was standing now in just the position where I could get a telling shot.

I loosed my arrow and a second later threw myself backward into such hiding as the brush gave me. I heard a terrible squeal and a thudding, but I dared not wait. If I had failed, that four-footed death would be after me. So I ran.

Before I reached camp I sighted Rudo and Insfar and gasped out my story.

“If the boar did not follow you, Lady, it was because it could not,” Insfar said. “They are devils for attack. But it may well be your shot was lucky—”

“It was folly,” Rudo commented sourly and directly. “It might well have slain you.”

He had the truth of it. My hunger had betrayed me into the rankest folly. I accepted his words humbly, knowing that I might now be lying dead.

We returned together, scouting the terrain as if we expected an attack from ambush. We had circled, going upslope. When we finally reached the scene, there lay the cow and, beyond, on bloodstained ground torn by hoofs and tusks, the boar also. My arrow had sunk behind its shoulders and into the heart.

I found this stroke of fortune earned me awe from the rest of the party. Such a happening was so rare that it might be deemed an act dictated by the Power. I believe that from that hour my people held that some of Dame Math’s knowledge and skills were also mine. Though they did not say it to my face. I saw them send favor signs in my direction, and they paid heed to all I said, as if what I uttered were farseeings.

Yngilda remained my thorn-in-the-flesh. I kept to my resolve that first night, and when the flesh was roasting on spits above the fire, so that the savor of it brought juices flowing into the mouth, I spoke aloud so all could hear.

The able-bodied who did not labor equally to supply us all would not share in the fruits of our seeking. So I said, after I had given full praise for the results of that day’s harvesting. I saw that all shared that night—save Yngilda. But her I refused openly, that all might note I did not accept rank as an excuse for idleness.

She flung at me that I was under blood-curse to her family. But I said as firmly that I accepted the Lady Islaugha as my charge, and her I would serve. To that these assembled could bear witness. However, Yngilda was young, of strong body, and therefore she would find none here to wait upon her—it would be equal sharing.

I think she would have liked to fly at me, to rake my face and eyes with her fingers. But in that company she stood alone, measured for what she was, and she knew it. So at last she turned from us and crawled back into her lean-to, and I heard her crying, but such weeping as comes from anger and not from sorrow. I had no pity for her. But I also realized that I had made an enemy who would remain an unfriend.

However, it seemed as one day followed another Yngilda had reconsidered her position and thought the better of her obstinacy. She did not do her share of the work graciously, but work she did, even to the odorous business of helping to spread the strips of beef to sun-dry after we butchered the cow that had fallen to the snow cat.

We were frugal, even making use of the bones of both slaughtered animals, their hides (though these could only be rough-cured), and the tusks of the boar. Martine regained her strength, so I had hopes that before the warm weather was past we could fight our way to Norsdale and I could at last lay down my burden of leadership.

Lady Islaugha took to wandering away, in search, perhaps, of Toross. One of our number had to guard her ever, since while so driven to this wandering, her strength seemed the greater and she would set off briskly, often struggling with her guardian if he tried to thwart her, only to falter later when she tired. Then her guardian would lead her back.

Timon fashioned some better fishhooks, and I continued to try my luck along the river. I think out of stubbornness, determined to win a victory here as I had with the boar. But, judging by my continued failures, my luck did not hold in water as it had on land. So clear was that water that ofttimes I sighted the shadows of what were indeed giants compared to the unwary fish I managed to pull out. But either there was some trick of baiting I did not understand, or else these were warier than most fish.

It was during the third day when I followed the river that there came upon me the strong sensation of being watched. So acute did this grow that my hand went to Toross’ knife in my belt. From time to time I halted to look around, certain that if I turned quickly enough I could sight some face framed in the grass or in a bush.

I grew so uneasy that I decided to return to camp and alert my people. Some scout of the invaders might have found our backtrail. If so, we might be already doomed, unless we could find and slay him before he reported to his force.

As I turned, the bush parted and one stepped into the open. I had drawn steel in the same instant, ready to defend myself.

He held up empty hands as if he knew what passed in my mind. At the same time, seeing him in full, I knew he was no invader. His battle hood was loosened to lie back on his shoulders. And he wore no over-jerkin or tabard with arms emblazoned on it. Rather did his mail and leather look dulled and dingy, as if purposefully darkened.

But—as my eyes swept down his slim body I stiffened. He wore no boots, his leather breeches were in-fastened at his ankles with straps and his feet—but he had no feet! He stood upon hoofs like one of the cows.

From that impossibility I swiftly looked to his face again, half-expecting to find it monstrous also in some way. But it was not. A man’s face truly, browned by sun and wind, the cheeks a little hollowed, the mouth firm-set. He was not as handsome as Toross and—my eyes met his, and in spite of my control I took a step or so back. For those eyes, like the hoofed feet, were not of human man.

They were the color of that amber known to us as “butter,” a deep yellow, and in them the pupil was more slit than circle. Not a man’s eyes—

When I drew back there was a change in his face, or did I only imagine that? And now I remembered Dame Math’s teaching (had she ever in the past, before she had joined Norsdale, met such a one?), so between us in the air I drew a certain sign.

He smiled, but it seemed that smile was a wry, almost twisted one, as if in some manner he regretted that I knew him for what he was—one of the Old Ones. For the first time he spoke:

“Greetings, Lady.”

“And to you—” I hesitated, for by what honorific should an Old One be courteously addressed? That had not been in my training. Thus I gave him what I would grant one of my rank in the dales. “Lord, greeting.”

“I do not hear you add ‘fair meeting,’” he said then. “Do you deem me without testing unfriend?”

“I deem you beyond my measuring,” I answered frankly, for I believed that to be true, and perhaps he could read my mind. Such was child’s play for one of them.

He looked puzzled. “Who think you that I am, Lady?”

“One of those who held dominion here before my blood came to High Hallack.”

“An Old One—but—” His wry smile came again. “So be it, Lady. I shall say you neither aye nor nay, since you have named me so. But you and your folk yonder seem in a sorry case. It may be that I can be of some assistance to you.”

I knew so little—there were those among the Old Ones who were said to be favorable to men, who had on occasion given them assistance. There were others of the Dark whose malice meant great peril. Trust is a precious gift. If I chose wrong now, we would all suffer. Yet there was that about him which argued that he was not of the Dark.

“What have you to offer? We would reach Norsdale if we can, but the way—”

He interrupted me. “If you seek to go westward there are many perils. But I can bring you to a shelter that will serve you better than here. There is fruit and game there also—”

I gazed into those golden eyes, troubled. When he spoke so, I wanted to believe. But I was not alone; there were these people of mine. And to trust an Old One—

His smile went as I hesitated. There was a coldness in his face, as if he had held out his hand and been rebuffed. My unease grew. Perhaps he was one disposed to aid my kind, but would take offense if that aid were refused, thus bringing on us his displeasure.

“You must forgive me.” I sought for words to assuage the ire I feared might be rising in him. “I have had no meeting with—with your people heretofore. If I do not comport myself as I should, it comes from ignorance alone and not from any wish to offend. Among the dales you appear only in our legends. Some of those are favorable; some deal with the Dark Ones who give us hate instead of friendship. Thus we walk warily in your presence.”

“Because the Old Ones have what you call the Power,” he said. “Well, that may be so. But I mean you nothing but good, Lady. Look upon what you wear there on your breast—hold it out that I may touch it with my fingertip—you will see that this is so.”

I looked to the crystal gryphon. Though there was bright sun on us, not moonlight, I could perceive that it was glowing; almost it appeared as if the creature within the ball was about to give tongue and speak for this stranger, so oddly knowing did the carving look. I did then as he suggested, took the chain from about my neck and held the globe in my hand, stretching it forth to him.

He touched it with fingertip only, and the globe flashed into such radiant glory that I near dropped it. In that moment I knew that all he said was the truth, and that here had come one out of the unknown past of this land to do us service. So my heart lightened, though my awe of him was greater.

“Lord.” I bowed my head before him, giving homage to that which he was. “In all things behold one whom you can bid—”

Again he interrupted me, this time speaking with such sharpness that it was a rebuke.

“I am no lord of yours, Lady, nor are you under my bidding. You are to make your choice freely. I can offer you and your people a strong shelter and what aid a single man can give—and I am not ignorant of the ways of war. But more than your friendship—if you can find it in you sometime when we are better acquainted to offer me that—I do not claim!” There was such authority in his tone as he spoke, as if it were very necessary that he make this plain to me (though I was not sure of his meaning), that I was abashed. But I knew I must abide by his wishes.

He came back with me to my people, and they were also in awe of him, shrinking away. I watched him and saw the bitterness in his face, and there came into my mind that he was hurt at this effect he had upon people, so in turn I felt something of his pain—though how I knew all this I could not tell.

But he being who he was, his orders were obeyed without question. He whistled, and there came down from the hills in answer a mountain pony sure-footed and steady. And on this he mounted Martine. On our other horses we packed what we had harvested here and we went under his guidance.

In the end he brought us to a place that was indeed a greater wonder in its way than any keep of the dales, for it was built upon lake. To it led two bridges, though one was broken off and useless. But the other, as he showed us, could have a section moved in it, leaving a defensive gap across which no foeman could come.

Best of all, this land had once been under cultivation. There was fruit and stunted, wild-growing grain to be harvested.

With this promise against famine we knew we could remain here for as long as we needed to give our people strength and gather more food for the journey. And my trust in him was secure.

He gave us no name. Perhaps with him it was as it is with the Wisewomen who believe that if one knows their name one can then establish domination over them. In my mind I called him Lord Amber, because of his eyes.

Five days he stayed with us, seeing all was well. Then he said that he would go on scout, making sure those of Alizon had not struck inland far enough to trouble us.

“You speak as if the Hounds are also your enemies,” I said, curious. “Yet your people have not been attacked—it is my kin they sweep away.”

“The land is mine,” he answered. “I have already fought these elsewhere. I shall fight again, until they are driven back into the sea from which they came.”

I knew a thrill of excitement. What would it mean to my poor, beleaguered people if there were others such as he, possessors of the Power who would aid us in this death struggle? I longed to ask him if there were, and again it was as if he read my thoughts.

“You think the Power could be used to vanquish these?” There was brooding sadness in his face. “Be not wishful for that, Lady Joisan. He or she who summons such cannot always control it. Best not to call so. But this I will tell you: I believe this place to be as safe as any now in the hills. If you choose well, you will abide here until I return.”

I nodded eagerly. “Be assured we shall, Lord.” In that moment I had a queer desire to stretch forth my hand, perhaps touch his arm—as if some touch of mine could lighten that burden I thought rested ever on him. Such a fancy had no meaning in it, and of course I did not follow that odd whim.

15

Kerovan

I saw the shrinking in her eyes and knew that there could be naught between us. But it was only in my losing that I came to learn how much I had held in my heart the thought that, to at least one, I would be no monster but a man. How right had been that instinct that had kept me from obeying her wish and sending her my portrait. For she would never know now that I was Kerovan.

That Joisan took me to be one of the Old Ones was a two-way matter. On the one hand it kept her from asking questions that I must either struggle to evade or to which I must give answers. On the other hand she would expect from me some evidences of the “Power.” For that lack, I would also need to find excuses. But for a few days I could set actions before words.

The poor camp was a refuge for a pitiful band. There were but four who might be termed—very loosely indeed—fighting men. Two were past middle age, one lacked a hand, the other an eye. There was a green boy who I suspected had never drawn steel, and a hill shepherd who was wounded. The rest were women and children, though of that number there were some who could stand shoulder to shoulder with any armsman if there be need.

Mostly they were villagers, but there were two other ladies—one old, one young. The older was in a state of shock and had to be watched lest she wander off. Joisan confided in me that her son had been slain and that she now refused to accept that, but wished to search for him.

Of Ithdale itself she had a strange tale, almost as strange as the blasting of Ulmskeep. It seemed that one of her own House had called down some manifestation of the Power on the keep, catching thereby a goodly number of the Hounds. But before that there had been some warning, and she hoped many of her people had managed to flee westward. Their goal was Norsdale, but now they had no guide. Also there was one of the women who had recently given birth and could not travel long or hard.

It was then I thought of that fortress in the lake and how it could be a shelter for this band until they recovered strength. That much I could do for my lady, bring her and hers to a roof over their heads and a small measure of safety.

That she wore my gift was no matter of pride for me, for I was certain she did not wear it because of any attachment for its giver, but rather because she delighted in it for itself. Now and then I saw her hand seek and caress it, almost as if from such fondling she received strength.

The younger of the two ladies, Yngilda, who was kinsman to Joisan, I did not like. She watched my lady from under downcast lids with a sly hatred, though Joisan showed no ill will toward her. What lay between them in the past I had no inkling, but this Yngilda I would noways trust.

Of Joisan herself—but those thoughts I battled, summoning always in answer to them the memory of her expression when she had seen my unbooted feet. How wise I had been in my choice to bare that deformity to the world. Had I continued to hide it, made myself known to Joisan, found her welcoming and then— No, it was far better to eat bitterness early than to have it twist one doubly by following on the sweet.

That Joisan was such a lady as one might treasure, that I learned in those few days when, under my guidance, they made their way to the keep in the lake. Though many times she must have been weary and downhearted, yet she was ready to shoulder duty’s burdens without complaint. And her courage was as great as her heart. Had I only been as other men—

Now I chewed upon the sourness of that memory-vision in which she had supported a dying man in grief. Did that lie in the past or the future? I had no right to question her, for I had surrendered that with my claim upon her.

Somehow, if it was in my power, I would get them to what safety Norsdale promised. Then—well, I was now a landless man. It would be easy to drop out of reckoning. I could join some lord’s menie. Or I could go into the Waste, where those who were outcast from the dales carried their shame or despair. However, I would see Joisan safe before I said farewell.

When those from Ithdale had settled into the keep and had mastered the defensive use of the sliding bridge, I sought Joisan and told her that I must scout for the invaders. That was in part the truth, but with that need there was another, that I go forth and do battle with myself, for there were times when she seemed to reach to me. Not with hand, or invitation of voice. But she would look at me when she thought my attention elsewhere, and there was a vague questioning in her face, as if she sensed that there was a bond between us.

Because there was a weakness in me that yearned toward making myself known, trading on any familiarity that had grown, I was determined that I must get away until I could build such an inner control as would never yield. In her eyes at first sighting I had been a monster. Because she now believed me an Old One with whom the human standards of form did not hold, she accepted me fully. But as a man—I was flawed.

On leaving the lake keep, I circled out to the north and west. This was wild country, though it did not have the desolation of the Waste. Nor did I come upon any other Old Ones’ ruins, as I expected to with the impressive lake structure so near.

Three days I quested in the direction I thought we must follow to Norsdale. Though I did not know any trail, I had a good idea of the general direction. The way was rough; the wider dalelands of the east changed here to a series of knife-narrow valleys walled by sharp ridges, weary path for foot travelers. Also they would not be able to go fast. And I began to wonder as I struck more westerly whether they would not be better placed to wait within the lake keep for spring.

On the fourth day I cut across a fresh trail. It was of a small party, not more than four. They were mounted, but their animals were plainly not the heavier beasts the Hounds favored, the tracks being those of unshod hill ponies. More fugitives? Perhaps—but in times of war no man accepts an untested assumption.

Joisan had told me her people had been widely scattered when they fled. These could be more from Ithdale. I had a duty to make sure, to guide them if they were.

Yet I took no chances and followed with a scout’s wiles. The trail was, I believed, several days old. Twice I came to where they had camped, or rather sheltered, for there were no signs of fires. Also—their going spoke of more than flight—it was as if they knew exactly where they were going, driven more by purpose than fear.

Their direction, making allowances for natural obstacles, led directly to the lake keep. Noting that, I was more than a little uneasy. Four men did not make a formidable force, but four men, armed and ready, could take Joisan’s people by surprise. And these might be outlaws drawn out of the Waste by the bait of loot.

I might have held their trail had it not been for the storm. It came with the evening of the same day. Though it was a summer shower compared to the fury I had seen unleashed in Ulmsdale, yet it was not an easy torrent of rain or force of wind to face. With darkness added, I was made to seek cover and wait it out.

As I waited, my mind fastened on one evil chance after another. I could not rid myself of the belief that these I followed were unfriends. And I had lived on the edge of the Waste too many years not to know what outlaws would do to the helpless. Now I could only hold to self-control, try to believe that Joisan had followed my last orders and taken up the bridge section and that they would not admit strangers to the keep. Ithkrypt had not known such raiders. They could accept any dalesman as friend.

By morning the storm had cleared, but it had washed away the trail. I was too concerned to cast about hunting it. The need to return to the lake, discover what chanced there, rode me strong.

But I had two days yet on the way, even though I pushed myself and Hiku to the limit of endurance. When I came into the lake valley and saw the keep, I had worked myself into such a state of foreboding as prepared me to find a bloody massacre.

There was a hail from one of the largely overgrown fields that brought me up short. Nalda and two of the other women waved from a peaceful scene. They were engaged in harvesting the thin stand of stunted grain, gleaning every stalk and heaping it on two outspread cloaks.

“Fair news, my Lord!” Nalda’s voice rang loud in my ears as she crossed the field to reach me. “My Lady’s lord has come at last! He heard of her distress and rode to her service!”

I stared at her unbelieving. Then common sense made it all clear—she did not mean Joisan, of course. She spoke of the lord wed to Yngilda—though I had thought he was supposed to have died when his keep was overrun in the south.

“The Lady Yngilda must be giving praise to Gunnora at this hour,” I had wit enough to answer.

Nalda stared at me as strangely as perhaps I had at her a moment earlier.

“That one—she is widowed, not wed! No, it is the Lord Kerovan, he who has been so long wed to our dear lady! He rode in three days since—to rejoice our hearts. Lord, my Lady has asked all to watch for you, to urge you to hasten to the keep—”

“Be sure that I shall!” I said between set teeth. Who this false Kerovan was, I had no idea, but that I must see him, must save Joisan from any danger. Someone who knew of our marriage, who perhaps thought me dead, was taking advantage of the situation. And the thought that he could be with Joisan now was like a sword through me. That she might in time turn to another I had tried to endure, but that another had come to her in false guise—that I would not countenance.

For now I could call on my repute as an Old One of unknown but awesome powers. I could proclaim Kerovan dead, unmask this intruder, and she would believe me. Thus I had only to reach the keep, confront the imposter.

I urged my weary Hiku to a trot, though I longed to fling myself from his back, go pounding ahead into the keep, to call out this thief of another man’s name and slay him out of hand—not because he had taken my name, but because he had boldly used it as a cloak to reach Joisan. In that moment how I wished I was truly what she thought me, one who could summon forces beyond the understanding of men.

Angarl, the one-handed, was on sentry duty and gave me a greeting I forced myself to answer. Very shortly I was in the courtyard. The deserted emptiness which had restrained me on my first visit here from too detailed exploration was gone. Life had returned to the hold, and it was now a place for humans.

Two men loitered by the water-trough, chaffing with one of the village girls, their deeper laughter banishing even more the atmosphere of the alien. They wore House badges adorned with my gryphon on their over-jerkins.

Before they looked up, I studied them. Neither was familiar—I had begun to wonder if survivors from Ulmsdale might have been drawn into this. However, the fact I did not recognize them meant little, for I had been away from Ulmskeep for months before my father’s death, and he might have hired newcomers to augment his forces, taking the places of those who rode south with me.

That they wore such badges meant this was no hastily improvised scheme on the part of someone who had heard a rumor or two. Here was careful preparation—but why? Had Joisan still had Ithkrypt with men and arms, then I could have understood such a move. The false Kerovan would have ruled in Ithdale. But she was a landless, homeless fugitive. Why then?

One of the men glanced up, saw me, and nudged his fellow. Their laughter was gone; they eyed me warily. But I did not approach them. Rather I slid from Hiku’s back and walked, stiff with the weariness of the trail, toward that tower room Joisan had made her own.

“You—!” The call was harsh, arrogant.

I swung around to see the two armsmen striding toward me. It was not until they fronted me that they seemed to realize I differed from their kind. I faced them calmly, bringing into my bearing the stiffness of one who has been approached by those beneath him in rank in a manner highly unbecoming.

“You—” the leader began again, but he was now uncertain. I saw his comrade nudge him in the ribs. It was the second man who now pushed a little to the fore.

“Your pardon, Lord,” he said, his eyes searching me up and down. “Whom do you seek?”

His assumption of a steward’s duties here fed my anger.

“Not you, fellow.” I turned away.

Perhaps they would have liked to have intercepted me, but they did not quite dare. And I did not look to them again as I came to the tower doorway, now curtained with a horse blanket.

“Good fortune to the house!” I raised my voice.

“Lord Amber!” The blanket was thrust aside and Joisan stood before me.

There was that in her face at that moment which hurt. So he had won this already, this radiance! So ill had I played my part I had thrown away all. All? Another part of me questioned it. I had already decided that this was not for me. How could I then question her happiness if one she believed to be her lord had come to serve her in the depths of her need? That he was an imposter was all I must think on, that she must not be deceived.

“Lord Amber, you have come!” She put forth her hand, but did not quite touch mine, which I had raised against my will. Having spoken so, she stood looking at me. I could not understand—”

“Who comes, my fair one?”

I knew that voice from the dusk of the room behind her. Knowing it, my hate near broke bounds so that I thirsted to draw steel and press him into combat. Rogear here—but why?

“Lord Amber, have you heard? My lord has come—hearing of our troubles he has come—”

She spoke hurriedly and there was that in her voice which made me watch her closely. I had seen Joisan afraid. I had seen her rise above fear and pain of heart and mind, be strong for others to lean upon. But at this moment I thought that it was not joy that colored her tone. Outwardly she might present this smiling face, inwardly—no—

Her lord had not brought her happiness! Excitement stirred in me at that which I thought no guess but honest truth. She had not found in Rogear what she sought.

She retreated a step or two, though she had not answered his question. I followed, to stand facing my mother’s kin. He wore a war tabard over his mail, with that gryphon to which he had no right worked on it. Above that his face was handsome, his mouth curved in that small secret smile, until he saw me—

In that instant the smile was wiped from his lips. His eyes narrowed, and there was about him watchfulness as if we both held swords in hand and were set against one another.

“My Lord.” Joisan spoke hurriedly, as if she sensed what lay between us and wished to avoid battle. But she addressed me first as the higher in rank. “This is my promised Lord, Kerovan who is heir to Ulmsdale.”

“Lord—Kerovan?” I made a question of that. I could denounce Rogear at once. But so could he me. Or could he? That which had been my bane, my deformity—would not Joisan continue to think it proved me alien? At any rate, Rogear must not be allowed to play any dark game here—whether it meant Joisan turning from me in disgust or not.

“I think not!” My words fell into the silence like blows.

In that moment Rogear’s hand came up, something flashing in it—the crystal gryphon. From it struck a ray of light straight at my head. Pain burst behind my eyes, I was both blind and in such agony that I could not think, only feel. I staggered back against the wall, fighting to keep my feet. My arm was upflung in a futile effort to counter this stroke I was unprepared to face. I heard Joisan scream, and hard upon that cry another of rage and pain. Still blind, I was thrust aside and fell to the floor.

Joisan screamed again, and I heard sounds of a struggle. But I could not see! Not trying to rise, I threw myself toward the sounds.

“No! No!” Joisan’s voice. “Loose me!”

Rogear had Joisan! A foot stamped upon my hand, giving me a second thrust of agony so great I could not stand it, yet I must! If he had Joisan, could drag her out—

I flung out my sound arm, touched a body, embraced kicking legs, and threw the weight of my shoulder against him, bearing him under me to the floor.

“Joisan—run!” I cried. I could not fight when I could not see; I could only hold on, taking his blows, trying to keep him so she could escape.

“No!” Her voice again, and with a cold note in it that I had never heard before. “Lie you very still, my Lord.”

“Lord Amber,” she said now, “I hold a knife blade to his throat. You may loose him.”

He did indeed lie as one who would offer no more fight. I backed away a little.

“You say,” she continued in that same tone, “this is not Kerovan. Why, my Lord?”

I made my choice. “Kerovan is dead, my Lady. Dead in an ambush laid by this Rogear above his father’s keep. This Rogear has knowledge of the Old Ones—from the Dark Path—”

I heard a quickly drawn breath. “Dead? And this one dares to wear my lord’s name to deceive me?”

Rogear spoke up then. “Tell her your name—”

“As you know, we do not give our names to mankind,” I improvised.

“Mankind? And what are—”

“Lord Kerovan.” My head jerked toward that new voice. “What do you—” It was one of the armsmen from the courtyard.

“Lord Kerovan does nothing,” Joisan answered. “As for this one, take him and ride.”

“Shall we take her, Lord?” asked the armsman.

I had gotten to my feet, faced toward that voice, though I could not see.

“Let the wench go. She is of no importance now.” By his tone Rogear had regained his full confidence.

“And him, Lord?” Someone was moving toward me. My crushed hand hung useless. In any event I could not see him.

“No!” Rogear’s answer was the exact opposite of what I expected to hear. In that moment a single thrust from a sword would have finished it all in his favor, and he could have had his will of Joisan. “Touch him on your peril!”

“We ride,” he added. “I have what I came for—”

“No! Not that! Give me the gryphon!” Joisan’s cry ended in the thud of a blow, and her slight body struck against mine. She would have slipped to the floor, but I flung my arm about her. They were gone, though I cried out for any in the courtyard to stop them.

“Joisan!” I held her close against me. She was a slack weight—if I could only see! What had that devil done to her? “Joisan!” Had he killed her?

But Joisan was not dead, only struck senseless, as those who came running told me. As for Rogear and his men, they were away. I sat by Joisan’s bed, holding her hand in mine. About my useless eyes was bound a cloth wet in water in which herbs had been steeped. Only in that hour did I begin to face the fact that perhaps my sight was gone from me. Just as I had not been able to save Joisan from that last blow, so I would never again be able to step between her and any other harm. That was the black hour in which I learned how much she had come to be a part of me. The pain I had known earlier as I stood aside from making myself known was as nothing to what I now felt.

“Lord—” Joisan’s voice weak and thin, but still her voice.

“Joisan!”

“He took—he took my lord’s gift—the gryphon.” She was sobbing now.

Fumbling, I drew her into my arms, so she wept upon my shoulder.

“It was the truth you spoke; he is not Kerovan?”

“The truth. It is as I said. Kerovan died in ambush at Ulmsdale. Rogear is betrothed to Kerovan’s sister.”

“And I never saw my lord. But his gift—that one shall not have it! By the Nine Words of Min, he shall not! It is a wondrous thing, and his hands besmirch it. And he used it as a weapon, Lord—he used it to burn your eyes!”

That flash from the globe—

“But also, Lord, your own power answered, from this band on your wrist. If you had only held that sooner as a shield.” Her fingers were feather-light on my arm above the armlet. “Lord, they say those of you people are mighty in healcraft. If you have not that talent yourself, can we not take you to them? It is in my service, this grievous hurt came to you. I owe you a blood-debt—”

“No. There is no debt between us,” I denied quickly.

“This Rogear has always been my unfriend. Had we met anywhere he would have sought to kill me.” And, I thought bleakly then, perhaps I would be better dead now of a wound, than alive with this cloth about my head marking my loss.

“I have something of healcraft, and so has Nalda. Perhaps the sight will come again. Oh, my Lord, I do not know why he sought me here. I have no longer lands or fortune—save that which he took with him. Know you of this gryphon? It was sent me by my lord. Was it then such a great treasure of his House that this Rogear would risk so much to get it into his hands?”

Her query drew my thoughts away from my own darkness to consider why Rogear had come. The crystal gryphon—that it had strange powers was entirely possible. He was learned in the lore of the Old Ones—the Dark Old Ones. I had heard enough from Riwal to know that when one went some distance down the path of alien knowledge, things of power, both light and dark, could make themselves known to the initiate.

I had been with Riwal when I first found it. Neevor had said Riwal was dead, but he had evaded giving a description of how my friend had died. Supposing Rogear, already practiced in the Old Ones’ learning, had somehow ferreted out Riwal, learned from him about the gryphon, traced it thereafter to my lady? That would mean it was such a talisman as could cause great troubles. In Rogear’s hand its use would be a danger to the world I knew. Joisan was right, we must strive to get it back. But how—? I put my hand to my bandaged eyes with a sigh. Could it ever be done?

16

Joisan

I was in the eastern watchtower when my lord came to us. Though there was no alarm gong hung there, yet in the uppermost room we had found a metal plate set into the wall. A sword hilt laid vigorously to that brought forth a carrying sound. After Lord Amber rode out, we kept a sentry there by day—secure at night with the bridge drawn against any shoreside visitor.

So was I alert to the riders and beat out an alarm before I saw that they rode at a quiet amble and that Timon came afoot with them. He was under no restraint, but spoke with their leader in a friendly fashion. For a moment or two I was excited by the belief that some of our men might have escaped the slaughter by the river and been able to trace us. Then I saw that their battle tabards were not red but green.

They could be scouts of some other dale, and from them we could claim escort to Norsdale, though that thought made me a little unhappy. I wanted to reach Norsdale with my people. There the Lady Islaugha would find the proper tending, and the others for whom I was responsible would find new homes. Though the Lord Amber had indeed provided us with such a refuge as I had never hoped to find in this wilderness, we could not stay here forever.

I did not know why I had been so content here, as I had not been since that long-ago time before Lord Cyart had ridden south at the beginning of our time of trouble.

Now, even as the sound died away, I sped down the stair, eager to see who these newcomers might be. Yet I ordered my pace as I reached the courtyard, for chance had made me ruler in this place, and I must carry myself with proper dignity.

When I saw what was emblazoned on the tabard of he who led that very small company I was shaken. So well did I know that rearing gryphon! These were my lord’s people. Or even—perhaps—

“My dear Lady!” He swung from his saddle and held out his hands to me in greeting, his voice warm.

Though I wore no skirt now, I swept him the curtsy of greeting. However, I was glad he attempted no wanner salute than voice and hand.

“My Lord Kerovan?” I made that more question than recognition.

“I so stand before you.” He continued to smile. Yet—

So this was my wedded lord? Well, he had not Toross’ regularity of feature, but neither was he unpleasing to look upon. For a dalesman his hair was very dark—a ruddy darkness—and his face less broad across the jaw—more oval. Despite those ugly rumors that Yngilda had first loosed for me, there was certainly nothing uncanny in him. Now Lord Amber was plainly of alien stock, but my Lord was as any dalesman.

That was our first meeting, and it was a constrained and uneasy one with many eyes watching. But how else could it be in this time and place when we two so bound together were strangers to one another?

I was grateful that he treated me with courtesy and deference, as one yet to be won, not a possession already in his hand. And he was both kind and gentle in his manner. Still—

Why did I feel that I wanted nothing more of him, that I regretted that he had come? He spoke me fair, always in that voice which was so pleasing, telling me that he, too, was now homeless—that Ulmskeep had fallen to the invaders. He and his men had been in flight from there, striving to reach Ithdale, when he had crossed the path of some of our people. Learning how it had been with us, he then pushed on to search for me.

“We were told you were with the army in the south, my Lord,” I said, more to make conversation than to demand any explanation.

“That I was, for my father. But when he became ill he sent for me. Alas, I arrived too late. Lord Ulric was already dead, and the invaders so close to our gates that our last battle was forced upon me in great haste. But we were favored in that there was a storm from the sea, and so those of Alizon took nothing. In the end they were totally destroyed.”

“But you said that your keep had fallen.”

“Not to the Hounds. It was the sea that brought down our walls: wind and wave swept in, taking the land. Ulmsport”—he gestured—“now all lies under water.

“However,” he continued briskly, “the lad who brought us here says you seek Norsdale—”

I told him our tale and of how I was curse-bound to the Lady Islaugha and must see her to safety.

He was grave-faced now, hearing me through without question, nodding now and then in agreement to something I said.

“You are well south of your proper trail,” he replied, with the authority of one who knew exactly where he was. “And your fortune has been great to find such shelter as this.”

“The finding was not ours, but Lord Amber’s.”

“Lord Amber? Who bears such an unusual name?”

I flushed. “He does not speak his name—that is mine for him, since every man must have a name. He—he is one of the Old Ones—one well disposed toward us.”

I was not too ill at ease at that moment to miss noting his reaction to my words. He stiffened, his face now a mask behind which thoughts might race without sign. I have seen a fox stand so still as it listened for a distant hunter. A moment later that alert was gone, or else he concealed it.

“One of the Old Ones, my Lady? But they have been long gone. Perhaps this fellow seeks to deceive you for some purpose. How can you be sure he is such? Did he proclaim it so?”

“He had no need, as you will see when he returns. No man would be like him.” I was a little irked at the note in his voice, as if he believed me some silly maid to whom any tale can be told. And since I had led my people I had become one to make decisions, to stand firm. I had no liking to be pressed again into the old position of a saleswoman, that only my lord or another man could see the truth in any question and then decide what was best for me. Before I was Kerovan’s lady I was myself!

“So he returns? Where is he now?”

“He went some days ago to scout for the invaders,” I replied shortly. “Yes, he will return.”

“Well enough.” My lord nodded again. “But there are different kinds of Old Ones, as our people learned long ago, to their sorrow. Some would be friends, after a distant fashion; some ignore us unless we infringe upon their secrets; and others follow the Dark Path.”

“As well I know,” I answered. “But Amber can touch your gift and it blazes as it did when it saved me from the Hounds.”

“My gift—?”

Did I hear aright now? Had there been surprise in his tone? But no, I schooled my thoughts, I must not react so to everything he said as if we were unfriends and not life comrades, as we must learn to be.

He was smiling once more. “Yes, my gift. Then it has been of good use to you, dear one?”

“The best!” My hand went to my breast, where the gryphon lay safe as I ever kept it so. “My Lord, I am not wrong then in believing it is a treasure of the Old Ones?”

He leaned forward across the stone-slab table between us, where he had broken his fast on the best we had to offer. There was eagerness in his eyes, even if emotion did not show elsewhere on his countenance.

“You are not wrong! And since it has served you so well, I am doubly glad that it was in your hands. Let me look upon it once again.”

I loosed the lacing of my jerkin, pulled at the chain to draw it forth. Yet something kept me from slipping it off and putting it into the hand he laid palm up on the table as if to receive it.

“It does not leave me, as you see, night or day.” I made excuse. “Can you say the same for my return gift to you, my lord?” I tried to make that question light, the teasing of a maid with her wooer.

“Of course.” Had he touched his own breast swiftly? Yet he made no move to show me the picture I had sent him.

“Still you did not follow my wishes sent with it.” I pursued the matter. I do not know why, but my uneasiness was growing. There was nothing I had seen in him or his manner to make me unhappy yet, but there was a shadow here that I could sense and that vaguely alarmed me. I found that I was restoring the gryphon to its hiding place hastily, almost as if I feared he might take his own gift from me by force. What lay between us that I should feel this way?

“There was no time, nor trusted messenger,” he was saying. However, I was sure he watched the globe as long as it was in sight with greater interest than he had for my face above it.

“You are forgiven, Lord.” I kept to the light voice, molding my manner on that of the maids I had seen in Trevamper in that long-ago time before all this evil had broken upon the dales. “And now—I must be back to my duties. You and your men must have lodging, though you will find it somewhat bare. None of us sleep soft here.”

“You sleep safe, which in these days is much to say.” He arose with me. “Where do you quarter us?”

“In the west tower,” I answered, and drew a breath of relief that he had not asserted his right and demanded my compliance. What was the matter with me? In all ways he had shown consideration and courtesy, and in the days that followed it was the same.

He spoke of our efforts to harvest the stunted grain from the old fields and pick and dry the fruit. He praised our forelooking. He was quick to say that such a band as ours—of the old, the very young, and the ailing—would be extra long on the road and would need all the food we could gather. His armsmen took over sentry duty, leaving us free to work in field and orchard.

Nor did he press for my company, which eased my feeling of constraint. Only I was haunted by an uneasiness I could not account for. He was kind; he strove to make himself pleasing to me in thought and word. And yet—the longer he stayed, the more unhappy I was. Also I was a little frightened at the prospect to come of the time when he would be my lord in truth.

Sometimes he rode forth to scout along the hills, assuring us added protection. I would not see him from dawn until sunset, when we drew in that movable part of the bridge. However, twice in the dusk I saw him in conversation with Yngilda, whom he treated with the same courtesy he showed to me and Lady Islaugha, though the latter seemed hardly aware of his presence.

I do not believe he sought out my kinswoman. Their meetings must have been of her contrivance. She watched him hungrily. At the time I believed I knew what lay in her mind—her lord was dead; she had naught to look forward to save a dragging life at Norsdale. Yet I, whom she hated—yes, hated, for I no longer disguised from myself that her dislike of me had crystallized through envy to something deeper and blacker—had Kerovan, eager to serve me. That she might make trouble between us, well, that, too, was possible. But I did not think so, for I could see no way that even a spiteful tongue could disturb the relationship we now had, it being so shallow a one.

Had my heart followed my hand, that would have been a different matter. Undoubtedly I would have resented meddling. As it was, no action of hers disturbed me.

On the fifth day after his arrival, Kerovan did not stay so late in the hills, but came back in mid-afternoon. I had been in the fields, for another pair of hands was needed. One of the children had run a thorn into her foot, so I brought her back to wash and bind it with healing herbs we had found.

Her tears soothed, her hurt tended, she went running back to her mother, leaving me to put away our small supply of medicants. While I was so busied, my lord came to me.

“My fair one, will you give into my hand that gift I sent you? There is perhaps the chance that it can serve you even better than it has, for I have some of the old learning and have added to it since I sent you this. There are things of power which, rightfully used, are better than any weapons known to our kind. If we indeed have such a one, we can count on an easier journey to Norsdale.”

My hand went to what I wore. In no way did I wish to yield to his request. Still, I had no excuse. I did not understand myself, why I shrank from letting it go out of my hands. Most reluctantly I loosed lacings and drew it forth. Still I held it cupped for a long moment while his hand was held forth to take it. He smiled at me as one who would encourage a timid child.

At length, with an inner sigh, I gave it to him. He took a step into the light of the slit window, held it at eye level as if he were fronting the tiny gryphon in some silent communication.

It was at that moment that I heard from without the traveler’s greeting. “Good fortune to his House.”

I did not have to see the speaker. I knew at once and was past Kerovan into the open.

“Lord Amber!” I did not understand the emotion awakened in me at the sound of his voice. It was as if all the uneasiness of the past few days was gone, that safety stood here on hoofed feet, gazing at me with golden eyes.

“You have come!” I put forth my hand, eager to clasp his. But that reserve which was always a part of him kept me from completing that gesture.

“Who comes, my fair one?” Kerovan’s voice broke through the wonderful feeling of release, of security. I had to find other words.

“Lord Amber, have you heard? My lord has come—hearing of our troubles he has come.”

I retreated a little, chilled by a loss I could not define. The Old One followed. I did not look to my lord, only still into those golden eyes.

“My Lord, this is my promised lord, Kerovan, who is heir to Ulmsdale.”

His face was secret, close, as I had seen it other times.

“Lord Kerovan?” He repeated it as if he asked a question. And then he added with the force of one bringing down a sword in a swift, lashing stroke, “I think not!”

Kerovan’s hand came up, the globe clasped tight in his fingers. From that shot a piercing ray of light, striking full into Lord Amber’s eyes. He flung up one hand as he staggered back. On the wrist of that hand I saw an answering glow, as if a blue mist spread to raise a curtain about him.

I screamed and struck at Kerovan, striving to snatch the crystal from him. But he beat me off, and in his face I read that which changed my uneasiness to fear.

Kerovan caught me in a strong hold and dragged me toward the door. Lord Amber, one hand to his eyes, was on his hands and knees, his head moving as if he strove to find us by sound alone, as if he were blind!

I beat at Kerovan, twisting in his hold. “No! Loose me!”

Lord Amber lurched toward us. I saw Kerovan raise his boot, stamp, and grind one of those groping hands against the floor. But with his other arm Lord Amber caught Kerovan about the knees and bore him down by the weight of his body.

“Joisan, run!” he cried.

I was free of Kerovan, but run I would not. Not while Lord Amber took the vicious blows Kerovan was dealing.

“No!” My belt knife, Toross’ legacy, was in my hands. I crouched above the struggling men, caught Kerovan’s hair, and jerked his head back, putting the edge of that blade to his throat. “Lie you very still, my lord,” I ordered. He must have read my purpose in my face, for he obeyed.

Not taking my eyes from him, I said then, “Lord Amber, I hold knife-edge to his throat. Loose him.”

He believed me and edged away.

“You say,” I continued, “this is not Kerovan. Why?”

He was rising to his feet one hand still to his eyes. “Kerovan is dead, my Lady.” His voice sounded very weary. “Dead in an ambush laid by this Rogear above his father’s keep. This Rogear has knowledge of the Old Ones—from the Dark side.”

My breath hissed between my teeth. So much was made plain to me now. “Dead? And this one dared to wear my lord’s name to deceive me?”

Rogear spoke up then. “Tell her your name—”

Lord Amber answered him. “As you know, we give not our names to mankind.”

“Mankind? And what are—”

“Lord Kerovan!” I was so startled by that voice from the door I jerked away from my guard post. “What do you—?” One of his armsmen stood there.

I spoke quickly. “Lord Kerovan does nothing! As for this one—take him and ride!”

There was a second man behind him, with the bolt on his crossbow, which was aimed not at me but at Lord Amber. And in his face a horrible eagerness, as if he would joy in loosing death.

“Shall we take her, Lord?” asked the first man.

Lord Amber was moving toward him, his hands empty. And the man held ready steel.

Rogear had rolled away from me. “Let the wench go. She is of no importance now.”

“And him, Lord?”

“No! Touch him not, on your peril!”

I had thought he would order Lord Amber’s death, if one of the Old Ones can be so killed.

“We ride,” he added. “I have what I came for.” He was putting the gryphon into the inner pocket of his tabard.

That roused me to action. “No. Not that!” I sprang at him. “Give me the gryphon!”

He aimed a blow at my head with his other hand, and I did not dodge in time. A burst of pain drove me into darkness.

When I awoke I lay on my bed-place, and the dusk was deep. But I saw that Lord Amber was beside me, and my hand lay in his. There was a bandage bound about his head, covering his eyes.

“Lord—”

He turned his head instantly to me. “Joisan!”

“He took the gryphon!” For I had brought out of the dark that memory, strong enough to urge me into action.

Lord Amber drew me gently to him, and I wept as I had not in all those days of danger and sorrow that lay behind me. Between my sobs I asked, “It was the truth you spoke? He was not Kerovan?”

“It was the truth. It is as I said, Kerovan died in Ulmsdale. Rogear, who is betrothed to Kerovan’s sister, arranged the ambush.”

“And I never saw my lord,” I said then in sad wonder. “But his gift, that one shall not have it!” Anger brought me strength. “By the Nine Words of Min, he shall not! It is a wondrous thing and his hands besmirch it! He used it as a weapon, Lord—he used it to burn your eyes. It was what rested on your wrist that defeated him. If you had only used it sooner as a shield!” I put my fingers to his wrist a little above that armlet. “Lord,” I continued, “they say those of your people are mighty in healcraft. If you cannot aid yourself, can we not take you to them? It is in my service that this grievous hurt was done you, I owe this as a blood-debt—”

But he denied that with force and quickly. “No! There is no debt between us. Had we met elsewhere he would have sought to kill me.”

“I have something of healcraft,” I said then, “and Nalda.” But in my heart I knew how limited we were, and that gave birth to fear. “Perhaps the sight will return. Oh, my Lord, I do not know why he sought me here—I have no longer lands nor fortune—save what he took with him. Know you of the gryphon? It was sent to me by Kerovan. Was it then such a great treasure of his House that this Rogear would risk much to get it into his hands?”

“No. It is no treasure out of Ulmsdale. Kerovan himself found it. But it is a thing of power and Rogear has enough of the Dark knowledge to use such. To leave it in his hands now—”

I could reach his thoughts as well as if he put them into words—to leave such a weapon with one of the Dark Ones was something we were bound in honor not to allow. But Rogear—not only did he ride with armsmen prepared to slay, but he had already shown he could harness the gryphon to his service too.

“My Lord, what can we do then to gain it once more?” I asked simply. For in this man (if man one might call him), I centered now all my trust.

“For the present”—weariness was deep in his voice—“I fear very little. Perhaps Rudo or Angarl can follow his trail a little, mark his path from here. But we cannot follow—yet—”

Again I believed that I knew his thoughts. He must nurse some hope that his sight would return. Or else he had some power of his own he could summon to aid. In this thing he must ride as marshal, I as an armsman. For I knew that the quest, or coming battle, was as much mine as his. It was my folly that had delivered the gryphon to Rogear. Thus my hand must have a part in its return.

My head ached cruelly, and Nalda brought a bowl of herb tea that she said I must drink. I suspected that it would make me sleep, and I would have refused. But Lord Amber urged me to it, and I could not set my will against his.

Then Nalda said she had a new ointment for his eyes, something she had used on burns, and that she would dress them again. I do not think he believed it would help, but he allowed her to take his hand and guide him forth.

I was only on the edge of drowsiness when Yngilda came to me, standing above my bed and staring down as if I had, in the space of hours, taken on a new face.

“So your Lord is dead, Joisan,” she said. I detected satisfaction in her words. That I did not prosper over her meant much.

“He is dead.” I felt nothing. Kerovan had been a name for eight years—little more. To me he was still a name. How can one sorrow for a name? Instead it was a matter for rejoicing that I had that strange, instinctive dislike for the imposter. Rogear was not my lord; I need feel no discomfort or guilt because I did not like or trust him. My lord was dead, having never really lived for me.

“You do not weep.” She watched me with that sly malice with which she so often favored me.

“How can I weep for one I never knew?” I asked.

She shrugged. “One shows proper feeling—” she accused.

We were no longer by keep custom, not here, not with our world swept away by the red tide of war. Were I back at Ithkrypt, yes, I would have kept the terms of conventional mourning as would be expected of me. Here there was no reason for form alone. I was sorry that a good man had died, and by the treachery of his kin, but mourn more than that I could not.

She drew from an inner pocket a strip of cloth made into a bag. I caught a whiff of scent from it and knew it for one of the herb bags put under pillows for those with aching heads.

“My mother’s, but she does not need it this night.” Yngilda spoke brusquely, as if she believed I might refuse her offering.

I was surprised, yes, but not unduly so. Perhaps now that we were equal before the world, Yngilda would no longer think me the more fortunate. So I thanked her and allowed her to slip the scented bag beneath my head where the warmth of my body could release the odor to soothe me.

The herb broth was doing its work also. I found it hard to keep my eyes open. I remember seeing Yngilda turn away toward the door, and then—I must have slept.

17

Kerovan

“It is Nalda?” I turned my head, though I could not see.

“Yes, Lord.” She spoke briskly, and I silently thanked her for her way toward me. There was no pity in her manner, only the confidence of one who had nursed hurts and expected healing to come from her service.

“Lady Joisan?”

“She sleeps, Lord. And truly she has taken little hurt, save that the blow was a hard one. But there be no bones broken or other injury.”

“Have the men reported in yet?”

“No, you shall see them at once when they come. Now here is some soup, Lord. A man must keep his belly filled if he would hold his strength. Open your mouth—”

She spooned it into me as if I were a baby. Nor could I then say her “no.” But in me was a rage against what had happened and a dark feeling of misery that there was naught I could do for myself.

Nalda guided me to my bed, and I stretched thereupon. But sleep, even rest, was far from me, wearied from the trail as I was. I lay rigid, as one who expects any moment to be called to arms, though I might never be again.

I thought of Joisan—of her need to regain the gryphon. I knew that she was right; that it must be taken from Rogear. He had not been caught in the doom of wind and wave. Had then those others escaped also—Hlymer who was no true brother, the Lady Tephana, Lisana—?

Now I raised my hands to explore the bandage over my eyes. It was still damp, and I was sure it was of no use to me.

Rogear—if he had come after the gryphon—how could he have known of it save through Riwal, and from Jago, that it had passed to Joisan? What was it that he had come to seize? I knew so little at a time when knowledge was so essential.

I rested my arm across my forehead, the back of my wrist upon that bandage. How long was it before my thoughts were shaken out of the dreary path they followed, and I realized something was in progress?

The wrist band! Joisan had said it defeated the ray from the crystal. From it now—I sat up and tore away the bandage. A warmth spread from the wristlet where it touched my flesh. Perhaps instinct, perhaps “memory” guided me now, for I held that band of strange metal first against my right eye and then against my left, pressing upon the closed lids. I did not try to see as yet. What I did was simple. Why I did it I did not know, save there came from that act a sense of well-being, a renewed confidence in life.

I dropped my hand and opened my eyes.

Dark! I could have cried my vast despair aloud. I had thought—hoped—

Then I turned my head a little and—light! Limited—but there. And I realized that I sat within a darkened room with light marking the doorway. Hastily I arose and went to it.

Night, yes, but no darker than any night I had seen before. When I had raised my head to look heavenward—stars! Stars glittering more brightly than I could remember. I could see!

Joisan! Instantly in my joy I knew I must share this with her. And that was mainly instinct too. I looked around the courtyard to get my bearings and headed to her room.

The doorway curtain was down and made me pause. Nalda had said she had given her lady a sleeping draught and that she would rest until morning. But even if I could not tell her of this miracle, I could at least look upon her dear face. There was a faint glimmer of light behind the curtain. They must have left one of the rush lamps with her.

So I entered, wishing to shout aloud my tidings, yet walking softly, trying to control even my breathing lest I disturb her rest.

Only, there was no one on her bed! The light cloak that must have been her night covering was tossed aside; the couch of leaves, grass, and brush was empty.

Empty save for something that lay in the hollow where her head must have rested. It caught my eye and I scooped it up. I held a bag, lumpily stuffed with herbs, which gave forth a strong odor. Among the leaves and roots there was a harder knot.

I gasped and the bag fell to the floor. About the band on my wrist coiled a thin blue haze, as if the metal had given forth a puff of smoke. I needed no instruction as to the nature of what was in that bag. Black evil shouted aloud in my mind.

Stooping, I caught up the bag by the point of my knife and dropped it on the stone table, close to the rush light. Without laying finger on it I slit the cloth, using the knife point to dig and probe until I brought into sight a thing about the size and shape of a Sulcar trading coin. It was dull black, yet also veined in red, and those veins—No, they were not veins after all, but some runic pattern as involved as those on my wristlet.

This was a thing of Power, that I knew. But of the Dark Power. Anyone touching it—

Joisan! How had this evil thing come into her bed? In that moment such a fear rent me that I shouted, calling on Nalda who should certainly be near at hand. The fury of my voice echoed hollowly out into the courtyard. I called again, heard other voices upraised—

“My Lord,” Nalda stood in the doorway, “what—”

I pointed to the bed. “Where is my lady?”

She exclaimed, hurried forward, stark surprise on her face.

“But—where else could she be, Lord? She was sleeping, as the drink would make her. I would take Gunnora’s Three Oaths that she could not stir until morning—”

“Did you leave this in her bed?” I had controlled my fear, outwardly at least. Now I used the knife to indicate the torn bag and its contents.

She leaned close, sniffing. “My lord, this is a soothing bag such as we make for the Lady Islaugha when she is restless. One of these beneath her pillow, and she is not so led by her fancies. It is of good herbs—”

“Do you also add this?” My knife point was close to the evil symbol.

She bent her head again. When she raised it and her eyes met mine, she looked stricken.

“Lord, I know not what that thing is, but—it is wrong!” Then something else burst upon her. “Lord—your eyes—you can see!”

I brushed that aside. Once that relief had filled my world, but of greater concern now was what had happened to Joisan. That she had been exposed to this thing of the Dark was agony to think on.

“Yes,” I answered shortly. “But my lady slept with this by her, and she is gone. I know not what deviltry has been wrought here—but we must find her soon!”

So the aroused company searched from sentry towers to bridge ends. As the one that worked was pulled up for the night, I could see no way Joisan could have gone ashore. Yet it was plain she was not hidden in any of the rooms we explored.

In the end I had to accept that Joisan was nowhere in the keep. There remained—the lake! I stood at the bridge gap looking into the water, holding my torch to be reflected from its surface. Rogear—there was only one who would have done this thing! But he had been well away when Joisan had been laid on her bed. Someone in this place had been his servant in the matter. And from that servant I would have the truth!

I summoned them all, men, women, children, into the courtyard, and on a stone there I placed that ominous thing which had been a weapon aimed at my lady. I no longer felt the heat of first anger in me. For there had crept a cold along my bones, and my mind fastened on one thing alone—there would be such a blood-price for Joisan as these dales had never seen.

“Your lady has been taken from you by treachery.” I spoke slowly, simply, so that the youngest there might understand. “While she was weak of body this evil thing was put into her bed, and so she was driven forth, perhaps to her death.” Now I ventured onto ground of which I was not sure, depending heavily on what I had learned from Riwal. “Those who meddle with such a thing as this carry the taint of it upon them. For it is an essence of evil as to soil beyond cleansing. Therefore you shall each and every one of you display your hands and—”

There was a swirl among the women, a cry. Nalda had seized upon one who stood beside her, held fast a screaming girl. I was with them in an instant.

The Lady Yngilda—I might have expected it.

I spoke to Nalda. “Bring her! Do you need help?”

“Not so!” She was a strong wench and she held the whimpering girl easily.

I spoke then to the others. “I shall settle this matter. And I lay upon you—let no one touch, for his spirit’s sake, what lies here.”

They did not move from the courtyard, and none followed us as we returned to Joisan’s chamber.

I thrust my torch into one of the wall rings, thus giving us more light. Nalda had twisted Yngilda’s arms behind her back, prisoning her wrists in a grip I think even few men could have broken. She swung her captive around to face me. The girl was blubbering, still jerking futilely to loose herself.

Catching her by the chin, I forced her head up to meet me eye to eye.

“This was of your doing.” I made that an accusation, no question.

She wailed, looking half out of her wits. But she could not escape me so.

“Who set you to this? Rogear?”

She wailed again, and Nalda gave her a vigorous shake. “Answer!” she hissed into her ear.

Yngilda gulped. “Her lord—he said she must come to him—that would bring her—”

I believed that she spoke the truth of what Rogear had told her. But that Yngilda had been moved by any goodwill toward Joisan in the doing of this I knew was not so. That Rogear had left such a trap out of malice I could also believe.

“Bring her to her death,” I said softly. “You stand there with her blood on your hands, Yngilda, as surely as if you had used your knife!”

“No!” she cried. “She is not dead, not dead! I tell you she went—”

“Into the lake,” I finished grimly.

“Yes, but she swam—I watched—I did, I tell you!”

Again I believed she spoke truthfully, and that cold ice in me cracked a little. If Joisan had gone ashore, if she were under some ensorcellment—then I still had a chance to save her.

“It is a long swim—”

“She climbed ashore; I saw!” She screamed back at me in a frenzy of terror, as if what she read in my face near broke her wits.

I turned to the door. “Insfar, Angarl.” I summoned those two who had proven best at tracking. “Go ashore and look for any sign that someone came out of the lake!”

They were on their way at once. I came back to Nalda and her charge.

“I can do no more for you and your people now,” I told Nalda. “If my lady has been ensorcelled—”

“She is bespelled,” Nalda broke in. “Lord, bring her back safe from that!”

“What I can do, be sure that I will.” I said that as solemnly as any oath one could make with blood before kinsmen. “I must follow my lady. You will be safe here—at least for a time.”

“My Lord, think not of us. But rather fasten your thoughts upon my lady. We shall be safe. Now—what of this one?” She looked to Yngilda, who was weeping noisily.

I shrugged. Now that I had what I wanted from her, the girl was nothing to me. “Do as you will. But I lay upon you that she should be well watched. She has dealt with a Dark One and obeyed him. Through her more evil may come.”

“We shall see to her.” There was such a promise in Nalda’s voice that I thought Yngilda might well shiver.

I went back to the courtyard and took up the coin of evil on the point of my knife and carried it into the water. I would not bury it in the ground lest the unknowing chance upon it.

Dawn was breaking when I rode forth on Hiku with fresh provisions for the trail. Yngilda had spoken the truth; a swimmer had come ashore, crushing lake reeds and leaving a trace that could not be mistaken. Beginning there I must follow my lady.

What manner of sorcery had been used on her I did not know, but that she was drawn against her will I had no doubts. I tracked her to the valley rim. There she was met by those who were mounted, and I knew that Rogear and his armsmen had lurked there waiting for her.

Four they were, and with perhaps such weapons as I could not imagine, my lady probably well bound so I could not entice her in any way from their company. I might only follow, trusting fortune to give me a chance, ready to help fortune when it did.

The trail led west and north, as I thought it might. It was my belief that Rogear intended to return to his own keep. He had come to Ulmsdale to obtain power. Perhaps now with the gryphon he had it.

They did not often halt, and for all my pushing they kept ever ahead. On the second day I found traces that told me their party had been augmented by three more riders. Also there were led horses, so that they could change mounts when theirs wearied. Whereas I had only Hiku, who was already worn.

Still the rough-coated pony never failed me, and I thought that any mount supplied by Neevor might be more than he seemed in outward appearance. It was after I snatched the rest I must have on the third night and headed on in the morning that I realized we were skirting lands I knew, coming into the forested fringe which had been my boyhood roving place.

There could be only one goal for those I followed. They were heading for the Waste. Well, what else could I expect—they dabbled in forbidden knowledge; surely they would turn to some possible source of the Power they wooed. But why had they taken my lady? To spite me? No, Rogear would have no interest in that. To his mind I was maimed, not to be considered an enemy any longer. And he had the gryphon—why must he have Joisan also? I kept thinking of this as I went, trying this explanation and that, yet none seemed to fit.

On the morning of the fifth day I reached the edge of the Waste, near, I realized upon checking landmarks, to that road which ran to the naked cliff. And I was not greatly surprised to discover the trail I followed led in that direction.

Once more I rode on that ancient pavement. But it was difficult to remember that time, as if what had happened to me before had been the actions of another Kerovan who was not I, or even close kin. How I wished now for Riwal. He would have known so much more, though he was no Old One. But the safeguards he had had were not mine, and those I trailed were far more learned, I feared, than Riwal.

One night I camped along the road, scanting my rest, on my way before dawn. Here were the hills where those carvings stood out on the cliff faces. I found in my going curling runes resembling those on my wristlet. From time to time, viewing them, I felt a quickening excitement, as if I were on the very verge of understanding their meaning, yet I never did.

As before, I believed I was dogged by something that spied upon me. Though it might not have been dangerous in itself, what it might serve was another matter. I reached again the place of the great face. And before it I found evidence of those I hunted.

Set out on a rock before that great countenance was a bowl and, flanking it, two holders of incense. The bowl still held a film of oily liquid, and the incense holders had been recently used. All were of a black metal or stone I did not know. But I would not have set fingertip to them for my life’s sake. Around my wrist once more that blue warning arose. What I did I was moved to by revulsion. I hunted about for stones and, with the largest of these, I smashed all that was set out. There came a shrill noise as they were powdered into fragments. Almost one could believe that the things had life of their own. But I did not leave them behind me as a ready focus for any remnant of the Dark that might linger here.

When I came to that great star, which had so awed Riwal, I found no similar signs of any ceremony, only marks in the earth to show that here they had left the narrowed road on the far side, squeezed by as if they wished to be as distant from that carving in passing as they could get. This, then, they feared. I paused for a moment to study it. But it held no heartening message save that—they had feared it.

Ahead lay only the cliff wall; they could go no farther. I had come to my journey’s end, and I had no better plan in my head than to front boldly what waited me there. So I dismounted and spoke to Hiku:

“Friend, you have served me well; return now to him who gave you.” I stripped away bridle and riding pad, dropping them to the road, because I believed that what lay before me was death. It would not be their choice of death, however, for my lady and me, but mine. If need be she would die by my hand, clean of the evil they might try to lay on her.

My fingers went to the band on my wrist, seeking the pattern there. It was a thing of power, I knew. Only I had not the key of its use. However, touching it so, I stared upon the star and longed to know what would defeat the Dark Ones ahead.

It was at that moment Neevor’s words returned to me:

“You shall seek and you shall find. Your own heritage shall be yours. The discovery of what you are and can be you must make for yourself.”

Brave words—said only to hearten? Or were they prophecy? Riwal said that to call upon a name in this place would unlock some force. But I knew no names; I was only human—of mixed blood perhaps—but human—

It seemed to me in that moment that I had spoken that word aloud; that it echoed back to me from the walls.

I flung up my arm before the star, and I made my plea, but not aloud. If there was any power here that might be drawn upon, let it come to me. Even if it blasted me, let me hold it long enough to free my lady, to deal with Rogear who sought to bring to this land that which was better lost. Let—it—fill—me.

It was as if something within me moved, slowly, grudgingly, as might a long-locked door. There was a flow from behind that door, one I did not understand. With it came such a maze of shadow memories as nearly overbore me. But I fought to remember who I was and why I stood there. And the memories were but shadows after all; my will was the sun to banish them.

But I knew! The shadows left behind that much. I had a weapon. Whether it would stand against what those others might marshal I could not tell until I put it to the final test. And the time was now!

I trotted ahead, urgency driving me. A sound broke the silence, a chanting that rose and fell as waves pound a coast. I rounded the bend and came upon those I sought. But of me they took no notice. They were too intent on what they would do here.

Upon the ground was a star enclosed in a circle. And that circle had been drawn in blood, blood that smoked and stank and had been drained from the armsmen who lay dead at one side like so much refuse.

On each point of the star was a spear of darkness, of oily smoke, that struck up into the sky, adding its stench to that of the blood. And before each of the points stood one of their party, four facing inward, the fifth placed before the wall to stare blank-eyed at it.

Hlymer, Rogear, Lisana, the Lady Tephana and, with her face to the wall, my Joisan. The four chanted, but she stood as one who walked through nightmares and could not help herself. Her hands were at her breast, and between them she held the gryphon.

It was if they shouted their purpose aloud, for I knew it. They were before a door, and Joisan held the key. By some fate she alone could use it, and so they had brought her for that task. What lay behind that door to which this road ran—who knew. But that I would let them open it—no!

Still they did not see me, for they were so intent upon what they did that the world beyond their star-in-circle had ceased to have real existence for them. Now I perceived something else around that line of smoking: blood-edged creatures as wispy as shadows. Now and then some dreadful snout sniffed at that barrier or dabbled in it. Fresh blood drew these remnants of ancient evil, but they were worn by centuries to such poor things they were shadows only. Of them I had no fear.

Some sighted me and came padding in my direction, their eyes glinting like bits of devilish fire. Without my willing it consciously, my arm swung up and they cowered away, their eyes upon my wrist band. So I came to the circle of blood. There the smoke made me sick to the center of my being, but against that body weakness I held firm.

Now I raised my voice and I named names, slowly, distinctly. And my words cut through the spell their chanting raised.

“Tephana, Rogear, Lisana, Hlymer—” As I spoke each, I faced a little toward the one I so named. There was a shadow flicker in my mind. Yes, this was the right of it! This had I done once before in another place and time.

All four of them started as if they had been quick-awakened from sleep. Their eyes no longer centered on Joisan’s back; they turned to me. I saw black rage flare in Rogear’s, and perhaps in those of Lisana and Hlymer. But the Lady Tephana smiled.

“Welcome, Kerovan. So, after all, you prove the blood runs true.” Her voice was sweeter than I had ever heard it, as she counterfeited what should have bound us together and never would. But if she thought me so poor a thing that I could be so deceived, she reckoned little of what she had once wrought.

Again that shadow knowledge moved in my mind, and I made her no answer. Instead I raised my hand, and from my wristlet a beam of blue light shot to touch the back of Joisan’s head.

I saw her sway, and she gave a piteous cry. Still that which controlled me kept me to the attack, if attack it was. Slowly she turned around, seeming to shrink under a blow she could not ward off. Now she was away from the wall, facing me across the star-in-circle. Her eyes were no longer empty of what was Joisan. There was intelligence and life in them again, as she looked about her.

I heard a beast’s growl from Hlymer. He would have leaped for my throat, but the Lady Tephana gestured, and he was silent and quiet in his place. Her hands moved back and forth in an odd manner as if she wove something between them. But I had little time to watch, for Rogear had moved also. He had Joisan in his hold, keeping her between us as a shield.

“The game is still ours, Kerovan, and it is to the death,” he said. We might have been facing each other across a gaming board in a keep hall.

“To the death—but to yours, not mine, Rogear.” With my upheld hand I sketched a sign, a star without a circle. Between us in the air that star not only glowed blue-green, but it traveled through the space between us until it was close to him at face level.

I saw his face go gaunt, old. But he did not lose his belief in himself. Only he dropped his hold on Joisan and stepped forward saying, “So be it!”

“No!” The Lady Tephana raised her eyes from what she wove without substance. “There is no need. He is—”

“There is every need,” Rogear told her. “He is much more than we deemed him. He must be finished, or we shall be finished too. Spin no more small spells, Lady. You had the fashioning of him flesh and bone, if not spirit. Lend me your full will now.”

I saw for the first time uncertainty in her face. She glanced at me and then away swiftly, as if she could not bear to look upon me.

“Tell me,” Rogear pressed, “do you stand with me in this? Those two”—he motioned to Hlymer and Lisana—“can be counted as nothing now. It is us against what you sought to make and failed in the doing.”

“I—” she began, and then hesitated. But at last the agreement he wished came from her. “I stand with you, Rogear.”

And I thought—so be it. From this last battle there would be no escape, nor did I wish it.

18

Joisan

I dreamed and could not wake, and the dream was dark with fear at its core. For me there was no escape, for in this dream I walked as one without will of my own. He who gave the order was Rogear.

First there was the calling, a need so laid upon me that I left the keep, trusted myself to the waters about it, swam for the shore. Then I must have traveled yet farther across those deserted fields until Rogear was there and he horsed me before him to ride.

There were parts I could not remember. Food was put in my hands and I ate, yet I tasted nothing. I drank and was aware of neither thirst nor the quenching of it. We were joined by others, and I saw them only as shadows.

On we rode into strange places, but these were the places of dreams, never clearly seen. At last we came to the end of that journey. There was—no! I do not wish to remember that part of the dream. But afterward, I held my lord’s gift in my hands and it was laid upon me, as much as if I were in bonds, that I must stand, and when orders came I must obey. But what I was to do—and why—?

Before me was a cliff rising up and up, and behind me I heard a sound, a sound that lashed at me. I wanted to run—yet as in all ill dreams I could not move, only stand and look upon the rock and wait—

Then—

There was pain bursting in my head, like fire come to devour my mind, burn out all thought. But what vanished in those flames was that which held me prisoner to another’s will. Weakly I turned away from the cliff to look upon those who held me captive.

Lord Amber!

Not as I had seen him last with bandaged eyes, fumbling in blindness, but as a warrior now, ready for battle, though his sword was sheathed and he had no knife-of-honor ready. Still, that he warred in another way, I knew.

There were four others. And I saw then there was a star drawn in the earth and that I stood in the point that fronted the cliff, those others to my right and left in the other points.

One was Rogear, two were women, the fourth another man. He made a move in the direction of Lord Amber, but the woman to my right stayed him with a gesture. Rogear sprang before I could move and held me like a battle shield.

“The game is still ours, Kerovan,” he said, “and it is to the death.”

Kerovan! What did he mean? My lord was dead.

Lord Amber—it was Lord Amber who answered him. “To the death, but to yours, not mine, Rogear.” I saw him draw a sign in the air, and there was a blue star that traveled to hang before Rogear’s eyes.

He loosened me and stepped away, saying, “So be it.”

“No!” The woman to my right spoke. “There is no need. He is—”

Rogear interrupted her. “There is every need. He is much more than we deemed him. And he must be finished, or we shall be finished too. Spin no more small spells, Lady. You had the fashioning of him, flesh and bone, if not spirit. Lend me your full will now!”

She glanced swiftly then at Lord Amber; then away. I saw her lips tighten. In that moment she was far older than she had seemed earlier, as if age settled on her with the thoughts in her mind.

“Tell me,” Rogear continued, “do you stand with me in this? Those two”—he motioned toward the other man, the girl—“can be counted as nothing now. It is us against what you sought to make and failed in the doing.”

I saw her bite her lip. It was plain she was in two minds. But at last she gave him what he desired. “I stand with you, Rogear.”

“Kerovan,” Rogear had called him, this man I would have taken blood-oath was one of the Old Ones. At that moment, all those sly whispers and rumors flooded back in my mind—that my lord was of tainted blood, becursed, that his own mother could not bear to look upon him. His own mother! Could it be—? Rogear said this woman had the fashioning of him, flesh and bone, but not spirit. Not spirit!

I looked upon Lord Amber and knew the truth, several truths. But this was not the time for the speaking of truth, nor the asking of whys and wherefores. He faced those who were deadly enemies, for there be no more deadly enemies than those of close blood-kin when evil works. And they were four against his one!

His one—! I looked about me wildly. I had no weapons—not even Toross’ knife. But a stone—even my bare hands if need be— Only this was not fighting as I had known it. This was a matter of Power—Power such as Math had loosed at her death hour. And I had no gift of such. I tried to clench my fist. A chain looped about my fingers and cut my flesh. The gryphon—I still had the gryphon! I remember how Rogear had used it before—could not Lord Amber do likewise? If I could throw it to him—But Rogear was between; he need only turn, wrest it from me, use it as he had before—

With this in mind, I wrapped my two hands tight about the globe, saying to myself that Rogear would not take it from me to use against my lord, not while I had life to defend it!

My lord—Kerovan? I did not know the rights of that—whether Lord Amber had lied to me. But had he, my heart told me, then it had been with good reason. For just as I had shrunk from Rogear when he played Kerovan to entrap me, so did I now range myself with this other in time of battle. Old One or no, Kerovan or no, whether he wished it or no, in that instant of time I knew that we were tied together in such a way no axe bond or Cup and Flame ceremony could add to. That I welcomed this I could not have said, only it was as inevitable as death itself.

This being so, I must stand to his aid. Though how I could—

Almost I cried aloud with pain. My hands—! I looked down. My shrinking flesh could not hide the glow I held. The gryphon was coming to life, growing hotter and hotter. Might I then use it as Rogear had—to strike out in flame? But I could not hold it—the pain was too intense now.

If I grasped it by the chain alone—? I loosed it a little to dangle. It was as if all the lamps that had once burned in Ithkrypt’s shattered hall were gathered into one!

“Look at her!” The girl on my left leaped at me, her hand outstretched to strike the gryphon from my hold.

By its chain I swung it at her and she cowered away, her hands to her face, falling to the ground with a scream.

So I had learned how to use what I held! Having so learned, I prepared to put it into further practice. A small black ball fell at my feet, thrown by the other woman. It broke, and from it curled an oily black snake, to wreathe about my ankles with the speed of a striking serpent, holding me as fast as if those coils were chains of steel.

I had been so occupied by my discovery concerning the gryphon that I had not seen what chanced with my lord. But now, fast captive, unable to swing my globe far enough, I watched in despair.

The other man held forth his right hand, and Rogear clasped it. Just so was he hand-linked to the woman, and the three faced my lord as one. Now the woman took into her other hand, from where it was set in her girdle as a sword might be, a rod of black along which red lines moved as if they were crawling things. She pointed this at my lord and began to chant, outlining his body with her wand—head to loins and up again to head.

I saw him tremble, waver, as if a rain of blows battered him. He held his arm ever before him, striving to move it so that the blue band about his wrist was before the point of the rod. Yet that he was hard set it was plain to see, and I wrestled with the smoky tangle about my feet, striving to reach those evil three with the globe.

“Unmade, I will it!” The woman’s voice rolled like thunder. “As I made, so shall it be unmade!”

My lord—by the Flame, I swear it! I saw his body shaken, thin, becoming more shadow than substance. And out of nowhere came a wind to whirl and buffet that shadow, tearing at it.

I feared to loose the gryphon, but this must be stopped—the wind, that roll of chant-thunder—the rod that moved, erasing my lord as if he had never been! Shadow though he was, torn as he was, still he stood, and it seemed to me the black rod moved more slowly. Was she tiring?

I saw Rogear’s face. His eyes were closed, and there was such a look of intense concentration there I guessed his will was backing hers. Did I dare loose my only weapon now?

Hoping I had not made the wrong choice, I hurled the gryphon at Rogear. It struck his shoulder, fell to the ground, rolled across the point of the star, stopped just within the circle. But the hand with which Rogear had gripped that of the woman fell from her grasp, limply to his side. He went to his knees, dragging with him the other man, who fell forward and lay still. While along Rogear’s body, spreading outward from where the gryphon had struck, played lines of blue like small hungry flames, and he rocked back and forth, jerking with his other hand to free himself from the hold on the prone man. Yet it appeared he could not loose that finger locking.

The lines of fire ran down his arm swiftly, crossing to the body of the other man. Now Rogear did not strive to break that hold, and I guessed that he was willing the fire to pass from him into the other, who was now writhing feebly and moaning.

While he fought thus with his will, the woman stood alone. And her wand was held in a hand plainly failing. My lord was no longer a shadow, and the wind was dying. He looked to the woman steadily and without fear. In his eyes was something I could not read. Now he did not trouble to move his hand to ward off the rod. Rather, he held the wristlet level between them at heart height and he spoke, his words cutting through her chant.

“Do you know me at last, Tephana. I am—” He uttered a sound which might be a name, yet was unlike any name I had ever heard.

She raised her rod like a lash, as if she would beat him across the face in a rage too great to be borne.

“No!”

“Yes and yes and yes! I am awake—at long last!”

She twirled the rod at shoulder height, as I have seen a man ready a throwing spear. And throw it she did, as if she believed its point would reach his heart.

But, though he stood so close, it did not touch him, passing over his shoulder to strike against a rock and shatter with a ringing sound.

Her hands went to her ears, as if that sound were more than she could bear to hear. She wavered, but she did not fall. Now Rogear dragged himself up to his feet, moved beside her. His one hand still hung limply by his side, the other he raised swiftly, and let it fall on her shoulder. His face was white, stricken, yet I saw his eyes and knew that his will and his hate were blazingly alive.

“Tool!” His lips moved as if his face had stiffened into a mask. “Fight! You have the Power. Would you let that which you marred in the making triumph over you now?”

Lord Amber laughed! It was joyful laughter, as if he had no cares in the world.

“Ah, Rogear, you would-be opener of gates, ambitious for what, if you knew all, you would not dare to face. Do you not yet understand the truth? You seek to reach that which is beyond you: not only to reach it, but to put to use that which is not for your small mind—to Dark use—”

It was as if each word was a lash laid across Rogear’s face, and I saw such anger mirrored there as I thought no human features could contain. His mouth worked, and there was spittle on his lips. Then he spoke.

I cannot put into words what rang then in my head. I know that I sank to the ground, as though a great hand were pressing me flat. Above Rogear’s head stood a column of black flame, not red like honest fire but—black! Its tip inclined toward Lord Amber. But he did not start away. He stood watching as if this did not concern him.

Though I cried a warning, I did not hear my own words. The flame leaned and leaned, out across the star, the circle which enclosed it, poised over Lord Amber’s head. Yet he did not even raise his eyes to see its threat, only watched Rogear.

About Rogear and the woman he held to him, the flame leaped and thickened as if it fed upon their bodies. It grew darker than ever, until they were hidden. And the tip of the flame moved as if trying to reach Lord Amber. Still it did not.

Slowly it began to die, fall back upon itself, growing less and less. And as it went it did not disclose Rogear or the woman. Finally it was but a glowering spark on the pavement—and nothing! They, too, were gone.

I put my hands to my eyes. To see that ending—it gave me such fear as I had never known, even though it did not threaten me. Then—there was silence!

I waited for my lord to speak—opening my eyes when he did not. And I cried out, forgetting all else. For no longer did he stand confidently upright to face his foes. He lay as crumpled beyond the circle as those who left within it—and as still.

About my feet the serpent no longer coiled. I staggered toward him, stopping only to pick up the gryphon. That was plain crystal again, its warmth and life gone.

As I had once held Toross against the coming of death, so did I now cradle my lord’s head against me. His eyes were closed. I could not see their strange yellow fires. At first I thought he was dead. But under my questing fingers his heart still beat, if slowly. In so much he had won, he was still alive. And if I could only keep him so—

“He will live.”

I turned my head, startled, fierce in my protection of the one I held. From whence had this one come? He stood with his back to the wall of the cliff, leaning a little on a staff carven with runes. His face seemed to shift queerly when I looked upon him, now appearing that of a man in late middle life, again that of a young warrior. But his clothing was gray as the stone behind him and could have been that of a trader.

“Who—?” I began.

He shook his head, looking at me gently as one who soothes a child. “What is a name? Well, you may call me Neevor, which is as good a name as any and once of some service to me—and others.”

Now he stood away from the cliff and came into the circle. But as he came he used his staff to gesture right and left. The evil outer circle was gone; the star also. Then he pointed to the girl, the other man, to all other evidences of those who had striven to call the Power here. And they were also gone, as if they were part of a dream from which I had now awakened.

At last he neared me and my lord, and he was smiling. Putting out the staff again, he touched my forehead and, secondly, touched my lord on the breast. I was no longer afraid, but filled with a vast happiness and courage, so that in that moment I could have stood even against the full army of invaders. Yet this was better than battle courage, for it reached for life and not death.

Neevor nodded to me. “Just so,” he said, as if pleased. “Look to your key, Joisan, for it will turn only for you, as that one who dabbled in what was far beyond him knew.”

“Key?” I was bemused by his order.

“Ah, child, what wear you now upon your breast? Freely given to you it was with goodwill, by one who found the lost—and not by chance. Patterns are set in one time, to be followed to the end of all years to come. Woven in, woven out—”

The tip of his staff moved across the ground back and form. I watched it, feeling that I could understand its meaning if I only made some effort, knew more.

I heard him laugh. “You shall, Joisan, you shall—all in good time.”

My lord opened his eyes, and there was life and recognition in his expression, but also puzzlement. He stirred as if to leave my hold, but I tightened that.

“I am—” he said slowly.

Neevor stood beside us, regarding us with the warmth of a smile.

“In this time and place you are Kerovan. Perhaps a little less than you once were, but with the way before you to return if you wish. Did I not name you ‘kinsman’?”

“But I—I was—”

Neevor’s staff touched him once more on the forehead. “You were a part, not the whole. As you now are, you could not long contain what came to remind you of what you were and can be. Just as those poor fools could not contain the evil they called down, which consumed them in the end. Be content, Kerovan, yet seek—for those who seek find.” He turned a little and pointed with his staff to the blankness of the cliff. “There lies the gate; open it when you wish, there is much beyond to interest you.”

With that he was gone!

“My Lord!”

He struggled up, breaking my hold. Not to put me aside as I feared he now would, but rather to take me in his arms.

“Joisan!” He said only my name, but that was enough. This was the oneness I had ever sought, without knowing, and finding it was all the riches of the world spread before me for the taking.

19

Kerovan

I held Joisan in my arms. I was Kerovan, surely I was Kerovan. Still—

Because that memory of the other one, the one who had worn my body for a space as I have worn mail, clung, so did I also cling to Joisan, who was human, who was living as I knew life and not—

Then the full sense of who and what I was as Kerovan returned. Gently I loosed my hold of her. Standing, I drew her to her feet. Then I was aware that the happiness of her face was fading and she watched me with troubled eyes.

“You—you are going away!” She clutched my forearms with her hands, would not let me turn from her. “I can feel it—you are going from me because you wish to!” Now her words had an angry ring.

I could remember our first meeting and how she had looked upon me then—I who was not wholly human, part something else that I did not yet know or understand.

“I am not an Old One,” I told her straightly. “I am indeed Kerovan, who was born thus!” I shook off her hold to step back and show her one of those hoofed feet, thrust stiffly out that she might see it plain. “I was born by sorcery, to become a tool for one who aspired to the Power. You watched her try to destroy what she had created, and instead she herself was destroyed.”

Joisan glanced to where the flame had eaten up those two.

“Twice-cursed was I from the beginning: by my father’s line and by my mother’s desire. Do you understand? No fit mate for any human woman am I. I have said—Kerovan is dead. That is the truth, just as Ulmsdale is destroyed, and with it all the House of Ulm. ...”

“You are my promised, wedded lord, call yourself what you desire.”

How could I break that tie she pulled so tight between us? Half of me, no, more than half, wanted to yield, to be as other men. But the fact that I had been a vessel into which something else had poured, even though that was gone again—How could I be sure it would not return, with force enough to reach out to Joisan? I could not—tainted, cursed, deformed—give me that name best-suited. I was no lord for her.

Once more I retreated, edging away, lest her hand meet mine once again and I could not control the desire of that part of me human-rooted. Yet I could not turn and go from her, leave her alone in the Waste. And if I went with her, back to her people, could I continue to hold to my resolve?

“Did you not listen to Neevor?” She did not follow me; rather she stood, her hands clasped on her breast over the englobed gryphon. “Did you not listen then?” Still there was anger in her voice, and she regarded me as one who is exasperated by stupidity.

“He called you kinsman—therefore you are more than you deem yourself. You are you—no tool for any one, Kerovan. And you are my dear Lord. If you strive to say me ‘no,’ then you shall discover I have no pride. I shall follow wherever you go, and in the face of all shall I claim you. Do you believe me?”

I did, and believing could see that now I could not deal otherwise than seem to agree.

“Yes,” I made simple answer.

“Good enough. And if in the future you try to walk away from me again, never shall you find that easy.” It was not a warning of a promise, but a statement of fact. Having seemingly settled that to her satisfaction, she looked once more to the cliff.

“Neevor spoke of a door and a key which I hold. Someday I shall put that to the test.”

“Someday?” Yes, I could remember Neevor’s words better now that I had my emotions under control.

“Yes. We—we are not ready—I think—I feel—” Joisan nodded. “It is something we must do together, remember that, Kerovan—together!”

“Where to, then? Back to your people?” I felt rootless, lost in these dales. I would leave the choice to her, since all my ties were gone save one.

“That is best,” she answered briskly. “I have promised them what measure of safety can be found nowadays. When they have won to that, then we shall be free!”

Joisan flung wide her arms, as if the taste of that freedom was already hers. But could it be freedom if she held to that other tie? I would walk her road for now because I had no choice. But never would I let her be the loser because she looked at me and saw a Kerovan to whom she was oath-tied.

20

Joisan

My poor lord, how bitter must have been his hurts in the past! I wish that I could run back down the years and rub out the memory of each, one by one. He has been named monster until he believes it—but if he could only look upon himself through my eyes—

We shall walk together, and I shall build a mirror that he may see himself as he is, and, so seeing, be free from all the sorrow the Dark Ones laid upon him. Yes, we shall return to my people—though they are not truly mine anymore—for I feel as one who has taken another road and can look back only a little way. We shall make sure that they reach Norsdale. For the rest—

So I thought in that hour, and wise was that thought. For sometimes wisdom comes not altogether through age and experience, but suddenly like an arrow flight. I nursed my key within my hand—that bride gift which had been first my bane and then my salvation. I put my other hand within my lord’s, so we went together, turning away for a space from the gate Neevor promised us, knowing within my heart that we would return and that it would open upon—But what mattered what lay beyond if we went together to see?

Gryphon in Glory

For Susan, Anne, Marion, Cynthia, Carolyn
and Lisa, all of whom weave
their own enchantments at many looms

Joisan

ABOUT ME THERE WAS ONLY THE GRAY LIGHT OF PREDAWN, WHICH left the ridges black and harsh against the sky. Like all who deal secretly, I used this cover of shadows as I prepared to ride forth. Though I believed I was well armed in spirit for what I must do, still I shivered under my mail and leather as if I needed the cloak now rolled behind my saddle.

“Lady Joisan—”

That voice out of the dark, deep-set Abbey gate gave me a start. I swung around, my hand going without bid of conscious thought to the hilt of the sword swinging heavy at my belt.

“Lady …”

It was Nalda, who had been my right hand, and sometimes the left also, when the invaders drove us out of Ithdale and we wandered guideless westward across unknown lands. Last night I had given her, not my orders, but my confidence.

She had listened as I pointed out that those who were left of our people were now safe in Norsdale, that they would continue to be given shelter and work by the Dames, even as were the other refugees who had come this far, there being no near fear to trouble their future.

“But you,” she said, shrewdly seizing upon what must have colored my voice, “you speak as if you will not be here.”

“I will not—for a space. None of us can know what lies ahead from one day’s dawning to the next. I have been your lady, and, in a manner, also your lord, during our wanderings. Now I must consider my own affairs.”

“My lady, do you go to seek him, then—my Lord Amber?”

“Not Amber!” My answer had been sharp. That was the name we had given him when he first found us and we had thought him one of the Old Ones aiding us because of some whim. “You know that he is my wedded lord—Kerovan. Yes, I must go to him—or at least seek him. I must, Nalda.”

I had hesitated then, shy of revealing my feelings to anyone, even to Nalda, true of heart though she had always been. But she had nodded. “When my lord rode forth these five days past—I knew you would follow, my lady. There is the bond between you, which cannot be denied. Nor are you one to abide behind safe walls to wait there in patience for tidings. You must be a-doing—even as you were in Ithdale when we strove to defend it.” Her voice faltered. I knew that she remembered what ties of her own had been broken on that raw, red day when we had run from death, our escape so hard bought.

I had become brusque, for memory is sometimes a burden one must throw away lest it weigh too heavily, the past against what must be done in the present.

“To you I would give my keys, if those still hung from my girdle. I set you in charge of my people, knowing that you will see to their good—”

She had interrupted me quickly. “Lady, you have kin here. I am not of the keep household nor kin to the House. What will my Lady Islaugha say to this? She has recovered and no longer wanders in her wits—and she is a proud woman—”

“She may be my aunt but she is not of Ithdale,” I had pointed out decisively. “This is our own matter, none of hers. I have told the Lady Abbess that you are to be my deputy. No”—I shook my head at the open question on her broad, sun-browned face—“the Abbess does not know my intentions. I have only said that this shall be so should accident or illness strike at me. Your authority will stand.”

There was only one under that roof besides Nalda who knew what lay in my head or heart—and it was by her contrivance (that of the much revered Past-Abbess Malwinna) that I rode forth wearing unfamiliar steel and leather, mounted on a tough mountain mare, in the dim light of morning. Or would ride when I had done with Nalda.

She came closer, her voice a husky whisper. It would seem that she, no more than I, wanted to arouse any notice. Now her hand, pale in this dim light, raised as if to catch at the reins I had gathered up when I swung into the saddle.

“Lady, you must not go alone!” she said urgently. “I have been burdened with worry since you told me of what you would do. Outside this dale the country may be a trap—danger crawls there.”

“All the more reason that I ride alone, Nalda. One only, who goes with caution, can slip between shadows.” My hand rose to cup over that which hung about my neck—the globe of crystal with its imprisoned silver gryphon, my lord’s own gift to me, and one that was—was what? I did not truly know; this might be the time for me to discover the power of that which I wore, carried, and had once used, without understanding what it could or would do.

“I have seen things, Nalda. Yes, and been a part of them also, that would make those raving Hounds of Alizon turn and run, their tails clapped between their legs, their jaws foaming with fear. I ride alone and when I return, then my lord shall be with me—that, or I shall not come at all!”

She stood, her shoulder brushing against my saddlebag, looking up at me with searching intensity. Then she nodded briskly as I had seen her do many times on the trail when we had come to the solution of some problem.

“So be it, my lady. Be sure when you come for an accounting all shall be as you wish. May Our Lady of the Harvest Shrine guide your way—for she is ever mindful of those who love true!”

I made my own farewell, but Nalda’s invocation of Gunnora, the lady who is mindful of the pains and pleasures of womenkind, was a warm thing to carry. In my heart I blessed her for such an invocation—though she gave it in the very shadow of the House of the Flames, where Gunnora holds no rule or place.

Or was there one behind the walls who would also give me a blessing strange to the learning of the Dames? As I headed out into the first thin light of day I thought of that other—the Past-Abbess Malwinna, her ancient body so well tended by her “daughters,” who perhaps did not even guess what her thoughts might be or where they might roam.

I had sought her out in misery, coming into her small walled garden, which was a place of infinite peace, though there was no peace for me, nor could there be now. Within me battled feelings that were hot and high. I had thought her perhaps too old to understand what I felt. She was so near the Dames’ idea of perfection—how could she find sympathy for me?

Then my eyes had met hers and I knew that there was full awareness there. She did not weigh me in that long moment we sat so, eyes linked to eyes, or rebuke my savage impatience. All she took from me was that hampering self-pity, my sense of outrage, and so cleared my thoughts to positive ends.

“I will not let it end so!” I had cried out of my hurt and anger, which fed each other into a mighty storm.

Still our gaze had locked. She gave me nothing—I was young, uncertain. I wanted some one to say now, “Do this, or that, Joisan, and all will come right.” Except there was no one left to so order my life. I stood alone.

That loneliness was the very core of what ate at me.

“I am his wife—not only by ceremony, but by my heart’s wish!” I said that with defiance. To speak of such emotions here might well be a sin. The Dames of Norstead put aside all the desires of the flesh when they take their vows. “Two ways I can claim him—still we are not one!”

She did not answer—my words tumbled on, growing shriller as I thought upon my loss.

“We stood against evil, and after that, I thought our true marriage must come. He—I knew he was exhausted by the struggle, that he would turn to me soon—perhaps that he must learn a little to be himself after that ill fortune had passed.

“So I was patient.” Now, remembering my words, my clasp on the reins tightened, I stared ahead not seeing the road before me. “I tried to let him know by word and act that in him I found all that any woman might desire. Marriage between House and House is not rooted in liking of maid for man, man for maid. We wed, or are wed, for the advantage of our kin. But I believe, yes, I must believe that sometimes a richer life comes from such couplings. I thought it would be mine!

“You know the marks he bears,” I had continued, “the sign of the Old Ones. When his enemies seized and would have used me for their foul purposes he alone came. Then I understood that such marks meant nothing, he was not one to hold in awe, but one to love.

“His hurts were mine, his way my road. I know this will be so as long as that Flame Eternal burns upon any altar. But—what I had to give him was not enough …”

So I had poured out my hurt, and my hands had been tight upon the englobed gryphon which was all he had left me, even as I held it now, left-handedly, for comfort. The gryphon was the badge of my lord’s house, but this talisman was far older, a thing out of the Waste where the Old Ones had gone.

I looked down at it. Even in this half light its tiny gemmed eyes glittered, I could almost believe that its half-furled wings had moved, that it longed to break free of the confinement of the crystal. It was a thing of Power, though neither my Lord or I knew how to use it. Also it was a Key—

I remember the words of that strange man who had come at the end of my lord’s battle. Neevor, he had called himself. It was he who said that I held a key.

What I had was not enough! My pain caught at me, it had burned away pride. Pride of that kind I did not want. I shifted in the saddle, I was beyond the outermost farm, soon I must turn into the southern way-path. Still I could not control my backward-looking thoughts.

When I had made that same cry to the Past-Abbess she had answered me with what I had not expected—agreement.

“No, what you have is not enough.”

“Kerovan.” She had said his name in her soft voice, as if she blessed him. “He has been ever made poor. His father—to him a son was needed for his own pride, that one of his blood follow him in the great seat of his hall. Kerovan knew this with his heart before he could understand.

“Darkness feeds and grows stout on unhappiness, draws also thoughts which are misshapen and hurtful. We all have such thoughts—some held so secretly we do not know with our full minds that they exist. Yet, in spite of such a fashioning, Kerovan was not wrought into what they term him—monster. Rather he is stronger within than he believes.

“I have met your lord.”

That startled me, for I knew that no man entered the inner part of the Abbey. I must have made some sound, for the Past-Abbess had smiled at me.

“Great age brings its own privileges, my child. Yes, when I heard your story I wished to learn more of him. He came and—in spite of his inner wall against the world—he talked. What he said was less, of course, than what he did not, but he revealed more than he knew.

“He now stands in a place from which run many roads—he must choose and that choosing shall make of him, for good or ill, a different man. Child, we know so little of the Old Ones. Though, in spite of prudence telling us to walk with care, we are drawn to the unknown—those wonders and perils beyond our understanding. Kerovan has their heritage; he is now like a child who faces a pile of glittering toys. But the caution born of his strange birthing makes him ever suspicious. He fears giving way to anything that he senses will make him feel instead of think. Most of all he fears himself, thus he will not be drawn to any he loves—”

“Loves?” I had been bitter then.

“Loves,” she repeated firmly. “Though he knows it not, nor, even if he did, would he allow himself to be moved now. He feels safe within those walls of his—not only safe for himself, but for others. He will not come again to you, Joisan—though he does not admit this even to himself. He will not come because he cares—because he fears that the strange blood in him shall, in some manner, threaten you.”

“But that is not true!” I had cried then. My hold upon the crystal gryphon became so tight that I might have crushed it.

“To him it is. Unless he can break his inner wall—”

“Or have another break it for him!”

She had nodded then. And again, when I had added, “I am not free, nor shall he be! Let him ride south at Lord Imgry’s bidding as he has done. They will try to use him—even as they make wardsigns for evil behind his back. He shall find no friends there. Oh, why did he go?”

“You know why, child.”

“Yes! He thought he had nothing else, that he might as well spend his life thus. So he tells his wife that she is free—and he goes! Well, I care! I have no false pride. If Kerovan rides to the bidding of those who would make him a tool—then I shall ride also!”

“You shall. For this is a meant thing, and, perhaps, of greater importance than you can guess now. Go with the Will of the Flame. That shall be your cloak and shelter, dear child. May It lighten your path and kindle joy in your heart at last.”

So she had not only given me her full blessing, but, by her orders, the storehouse of the Abbey had been opened to me. There I had chosen weapons and gear from that brought by refugees, keeping my own council until all was readied. Then I held my meeting with Nalda and so had come to this lonely ride into the unknown.

My mare, an ugly beast if compared to the larger horses of the plain, was mountain bred. I called her “Bural” which is a landsman’s name for a tough root it is hard to pull free. She turned now under my urging into the trail southward that my lord and his escort had taken earlier.

I had little hope of catching up with him; there were too many days gone. Also, though this road must be my guide, I was wary of riding openly.

The land was now a roaming place for more than one kind of enemy. Before the war the Waste, which lay not too far distant, had been a haunt for outlaws and masterless men, raiders. I also had heard that there were small bands of the enemy quartering the land to the eastward—though those had grown fewer of late. Perhaps their scouts had found this trail, visited it to spy upon any traffic there.

Once this had been a merchants’ path. The abbey dales were notably good for trade and several sponsored yearly fairs. However, there had been no attempt to keep this road open since the invasion began and now it was overgrown; winter slides had cut away slices of the way where it climbed the ridges.

I was glad of the coming of better light, for several times I had to dismount and lead Bural over loose footing. Still I was not too delayed until the second day of travel when a thick mist became a threat. It was so complete a cloaking of the ground that I could see less than a sword’s length before me. Moisture gathered on my helm, trickling down to wet my face, and my hands were clammy on the reins as I led the mare on.

To continue so blindly was folly. I began to look for shelter. There were rocks and heaps of stone in plenty, but nothing in the way of a cave or even a half-roofed crevice. I had no mind to squat on wet stones in the open while waiting for better weather.

Then, before us reared a sudden barrier of rock. Bural jerked at the reins, turned her head stubbornly to the left, though whether that was north, south, east, or west, I could not have said. We had left the road earlier, as it lay straight and open for a space and I had no mind to be seen.

Since the mare was so stubborn, and the footing seemed less loose in that direction, I allowed her her will. Thus we skirted along the wall so closely that now and then the saddlebag brushed the stone. I do not know when I first noticed that it was not just an escarpment of natural rock, but in truth a wall made to some purpose.

The stones, though rough and very large, had been laid with such skill that I do not believe I could have forced the point of my belt knife into the cracks. Though on other rocks one could see the ash-green or rusty-red of lichen in growth, this wall was clear except for runnels of moisture condensed from the fog.

I was certain we had come upon another ruin of the Old Ones and I paused, holding out the gryphon as a test. The crystal was, as ever, warm, while the glittering eyes of the imprisoned beast were bright, but there came no real glow. Not all the remains scattered about the Dales were imbued with unknown Power. There were many no different from the new-made ruins of our own where war had swept. I judged this to be one of the dead places where I had nothing to fear.

Bural plodded steadily on. There was no break in the wall. Then, suddenly, the mountain mare snorted, her head came up higher as if she had scented something through the mist. She hastened pace, pulling determinedly when I would have held her back.

I drew the dart gun for which I had but little ammunition, took Bural’s reins into my left hand. Swordplay I would trust to only as a last resort.

Now I smelled it also, hanging heavily entrapped in the mist, wood smoke! We could not be too far from a fire.

Before I could silence her, Bural uttered a loud whinny—and was answered! There was no holding her wiry strength, though my tight grasp on the reins brought her head around. She bucked and kicked out. Our struggle carried us into an open space where the wall came to an abrupt end.

In the murk there was a ruddy glow which must mark a fire. I saw a shape, well-veiled by the mist, coming from it toward me. As I brought up the dart gun, Bural broke away and went trotting straight to the fog-muted flames.

I dared not be set afoot in the wilderness, so must get the mare back, though that fire, in this place, was likely tended by enemies rather than friends. No refugees would have willingly chosen these barren heights as their road.

The one coming toward me swung aside to let Bural pass, making no attempt to catch at her dangling reins. Tall—plainly a man. Now I could see he carried bared steel. I must hold my own fire until I had a better target, for he probably went mailed.

I had seen death and had been ready to kill. But then my actions had been in defense, for myself or the lives of others. To shoot coolly thus, I discovered, was a difficult thing.

“Jervon!” A hollow call came from the ruddy blotch of flames behind the advancing man. He did not turn his head, but he stopped and stood, his sword still in his hand. All I could see of his face beneath the rim of his helm was a whitish blur, for as he halted, so did I, still and waiting.

Another came out of the fog, near to the height of the man but more slender. The newcomer held out both hands, shoulder high, palm out, in the age old sign for truce. Passing the man, that second stranger approached me confidently as if we were kin meeting.

The mail this warrior wore had a strange bluish hue, as if fashioned of a different metal. I slowly lowered the dart thrower, yet did not slide it back into the loop on my belt. Now the mist ceased to mask all so completely and I was looking into a face browned by the sun, yet of delicately cut feature. I was fronting not another man but a woman going armed like myself.

Her hands dropped, but not to draw a weapon, rather so her forefingers sketched in the damp air a sign. I saw that symbol gleam sharp and clear for a space of three or four breaths and then fade. It was blue—yet partly green—and I knew it for a manifestation of Power.

An Old One?

I drew a deep breath, put the dart gun away, knowing well that no man-made weapon could be used against such. Also I knew that any of the Power that was without harm for my kind was of that pure color. Just as places of safety in the Dales glowed the same shade by night.

She smiled, this woman of the Old Ones. Then she nodded as if the answer to some riddle had become clear. Now she held out her right hand to me.

“Come.” That was neither order nor invitation, but lay between. Her fingers closed on mine as I unconsciously reached out. They held fast as if she half-expected me to jerk away.

Her flesh was as damp and chill from the mist as mine, but no different, that I could see, from humankind. I was sure she meant me no harm. Rather she looked on me with a smile as if I were one she had been awaiting for a long time.

She drew me on to the fire, and I went willingly enough. As we passed the man, he fell in on my other side, his sword now sheathed. He had a strong, comely face, though there were lines laid deep about his eyes and lips. Yet now he also smiled in welcome, as if he were brother-kin.

I sensed almost from the beginning that there was a deep bond between these two. They did not speak to each other or to me, but the three of us came companionably to a pocket where the fire had pushed back most of the mist.

Beyond the flames were two of the larger horses of the lower Dales, now rough of coat, such as my uncle had once prized in his stables before he rode south to die. There was also a pack pony, by which Bural stood, stretching out her head so that they might rub noses. All three of the horses had been stripped of gear, which was piled, saddles and packs together, behind the fire. At the side of that were spits whittled from wood impaling the fat, dripping bodies of three hill hens. The scent of the roasting meat made my mouth water.

The woman laughed, pointing to the hens.

“See even Gunnora has prepared for your coming. There is plenty for all of us. Sit, rest, and eat. But first—” She turned to her companion who, without a word, fetched a small saddle cask, drew the stopper from it with his teeth, while in his other hand he held a horn cup into which he then poured liquid from the cask.

The woman took the cup and pressed it into my hands, serving me in the manner that the lady of a Dale keep does an honored guest—the welcome cup to wash trail dust from a wayfarer’s throat before he announces himself and his business.

Old formal manners—I remembered to bow instead of curtsy, and the proper words came to me without trying. “To the givers of the feast, thanks, fair thanks. For the welcome of the gate, gratitude. To the rulers of this house, fair fortune and bright sun on the morrow.”

As I drank, the lady’s nose wrinkled and she chuckled.

“For that last wish, we may all petition whatever Powers aid travelers here. Unless”—she raised a long finger, as she had used it pen fashion in the air earlier, and nibbled at it—“unless all this has been the work of some Plan.”

I saw her companion frown slightly, as if a memory he did not like touched him. Studying them both in this better light I thought that he was just such a man as one might find in any Dale force, though one of rank to seat at the high table. Yet at the fore of his tarnished helm (for his armor had none of the brightness of hers) there was no longer any house badge. I found his face frank, open, strong of mouth and jaw as a man’s should be, with an air of confident purpose about him.

The lady—I was sure she was not of Dale blood, which here in High Hallack, could only mean strange kin, Old. Though she also wore a helm, a small wisp of hair (as if she had assumed that head covering hurriedly at my coming) lay loose on her cheek. The color was very dark, also her features were thinner, sharper, and her eyes very large. I had never seen her kind in any Dale holding.

While I drank the welcome cup, they both sat at ease, cross-legged, on either side of me. I wondered what to say beyond the courtesy of my name. They could well wonder why I wandered alone among the hills, but to entrust strangers with the nature of my mission was folly.

Kerovan

IN A LAND SUCH AS OURS A MAN IS WARY OF DREAMS WE OF THE Dales carry old fears, not the least being that perhaps, when we dream, our innermost selves receive warnings, orders … Save that we carry into waking only broken shards, to be haunted by them. Can a man dream himself into madness? I have sometimes feared so. For I was haunted … Yet with the coming of each morning I hoped again to wake from the shadow which new deep dreams had laid upon me and which I never could remember.

In a way I was captive—to whom or what I could not name.

When I last went into the Waste it was in search of Joisan to whom I owe duty. Yes, I will have it so—duty only. She must not be more to me. No matter what boy’s hopes I once held, I recognize that they are not for my kind—half man, half—what? At least I now have the courage to know myself for what I am and show it. I need only look at my bootless feet, bare after all those years when I tried to conceal my otherness, to see the hooves upon which I walk …

I went then into the Waste, still, in part, Kerovan of Ulmsdale. What did I come out as? I do not know. Perhaps I will never learn—maybe for my own good. Yet I was driven by restless loneliness, sharp as any sword point against my flesh.

Joisan—no, I will not think of Joisan. I will harness my determination to keep her out of my mind. I need only remember how they looked at me in Norsdale when I brought her there—sale, still her own woman. Then I broke our wedding bonds, I evoked wife-right for her, since she would not for herself.

That woman—the Past-Abbess … No, I will not think of her either. Their world is not mine. In truth, I felt no tie with the Dales, even though Lord Imgry had summoned me again. Because nothing, any longer, has meaning for me, I have answered his order.

Yet the dreams come and I cannot tear them out of my aching head as a man tears away the badge of a lord he no longer serves. I hate to sleep—unless it be to drop into darkness without another awakening.

My escort sit and talk around the fire well beyond me. Men, as I once was, or seemed to be. They avoid me and I know it is only Imgry’s will that has kept them in my company.

Once I was fascinated by the Old One’s secrets. I had gone exploring in the Waste with the Wiseman Riwal. Together we rode the Road of Exile. No—I am not going to remember!

Hair—like the polished leaves of autumn, her quick steps, her voice … Too strong a memory, a hurting which will never heal. I will not remember! I am not the Kerovan that was …

To tramp about the camp at night is a way to keep awake. My body aches with fatigue. The men watch me from the corners of their eyes, whisper. I do not allow myself to think of them—or …

However, one cannot fight sleep forever. I dream again …

There was one of the Old Ones—Neevor—I remember his name. Who he was or what I do not know. Once—twice—he has given me aid. A friend? No, those such as I have no friends. When I am awake I try to think of Imgry and what he wants of me. A cold man, strong with a pride that feeds on accomplishment. on strength of will and purpose.

We of the Dales (once I was of the Dales) have never given oaths to any one overlord. That was our great weakness when the invaders, having tested us with their spies, struck our land. Each lord fought for himself to defend his own holdings, so was speedily overrun.

Painfully we learned our lesson. The sea coast by then lay in their hands, while those among us who had the grace and largeness of spirit to attract others to serve under them were dead—either slain in fruitless battle, or by assassination. Only then we drew together under three of the southern lords who were far-seeing and strong enough to make a kingdom of sorts out of a loose confederation of holdings.

Of these Imgry is the least liked. However, no man who has served with him can deny that he has the iron will to gather support. A man does not have to be loved to be well served. He, most of all, drew together our broken forces, hammered them mercilessly into an army where old feuds were unallowable—an army knowing only one enemy, the Hounds of Alizon.

Only that army was so battered and weary they could make no real stand. They raided, like the snarling outlaws of the Waste, fighting like wolves even as those canny beasts hold to pack-kin.

Still the invaders poured into the port they had taken. The only advantage we had was that they brought no more of those strange weapons from overseas which had given us such blows—rolling over strongholds as a man steps upon a hill of ants. Those, we were told by the few prisoners we took, were not of Alizon but a new magic known to allies of our enemies.

The fact that these land-crawlers were broken, or helpless, for some reason we did not understand, meant little for they still had men and weapons in plenty. Though our smiths labored in the far western Dales, we could not make one dart do the work of two, and we must at times raid for the very supplies we needed.

I had been one of the scouts seeking out such supplies. My childhood in the far Dales, where I had been fostered with a hunter, gave me skills for such work. I had been content to serve so, for among my own kind I was suspect even before my physical differences were known—monster—half-man—rumor had always played with me.

Imgry had sent me north months ago because my father ailed. Also, there was always the chance that the Hounds, nosing along the coast, might strike inland there. I had visited Ulmsdale in secret, learning then that I had enemies of my own blood, my closest blood. My mother had hated me from birth, not altogether because of my misshapen body but because (as I learned) I failed to be the weapon she had sought, with her limited learning of ancient Power, to forge.

Too proud she had been of that learning; I was not her only failure. When she and her companions sought to summon the sea to blast Alizon’s men, they instead flooded the Dale itself and there remained no lordship for anyone. When I then would have returned to my duty with the army, I discovered the enemy between me and the Dale forces. Striking westward I had found—my lady …

No, I would not think of her as that—even though, by all the laws of the Dale, we were securely wed and had been since childhood, long before we ever saw each other. Joisan …

I cannot master my thoughts any more than I can master my dreams. I see her with her people, I see her with my cousin Rogear, who came to her under my name—she believing me to be an Old One; I see her in the Waste, under Rogear’s control, being used by him and my mother as a tool because in her hands was that thing of true Power which I had found and given to her—the ball with its imprisoned gryphon.

Yes, I cannot flee her in mind as I have in body. I see her always, proud, full of courage, kind of heart, all things a man wishes for. A man—I was not a man, yet still I want her.

Why does she linger so in my mind—I have released her? There are good men in plenty in the Dales to give her all she deserves. I am not to be numbered among them.

I rode away more to free myself from her than because Imgry summoned me, let me face the truth of that. And I am so tired—yet when I sleep I dream … Still I must sleep—though there is a pride in me which will not let me show fatigue or weakness to those who ride with me. Yet at last I must give way …

The hall was so vast that its walls lay beyond my sight. Great pillars formed aisles along which drifted wisps of sweet-smelling mist, which coiled and wove patterns in the air as if invisible hands played with their ribbon lengths. There were no torches, no wall lamps, but there was light.

I moved between two lines of the pillars, seeing as I passed that runes were graven over their surfaces. These runes, also, held light of their own, some gray as early dawn, some faintly blue.

The runes bothered me. I should be able to read them—the messages they carried were or had once been of vast import—perhaps the history of a people or a nation long since vanished. For this place was very old—the feeling of age lay so strong that it was a weight to press upon any venturing here.

Age—and knowledge. Our own keeps had their record rooms. There is something in a man which makes him wish to leave some remembrance of his life and deeds. However, the records of my people were as meaningless scrawls made with a twig in river sand compared to all this. Also it was a place of Power. Power that could be felt, tasted, filled this place throughout.

Still, I was awed, but not fear-ridden. All here seemed so far removed from the being I was that I could not be touched by it. The being that I was …

I was Kerovan. I clutched tightly at that scrap of identity. Where I was I did not know, but who I was—that I could not forget. My decision held defiance.

The pillars became only shadows I passed at a swift, steady pace. Though I heard nothing audible I was aware of a kind of whispering inside my head—small bodiless things pushed and plucked at some protective covering over my thoughts, striving to win an entrance.

Ahead was an intensifying of the light. The radiance, centered at that spot, began to change color, deepening to blue—then fading to a silver that was like a fire for brilliance.

Though I had no sense of my feet pressing any pavement, I sped along as might a runner intent upon his goal. There was a rising excitement in me as if I were indeed engaged in a race and that the end of it, for good or ill, lay just ahead.

That which was so alight was a dais, a point of which extended toward me. I guessed from what I could see that its full shape was that of a star. On that stood what might be an altar wrought of crystal—an altar—or a tomb—for a form rested within.

I reached the point of the star, there to sway dizzily for a moment—forward with the impulse that had borne me here, back when I encountered resistance from the air itself. Perhaps this formed a protection for the sleeper.

He was neither man nor bird; still a part of both species seemed fused in him. Though, as I looked upon him, this unnatural coupling seemed natural and right. His face was avian—provided with a bill-like extension, which was both nose and mouth; wide, if now closed, bird eyes. On his head rose a crest of feathers, which extended, growing smaller, down to his shoulders, then along the upper parts of his arms. However, his feet were not birdlike—rather broad paws showing the tips of mighty talons, which must have been withdrawn into sheaths. On the contrary, however, his hands were a bird’s claws, laced together about the hilt of a sword, unsheathed, unblemished by time, the blade appearing not steel but a rod of light.

All this and yet he was no monster. Rather the same awe that had filled me since I came here intensified. There, surely, lay one who in his own time had been far greater than any of those who call themselves “men.”

Why I had been summoned to this place I did not know, for summoned I was sure I had been. Those whispers in my head grew stronger, battered harder, with an almost frantic intensity as if they had but a little time in which to deliver some message and feared their mission was in vain.

Still I gazed upon the sleeper. More and more it seemed to me that there was something about him that was of the gryphon—that symbol of my House, which also hung imprisoned in crystal in the ball that Joisan wore. He lacked the beast body, the wings—yet his avian face—crested head—paw feet—claw hands—yes, there was a likeness.

That thought opened the door for an instant to the whisperers, for they became audible at last.

“Landisl, Landisl!”

I turned my head back and forth as one does to dislodge buzzing woodsflies, trying to escape that shrilling. Once before I had heard that name—for name it was—but where and when?

Memory opened—I had called it when I had faced the black sorcery of my mother’s and Rogear’s raving, though then it had been so alien that I had not understood.

“Landisl.” My own lips shaped that once …

There followed a moment of dark, a twisting and wrenching, as if my body had been seized and jerked out of one life into another. I opened eyes upon light. But it was not the brilliance of the star dais. I blinked and blinked again, stupidly, be-mused … There was a fire, born of wood, real, of this world …

Standing over me was the chief of those sent by Imgry. Behind him the other men stirred in the early morning light. I felt a surge of rage—I had been so close to knowing—learning … This dolt had broken the dream—the first dream that had meant something, from which I might have learned!

I still found difficulty in seeing trees instead of pillars—fire … This time I did not lose the details I dreamed. Rather I carried with me, as we got to horse and rode on through the morning mists, a vivid memory of that other place.

In fact, I became more and more sure that that had been no ordinary dream. Instead, part of me, which thought and could remember, had been drawn into another time—or world—where there still did lie the body of the gryphon-man, sleeping or dead.

“Landisl.” I tried to shape that name waking and found that now it was distorted, sounded so unlike, that I caught my tongue between my teeth. Nor did I exchange any words with my companions. I did not even note when they forged ahead, leaving a gap between us.

Finally I summoned resolution and shut the vision or dream back into memory. I had an odd feeling that if I allowed myself to dwell upon it too long, or too often, I might be lost somewhere, between the world in which I now moved and that other place.

I concentrated with determination on what lay about me—the morning’s warmth of sun, the track along which we rode, even the men of our company. My old scouting instinct returned and I was as alert as if I moved on a foray.

Now I wanted to talk, though heretofore I had held aloof from the others, speaking only when spoken to, which was seldom. That the war in the south was in stalemate I gathered from comments I had heard. Our own fighting had become a smattering of raids made by small squads of men. Imgry and his two fellow-leaders were busied about the foraging of weapons, the rebuilding or building of a closer knit army, under tight leadership.

The invaders, also, appeared less aggressive, willing to hold to what they had seized, but making few attempts to enlarge that territory. Two of the men I traveled with had been talking eagerly of a Sulcar ship, which had made a landing to the far south and been met by a scouting party.

Those hardy merchant adventurers had brought news of a second war overseas, one that hampered the plans of Alizon. The Sulcars, always fighters, had taken with them an invitation to come coast raiding if they could, taking toll of the invaders’ captured seaports. Whether anything might come of this loosely discussed alliance no man knew, but the possibility was heartening.

However, we all knew that the Hounds must be defeated in the Dales, and that we alone must face the struggle for freedom. That was dictated, not only by stiff Dale pride, but the fact that we could claim no other allies—having always been a lone people living much to ourselves.

Or were we alone? I looked to the west as that thought stirred in my mind. In the beginning, generations ago, the Dalesmen had come up from the south. We are a legend-loving people with our songsmiths ever ready to blow up a small encounter into an epic battle. Oddly enough, though, we had no tales of our race that reached farther back than our coming into High Hallack. That our fathers then built well-fortified keeps here suggested they had left behind turmoil and trouble.

What they had fled from we do not know. We are not nomads by nature. Each lord kept his fort-keep snug, trained his sons to war as a matter of course. Yet we had faced no threat, until the coming of Alizon, that was more than a brush with outlaws, a kin feud between one Dale and the next.

Our people had come, however, into a haunted land. The Old Ones (and how many races and kingdoms there had been of them we shall never know) had already withdrawn. They left behind them numerous traces of their own, alien to humankind. There are places where no man dares venture, not only for his life’s sake, but also because of a threat to his spirit. Other places are known to welcome, bring peace and healing. Some of our blood sought out what small secrets they could uncover, but that lore was often baffling.

However, though the Old Ones had left coast and Dales for some compelling reason, we are all certain they had not altogether withdrawn from our world. There was the Waste to the west, a vast buffer between us and even more unknown land, full of signs of Power, potent places. We knew well that there was life there—besides the outlaws—perhaps left to spy upon us, perhaps utterly uncaring, since their affairs and desires might be so far removed from those we understood.

There were fighters among the Old Ones—we have found traces of ancient and terrible wars. Metal seekers have brought out of the Waste masses so congealed and melted that it proved such had been the targets of vast forces.

If the Dalesmen had first believed that they only lived in High Hallack on sufferance, Jong, undisturbed years had lulled us into thinking that we had nothing to fear from those others. Still—suppose that the invaders, who knew nothing of this land, the things that trod the Waste, were to overrun us? Where next would they strike? Would they be stopped by legends and shadows?

We were not even sure why those of Alizon were unleashed upon us, traveling overseas to expend such fury upon a country, which, by all accounts, was far less rich and useful than their own. I had heard one story that a high-ranking prisoner, taken when one of their mighty earth-crawlers had broken down, reported that those who had lent them those alien weapons had said the secret of vast power was to be found here—enough to make them masters of the world. So their ruler lusted for that.

The only place where such a Power could be found might be the Waste, or in a land that might lie beyond that. If that belief was what had brought the Hounds upon us … Then—could those of the Waste be made to see that they had a part in our war?

No thinking man doubted that if Alizon invaded there they would come up against potent forces. But could the wielders of those be persuaded now to lend aid to the Dales?

I chewed upon that, finding it held a flavor I liked. To meddle with Power on our own, as my mother and Rogear had sought to do, was fatal folly. However, to enlist on our side those who had tamed it was another thing. Had this lain somewhere in Lord Imgry’s mind?

I sent my horse forward with a click of tongue, suddenly eager to reach the journey’s end—as we did by nightfall.

My last meeting with the southern leader had been in a forester’s hut, no trappings of state had backed that tall man with the cold greenish eyes. Now I sat on a stool in a small keep’s great hall.

Imgry occupied a high-backed chair which had been taken from the dining dais, yet still raising him above those who came to him. The man’s authority was like an unseen armor, though the latter in truth he did not wear at present, only the plain leather of a lord home from a day’s hunting. The hunt he spoke of, though, lay before and not behind him.

I had waited for some change of countenance when he sighted my bared hooves—they had been boot-hidden at our last meeting. Only I came to believe that indeed I could have been as inhuman as the gryphon-man of my night vision and he would not have noted the difference since I was there to serve a purpose.

For Imgry, only his own ambition and aims had importance. Everything he said, thought, acted upon, was for one purpose alone—to achieve plans that burned in him, to the extinction of all else.

He had laid out on the bench between us a much creased and spotted leaf of parchment. There were marks on it that my own past scouting had added, but much was blank, and, upon that blank surface, his hand lay now, palm flat.

“The answer lies here.” That he was so frank with me was enough to make me wary. It was not in his nature to share even the thin edge of his plans with another. Neither was it in him to be conciliatory, to ask instead of order.

“Be a little more plain with me my lord!” During the time since I had at last accepted this man’s orders I had gained freedom of a sort—at high price. He could not overawe me any longer.

“We have accomplished much.” That was not boast, but a matter of fact. “Our smiths have worked the metals that came out of the Waste—in spite of the danger. We have now many weapons better than any of us have ever seen. We gather men—but also we have lost.” Now the palm lying on the map clenched into a fist. “Still the invader ships land fresh troops. Oh, it is true that they have not advanced against us in force for a time. But that is not because we have held them. We can as yet only worry their flanks, strike a small blow here, another there. Though”—there was a faint satisfaction in his tone now—“they have at last learned the folly of pursuing us too far into land we know far better than they. Now”—he leaned forward a fraction—“we have learned for certain something new—”

When he paused I dared to strike in with a question. “Is it true they seek some mysterious power?”

He shot me a glance so sharp and piercing he might have used the dart thrower on his belt.

“So men talk openly of that?”

I shrugged. “It was a story told even before I rode north. There must be some sane reason why Alizon harries us, when, if we are to believe the word of traders, there is nothing in this land to match theirs. We possess no treasure.”

There was no deference in what I said. I spoke as equal to equal. Imgry was a force, yes, and those of the Dales might be very glad it was wielded for them. However, he no longer impressed me. I was, in a way, inner-walled against him now.

He studied me with narrowed eyes. I think I had suddenly become a person, not a weapon ready to his hand. That impatience that lay ever close beneath the surface of his manner retreated a little. He considered me in a new way for I was not the boy who had gone to Ulmsdale—but a new factor to be fitted into the game.

“Your hand,” I continued, “lies there upon the representation of the Waste. Is it there you believe your goal to be? No treasure in truth—but Power …”

His expression did not change, but I had a sensation of fronting pure cold. Heat of anger was not for such a man, his rage would ape the icy breath of the Winter Dragon. I had prodded him then as I sat there, unmoved, drawing on my self-confidence. Why should I care that this Lord was ridden by ambition—to carry on great things if fate allowed? I was not of his kin.

“Yes, it is the Waste—or what it can hold.” He had decided to accept me as I was. “We do not know what it may be. This much we have learned from more than one prisoner—the Hounds want something they must find or control. In their own land they face an ancient enemy—one they would devour as they have much of the Dales. This enemy—by their accounts—may be kin to our Old Ones. They were armed in turn by others who have some way of divining what they seek but not the manpower necessary to take it. The knowledge lies here!” His fingers turned inward, his nails scraped across the map as the talons of a hawk might grasp jealously held prey.

Joisan

THE MIST HUNG LIKE TAPESTRIES IN SOME GREAT HALL, SHUTTING IN the fire those two whose warmth and life it served. Now I was there also and oddly content in a way I had not been since that hour when Kerovan had turned his back upon me and ridden forth from Norsdale. I watching him go dry of eye, though weeping in my heart. That sorrow and fear had been my own and I would not allow any to see the signs of it. But here—it was like—like being with kinblood. I marveled a little that I felt so.

“I am Elys,” the woman said, adding no House or Dale to mark rank. Yet manifestly she was one who would sit at the high table in any hall.

“And this”—her hand reached forward a little as if, were there no space between them, she would lay fingers on his arm (again I felt the bond between them, and I hungered for its like)—“is Jervon.”

“I am Joisan.” Because they made no claim of land or kin, neither did I.

“Joisan,” she repeated, her head a fraction to one side, almost as if she expected some echo from the mist.

That thought made me uneasy once again, broke through the dreamlike content which had held me for a fraction of time. I turned my head quickly. Only our four horses stood there.

“But you are also …” Elys’s fingers twitched, as if, against her will, they sought to summon some trick of Power. Then her tone changed as she added the same warning Nalda had given me.

“This is a dangerous land in which to ride alone, Joisan.”

I made the same reply that I had in Norsdale: “For one alone and careful, it may be less dangerous than in company.”

To my surprise Jervon gave a low laugh. “She is right.” He spoke across me to Elys. “Have we not proven the truth of that ourselves? As long as one stays away from certain—places.” To that last word he gave emphasis.

For a moment I thought that his companion might take his words amiss, though I knew nothing of what lay behind it all. I saw her teeth close for an instant upon her lip. Then she nodded.

“There are dangers and dangers. Only …” She turned her head to catch my eyes in as direct a gaze as the Past-Abbess had bent upon me when I had informed her of my plans. I did not know whether I held this woman in awe or not, but I knew she was more than she seemed, and somehow she knew more about me than I had told or wanted a stranger to discover.

“You carry,” she said abruptly, “such protection as will serve you well. How else could I have felt your coming hither so strongly? But you are not of those who by blood have the use of such.”

My hands flew to the gryphon. Any chance to conceal it now was too late. That Elys guessed, or knew, something of its value I had no doubts now.

She shook her head quickly. My alarm must have been very transparent and easy to read.

“No, Joisan, I do not know the nature of what you wear or to what use that may be put. Only that it is a thing of Power. That you wear it so openly means that that Power is ready to your hand—”

“No!” Least of all did I make any claim of strange talents before one who was of the Old Blood. “This is a thing of Power, yes. But I do not know how to summon what it may control. Perhaps my lord can riddle some of it, for this is his gift—that is my wedded lord. I have seen it act—but not by my will.” Or had some of its strength gone forth that time I feared for Kerovan’s life because I had willed it? Who could tell me that?

“And your lord is?” Jervon asked that.

My chin came up defiantly. Did he know of Kerovan? By his gear he must have served or did serve now with the Dale forces; he was clearly no outlaw. Perhaps he had heard those vile whispers, rumors of “monster,” “half-man,” which had poisoned my lord’s life, walked him away from me.

“My wedded lord is Kerovan of Ulmsdale,” I answered and brought pride strong into my reply. “He rides now to answer the summons of Lord Imgry.”

“Kerovan?” Elys made a question of the name as she spoke to Jervon. He shook his head.

“There are many lords with Imgry—those who still live. Of him I have not heard.”

I was sure he spoke the truth, but Elys, it was plain, was not satisfied. She turned that probing gaze now upon the gryphon itself.

“He who made a gift of such a thing,” she commented, “must be no common man and of no common heritage.”

I knew I must make a choice. After all Elys was one who might well share Kerovan’s burden, though she appeared to accept it as a part of her life, not a curse. As Jervon also did. That he did and their bond was the stronger for his acceptance (as any, looking upon them as I did with eyes made wise by my own hurt, could see) brought weariness upon me. These two were strong because they had each other, were thus forged into a more formidable whole. That was what I longed for with Kerovan. Perhaps I lacked wit, or strength, to bring such coupling about; perhaps I was too young, too poorly schooled in things of any heart save my own. Envy arose in me like a black and bitter taste in my mouth, a shadow on the spirit. But I gave them truth because they held what I wanted, and perhaps some small crumbs of knowledge of how they had gained that oneness might fall within my reach.

“Lord Kerovan is partly of the Old Blood. He is—different.”

I did not know what to expect, aversion, disbelief … What followed made me gasp in surprise. Elys caught the hand which lay upon my knee. When I dropped my other, in surprise, Jervon’s strong fingers closed about it, linking us three together. From each of them flowed warmly into me a feeling of peace and comfort. That envy withered, leaving only wonder and a vast longing, a birth of hope.

The mist did not lift from this refuge between the ancient walls. We feasted on the fat-dripping birds, watched the shifting billows of the feather-soft cloud about us. The original purpose of the wall, which enclosed this space on three sides, we did not know—there was no sign that anything had been erected within.

Under us the bare rock had been smoothed to a pavement on which the mist left damp drops. From time to time Jervon disappeared into the mist, with an uneasiness about him that touched me quickly.

“This is a dangerous place?” I had felt none of that warning which the gryphon should have given. Elys shook her head.

“Not openly. Still, when one rides the Dales these days, there is ever a need for caution. Jervon is a man of war. His band was beaten into death, only he survived. It is not his way to accept any refuge he does not prove many times over.”

“You—” I hesitated and then dared because of my deep need. If I only knew how these two had come together I might better be able to confront my lord. “You are not of the Dales—but he is …”

She caught my meaning I am certain, the one I could not quite put into bald and open words.

“I do not know of what blood I am,” she answered me. “Those who gave me birth were washed ashore on the coast here after a great storm—seemingly they fled some danger, but what I was never told. My mother was one who had strange knowledge, she was Wise. Only, because she wished to give her lord children, she had to strike a dire bargain with certain Powers. When my brother and I were born at one birth, she paid for us with her life. My brother—” She hesitated. “He had none of her heritage. He distrusts such knowledge—it may be true that men cannot control the Moon Strength.

“The invaders came, my father went to war, later my brother. I gave what help I could to those coast people who had been our friends. Some things I learned from their Wisewoman—I was very young and had not much teaching. Our people fled inland and Jervon found us. He was sore wounded in both body and spirit. Later I had a message that my brother was in danger. So I rode, and Jervon with me, because his lord was dead and he had no kin left. We—”

Again she hesitated, then continued, her voice coming in a tumble of words as if she would quickly be done with the rest of the story. “We did what was to be done for my brother’s sake. With him there was no place for me. I am what I was born and few men—very few—can accept me so. Perhaps, in truth, only one …” She looked now at Jervon as he came back to us through the fringes of the mist. There was that in her eyes which made me once more know envy. So, I was sure, I looked upon Kerovan—but all that I had to offer had not been enough!

“Now,” Elys spoke more briskly, “we ride together as blank shields, lending our sword strength to those who need it most. Yes, I am war-trained. It was my father who willed it so. We are kinless, landless, but never without what we need most.”

Kinless and landless they might be, Woman of Power, Man of Sword—but they were one.

“Where do you ride now?” I asked. Though I had determined to make this quest alone, now I longed, suddenly and fiercely, for her to say south. Surely if they were blank shields the gathering of forces under Lord Imgry would attract them.

Rather to my surprise Elys shook her head. “I do not yet know. There is …” She looked troubled. “Joisan, would you fear if I made a scry pattern for you?”

I remembered once I had seen that done—and also for me—in the bowl of the Past-Abbess. Then I had seen my lord but had I known it not.

“You can do this?”

“Only for others, not for Jervon—not for me. It is like all Power—it does not work for the direct advantage of the summoner. Still I feel it should be tried now—for you.”

“Once it was done for me—only I did not understand then what was meant by what I saw.”

Elys nodded. “Many times such foreshadows can be obscure. They can even deceive—always remember that. You must not confidently expect that this or that will come to pass. We make many decisions, turn right on some path when we might have turned left, enter into a hall wherein it chances that we meet with one to alter our future. There are ways beyond counting in which fate can be so changed. All we learn from the bowl is one single path. Do you wish me to do this for you?”

Jervon was now standing at her back, his face sober. When he spoke quickly, before I could answer, it was to Elys not me.

“This is needful?”

“I think so.” Her words came slowly. “If Joisan agrees—this may be a part of why we were led here.”

He knelt to open one of the saddlebags, bringing forth something bundled in a heavy swathing of cloth. This he passed to Elys as if he handled bare steel, uncertain that it might not turn its cutting edge against him.

The wrapping was in two parts, the outer being a length that might have been cut from an old cloak. Underneath that was a fair piece of linen with across it, not in stitchery, but as if one had applied a scorching hot brand to its surface, brownish runes and symbols. All Elys’s attention centered on what she did. I saw her lips move, though she spoke no words aloud. Yet it seemed that now the mist, held at bay by our fire, had a life of its own and began to encircle us, pushing against an unseen barrier.

What lay within the inner cloth was a cup of moon-bright silver, into the waiting hollow of which Elys poured liquid from a small vial she took from her belt pouch, measuring it drop by drop. Now I heard the murmur of her voice as she repeated in cadence what could only be the spell words of a Wisewoman.

Carefully she set the cup on the rock between us, holding both hands about it. Her eyes were closed, her head upheld as if she looked far beyond.

Then, she jerked her hands away—some mighty heat might have blasted outward—and looked directly to me.

“Watch then!” I could not have disobeyed that order even if I wished.

I leaned forward, my hands on the rock, my arms braced on either side of the cup, my head bent so I might see clearly within.

At first there was nothing, only that thin film of oddly dark liquid. I could not see through it to the silver beneath. Then the liquid began to swirl about and about, rising in the hollow.

I felt dizzy, my head giddy, I could not turn away my eyes. Slowly the liquid stopped, now it filled the cup to its very brim, still dark … A mirror’s surface but one that reflected nothing.

Nothing? No, there was movement there, not caused by the liquid itself. A shadow arose to the surface, changing, becoming clearer. Now I saw, not my own face reflected therein, but a sharp picture.

“Kerovan!”

He was there, armored, helmed, but still bare of foot—or hoof. The mail he wore was strange, holding the same blue sheen as that which clothed Elys. He sat with a bared sword stuck point deep in gravelly earth as if he must keep a weapon close to hand. Behind him grazed three horses, and there was a stream, coarse grass, some stunted bushes. There was a strangeness about that land as if it were not Dale country.

His face was that of a carven figure like unto those I had seen in the Waste—nothing remaining in it of the Kerovan I wished to see. In a way he was as walled in crystal as the gryphon—beyond my reach.

I dared not look too long directly upon him lest my longing draw from me the strength I needed. So I busied myself studying the place about him, trying to locate some landmark, some way of telling where he so rested.

How long that picture held I did not know. Then it began to fade, was gone. While, as a bubble is pricked and becomes nothing, that which filled the cup fell back to the bottom of the hollow.

“I think”—Elys spoke first, breaking through my frustration and despair—“that is the Waste.”

I settled back, aware now of the ache in my shoulders, the pain of my hands, as if I had tried to dig into the unyielding rock with my fingers.

“The Waste?” I echoed. Why should Kerovan head back into that piece of ill omen? He had gone to Lord Imgry. Had the sight of his hooves, the knowledge that he was of what would seem to a Dalesman tainted blood, made him an exile after all?

Jervon shifted a little where he sat beside Elys. “So—” His brows drew together in a frown. “Well, it was well within the realm of possibilities that sooner or later Imgry would be moved to try that.” His eyes were on the cup around which Elys was once more enfolding the cloth, having thrown the liquid it contained into the fire, only to have her act followed by a burst of brilliant flame.

“Try what, my Lord?” Instinctively I gave him the honor title.

“Imgry”—with one hand he caressed his chin where an old scar made a half-discernible seam—“has always been one to plan—to dare—if another bears the burden of the action. I would say that it is now in his mind to meet with some of those in the Waste—and not the outlaws or scavengers—to perhaps propose an alliance.”

Anger burned in me. “Using my lord,” I burst out, “because he is of mixed blood and perhaps, that being so, some of those who wander or abide there might then feel kinship? He uses men hardly, does this Imgry!”

“It is because he does,” Jervon replied, “that perhaps, in the end, he will impose peace in this land. He is not loved, but he is obeyed, and that obedience draws together men who might not otherwise be held to any strong purpose.”

“But the Waste …” Lord Imgry’s qualities of leadership meant nothing to me. “Kerovan has been there—he barely lived when he went up against one Power. And he has no longer access to this.” My hand covered the gryphon. “He is not trained or armored against what prowls there. May Imgry be everlastingly cursed!” My hands curled talon-wise. I wished that I were a hawk to tear at the face of that cold and devious lord.

“Your lord must have chosen to do this. Imgry could not have forced him so.” Elys still held the now shrouded cup. “There is that in him”—she spoke as if Kerovan were before her, or else that she indeed knew him well—“which would not yield if he wished it not. He is”—she shook her head slowly—“he is unlike any I have met before. A man of two natures, each held at bay lest they lead him to destruction. Within him is locked Power he does not want. He might even ride his present road because he seeks the peace of death.”

How could she know him thus? Unless there was in her the gift of what the Wisewomen call the True Sight.

“No!” I was on my feet, looking around as if I could seize a weapon to destroy her words. I fought to master my fear as I said then, “If he is in the Waste, there, too, I go!”

“The Waste”—Jervon might have been speaking to an impatient child—“is very large. You have no guide—”

“But I do!” I did not know whence came my conviction as my hand was tight on the gryphon. “There is this—and I shall learn how to use it!”

“Perhaps that is possible,” Elys said slowly. “But are there the seeds of Power in you?” She arose and began studying my face. “No, you do not know what you can do—not yet. However, this is the road you will follow—” Jervon started to speak. She stopped him with a gesture. “This is a choice she has already made, for good or ill. What remains …” Now she looked at him instead. “The Waste and a man who may or may not be found, a task which may or may not be beyond the doing. We have been only drifting, you and I, do we now make a choice also?”

His frown grew darker but he said at once, “If so be your will.”

She shook her head vigorously. “Not my will. The day is past when I choose to ride and you follow. We go as of one mind or not at all.”

I looked eagerly from one to the other. This Elys might not be one of the Old Ones, but she controlled a fraction of Power learning and through that might be able to claim kin-right with the Waste roamers. I had spoken of a guide, but I knew not how to make use of it. This was no venture of theirs, save I wanted to ride in their company. Their closeness of spirit was warm to my heart, so I clung to the fancy that being with them longer I could learn the secret of that—enough of it to smooth my way with Kerovan.

Jervon hitched at his swordbelt. “Might as well ride one way as another,” he commented. “Also I think that your Kerovan”—now he spoke to me—“since he was dispatched by Imgry, would head directly westward from the headquarters. Thus we go south if we would pick up his trail.”

“I have heard that Lord Imgry buys much of the salvaged Waste metal for the forging of arms,” I said. “Therefore there must be a going and coming of those who deal in that. Perhaps Kerovan would follow their trails.”

“Well enough. Let morning come and this mist rise—then we ride south and west. If there lies any trace of such a trail we can cut it so in time.”

The mist that imprisoned us did not rise during the rest of that day, still clinging heavy as night came. I watched it uneasily as the darkness grew, for I kept thinking that, from the corners of my eyes, I now and then caught a hint of movement within it which was not the billows of the fog itself, but rather as if something more tangible hovered there, using it as a cloak from which to spy on us.

Jervon ventured out from time to time coming back with armloads of dead wood, which he piled close to hand. Only when the dark really deepened Elys put an end to that. She confirmed my own suspicions when she produced from her belt purse a slender stick of blue.

With this in her right hand and her left raised so that her slender fingers were free to move in complex patterns, she proceeded to draw lines on the pavement, fencing in our campsite, including the mounts, which Jervon had hobbled and brought closer to the fire. What Elys finished at last was a star of five points, setting the lines true with skillful accuracy, though the labor wore away her strange pen.

In each of the outflung points she proceeded to add an intricate symbol, thus locking us in. The horses had been restless for some time past, throwing up their heads, snorting, staring into the mist with signs for growing uneasiness. However, once her work was complete, they quieted.

Nor, I discovered, did I myself now have that sense of being watched by the unseen.

I shared journey food from my own store with my new companions as we settled down in the warmth of the fire, agreeing upon taking watches turn about to feed the flames. Elys, by lot. was the first sentry. Wrapped in my cloak, not laying aside my mail, I strove to sleep, crossing my hands over the gryphon on my breast.

Jervon awakened me at the proper time and I watched the paling of the stars as morning drew near. For the mist had withdrawn, save for a ragged wisp or two. The star drawn for our protection held a faint light of its own. I studied it and wondered how one learned such lore. The Dalesfolk believed that only one born with the Talent could be taught, though we had Wisewomen, healers, gatherers of herb lore, and the like. Yet there had been the Lady Math—my aunt.

She had taken the lesser vows of the Dames, and to all such this kind of learning was a sin. Still, in the last hour of her life, she had brought forth a curiously carven wand—before sending me forth from our threatened keep—saying she would have her own kind of vengeance against the despoilers and murderers besetting us. The keep had burst apart in flame and flying stones, taking to their deaths most of those who had dared invade its inner walls.

That the destruction had come by her will I had never doubted, though I do not know what Power she had called upon in that hour or how she had summoned it.

Might it be that some of full Dales-blood, wary as they were of the brooding past, did indeed share a ghost of Old talent. Perhaps children born and nurtured in this haunted land were really apart from the parent stock. I had never considered that before.

It was our custom to look askance on anything that smacked of such learning. Those proven of half-blood were avoided, looked upon by most as … In the name of my dear lord, I refused to use, even in my mind, that ugly name. What of the rest of us who bore no outward stigmata? Did we also carry traits of strangeness that were not as obvious as my lord’s cloven feet, his eyes of amber yellow, but that could, if known, exile us quickly?

Was this an argument I could use with Kerovan? If I could but display a little of the talent, prove to him that I was not as pure blooded as he believed … I moved restlessly around the fire, longing for the coming of true morning. Had I found an ally in Elys, one who would train me if I had that which would be fertile ground for learning?

It took many years to make a Wisewoman, it was said. I had no such time to spend. I remembered once again that meeting with Neevor, that stranger of the Waste who had said the crystal gryphon was a key, which I only could use when the time came. If so—surely his words argued I had some command of Power.

I wanted to shake Elys awake, demand that she aid me. But I fought against impatience, kept my desires in check for the proper time. This was not a matter that could be rushed, my mind told my heart—but oh, how my heart raged for action!

Kerovan

IMGRY MAY HAVE THOUGHT HIMSELF PERSUASIVE; THE FINAL DECISION was my own. I had listened to his summing up of what he believed the enemy wanted—and of what might be done in return by making contact with some authority within the Waste, to give a warning—and make an offer. The latter, to be sure, was an arrogant gesture on his part, for what had we to offer that could match those forces the Old Ones commanded? I did not have the ambition that drove Imgry. On the other hand, if by some fluke of fortune, I might succeed, I would have achieved something that the Dalesman must admit only a despised half-blood would dare to attempt.

He offered me a command, but I refused it. He did not like that. I think he wanted no ambassador to have too much freedom.

“One man,” he had said, “to go alone is too high a risk.”

“One man, Lord Imgry? Look at me. Ask any in this hall if I am in their eyes a man. You have made me your envoy because of my heritage. Then let me go as if I am truly of the blood you deem me. I shall ride openly and wait to see what fortune will send. What I can do, I shall. I promise nothing.”

Reluctant as he was, he knew I spoke the truth. Nor was he niggardly with equipment. I was offered, and accepted, mail, sword, and helm, new-fashioned of the salvaged metal from the Waste. All men knew that this was the best, an alloy we had no equal for in the making of fine armament.

I chose horses, three of them, from the lines. The mounts from the eastern Dales (there were all too few of those left now) were of little use in the west. Nor did I want hill-bred stock, for, hardy and tough as those were, the Waste was partly desert. A mount used to the plentiful waters of mountain springs could not stand the heat and lack of forage and drink.

What I took were such beasts as were used by the Waste scavengers. Luckily, in that sweep Imgry had ordered to gather all available mounts, these had appeared. Slightly larger than mountain-bred pontes, they were gaunt, with long necks out of proportion to their bodies. Their eyes were unusually large and heavily lidded, well lashed to screen out glare of sun and wind-borne grit. Their hooves were broader than normal, meant for the traversing of shifting sand. They had a reputation for being vicious, and it was always necessary to hobble or tether them at night.

Two I would ride turn and turn about, and the third would serve as a pack animal. It took me four days of careful preparation, of selecting supplies. And I did not dream again on those nights between.

I refused the map Imgry had played with during our interview. Such sites as were marked on it had come by word of mouth from scavengers, who were not to be trusted, being always jealous of their sources of supply.

When Riwal and I had traveled the Road of Exile, that had been well to the north. The road that had led me to the place where Rogear and my mother had wrought their black incantations was also in that direction—barren and desolate. If there was any life now to be found in the Waste I felt I would discover it elsewhere—though the Old Ones could not be judged by our standards. Still they must need water, sustenance of some kind, shelters more than a jumble of ruins.

Thus I decided to strike straight west, following for the first part of my journey the faint trail left by the scavengers bringing in metal for Imgry’s forges.

I rode out in the early morning saying no farewells. The night before I had met with Imgry for the last time. He spoke again of the urgency for carrying my warning of invasion to any of authority I might find—of his complete certainty that somewhere in the unknown west lay whatever it was that the invaders really sought. He did not come to watch me out of sight—I was merely a dart he had launched. If I struck true, that was good; if I failed … Well, all he could do had been done.

My mount fought control, but when I was well away from the camp and headed west he settled down, while the two on lead ropes came easily enough. All of them from time to time held high their narrow heads, expanding red-lined nostrils as if they searched for some scent that was of importance.

We were four days along, the last three well into a scrub wilderness, before the one I rode cried out, making a sound like an eerie scream. The other two answered him, their weird cries echoing back from jagged-topped heights, which overhung the path so darkly we moved through shadows as thick as twilight. The walls of that cut grew increasingly high, drawing together overhead. Then the two cliffs actually met, forming an arch into an even darker day.

My mount broke into a fast trot I did not try to restrain. The others quickened stride in turn. We passed through a rough-walled tunnel to come out into a brighter light than I had seen for hours.

Here was the Waste. No remnant of any path remained, only bare rock as footing, though that was crossed here and there by a runnel of coarse sand. The land itself was a rolling plain. In the far distance were shadows against the sky, which I thought must mark highlands. For want of a better guide I fastened on those as my goal.

The led horses were no longer content to trail behind, but moved up, one on either side of my mount, matching their pace to his, as if they also had riders and we were readying for a charge. I thought that they were at home in this country and perhaps they could, by their attitude, give me warning of other life forms we might encounter though who, or what, could live in such a land as this I found hard to guess.

I made camp while the sun was still up in the afternoon sky, for my horses had come directly to a dip in the land, at the bottom of which there was a sluggish stream pushing out of the ground, running for a space, only to be swallowed once more by the greedy earth. However, along its banks grew grass and several stunted bushes. Out of the nearest of those clumps burst winged creatures. They moved with speed, but I saw that they were black of feather and their heads, hanging downward on oddly crooked necks, were rawly red as if new plucked.

Their squawks were as unnatural as the cries of the horses had been and they circled overhead, plainly angry at being disturbed. I did not like the sight of them. There was something foul about their black bodies and those naked heads.

What had drawn them into the brush made itself plain within a moment or two. For a noisome stench of something dead, and dead for some time, arose strongly, as my horse half leaped, half slid down to the water’s edge.

He plunged his muzzle deep into the water, his companions copying that action as speedily. I slid out of the saddle, made my tether ropes fast to the nearest bush. Then, though I disliked the business, I went to see what lay where the still-screaming birds had been busy.

Bird beak and blazing sun had done nasty work, but there remained enough to perceive that this had once been a near-human form—though very small. A child—here? I tried not to breathe as I made myself move closer. Whatever it had been alive, it was no kin to Dalesmen. The body, where flesh still remained, was furred with a bristly brown hair standing stiffly up from the roots. The head and face were so destroyed I could not trace any features, and for that I was glad. Both fingers and toes ended in great hooked claws, in some of which clods of earth still clung. The thing lay half in a scooped out pit as if it had been digging frantically to escape whatever fate had struck it down.

Using branches I broke from a bush, I rolled the thing farther into the hole and tossed rocks and sand over it. I had no intention of leaving it uncovered were I to camp here.

As I worked I kept glancing around. Whatever had killed this creature might just still linger—though there was very little cover about and I did not believe that the birds would have been feeding, or my horses would have entered the oasis, had there been danger.

I picketed my mounts as far from that rude grave as I could, and I did not drink of the water myself, rather relied on what I carried in my saddle bottle. The shape and size of the dead creature intrigued me.

There are many legends of things that have ventured or blundered out of the Waste in times past, of monsters and demons, which men, during the early days of our people in the Dales, had fought, killed, or been slain by. I had heard of great scaled reptiles with talons and beaks, of furred creatures near as tall as a keep tower, of smaller flyers with stinger tails carrying a fell poison. Then there were those in human form who could persuade a man they were kin, then ensorcel or kill him.

Riwal had been so enthralled by the Waste mysteries that he had kept records of such stories and had shared them with me. In his cottage he had bits and pieces of old images that he had found—some beautiful, some grotesque, some frightening. However, we could never be sure whether those had been made to resemble actual life forms or were the imaginings of artists who must have dreamed strange dreams. Nowhere could I remember having seen or heard of anything resembling the creature I had just buried.

Its wickedly sharp claws might have been employed for more than digging. With that thought in mind I drew my sword, set it point down in the earth close to hand as I opened my supply bag, found the tough trail rations, and chewed slowly, alert to any sound.

The birds continued to wheel overhead for a time, shrieking their anger. Finally they drew into a flock and, like a noisome black cloud, circled the oasis for a last time, then flew northward over the Waste.

The horses continued to graze, never raising their heads. As a rule their species could not be brought to approach dead things so easily, yet these three had not shied away when we entered the cut. I settled to my dry meal, reminding myself that I must never make the worst possible error—that of judging any life form I found here by the standards of the Dales. I had entered a new and different world.

After the flight of the birds it seemed very quiet—broken only by the sullen gurgle of the water, the sounds made as the horses cropped grass. There was no buzz of insect, no rustle of breeze through the twisted and curled leaves of the bushes. The heat of the westering sun seemed heavier. My mail burdened my shoulders, sweat trickled from beneath the rim of my helm.

Having finished eating, I explored this pocket further. What herbage grew made the most of the water’s trickle. Along the banks grass was thick, bushes like solid balls, so intertwined with one another that I thought even a slashing sword could not have cleared a path.

The water issued from a rock-walled bank, the stone of which was smeared with a rusty-red stain reminding me unpleasantly of blood. Another warning against drinking here. That crevice was not natural, I decided, too well shaped—as if it had been set here to pipe in a flow of water for travelers. What kind of travelers?

Downstream I searched with care, but I could discover no signs that any had camped recently. The sand and gravel did preserve here and there formless prints suggesting that it was used by animals native to this harsh land.

What was the thing I had buried? I could not force myself to disinter it for another examination. Still, I was troubled by its presence. To establish a camp here, even for the sake of the horses, would be, I decided, too great a risk. This oasis must be a loadstone for any life nearby.

I did linger until the sun was nearly down before I let the horses drink a second time and then headed out into the open country, taking care to pick a way that led across the rockiest section I could find, so we would leave no trail.

Those heights, which I had marked as a goal, were now a black fringe across a rapidly darkening sky. I began to look for shelter, even if it were only an outcropping rock against which I could set my back in case of attack. I finally sighted a stand of stony spires set closely together, and toward that I turned the horses.

There was still light enough to perceive that this was the first indication something living here had needed a home or rough fort. What I had first thought to be spires of natural rock were a building. The structure had been so attuned to its surroundings that you could almost believe it was some freak of nature.

The tall rocks that formed its walls were rough, unworked, set vertically, but very closely, side to side, so that the cracks between were as narrow as their surfaces would allow. They were of the same yellowish-white as all the boulders I had seen hereabouts. What I did not expect was that the interior they guarded was filled by what looked, in this half-light, to be a vast, untidy nest.

Dried brush, clumps of coarse grass torn up by the roots, had been packed to such a depth that the top of the mass reached my waist when I dismounted. I prodded at it with sword point. Under the touch of metal the stuff broke apart, turned to powder, so dried and old it was.

Fastening the horses to one of the side pillars, I set about raking out that mess, using mainly my sword, as there was reluctance in me to touch any of the debris with my hands. At length I drew on my mail gauntlets before I dug into the lower layers.

Something hard rolled against my boot. I looked down into the empty eyeholes of a skull. Manifestly this was the remains of a human, or something near human. I put the thing aside and kept on with my task.

There were more bones, which I had no desire to examine, and a faintly evil smell that grew stronger as I delved deeper, throwing out the fetid, decayed material. I became aware of a persistent itching about my wrist as I tossed out the last I could grub free.

Washing my gauntleted hands with sand, I unfastened the wrist binding and turned back the supple linkage to bare what had become so much a part of me during the months since I had found it—that band of metal I had discovered by chance and which had saved me when Rogear had tried first to blind, and then to kill.

The band glowed; it was warm. The runes carved around it were bright sparks of fire. I stared down, near entranced, until on sudden impulse I thrust my arm into the space between the pillars. The marks flashed even brighter—yet I had had no warning of uneasiness.

Still, from the tall rocks, from which I had scraped the last of the nest, came an answering spark of light, I drew my small boot-top knife and picked out from a rock a scrap of the same blue metal as made up my wrist band, tucking it away in my pouch.

To keep my horses better tempered, tethered as they were away from grass and water, I crumpled journey cakes upon a rock. They nosed at them avidly, paying no attention as I made them secure for the night before I crawled into the space I had cleared.

There was only the one entrance, though overhead was no roof. The rocks tilted slightly inward so that the open space above was small. I pulled before the door itself my saddle and the bags of supplies, using them as a barricade. This night I wished that I had some comrade-at-arms to share watch and watch. Instead I must depend upon that faculty any soldier learns, the art of awaking into instant awareness at the least change in his surroundings. Once more I laid my sword, bare-bladed, at my side, while I sought sleep.

If any danger prowled the night it did not come near my refuge. However, I was awakened at dawn by that same shattering scream my mount had earlier given when he first sniffed the wind from the Waste. I crawled out to discover all three of the horses pulling furiously at their halters, rearing and pawing at the rocks.

Though I used all the art I knew to soothe them, I discovered, once I had loaded and saddled, there was little I could do with them. They were determined to head back to the oasis and perforce I had to allow that, since they needed grazing and water. They could have it as I broke my own fast.

Thus the sun was about an hour above the horizon when we set forth again toward the heights. Gradually the country changed. The desert stretch became a brown-gray soil that rooted clumps of grass, seared by the sun. As we passed, my led horses strove to snatch mouthfuls of the stuff, their elongated necks aiding them to so feed. Bushes were next, then trees, some of which my animals made wide detours to avoid.

I trusted to their instincts for they knew this land far better than I. Near midday I saw the first moving thing. The clumps of brush had become so thick that we must swing well to avoid them, and on such a side venture I caught a glimpse of more open land.

Crossing that was a rider. Though he was distant I could not mistake the glint of sun reflected from armor. His horse was unlike my three; there was no sign of the long neck.

He rode with the ease of a man who knew exactly where he was going. I did not think him a scavenger—though he could be an outlaw. Or … this might be the very kind of contact I had been sent to seek! I loosened my sword in its sheath and headed out into the open willing to let myself be sighted, in spite of possible risk.

Certainly his mount was of better stock than the desert-bred nags I had selected, for, though he did not appear to be going at more than a comfortable trot, he continued to draw ahead. Nor did he seem aware that I followed.

Not too far before him stretched a spread of woodland. I wanted to catch up before he vanished into its shade. If I were to meet with trouble I desired such confrontation in the open. So I urged my mount to a faster pace, though he snorted and jerked at the reins angrily.

The stranger was almost under the shadow of the trees when the ill-tempered beast I bestrode actively protested our chase. Voicing one of those screams, he arose with his forefeet pawing the air. The other two used their advantage at the same moment to pull back on their lead cords. Perforce I was brought to a speedy halt.

Viciously my mount continued to rear and kick, attempting to attack his own companions. I had my hands very full striving to control the three of them. What suddenly pierced the din they were creating was a whistle, commanding, imperative.

My horses set all four feet to the ground again. Still their eyes rolled to show the whites, ribbons of foam dripped to the earth they had torn up with their hooves. However, now all three stood as if as well rooted as the trees not too far away.

Taking as tight a grip on reins and lead ropes as I could. I looked around.

The rider I had trailed had finally swung about and was heading toward me, the gait of his mount a smooth flowing gallop. Indeed that horse was different. As large as a lowland-bred stallion, it possessed a strangely dappled hide such as I had never seen before; shades of gray-brown merged into one another so there was no clearly spotted pattern, only a suggestion of such.

His horsecloth was not woven, but rather formed by the skin of some beast—silver gray and also spotted. As he drew nearer I recognized it for the tanned hide of a snow cat, one of the rarest and yet most deadly and cunning beasts to roam the heights within the Dales.

He, himself, wore armor of the same silver-gray as the skin. The helm, which overshadowed his face until he seemed half masked, was surmounted by a beautifully carven crouching cat of that species. There were yellow jewels of eyes in the cat head, and, by some trick of the sun, they appeared to blink as if the thing were alive and merely resting on a perch, watching me curiously.

The stranger rode only a short distance toward me before he pulled up his shadow-patterned horse. My three beasts sweated, stared wild-eyed, gave the impression they were possessed by terror. Yet this other had, as far as I could see, made no gesture suggesting attack. His sword still rested in sheath, its heavy pommel forming the head of a cat, while the belt he wore was again of fur and its buckle a snarling feline head.

Though he had halted some distance away, I could see those cat heads clearly. They loomed as if they were the House sign of some clan.

We sat so for some moments of silence, eyeing each other across that gap he had chosen to keep between us. Now I was able to make out more plainly his features. He was young, I thought, perhaps near my own age. His face was smooth—but that was not strange, for many of the Dalesmen grew little or very scant beards until they were well past the middle span of life.

His skin was brown, and his eyes were slightly elongated, sloping up a little under straight brows. The more I studied him, the surer I became I had found one who called this Waste, or some place like it, his home. This was no strayed Dalesman. His accoutrements were too finely wrought, his mount a superb animal. Also, though he looked fully human, yet I did not need that light warmth at my wrist to tell me that this was one who possessed Power of one kind or another.

He regarded me with an equally intent study. I was certain he had not missed the sight of my hooves in the special stirrups I had devised. Did he know of any of my kind? Were there any of my kind or kin—or was I merely half-misshapen hybrid, and so, in the eyes of any true blood here, as much a mistake of birth as I was in the Dales?

I knew that without any warning it was useless for me to approach him closer. It was plain that my three animals held him in odd terror. They shivered, while foam still gathered at the corners of their mouths.

Since he had not drawn steel—did he think that I was so unworthy a foe, so helpless that he need not defend himself in that way—dare I accept him as neutral? There was no other choice. I would do what I had to.

Taking a chance, I dropped my reins and raised my hands palm out. The silk-fine mesh of my mail fell a little back from my wrist and the sunlight made a blue flame of that band.

Was it a passport, something that would gain me recognition in this place, at this time? I could only wait on the stranger’s answer to me.

Joisan

As THE LIGHT OF DAY GREW STRONGER MY COMPANIONS ROUSED. The mist was gone and the protecting star about us faded. Jervon gave the animals each a small measure of grain, led them out to water at a hillside spring, while we opened supply bags for our own food.

With the mounts saddled, the packs on the pony, we headed away from the walls, following a hint of a trail, a shadow of a road, perhaps one so old that even the hills across which it cut had forgotten it.

Jervon led, heading westward across heights where there were no signs of any traveler before us, save twice a tumbledown hut such as were built by herders when they took the flocks out for summer forage. Those days of peaceful herding were past. We saw no one or any life, save for a blundering hill hen or two that ran squawking from under the very hooves of our horses, and once a glimpse of a snow cat staring arrogantly down from so high a ledge I wondered how even that venturous climber could have reached it.

We lit no fire that night since we camped in the open. It was plain that my companions moved with the wariness of scouts and took all precautions. As we sat closely together, more for the need for company than the warmth of our bodies, I asked whether they had ever been into the Waste.

“Only to the fringes,” Jervon answered. “For a while we rode with scouts who were sent north to see if the invaders had headed down country. There was no sign of any Hound passing, though we combed the country as best we could. We saw the beginning of the Road of Exile.”

The Road of Exile—Kerovan had mentioned that during those days when we had traveled to Norsdale, leading my poor people to safety. He had once traveled for a space along it, though he had not told me many details of that journey. Even that much of his past he had refused to share with me.

“Do any know where that leads?” I asked.

“Not that I have heard. We did not try to follow it. But neither have I heard of any other open road into that country.”

During our day’s journey I had had no chance to speak to Elys about my idea of early morning. Somehow I did not wish to mention my longing to master Power before Jervon. It was not because I feared he might object. Because of Elys he accepted much where any other Dalesman would have decried the very idea. It was rather that I was shy of making a plea for aid and did not know just how to phrase such.

During the next four days I had no better luck. The land was so deserted that, even though we traveled with all caution, we covered a goodly amount of distance in a short time. On the fifth evening Jervon pointed to the westward where there was a yellow glow across the clouds, differing from the clean sunsets I had always known.

“The Waste.”

During our journey to the southwest we had searched diligently for any trace of a track such as the metal gatherers might have made, but had not sighted a single sign of such. Now, when we had unloaded the pack pony and Elys had collected certain dry branches, which she said would not yield much notice of a fire, Jervon did not unsaddle. Rather he proposed to ride out on a half circle, seeking again for trail marks.

As the yellow sky-glow faded, Elys and I spitted hill hens to roast, a more tasty meal than we had had for four days past. This was my chance and, as we worked, I made my desires known to her, hurrying lest Jervon return before I was done.

She listened, but when she spoke it was with a most serious note in her low voice.

“There is some logic in what you say. It could well be that this country has an influence over those born here—even if they have never had any reason to believe they had talents because fortune did not demand such efforts from them. As for learning the calling of Power—yes, I could teach you a little, if you showed aptitude, even as I was schooled in my girlhood and youth. But there is no time. This is not knowledge that one can pick from the air. It needs careful study. However, that does not mean that you cannot strive within yourself to awaken what may lie in you. Only you must be very patient.”

After this warning she began there and then outlining to me some disciplines of mind I could practice, while I vowed that if I could win anything by following her teaching—that I would do. So from that hour forward I stretched my mind as a warrior stretches and exercises his body that battle skills may be known to every muscle over which he holds command.

We rode on in the morning, though Jervon had again found no guide, heading outward into a land that was grim and full of foreboding. I knew that the Waste must be a mixture of different kinds of land, but here it was all sand and gravel and bare rock upon which the sun beat with great waves of heat. We used the tricks of travelers in such desert land, seeking shelter during the worst hours, traveling in the early morning or in the evenings. We did not move at night, bright though the moon might hang over us.

Here there were too many oddly shaped shadows, strange sounds (though those were far away). It was better to camp, even though our traveling time was thus cut to a crawl, and be sure we were on guard.

By some favor of fortune we did chance upon meager grazing and water each day. Jervon remarked that, though there was no sign of any road, it might be that we had stumbled on some travelers’ route—perhaps long forsaken.

I watched my gryphon anxiously, hoping it might in some way offer a clue as to whether we were headed in the right direction or not. I did not know what I expected, it was mainly hope that kept me at that quest. Only the globe remained ever the same.

Jervon wove a zigzag path ahead of us, still hunting a track. returning always to report he found none. Perforce, because we had to have some goal, we chose to head toward the line of heights in the west—those that loomed purple-black at night and brown by day. They were the only noticeable landmarks.

On the second day Jervon returned at a fast trot from one of his side expeditions. We had kept our horses to a walk for their own sakes and this burst of speed on his part suggested trouble.

“There is an oasis with water where there has been a camp,” he reported, “and recently.”

So slim a chance that that camp had been Kerovan’s. Still I at once swung my mare in that direction, the others with me. The oasis lay in a narrow cleft, cutting below the surface of this sandy waste. It held greenery, dark and withered-looking. The water of the stream was not pleasant appearing either, rather dark and turgid as if it were a stagnant pool, though there was a slow, rolling current. However, our beasts drank greedily as Jervon pointed to where grass had been shortened by grazing and that not long ago.

“There is something else—” He beckoned us to follow him between two bushes.

I sniffed and wished I had not. There was the sweet corruption-smell of death here! The ground was disturbed, a pile of stones covering a narrow, filled-in depression.

“An animal would not be buried.” Elys surveyed the stones. “But that space is too small to hold a man.”

To my relief she was right, only a half-grown child could be in such a short grave. But a child—Kerovan could not have killed a child!

Elys’s eyes were closed, she swayed, Jervon was at her side instantly, his hand out to steady her. She shuddered before she looked at us again.

“Not of our blood—it was not of our blood. Something strange—or perhaps not strange in this land. But whatever it was, it lived as a servant of the Dark.”

I drew back involuntarily. The Dark—that signified the evil Powers and all who served them. Had Kerovan been attacked again by such force, which he spawned in the Waste?

“Leave be!” Jervon’s order came harshly. “There is no need to fear the dead, do not mind search for it. We must not meddle.” It was the first time he had spoken so, with such a show of authority.

She turned away. “You are right. And this is truly dead—for many days I would say.”

“Then Kerovan—” I stumbled over one of the rolling stones. He must not have been responsible for that death, though he could have buried the corpse. I held on to that belief as tightly as I could. I hoped that he had not fronted again—and alone—a dire danger of the Dark.

“I do not believe,” Jervon continued, “that this is a place of good omen.”

The three of us withdrew from that grave place, as far down the cut as we could, allowing our mounts, who showed no distaste for their surroundings, to graze through the hottest part of the day. When the sun was westering we started on.

It was when we topped the far bank of that sinister hollow that what I had waited for so long happened. The gryphon flashed with more than the sun’s reflection. At my cry the others drew rein, while I shifted in the saddle, this way and that, my attention close fixed upon the ball—until I thought I judged in what direction it flashed the brightest.

My companions willingly granted me the lead and I pushed Bural at a faster gait to where a circle of pointed rocks rose abruptly from the sand-drifted ground. Lying to one side there was a mass of dry stuff, which had plainly been dug from the core of the rock huddle. Powdery, disintegrating wood mingled with remains of long-withered vegetation. Perched on the highest point of that moldering heap sat a grinning skull and I thought that I sighted other bits of brittle bones in the decayed mass.

“Someone made camp here.” Jervon slipped from the saddle, went to peer within the circle of rocks. He stirred the dark heap a little with the toe of his boot. “This may once have been a nest lying within that.”

“The nest of something large enough to hunt such prey?” Elys gestured toward the skull.

Jervon stopped to view it the closer, though he did not touch it.

“Very old, I think. Also what laired here once must have been gone for a long time,” came his verdict.

I cupped the crystal between my palms. Now heat flared from it, startling me into a cry of pain. I let the globe fall, to swing at the end of its chain. Though I made no move of body it continued to move. In spite of my disgust and, yes, a growing fear, I, too, dismounted, advancing unwillingly toward the heap of debris, where that hollow-eyed skull rested—by chance or design.

Then …

There appeared in the dark eye hollows of the skull (I could not be so preyed upon by illusion even here) an answering fraction of light. My shaking hand was at my mouth, keeping back a cry of panic to which I refused voice.

The crystal now lifted from its place on my breast, pointing outward, pulling the chain that supported it into a taut line, as if it strained for freedom. I had said it would be a guide, now it drew me toward that ancient, time-worn thing of bone.

Unable to control the gryphon, I knelt, my hands going out, in spite of my efforts not to move. I was not going to touch that dry and years-leached bone—I was not!

The crystal became a ball of sparkling light, so bright I could no longer look directly at it. While to my ears, or perhaps within my head, came a very faint sound, like a far-off solemn chanting, such as might mark some ceremony. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and run as far as I could from that skull.

No skull—no! Air curdled about the yellowish bone, took on visible substance, building up a thin and unsubstantial vision of a face, a head. The eyes, the sharply jutting nose—so pointed that it might be likened to a bird’s beak—overhanging a small chin, obliquely set eyes … No human face!

There was an urgency in the light-sparked eyes, a demand made upon me—but one I could not interpret. There had been something lost, which must be found. There was danger to be faced—there was—

The wisp of face vanished. While the bone it had built itself upon—I gasped! That, too, was crumbling into ashy powder. I cried out, “What is it that you would have me do? What do you want?”

The chant of that far-off ritual ceased, the terrible demand faded. Now the englobed gryphon lost its blaze of light, fell to rest again near my heart. Of the skull nothing remained.

“It wanted …” I stammered, turning to my companions, but I had no real explanation for them.

Jervon’s face was impassive, Elys stared beyond me into that hollow among the rocks from which the skull and the rest had been cleared.

“There was something there!” I was obsessed with what I had seen. But had they also shared my vision?

“One who dies during some task laid upon him for good or ill,” Elys said slowly, “clings to a shadow of life, unwilling to depart to new roads until that task is fulfilled. I think that such a shadow clung here. It is now gone—for good or ill.”

“But it did not tell me what it wanted!” I found I could accept her words, accept them so completely that now I wished the skull back that I might again demand of whatever shadow was tied to it what I must do and where. For now I bore a burden also—though that might be an illusion only I could perceive.

“There will come a time when you shall know.” Elys did not say that as one promises enlightenment to calm a bewildered child, rather as one who is sure of the truth.

I rose to my feet, my hand moved, as it so often did for reassurance, toward the gryphon. Then I jerked my fingers away before they could close about the globe. I wanted to rid myself of the thing! That is, one part of me did, while, deeper in me, arose an excitement that demanded that I yield to an unknown force, that I throw aside all those old fears and wariness of my people and go forth—to grasp … as yet I did not know what.

We did not linger long at that strange nesting place but went on, and soon there came a welcome change in the land. The arid desert gave way to growing things.

An arrow shot by Jervon brought down a creature not unlike the deer of the Dales. Thus we ate fresh meat and were able to drink the water we found in a much more wholesome oasis. Here were the signs of older camps and we believed we had chanced upon one of the regular rest sites of either scavengers or outlaws. Since the grazing was good we decided to remain there while Jervon once more went out scouting.

I was certain in my own mind that Kerovan had sheltered among the rocks, also that he had been in the narrow valley earlier. Inwardly I was discouraged. There was no trail to be followed through this wilderness and I could neither guess his destination nor direction. The gryphon—no, since its actions with the skull, even that I distrusted.

Though I tried talking with Elys, her answers were so random that I began to believe she either had thought better of her agreement to aid me, or that the episode of the skull had sent her into deep speculations of her own.

I sat back on my heels to look about me. This rough pasturelike land was normal to Dale eyes, at least more so than that portion of the Waste we had crossed. I remembered tales of the scavengers—that scattered across this country were cities or fortresses so blasted that all that remained were lumps of congealed metal, which they hacked free to sell. The metal itself was uncanny, for sometimes it exploded when touched with tools, killing those who would master it.

Who were the Old Ones? What kind of lives had they lived here? That skull, when it had taken on the semblance of life, had been more avian than human. The dead had not been in our form entirely—had it been more—or less—than us?

“Who were the Old Ones?” I had not realized that I asked that aloud until Elys, shaken out of her preoccupation by my voice, answered.

“I think there were many different kinds of them. She who taught me a Wisewoman’s knowledge once said that they knew too much, tried too many uses of the Power. That they could change and did change into many forms. You have certainly heard legends …”

I nodded. Yes—the legends. Some were of monsters against whom our Dale forefathers had fought with fire and sword. Others—taking the seeming of fair women and comely men—enticed the venturesome away, some into permanent exile, others into visits from which they returned so bemused and bewildered that never again did they fit into human life, but went wandering, seeking that which remained ever hidden from them until their longing ate them into death.

“The use of Power,” Elys continued, “can be the deadliest fate laid upon one. It is somehow bred into us, maybe doubly so into them, that the more we know, the more we must continue to seek. I think that those ancient ones learned, tampered, attempted too much. Their thirst for knowledge became the only mover in their lives. So it would follow that they might not be bound by any code of right or wrong—only by their own wills and desires …”

The truth of that I had already seen proven when Rogear had used the force of his will to bend me for a space into a tool—save that my dear lord had followed, to prove himself stronger. Yes, Rogear and my lord’s own mother—others—had played with Power, drawing it greedily to them. However, in the end, it had turned upon them, eaten them up. Perhaps to bring upon them their endings.

“Can one use Power and still escape such consequences?” I made that a half-question, a new fear moving in me. Was I already, in my great need to gain my will with Kerovan, tainted with this hunger for the unknown? What had seemed to be a straightforward plan of action when I had ridden out of Norsdale was now confused. I was nibbled upon by doubt, which grew stronger. Was Kerovan—could he be right? Was it knowledge derived of the Dark and not the Light that would grow between us if we kept a bond and built upon it? Must I resist what lay in me clamoring for fulfillment?

No! That belief I refused to accept. I remembered again that strange man who had appeared out of nowhere when my lord had been so beaten down by the Dark, all those months ago. Neevor—he had said that I had the key, that we were fated to use it together. And for good—surely for good. I must allow no such doubts to creep into my mind.

Jervon returned just before sundown, excited and eager. He reported having found tracks of three mounts, one he thought ridden, the other two led. “There was a fourth also,” he added.

“Three of the horses are still there grazing free. There are packs also—but no one camps. I believe that someone met with the traveler—their trails lay close together.”

I was on my feet at once, heading for Bural. “Kerovan—he may have been taken captive!” In my mind churned the many dangers that could have befallen him.

“I do not think so. There is no sign of any attack. The horses are of the desert breed the scavengers usually use and they are peaceful. It is a good situation for a camp.” Now he looked to Elys. “Also there have been safeguards placed.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Of what nature?” she demanded sharply.

“None of a kind I have seen before. There are four peeled wands, each set upright in the earth at the outer limits of a well-seized grazing field. One, to the north, has fastened to it a tuft of horse hair. That to the south bears a patch of snowcat fur. To the east is one with an eagle feather, to the west one bearing boar bristles. I did not touch any. However, they manifestly have a purpose and the horses do not stray past them.”

I glanced at Elys for an explanation. She looked as baffled as I felt.

“Where did he go? The man of that camp—it is Kerovan!” I did not know why I was so sure, perhaps mainly because I wanted to be.

“There are hoofprints—leading on westward into a wood. I would have followed but Agran here”—he drew his hand down the neck of the horse he bestrode—“would not approach it. He was as wild with fear as if a red bear reared in the way reaching for him. It is plain that was forbidden territory and Agran recognized it.”

“But if the horses will not follow—then we can go afoot,” I persisted.

Jervon regarded me gravely. “Lady, I would not try to enter that place whether astride or on my own two feet. It warns one off, I believe that some power rules there. We can but camp and wait at that place—to dare more is to achieve nothing.”

I refused to believe him—then. We did ride on to that strangely marked camp and saw the horses as placidly grazing as if they were in a fenced field, never venturing beyond those wands. I paid only passing attention to those; instead I set Bural on the way to the wood.

She shied violently, near tossing me from the saddle. Twice we fought a battle of wills until I was forced to admit that I could not make the mare venture near the shadows of the trees.

My companions had gone their own way, establishing camp in the same hollow where the vanished traveler had left piled saddle and gear. Jervon tried the experiment of turning our own beasts into the square with the three desert horses and they appeared also to respect the wand barrier so that they need not be put on grazing ropes.

Only I was far too impatient to remain in camp awaiting a return that might or might not come. Having proven I could not ride into the wood, I was determined to attempt it on foot, with the turf torn by hoof marks for my guide.

My start was brisk enough, and neither Elys nor Jervon attempted to argue me out of it. It was not until I was some distance along my chosen path (so was I strengthened in stubborn determination) that I realized I could not move fast, nor could I touch any of those hoofprints with my boots. Rather, without any volition, I was zigzaging back and forth just to avoid that.

An uneasiness was growing in me for which I could not account. I persevered but against a growing sense of danger, of opposition, so that my pace grew slower and slower, in spite of my will to push on.

It was not that I was fronted by any visible wall forbidding entrance to the wood. No, rather my energy was steadily sapped, my will itself weakened with every step I fought to gain. I decided that I was not repelled by fear itself, rather a growing awareness that I was intruding rashly, rudely, on private ground, that I ventured where I had no right to go without invitation.

Even though I had come near under the outstretched branches of one of the tall trees, I realized that my hope of traveling farther was done. This was forbidden ground. Reluctantly I turned back, faced toward camp. Then it was as if a strong force swept me up, a storm of wind (though not a leaf rustled, none of the tall grass rippled) pushed me away, heavy at my back. I had dared to approach a guarded refuge—the wood was a sanctuary—but not one for those of my kind.

Kerovan

As I SAT WITH WHAT I HOPED WAS AN APPEARANCE OF EASE. THE SUN shining on that band of metal, I was certain the stranger’s oddly set eyes widened. For a moment, perhaps two breaths, his gaze held on that. Then he dropped his reins in turn, the shadow steed standing quiet, all four feet planted rock fast, as its rider’s hands arose in an answering gesture of peace. At least in this much he followed Dale custom.

Cautiously, half fearing that my horses might come to life and bolt, I slipped from the saddle. None of the three moved as I watched them warily before advancing through the tall grass toward the cat-crowned man.

He waited until I was a sword’s length away before he spoke—soft slurred words with a lilting cadence. He might have been reciting some formula. I shook my head, then replied in Dale speech:

“Greeting to a sharer of the road; may the—” I hesitated now. I could not wish him Flame Blessing—such words might be an insult to one who worshiped other powers. Nor could I, in all honestly, call upon the Flame myself, since I was marked as one with no right to the belief of true men.

He frowned. For the first time there was a shadow of expression on his impassive face. Had a faint tinge of surprise also crossed it for an instant? When he spoke again he used Dale speech, accented, but clear.

“Where ride you, man?” He made the word “man” sound like a title of disrepute.

“In search of—” I hesitated again. To inform the first comer of my reason for riding the Waste was folly.

“In search of—” he prompted. Now it was true he wore an expression and it was grim. “Old treasure, of scrap heaps to burrow in, scavenger?”

His hands dropped, not to seize sword as I had first thought, rather to gather up reins. I knew he was preparing to ride on where my mounts would not follow. At that moment I knew fear. For I had a strong feeling if he went I would not again see him or discover more of his kind, while it could well be he represented just those I had been sent to find.

“I am not a hunter of old metal—a scavenger.” I hastened to say. “I ride with a message.”

“What message and to be given to whom?” He was plainly impatient.

“The message I do know—but to whom it is to be delivered—of that I am not sure.”

“Riddles!” he snapped scornfully.

“Not riddle but ignorance. I am out of the Dales where there has been war for two years and more …”

He had been on the point of turning his horse, now he stayed that movement.

“War.” Again there was scorn in his tone. “One petty lord man against his fellow, quarreling over half a hillside of near-barren land.”

His contempt for the Dalesmen was open. I half agreed inwardly that he was right. That was all that war had been for years—hot family feuds in which men died, to be sure, but there was no wide ravening of the countryside.

“This is true war,” I made haste to explain. “Invaders from overseas such as we have not seen before, using new and terrible weapons.” There was no need, I decided, for me to explain that most of those weapons had been by now rendered impotent through some lack we did not understand. “All the coast they hold and now they sweep farther inland. Always they bring reinforcements. We die and there are few to fill our empty saddles, or even horses to wear those saddles.”

He leaned a little forward, his eyes narrowed. By some trick of the light they yet showed, within their depths, tiny glints of flame such as I had seen earlier in the cat eyes of his helm crest.

“So—why do you then come to the Waste—you in warrior mail? Do you run?”

Temper unleashed or leashed I had long ago learned to use as a weapon. I did not need to show any inner fire in answer to his taunt upon this occasion.

“I bring a message, as I have said.” I decided there was only one way I might achieve my purpose after all—and that was with the truth. “We have taken prisoners and they have talked. Their story is that what they seek is a source of power, and it lies to the west. We think that they believe this. Therefore, it is not our Dales that is their final goal but perhaps—this—” I made a gesture to include the meadow in which we stood. Once more the wristlet blazed. “Your land—and perhaps those you name kin.”

He made a sound deep in his throat, a snarl such as a cat might voice. Now he pointed to my wristlet.

“Where got you that?” he demanded.

“By chance—I found it in a stream in the Dales.”

He smiled, the lift of his lip resembling a cat baring fangs—though the teeth he displayed were no different than my own.

“And where got you those?” This time he pointed to my hooves.

I answered steadily enough.

“My birthright—or birth curse. I have heard it said both ways in my time.”

Again those narrowed eyes studied me closely. When he spoke some of the hardness was gone from his voice.

“I think you may have found those who will listen to your message—or may find them after I take council. Your animals”—he glanced disdainfully at the fear-struck desert horses—“cannot follow our trails. Their breed would die of terror were one of my people to approach them closely. I go now to my pack lord. If he wishes to see you I shall return—Man of the Dales.”

He pointed now to the north.

“There is water there and good forage. If you wish—camp and wait.” He had turned his mount, now he looked back over his shoulder.

“I am Herrel.”

I was startled. It is one of the strong beliefs of my people, who know the Power only slightly, that to give one’s name to a stranger is a dangerous thing—since a man’s name is an important part of himself and he can be influenced through it. Still this stranger had just, by that standard, shown great trust in me. I answered as quickly.

“I am Kerovan.” To that I added no title or lordship, for such were mine no longer.

He sketched a salute with his free hand, then rode without looking back again, while I followed his advice in leading my now-more-biddable mounts on toward that campsite he had indicated.

I did not have to wait long. Herrel returned and with him another like him, save that his helm crest was an eagle with half unfurled wings, his saddle cloth a netting into which feathers had been woven. He sat his horse a little aloof while Herrel told me that I was bidden to speak with their lord. The second rider busied himself by driving four wands well into the ground, each being topped with a tuft of fur or feathers. Herrel, indicating them, told me that they would keep my mounts within bounds as well as any fence, but that I must go afoot.

So it came that I paced as might a captive between the two of them into the dusk of that dark wood. I did not allow my hand to brush near my sheathed sword. From now on I must be doubly wary, though I did not sense from these two, as I always had in Imgry’s camp, the waves of hatred that my appearance fired in the Dalesmen.

Once within the first screen of trees, the way was not hard going. In fact there was a path or narrow road, wide enough for only one horseman, so deep-trodden one might believe it was a highway used through many years. To my advantage, my hooves were no longer constricted by the boots I had worn so many years in concealment. In fact I was glad to stretch my legs by this tramp. The many scents of the forest were heady. I drew deep breaths, and I discovered that I was growing lighter of heart and less wearied than I had been since I entered the Waste.

What did begin to impress me was that I saw no other life save the three of us who moved silently, for the hooves of the horses awakened only the slightest of sounds. No bird hopped on any branch, nor did I spy, along the outer edges of the trail, any beast’s prints. The greenery was very dark nor had I elsewhere seen such trees of so huge circumference of bole. Their bark was black and deeply ridged.

The path we followed wove a meandering way, turning often to avoid such an obstruction as one of those trunks.

How long we traveled I had no way of knowing. My two escorts held their curiously dappled steeds to a walk, while around us the silence grew, the light became more and more dusky. Twice we passed stones, set upright, no normal outcroppings, for they had been wrought upon by man.

The tops of each of them had been carved with diabolical skill—I say diabolical for the creatures sculpture had evoked out of the rock were grim. One was a head, or perhaps better a skull, with a huge beak looming out to threaten any passerby. That bill was also a fraction agape as if about to seize on the unwary. There was something of a bird about it, also a bit of a long-snouted reptile. The holes, which had been left to represent eyes, had insets, so deep within I could not see whether they were gems or not (though how, in the absence of sunlight, any gleam could have been awakened from such was a mystery). I only know that red pits of utter savagery regarded me.

Neither of my companions so much as turned an eye in the direction of that looming guardian. Nor did they, either, regard the second such we passed. Where the first had been beaked or snouted, this was a life-size death’s head possessing close kinship to a skull of my own race. The thing had been more graphically and disgustingly carved as if far gone in decay, stretches of rotting skin portrayed across cheekbones and chin, a nose half sloughed away. Once more there were eyes to watch, these yellow.

I made no comment as we passed these posts. For I was determined not to allow my companions to believe I found anything strange in this wood. To my own pride I owed that much, so I clung to an outward show of self-possession as I would to a battle shield.

We had left the skull post at least five turns of the path behind when Herrel leaned forward to sweep out an arm. As if he had so loosed the latch of a door a mass of branches lifted, swung to one side, to allow us out into the full light of day once again.

The wood still stretched like encircling arms on either side, and, by a distant mark across the horizon, formed another barrier there. However, directly ahead lay a section of land as wide as any Dale holding I had seen. Planted fields were guarded by low stone walls from pastures in which horses, such as Herrel and his fellow rode, grazed. There was the blue sheen of a pond or small lake farther west. Near that stood the first building that was not a long-abandoned ruin that I had ever seen in the Waste.

Stone formed the walls of the first story, but, rising above that, logs were set in tight company. The strangest thing was that these logs were apparently not dead and seasoned wood. Rather branches jutted here and there and those bore living leaves. The branches were thickest near the top of the walls, and spread wide as if they so formed the roof.

From the point where we had issued out of the wood, running directly toward the building, was a continuation of the forest path. Here in the open, however, the way was much wider. Perhaps four horsemen could have ridden it abreast.

He who had followed me on the trail did not urge his mount forward and we proceeded by the same line of march as we had kept under the trees, save that Herrel slowed a fraction to allow me to pace beside him. For the first time since we left my camp he spoke:

“The lodge.” He gestured to the building.

Any Dale keep whose lord abode within its wall would have flown his banner from the highest point. None such happened here. Rather in a line flanking the front of that half-alive structure, there was planted in the earth a series of poles, all perhaps twice my height. From the top of each fluttered a narrow ribbon of color. The closer we drew the better able I was to recognize the devices these bore. Whereas the lords of High Hallack used for their heraldic crests either some fanciful monster, or an object suggesting a deed of valor performed by some ancestor, these carried very detailed pictures of well-known animals or birds.

A boar, a rearing stallion, an eagle, a mountain cat, a snouted and armored lurker of the river—there were a full twenty banners and not two alike. Save for my escort, however, there were no signs of life except four men, stripped to breeches and boots, at labor in the fields. Not one of them raised his eyes from his task to mark our passing.

Herrel swung out of his saddle and dropped the reins of his horse. The animal stood as if tethered.

“Wait!” He flung that single word in my direction, then passed beneath the outgrowing, bushy leaves of the building to push in a massive door. He who had been my other guide or guard, swung his own mount around and rode off. Nor did he look back.

I studied the strangeness of the keep for want of any better occupation. There were windows set on either side of the door on the lower floor. Each was covered by a fine latticework of branches perhaps as thick as my thumb. However, they were of worked wood, showing no leaves or twiglets.

My attention was drawn to a stirring among the leaves above, certainly not induced by any wind’s rustle, for not the slightest breeze blew. I caught sight here and there of a small head—then two or three more—that could be viewed only for a moment, disappearing again before I had real sight of them. I thought though they were not of any species of animal or reptile I knew—and they were not birds.

They left an impression of a long, sharply pointed snout, ringed by fangs, exposed as if the creature possessed no concealing lips. Above that were the eyes, bright, inquisitive, knowing … Yes, knowing.

Almost the whole of the brush wall facing me was a-shake now. Numbers of the creatures, small as they were, must be gathering, right above the door. I had a sudden hint of what might happen should an intruder attempt entrance there against the will or orders given to such sentinels, guards, or whatever they might be.

As abruptly as he had disappeared, Herrel returned, the door left open behind him. He gestured for me to come. Nor did he glance above to where boughs creaked under unseen weight. The watchers remained at their posts, as, trying not to show any interest in them, I passed under that overhang and came into the hall of these Waste riders.

I had expected to walk into gloom, for those tightly latticed windows suggested that they admitted very little light. Instead I discovered a green glow, while at intervals along the stone walls there were baskets of metal—not the torch rings of the Daleland. In each of these rested a clutch of balls about the size of an egg, all of which glowed to give fair lighting.

The hall itself was enough like that of a keep to make me feel that these horsemen lived a life not too different from what I had always known.

Directly facing me stood the high table. However, this did not have just three or four chairs of honor. Instead there were twenty, each with a high-carved back, none set above its fellows. There was no second table for servants of the household, only that one board.

A wide hearth took up nearly a third of the far wall, cavernous enough to hold logs that must be nearly the size of those forest giants we had passed among. Along the other wall, which was broken by the door, were bunks on which were piled cloaks and coverings made of the cured skins of animals. A chest stood beneath each sleeping place.

There were no wall tapestries, no carved panels or screens. However, on the expanse of stone against which the high table was situated, a star was outlined in red-brown, the color reminding one unpleasantly of dried blood. The center of that was a mass of runes and symbols for which I hurriedly averted my gaze. For it seemed to me, that, when one viewed it directly, they came to life, wriggled, coiled, moved as might headless serpents in their death throes. I glanced to the band on my wrist. Its blue sheen neither waxed nor waned. Perhaps that meant that for me (at least now) there was no danger, no Power of the Dark here.

I was given little time to look about, for a man, seated in the chair directly before the center of that wall star, moved. He had sat so utterly motionless that now he startled me as he leaned forward. Both elbows were planted on the table, his forearms outstretched along the surface of the board. He presented the appearance of one who had no reason to try to impress a visitor, he being who and what he was.

He did not wear mail, or even a jerkin, his chest and shoulders being as bare as those of the field laborers. Though he was seated he gave the feeling of height and strength—the wiry strength of a good swordsman. A sword did lie there, lengthwise on the table, both of his hands resting upon its scabbard.

The scabbard was leather, horsehide, while the pommel of the weapon was in the form of a rearing stallion, such as I had seen depicted on one of the banners without. To his right a helm also rested, its crest the same design, save larger and in more detail.

He was dark-haired, and there was a likeness between him and Herrel, which revealed, I decided, some kinship—if not of close blood, then of race. It was difficult to judge his age, though I believed him older than my guide. There was about him such an air of inborn command and practiced Power as would reduce Imgry’s bearing to that of a fumbling recruit new come to camp. Whatever this warrior might be otherwise, he was a long-time leader and user of Power.

I do not know whether he was used to staring others out of countenance at first meeting, but the look he turned on me was a heady mixture of contempt, a very faint curiosity, and much personal assurance.

Little by little I was learning how to deal with the unknown. Now I left it to him to break the silence. This might just be a duel of wills set to test me, he who spoke first forfeiting an undefined advantage. How long we faced each other so I do not know. Then to my surprise (which I fought not to show), he flung back his head and gave a laugh carrying a hint of a horse’s neigh.

“So there is sturdy metal in you, hill-hugger, after all.”

I shook my head. “Lord”—I granted him the courtesy title, though I did not know his rank—“I speak for certain of the Dalesmen, yes, but if you look you shall perceive I am not wholly hill-hugger.” I advanced one of my hooves a fraction. If my half-blood should prove a barrier here as it was in the Dales, that must be my first discovery.

He had very level black brows, straight and fine of hair. They now drew together in a frown. When he spoke it was as if a faint, far-off ring of a stallion’s battle scream hung behind his words.

“None of us may be what we seem.” There was bitterness in that.

Then it happened. The air thickened, wrapping him in mist. When that cleared, it was pulled away by force, as if blown by the great arched nostrils of a horse. For there was no longer any man in the chair. Rather a war stallion, such as any fighting man may see but once in a lifetime, planted forehooves on the board, still nudging the sword. Its head, crowned by a wild mane, was lowered until it near overreached the far edge of the table in my direction. White teeth showed as it voiced the scream of a fighter.

I gave no ground; afterwards that memory sustained me. The thing was no hallucination, of that I was sure. Also the red fury in its eyes might signal a death warning. In that moment, in spite of my daze, I understood. I fronted a shapechanger—one who could at will, or in the heat of some emotion, assume animal form. Not that of any ordinary beast, no, this was a manifestation of the Were—one of the most dreaded of our ancient legends.

There was a deadly snarl to my right. I dared to turn my head a fraction. Where Herrel had stood a moment earlier, there crouched a huge snow cat—tail lashing, fangs displayed, burning eyes on me as its muzzle wrinkled farther and farther back.

Then—

A man again sat at the table fondling the sword. I did not need another glance to assure myself that the cat had also disappeared.

“I am Hyron,” the man announced in a flat voice as if he had played a game that no longer amused him. There was a weariness in his tone also. He might have been very tired at the rise of each sun, the coming of every night. “We are the Wereriders. And you—what are you? Who are you? What do the hill-huggers want of us that they dare send a messenger?”

“I am Kerovan.” Once more I made no claim of lordship or rank. “I was sent because I am what I am—a half-blood. Therefore, there were those who believed that you might give me better attention.”

“A half-blood—one they hold in low esteem. And so they must hold us also—thus why would they wish a pact with us?”

“Lord Imgry has a saying to fit the need,” I returned steadily. This horseman’s taunts would awake no visible anger in me. “He has said that a common enemy makes allies.”

“A common enemy, eh?” Lord Hyron’s right hand had closed about the hilt of his sword. He played with the blade, drawing it forth from its sheath a fraction, snapping it back again sharply. “We have seen no such enemy.”

“You may, my lord. And, if things continue to go so ill in the Dales, sooner than you think.” With as few words as possible and as simply as I could I told him of what we suspected to be the eventual purpose of the invaders.

“A treasure—a Power …” He tossed his head with an equine gesture. “Poor fools and dolts. If these invaders found any such they would rue it bitterly in the end. Whoever dispatched them on such an errand is well disordered in what wits they possess. The Waste itself would fight with us.”

I felt Herrel stir rather than saw him move. His lord’s gaze shifted to him. The cat-helmed warrior said nothing. All I perceived was that he and his leader locked gazes, though I gained the impression that between them communication passed.

There was a need, I sensed, not to speculate too far concerning the talents of the Weres. They were not of the kind to take kindly to any who pried into their ways. But that this period of silence was important I was sure.

Nor was I too surprised when there appeared from behind us several other men, drawing near to Herrel and me as if they had obeyed some unheard summons to council.

A loud click ended that period of silence, as emphatic a sound as if the fist of a man had come smashing down. Hyron had given a final slam to the sword, smashing it back into the scabbard with full force.

He arose, not as a threatening stallion, but in man guise. Yet still he leaned across the board even as the stallion had done.

“There is much to be thought on,” he said. His frown had returned full force. Also there was a quirk to his lips as if he tasted something sour, perhaps his own words. “There is nothing in the Dales for which we choose to fight. On the other hand”—he hesitated as if turning some thought over several times to examine it the better—“there was once a geas laid—and perhaps that has brought us to this meeting. If we consult and discover that we indeed have a common enemy—that your purpose can answer ours—” He broke off with a shrug. What he said had no real commitment, but I guessed I would get no better answer. Then he asked a question.

“Whom did you really seek when you came so boldly into the Waste, Kinsman-by-half?”

“Whoever there might be who would listen, Lord.”

Now he raised a forefinger to scratch along the line of his beardless jaw.

“You are forthright enough,” he commented. From his tone I could not judge whether he thought me a fool for using the truth. “That being so—there are others here who might be interested in your warning.” He smiled and I heard muffled sounds from those about me as if they shared his amusement. Did he want me to beg him for directions to those “others”? Somehow I believed that if I did that I would lose any advantage I had held in this interview.

“This you may tell your Lord—or he whose scheme brought you to us—” He folded his arms across his chest, once more tossed his head so that the crest of his hair fell in a lock over his forehead. “We shall certainly consider all he has said. If we make a decision in his favor, he shall hear so from us. There will be a price for our services, of course. We must have time to think of that. Years ago we once sold our swords and sold them well. Those who bought had no reason to claim they did not receive full measure. If we choose to bargain again, your Dalesmen may find us worth any price we ask.”

“That price being?” I mistrusted this horse lord—not because I thought him a follower of the Dark, for I knew he was not. Still, legends say that there were those among the Old Ones who were neither good nor evil, but whose standards of right and wrong are not our measures.

“In due time and to your lord’s own face shall we state that,” he countered. “Also, if you wish to gather an army you need other allies.” He suddenly pointed to my hooves.

“Why not,” he asked, “seek those with whom you can claim kin?”

I knew that I dare not show ignorance now, that to do so would lessen me in their sight. My mother’s clan came from the northernmost Dales—there must lie the mixture that had made me what I was. So if I did have kin there I would find such.

I managed a shrug. “We have no maps of the Waste, Lord. I took the westward hills for my guide—that brought me here. Now I shall ride north.”

“North.” Lord Hyron repeated. Then it was his turn to shrug. “The choice is yours. This is not an easy land, none does ride or walk here without due caution.”

“So I have already discovered, Lord Hyron. My first meeting with a Waste dweller was his body—”

“That being?” He asked it idly, as if it did not matter.

Just because he would so dismiss my gruesome find, I described the mauled thing I had buried and was only halfway through my story when I felt the whole atmosphere about me change. It was as if I had brought portentous tidings without being aware of it.

“Thas!” It was a name, a word I did not know, and it exploded with force from Herrel. The indifference of Lord Hyron had vanished in the same instant.

Joisan

ELYS STOOD ON A SMALL RISE FACING THE FOREST LAND. She was frowning and the hands that hung by her sides twitched slightly. I thought that she was disturbed, that she felt some need for action, yet she was not sure what. Jervon had brought the packs and our saddles close to the mark of a recent Fire and was again off collecting wood. A small pile of branches lay at Elys’s feet also but she made no move to pick them up again. I paused beside her, turned also to face that line of trees that was so well protected against any invasion. Now that I regarded them more intently I could see that the leaves were darker green than those I had known in the Dales and they grew very thickly together.

“There are no birds.” Elys said abruptly.

For a moment I was at a loss. Then, thinking back, I could not remember having sighted, since we left the Dales, any wing-borne life. The Waste was indeed a barren land. Still—why Elys should now be seeking sight of birds puzzled me.

“In such a wood—yes, there should be birds,” she repeated; her frown grew heavier.

“But—I do not remember seeing any since we came out of the Dales.”

She gave an impatient shake of the head. “Perhaps over the desert—no—there would be few to wing there. But this is a wood, a place to harbor them well. There should be birds!” She spoke emphatically, her attitude one of foreboding. Then she glanced at me.

“You did not enter there after all.”

“Jervon was right—there was a barrier. As if a keep door was closed and no visitors welcomed.”

Her frown lightened a fraction. My answer might have supplied a part answer to her puzzle.

“There is a keep of sorts, I believe, in that wood. If that be so—then the land is closed, save when those who hold it wish otherwise, it will open to their desire only.”

I did not like the idea her words conjured in my mind. “But”—I spoke my thought aloud, trying to reassure myself, perhaps have Elys agree with some hope or comfort—“I cannot be sure that it was Kerovan who camped here, who was enticed within there …” Even as I spoke that denial I knew that any hope of it being so was folly.

“Enticed …” Elys repeated thoughtfully. “No. If he entered there he did so willingly. These are not of the ones who entice, they have no need to do so. They are—strong—”

“What do you know or guess?” I demanded eagerly. “Have you then found some trace—some clue …”

“I only feel,” she replied. “There is Power there, but I cannot say with any truth what it is. There is no sense of ill, but neither is there any of a force that is friendly, or beneficial. It is just—Power.” She made a small gesture of bafflement with one of her hands. “But I wish that there were birds.”

“Why?” I still could not understand her preoccupation with them. Nor why the presence—or absence—of birds might be so important.

“Because”—again she sketched that gesture of helplessness—“they would be here if all was well, judged by our own world. Without them that wood must be very silent, a secret place—too secret …”

Jervon called and we turned toward the camp. But she had wrought upon my imagination. As I went I found myself straining to hear a bird call—one of those things I had taken so for granted in the world I had always known that I had not been aware of such until it was missing.

Back in the campsite I looked longingly at those other saddle bags, which had been left behind by the missing traveler. If I could only rummage through them, perhaps so discover for certain that they were Kerovan’s. Yet I could not bring myself to do that. I was sure, far too sure, that this was his camp—but a small hint of hope did remain battling within me and I feared to quench it and allow the dark suspicions that prowled among my thoughts entirely free.

As I sat beside the fire Jervon had kindled I still strained to listen, hoping for the comfort of the usual noises of the world. Even those made by the grazing horses, the thud of their hooves as they moved about was a reassurance. There was also the crackling of the fire …

Elys had been far too right. That wood was ominously silent. Not a leaf stirred, no branch swayed. The growth was rooted like a dark green trap, set to swallow up a reckless venturer at its own time and in its own way. Behind it, now cutting off the setting sun, bulked that dark line of heights. Perhaps they stood guard on the very end of the world. One could believe any weird fancy here.

I was too restless to sit still for long. Twice I sought the small rise where I had found Elys, ever watching the wood. Only the horses moved within the oddly marked square of pasture. When I looked back over my shoulder I saw that Jervon had taken out a whetstone, was using it on his sword balde, though he continually glanced up and around with a keen measuring look such as a scout would use in unknown and perhaps dangerous territory.

Elys remained by the fire. Her back was straight, her head up, but I could see even from my perch that her eyes were closed, and still she had the attitude of one listening intensely. It was said that the Wisewomen at times were able to detach a part of their inner sense, send it questing in search of what could not be seen, felt, or heard—by the body.

Where was Kerovan? Who had he gone to deal with inside that silent wood? Why had he been welcomed within and I refused entrance? Had he arranged a meeting with one who did sentry duty there?

I was so impatient for some news of him that I could have raged in my frustration. The sun was gone, the sky was beginning to dim—though bright colors still spanned the sky with broad bands of brilliant hue.

Twilight always came to the Waste as a time of brooding evil, or so I had found it in the past. The shadows of these trees lengthened across the open meadow, crept and crawled toward us. Even as there had been in that thick mist that enclosed the ruin where I had met with my present companions, so here now grew the feeling that something—or things—used those shadows for sinister purposes, and that a threat of peril hung here.

Yet the last thing I could have done—a thing I could not force myself to think of doing—was to get to horse and ride away. Slowly, with heavy feet and a feeling of growing chill within me, I left the rise to return to the fireside. As I went I shook my head against those irrational fears—but I was not able to so rid my mind’s sensing of that brooding, watching something …

Jervon had put aside his stone, sheathed his sword. The world was all the more quiet when the scraping of his whetstone ceased. He came to Elys, dropped on his knees behind her. His hands went out to rest, one on each of her shoulders.

I saw her quiver at his touch, as if he had drawn her back out of some trance. Her eyes opened, yet she did not turn her head toward him.

“There is trouble?” he asked softly. I was on my feet again, looking at once to the wood.

Her eyes, though they now opened, remained blank. She did not focus on anything before her. At last one of her hands arose to close about his where it lay on her right shoulder. Again she shivered.

“If I only knew more.” Her cry held passion, even a note of despair. “Yes, there is something—something wrong—wrong—or else so different from us that there is no understanding it!”

Startled, I wheeled to look at that wood, for I thought only of it. Was Kerovan returning, perhaps accompanied by whoever dwelt here? But surely Kerovan, for all that strangeness in him since he had summoned Power (in spite of himself when he fronted Rogear and the rest), was not so unhuman as to be what Elys apparently now sensed.

“Who comes from the wood?” I demanded of her, all my fears aroused.

“Not the wood.” There was still enough of the lingering after-sunset light to see clearly what she did. She pulled out of Jervon’s hold, set both hands palm down on the earth where there was a patch bare of grass, leaving only the naked soil. There she leaned forward, her weight upon her arms and hands, while there was very strong about her that air of listening, of a need for concentration.

So tense she was that I found myself also kneeling, watching her hands against the earth as if one could expect a sudden upheaval of the soil there.

“Under”—she spoke so softly that I barely caught her whisper—“under …” I was sure I saw her hands whiten across the knuckles as if she exerted her full strength to hold down a force under the ground that was struggling with a matching effort to win free.

Then she threw herself backward and away, scrambled to her knees, seizing upon Jervon’s arm to drag him with her.

“Up—and back!” That was no half-whisper, rather close to a shout of warning.

I also scrambled backwards, at the same time heard a maddened squealing from the horses. They were racing, their eyes wild, kicking out at each other, milling around within that square marked by the wands.

While the ground—! The ground itself was trembling, shaking and rolling under my feet, the earth shifting as if it were as light and fluid as water, Jervon had drawn steel, so had Elys. Swords ready, the two crowded back from the spot where they had been a moment earlier.

The flames of the fire flared as wildly as the horses moved, spitting sparks into the air while the brands upon which they fed shifted this way and that.

I saw the earth rise like a wave, hurtling outward, striving, it would seem, to sweep us from our feet. Jervon and Elys were on one side of that surge, I on the other. I could not keep my balance as the wave sent me wavering from side to side. Now there was a second peril. Between me and my companions the soil spun around and around like batter stirred by a giant spoon. As it so spun the circle of that whirlpool reached farther and farther out gulping down first the fire, then the unknown’s saddlebags, then one of the poles—that with the tuft of grey-white fur—breaking so the unseen barrier that had confined the horses.

It was then I turned and ran, but not quick or far enough. One of the horses had found the opening and raced straight at me. I threw myself to one side, toppled and fell. The earth curled about me in an instant, trapping my legs, flowing waist high, engulfing my flailing arms. I sank as into quicksand, soil filling the mouth I opened to scream, forcing itself into eyes I tried to blink shut. I had but a single half-conscious moment to draw a deep breath and try to hold it, as the ground took me down into darkness.

Choking, I fought again for air. I could not move and my fear was such that I cannot now remember much of what followed, mercifully perhaps. Then—I could once more breathe freely! My smarting eyes teared, striving to clear themselves of the earth clotted on my lashes. I could see nothing but deep dark—and a sharp fear lashed at me—was I blind!

No—it was not completely dark. There was a glow—very faint—against my breast. I tried to raise my arms to brush away the burden holding me flat on my back and discovered that, twist and struggle though I might, my wrists and ankles were secured in some fashion.

However, those welling tears had cleared my eyes enough so that, with the aid of the faint glow. I discovered I was no longer encased in the earth. Rather I lay in an open space—though plainly I was still a prisoner.

The glow—with a great effort I raised my head and saw that it spread from the globe of the gryphon, which nursed a small core of faded radiance.

“Elys! Jervon!” I spat out earth and called. My only answer was a dull echo. Once more I fought against whatever held me, and, by twisting my hands as hard as I could, I became aware that each wrist was ringed by bonds to keep me firmly captive.

Captive. Then that action of the earth, which had been in force to engulf our camp, was a trap! And any trap in the Waste meant—

I fought the fear that followed like a sword thrust of ice cold. The Waste harbored life we could not even begin to imagine—what had taken me?

For some moments I lost control, flopping about as best I might, striving in sheer terror to tear apart what held me. My wrists burned from the chafing of the loops about them, earth cascaded from me in powdery puffs, until I began to cough and strangle, and so was forced to lie quiet.

Then I became aware of a noisome odor. Such was not natural to any earth I knew. It was the stench of some beast’s unclean den, of old decay and death. I gagged and fought sickness rising sourly in my throat.

Beast … den … More fear awoke from such scattered thoughts to nip at me. But beasts do not bind their captives. This was the Waste—said that other, the fear itself—anything may happen here.

Gaining such control as I could summon, I once more called aloud the names of my companions. This time, through the echo, came another sound—something brushed against the side of a narrow way—a scraping. I gulped, and in spite of my efforts to master my growing terror (for in my mind formed the picture of a giant scaled thing crawling through the dark), I closed my eyes. But I could not close my ears—or my nose.

There was other life here now—rustling. The odor was such to make me gasp and choke as I had when the soil had closed on me. I felt a tugging at my wrists, my ankles. There were hands (or were they paws?) fumbling about my body. I was firmly grasped by a number of such—what, I dared not open my eyes and try to see.

They raised me. Then I was being carried through a passage so narrow that at times my body brushed walls on both sides, continually bringing a rain of dust and clods down upon me. While that terrible foul odor never ceased to assault my nose.

I think that at least once I lost consciousness entirely and perhaps that may have lasted for some time. Then I was dropped with force enough to awaken pain from many bruises—and left to myself. I became dully aware that now there were no longer bonds to hold me.

Slowly I opened my eyes. The foul smell was still strong. Only the rustling had ceased, nor did I sense any of my captors close by.

It was still dark, a thick dark, broken only by the gleam of the gryphon. I had lost my helm, my hair had fallen about my shoulders and was matted with earth, sour smelling and sticky. I moved my hands cautiously, half expecting to be rushed by those whose prisoner I was. My sword was also gone, as was my belt knife and dart gun. Apparently my captors recognized the threat those weapons offered and had good reasons to be wary. I still wore my mail and the rest of my clothing was intact.

Wincing at the pain of my many bruises, I levered myself up, moving with great wariness since I could not tell how large was the place in which I lay. I half feared I might strike my uncovered head against a roof.

As I sat so, my hands out on either side to support me, turning my head very slowly to peer fruitlessly into the dark, I gained the impression that, far from now being in a tunnel such as the one I had earlier been dragged through, I was in a hollow of some size, perhaps a cavern.

I continued to listen and so became aware of a sound, which my still-dulled senses finally identified as the drip of water. The moment I thought of water my dust-filled throat became a torment. I did not attempt to get farther up than on my hands and knees. In fact even that much effort made my head whirl like the churning earth that had brought me here. So I crawled a little at a time, seeking the source of the sound.

It was mainly by a stroke of fortune that I found it, since the glow of the gryphon was so faint and I could not even be sure I was heading in the right direction. One hand, edging forward for the next advance to my painful journey, plunged down in liquid so cold it brought a sharp gasp from me.

The gryphon, dangling forward, showed the dim outlines of a small basin or hollow, perhaps worn so by ages of such dripping. The drops themselves fell from somewhere overhead to splash into a catch pool, which I could have covered with my lost cloak.

I drank, splashed water on my dust-covered face, drank again, a cupped palmful at a time. The water was as cold as if drained from some unreasonable block of ice. But, as it flowed down my parched throat, it brought with it a return of my courage.

When I had drunk my fill, I felt strong enough to stand, balancing myself with feet slightly apart and hands outspread at my sides. Once on my feet, I stood listening with all my might, for I could not rid myself of the idea that whoever had dragged me here might well still have me under observation and any move on my part would provoke an attack.

There was nothing to be heard but the constant drip of the water. At last I took the globe in one hand and tried to use it as a torch. But the dim light showed me nothing. I felt wary of advancing blindly into the unknown. Yet to remain where I was solved nothing.

It was plain I needed some way to locate the spring again after I was through exploring. Now I considered my clothing as an answer to that. Beneath my mail shirt was a quilted leather jerkin, under that a linen chemise, all the protection I had against the rub of the link-mail. I fumbled with the lashing of my protective shirt, stopping every second or so to listen. Then I dropped the quilted jerkin on top of my body armor, skinning off, last of all, the linen.

Once more I donned leather and mail, then considered the linen. It was stout stuff, well and tightly woven, made to resist hard wear.

Had I been left my knife I might have had an easier piece of work, but I had to use the edge of my belt buckle, even tug at the fabric with my teeth, before I could start a tear. Then there was a battle to make a second slit, a third. Working at this so determinedly was settling for my nerves. At least I was doing something that was for my own help. Finally I had a ragged coil of frayed cloth, tied into a line.

One end of this I made fast with the tightest knot I could fashion to a sharp stone that helped to form part of the basin wall. The anchorage being in place, I walked forward, step, pause, step, until the cord pulled taut warningly. There was still nothing ahead of me, even though I took off my belt and swung it forward as a lash, hoping so to encounter a wall. Defeated in that direction I edged to the right, determined to make a complete circle about my anchor.

I had gone perhaps a quarter of that distance when a barrier did loom out of the dark, barely visible in the globe light. A wall—so close I could touch it with my hand. Running my fingers along its surface I moved on several steps. The cord grew so tight I was afraid of pulling it loose. I stooped to near floor level where my boots had kicked some small rocks. There I found one to which I made fast the other end of the line. Heaping several more of the rocks on top of that one I left it so, intending from here to keep to the wall as a guide.

The wall was all rock, not packed earth, rough enough to be the natural wall of a cavern. Yet it ran on and on without end, save that once it curved to form a side chamber.

At last I did come to a second section of wall that met the first at a right angle. This I also used as a guide. I had, however, taken only a few tentative steps along beside it when I halted. The rustling sound, the noisome smell—both were back! I was no longer alone.

Hastily I wrapped one end of my belt about my fist, leaving the buckle end dangling. This was the only weapon I could improvise, but I could flail out with it through the dark and defend myself so. I set my shoulders against the wall and stood waiting, hoping my ears could give me warning of an attack.

There came a grunting, which rose and fell—it might even have been speech of a kind. Only I could not center it at any one place in the dark. Suddenly I thought of the gryphon globe—the light from that could betray me. However, I had no time left now if my ears did not play me false.

I heard their rush, the pad of feet racing toward me. Tense, I let the globe swing free. Poor as its illumination was, it might serve if the creatures came close enough. Also, I had the belt whip.

I was hardly sure whether I could detect movements or not, but I swung the belt and felt it strike home. There was a satisfactory squeal—perhaps I had done more damage than I might have hoped for.

Skidding across the floor, to come to a stop just beyond the toes of my boots, was a dark hunch of a body. I swung the globed gryphon, needing to see the nature of my enemy. The thing gave a cry and flopped hastily away. I gained only a quick impression of something much smaller than myself, covered by thick hair or fur, not clothing, though it had four limbs, a body, and a blob of a head not too far from human kind.

The stench that arose from it was nauseating. I swung the belt once more, hard, hoping to catch it again before it could dodge. My blow failed, I only heard the buckle clang against rock.

There followed a determined attack and I lashed out again and again. Whether the things were used to being met by resistance I could not tell, but their grunting rose to a screeching as they dodged and flopped, so near the limit of my vision I was mostly only aware by touch when I caught any of them with my lash.

I had no idea how many of them there were, while I had ever the thought that if enough of them made a concentrated rush at me I could hope for no escape.

For some reason I could not understand they did not try that, making only scattered, darting attacks as if they were being held at bay by more than just my clumsy belt. Then an idea began to grow in my mind that it was the gryphon that must bother them. I could now try a great gamble, which might lose me what little advantage I had, or I could keep on beating the air about me until my arm was tired past raising (it was already beginning to ache and it took more of an effort to forestall those rushes).

If I only knew more about the nature of the Power the globe employed! I had seen it in action, yes, but both times it had been animated by one who had some knowledge of such energy—which I did not. Neevor’s promise—that to me it was a key—flitted through my mind. But it was not a key I needed now—rather a weapon.

With the belt hanging ready in one hand, I ducked my head to free the chain of the globe so I could swing it, though at a much more restricted length, like my improvised whip.

I whirled it up and around my head. To my vast astonishment, the result was the same as that of whirling a flaming torch to increase its fire. There followed a burst of light—the gryphon was lost to sight in the brilliant flare—the beams of which shot far farther than I would ever have dared hope.

For the first time I saw the enemy clearly. They stood hardly higher than my shoulder as they shuffled backward in haste. However, they retreated still facing me, hands or paws outstretched and sweeping through the air in my direction, as if their desire to cut me down was so great they must continue to wave those handlike extremities from which sprouted huge, sickle-shaped claws. Their bodies were completely covered by a bristly growth, which looked coarser than any fur or hair, more like fine roots, while there were pits in their rounded skulls though they did not appear to hold any eyes. Their faces became muzzles not unlike that of a foreshortened hound’s, showing great fangs of teeth—hinting ominously at what their diets might be.

In the light of the globe they squirmed, cowered, raised their clawed paws to cover their eye pits, while they shrieked and cried out as if I had handed them over to dire torment.

Then, cutting through all that clamor, there sounded a single long, high-pitched whistle. The noise hurt my ears—as sharp as a knife thrust into my head.

The things’ heads swung about on their bowed shoulders, turning almost as one in the direction from which the whistle had come. Then they moved, scuttling away at a speed that took them out of the range of light into their normal dark. I could hear the thud of their feet as they ran until there was nothing but silence once again.

So I had withstood one attack. Only I gained no sense of triumph from that, being sure that it was only a first one and that those under-earth dwellers would return. Which meant that I must find some way out before they mustered up will or desire to try me again.

I held the globe closer to the wall straining to see any opening, knowing better than to forsake it and head out into the open blackness of this place.

That whistle—and the things had answered it as hounds do their master’s call. It might well be that these creatures, who had tried to pull me down, had brought me here, were tools or servants of someone else, undoubtedly infinitely more dangerous. Why they had been called off when they need only have tired me out … Unless … I weighed the gryphon in my hand. If I only knew‘

I leaned one shoulder against the wall, the globe cupped against me. My encounter by battle, brief as it had been, had left me with an aching arm and a body. I was surprised to find now, shaking as if I had lately crawled out of my bed after a long illness. I realized it had been a long time, or so a gnawing within me testified, since I had eaten. Water I had found—but food to strengthen me … ? Where in this dark hole could I hope to discover that?

The wall seemed endless as I shuffled on, my pace very slow, for I also stopped every few steps to listen, always fearing that the dark-loving creatures might not come so boldly next time, rather would creep upon me stealthily. The globe gave off a warmth that battled the chill beginning to eat into me. I kept glancing down to reassure myself of the light—which had now faded to its first dim glow. The gryphon was once more visible, its sparks of eyes seemingly raised to meet mine. Suddenly I realized that I was whispering to it.

First just Kerovan’s name—which I said over and over in a sing-song as if it were a spell that could lift me through all care and danger. I tried to raise in my mind a picture of him as I had last seen him.

What followed was—no, I cannot ever find the words to describe what happened. It was as if some energy had hurled me back against the wall with a bruising force. I had—somehow I had—linked thought for an instant with my lord!

Frantically I stared down at the gryphon, fighting to hold onto that instant of communication—to know—to feel … I had not been alone. He … it had been as if he stood beside me. If I only could once more … !

“If I knew—if I only knew!” I cried desperately to the gryphon. The globe was a link, but chance only had made it, and now it was gone. That it was my own ignorance that stood in the way made my heart pound, brought tears of rage to my eyes.

Rage would not help. I did not need Elys to warn me against unshielded emotion. One commanded oneself before one learned to command Power. That was part of the long training she had spoken of—years spent in learning mastery, of how to nourish talent.

Will might control talent, but one had to center will, shut away all else, put all one’s energy into forming of one’s will a weapon as strong as steel. What could I do with my will? This was the hour in which I could bring it and me to a testing—a testing that could mean life or death.

Kerovan

AS I STOOD THERE IN THE HALL OF THE WERERIDERS I COULD INDEED feel the touch of danger—yet this was not a threat aimed at me. No, it was something inherent in that single word Herrel of the cat-shape had uttered, the word that had burst from him when I had described the mutilated body I had discovered in a dismal oasis of the Waste.

“Thas.” It was Lord Hyron who repeated that word now, and his voice was low, hardly above a whisper. I watched, for the second time, air begin to curdle about him. Whether he willed it or not this time, his shapechange had begun. Then, perhaps because he was able to control a near-compelling emotion, he was man again.

“Watch the ground,” he said to me with the force of one delivering a necessary warning. “For the earth itself is Thas land, and they have the rule of the under surface of it. They are no friend to any who can wear that without harm!” He pointed a long forefinger at the band about my wrist. “That they are now found near here—that means matters are on the move—matters that have long been dormant.”

He shook his head until his mane of hair near blinded him with its fringe across bright eyes.

“You are neither one thing nor the other, you who call yourself Kerovan. Learn what you are, and that speedily, or you shall be reduced to nothing at all—not even bones left to dry in desert air.”

Such was the farewell the lord of the Wereriders took of me, for I was not invited to be a guest under that bush roof. I had been offered no greeting cup when I came, no stirrup cup when I left. It was as if here I was less considered than even the most humble of landsmen. I did not allow my temper to take edge from that, for I was not wishful to remain longer in a place where I could never be sure which shape those about me wore was theirs in truth.

The sun was well west when I came forth into the clearing in which that half-living keep stood. None of the Wereriders had gathered to see me off. Only he who called himself Herrel followed me out, to mount again, and stood waiting to escort me from their holding. Perhaps in some way they were as suspicious of me as I was of them. My last sight of the keep showed me that the branches that clothed its upper stories were waving as energetically as if storm-tossed, while from them numerous small shapes sprang outward, heading in great racing leaps for the wood. Did they go to hunt by night, I wondered, as I trudged beside Herrel’s shadow-dappled mount? Or were they to form another part of my escort? I sensed in them a source of peril I did not understand, but thought it prudent that I be wary of them.

Once more we threaded that path through the wood. This time the gloom had deepened until now and then I stumbled, half-blinded by the dusk, though neither Herrel nor his mount had any difficulty in keeping the trail. It crossed my mind that those of the feline breed had excellent night sight, so that this man who could will to be a furred, fanged hunter on four paws might well share that sense.

I speculated, as we went in silence, as to how it might feel to be a shapechanger, to taste at desire another kind of life far divorced from that I myself awoke to each morning. Did the instincts and thoughts of a man remain alive in the mind of the beast, or were such dulled and forgotten after one endured the change? Was there in truth a real alteration of body, or was that only a forceful hallucination which the Weres were able to impress upon others? Had I indeed seen Hyron as an actual stallion ready to savage me. or just what I was meant to see?

So musing, I tried to recall such legends of the Weres as the Dalesmen knew. But all our stories were so old, so overlaid with the horror of people who had faced such a mixture of nature, that I really knew very little. I would have liked to have questioned Herrel—asked him what it meant to be two different natures fused into one. In my own way was I not this also? Did he ever consider himself so apart from normal mankind as to be cursed, walled off from any small pleasure of life? No—that burden would not touch one who walked among his own kin, who had the comradeship of those who shared his own talent, if one could call it that. Also I knew better than to ask such questions of a stranger.

Our winding path so disguised the length of the journey that I was not sure how close we were to the outermost part of the tree wall when there came a thin, high chittering from the left. It was the first sound other than the faint thud of hooves and the scarcely heard pad of my own feet to break the silence.

“Wait!” Herrel reined up.

I, who was behind him on the narrow path, obeyed his order. He leaned forward, his head turned a little toward the nearest of the tree branches.

Again, imperative, came that sound. I heard Herrel whistle—not that command note that he had used to stay the panic of my horses, but rather as if he summoned.

From the branch toward which he had been looking sprang a small creature, certainly of the same species as those abiding in the roof of the Were keep. It balanced on the Were’s shoulder and gave a series of sharp squeaks, as if it spoke to him in its own tongue.

At last he held out his arm and the creature ran along it with the sureness it might have used on a stout branch, leaped out, vanishing in the walling mass of green. Herrel looked to me.

“Thas,” he said tersely.

“Here?” Though I still did not know the nature of that enemy, the reaction of the Weres earlier had made very plain this was a threat even they respected, not to be taken lightly.

“At your camp.” He prodded his mount from a walk to a trot, so that I must run to keep up. However, it was only a very short time before we burst free into the open land. There was more light here—much more, for the western sky was striped with color. Only, what I looked upon was such an area of disaster as made me think for a moment that I was the victim of hallucination.

The ground where I had made my camp was now a raw mass of new cut ruts and hollows, of great circular scare, laying bare piles of soil. Where my horses had grazed there were no animals, while from the broken ground there arose a stench of foul decay strong enough to make me gag.

Down on his knees in the midst of that churned and torn sod was a man in Dalesman’s armor hacking at the earth with heavy jabs of his sword, sending broken clods flying in all directions. At his side a woman, also wearing mail but without any helm on her dark head, used the edge of a small arm shield to aid in the frantic digging.

As we broke from the wood, and I ran toward that mass, she glanced up—then reached to catch the arm of the sword user. The man turned his head to note us, but he did not pause in his digging. It might have been that any halt in his labor could be, for some reason, fatal.

The woman arose to her feet, shaking free a scoopful of earth she held in the shield. There was light enough to see her face clearly, and I was startled, for there was that in it I recognized—though I could not have set name to her. I felt, as I had not ever before in my life, that her kind was kin—to me who had no kin. Was she another inhabitant of the Waste, but closer to man in heritage than Herrel and his kind?

She spoke as I came up to her, not to me, rather to the man still digging.

“There is no longer any use, Jervon. She is lost to us.”

She then turned to eye Herrel and to him also she spoke, sharply, as one who had the right to demand answers.

“Warrior, what manner of peril is it that can turn solid earth into a whirlpool and engulf a traveler so? Who casts such a Power spell and for what purpose?”

He continued to sit his mount, though he met her gaze squarely, a faint frown on his face.

“Thas,” he replied.

“And what are Thas—or could it be who?” she persisted, with the same tone of command.

“Deep earth dwellers. The inner parts of the ground are theirs. It is their given talent to command it to their desires when they wish. As to why they set such a trap here—” He shrugged. “The Waste holds divers species, we go our own ways, following the demands of our natures. Though this is the truth: it has not been known for many seasons that the Thas venture outward from the mountains where lie their chosen burrows. Though they may well have delved so without our knowing of it, they run their ways very deep. Also, we of the Waste meddle not among ourselves.” His answer was chill, as if he meant it as a reproof for her persistence, her open questioning of a matter he plainly thought was none of her concern.

She stepped across a deep rut, advanced closer to him. Her companion had arisen, his soil-encrusted sword still in hand. I had seen his like in the Dales, for he was plainly a man of that pure blood. Though he wore a helm, it carried no House badge. Still there was nothing about him that proclaimed “outlaw.”

“These burrows, which the Thas run for their purposes,” the woman continued, “how deeply may such lie and where?”

Herrel shrugged again. “Who knows? Or cares. We have never had any traffic with the earth-dwellers—their ways are not ours.”

“Nor do you want to meet them, I presume.” There was a note of challenge in that. She was using a tone sharp enough to bring blood to the cheeks of any fighting man. Certainly she stood in no awe of Herrel. If she knew what he was … I had a strong suspicion that she did. Perhaps she had had dealings with his kind before and knew best how to gain answers. “Why do they seek to entrap those who offer them no harm?”

“We do not know. Thas are Thas. But such as this”—he glanced down at the churned earth, what had been a camp and was now only a morass of disturbed soil—“I have not seen before. There is—” His frown grew deeper.

“Perhaps you wish to say that there is something new—an awakening somewhere in this land,” she answered him. “Shapechanger, have you been so long safe in the refuge of your kind that you do not sense a stir—or know that there is a new element ready to invade the Waste? Old things can be stirred into life by those having the proper key—and the power to turn such. If this is done wrongly, then all, no matter who or how they seek to stand aloof, can be drawn in—into a battle where forces, blindly awakened, cannot be easily controlled—or laid—again!”

Herrel had been studying her face. His mount moved restlessly, sidled away from her. I did not believe the Wererider had any fear of the woman, rather he was moved by an instinctive wariness, which was a part of his heritage.

“You have Power,” he observed. “Ask any questions of those or that which you can summon. We have no dealing with the Thas, nor”—now he looked from her directly at me—“do we want any with those who can awaken aught here. Carry no assurances of any aid now to your lord. Dalesman-by-half. If the Waste stirs we shall have other affairs to deal with.”

With no more words and no backward look, he sent his mount trotting for the wood, the horse’s hooves throwing up clods of the loose earth as he went.

It was my turn for questions. Who were these two, and what did they mean about another who had been trapped in the earth? Again it was the woman who spoke.

“You are Kerovan.” She did not ask, she named me as one she had known well.

Her familiar use of my name was disturbing. Had she and this fighting man been sent after me by Imgry (who was the type, I was sure, to always strive to make certain any plan by a double protection)? He could very well have caught within his search net this woman (I was sure she possessed the talents Herrel had i recognized by instinct) and dispatched her also, with the same orders he had given me.

“I am Kerovan,” I admitted, “and you?”

I waited for her to tell me of Imgry, but all she answered was, “I am Elys, and this is Jervon.”

The Dalesman only nodded. He stopped to catch up a tuft of grass and began wiping the soil from his blade.

“We came,” the woman continued deliberately, “with my Lady Joisan.”

I froze. Of all the explanations I had been prepared to hear that one was the most impossible. For a long breath I could not believe I had heard her aright. Joisan here? But—where—and why?

As I looked around wildly, Elys then added, “She was engulfed—in that …” To my growing horror she pointed to the hole where Jervon had been digging.

“You—you lie!” I was caught now in such bewilderment I could only deny and deny that such an impossibility could be so. This was trickery, the kind of trickery those of the Waste might use to entrap one. “Joisan is in Norsdale. I set her free—she is safe—she is …”

That which welled in me now was an anger deeper, a fear greater, than I thought any one could hold. Now I knew—fleetingly—why I had felt so cold. This was the fire that had been in me, that I had willed so fiercely into an inner prison.

Jervon strode toward me, his sword point rising, aimed at the small hollow left bare between my chin and my mail.

“My lady does not lie,” he said with dangerous softness. “The Lady Joisan was here and the whirlpool of the earth swallowed her down. She came out of her concern for one Kerovan, who, it would seem, lacks any concern for her.”

Madness … either they were—or I was—mad! Hallucination—could this be some spell born perhaps from that meeting in the Wereriders’ Hall? To have any dealings with those who possessed Power was always dangerous and tricky. This could be some subtle attempt to try and influence me by awaking emotions I dared not allow to trouble my mind—or my heart.

Save that now Elys told me in detail of how the two of them had met with Joisan in the Dales, and of her great desire to find me, of how they decided I might have gone into the Waste because of a scrying in which Joisan took part, of how they had come here to what they believed was my camp—and then of the attack …

This was all true! I could not deny it any longer, and at that moment I could have thrown back my head and howled like any winter-haunted wolf. That Joisan had followed me! She had no part in my life—just as I had no right in hers. I was bound to a dark past, perhaps a worse future. She must be free of me.

That she had been taken, buried, caught in an evil web of the Dark spawn because of her mistaken value of me—that I could not bear. Only I must—I had to accept the truth, hard as it was.

I crossed the ruts to the hole where Jervon had dug so fruitlessly and then I looked up from that shallow pit to ask just one question. Though I already knew what the answer must be and how I would stand condemned by it, in my own eyes, as long as I lived. “How long?”

Elys had followed me. Now her fingers just touched my arm. I did not deserve any sympathy, but I was still too frozen without, too a-fire within, to reject her out of hand.

“I do not believe she is truly buried.”

I glanced at her, turned my eyes once more to the earth. There was no use in her trying to reassure me thus. Joisan was gone into the Dark. I was just beginning to realize what a loss was mine. I had believed when I rode out of Norsdale that I had armored myself, that I accepted in full the bitterness of what my life would be from that day forward. Now I knew that I had not sensed even a hundredth part of what fate had brought to burden me as long as I walked the earth that had taken her.

Now Elys’s fingers tightened their grip. She gave a tug, which brought me to look at her again.

“She is not dead.” Her words were quiet but delivered with conviction, a conviction I could not accept, caught as I was in my inner hell.

“Lady”—I spoke in the same quiet tone also, with a remnant of the old great hall courtesy—“you well know there is no way she could be buried so and still live.”

“We shall see—and I promise you this shall be true seeing.”

She made a summoning gesture with her other hand. Jervon had already gone to where a saddlebag lay half-hidden in up-thrown soil. From that he brought her a wrapped bundle.

Twilight was now upon us, but when Elys let fall the wrapping there appeared a concentration of what light was left, centering on the thing she uncovered, a silver cup that shone with a moon’s full light, as if the moon’s beams themselves had been forged into it,

I watched, dull-eyed, as she mixed pinches of dried herbs, which she took from small bags carried in her belt pouch, shifting them into a very small measure of water Jervon poured from a saddle bottle. I saw her lips move soundlessly as she twirled the cup. Then she held it out to me.

Against my will I accepted it. Not that I denied she could use some talent to so summon sight of Joisan, but because I was so sure of, and so feared, what I might see. On my wrist blazed the band, rising to a glow that matched that of the cup—no warning there—could it be a promise? I would not allow myself to believe that.

Holding the moon between my hands I looked down—into its hollow bowl.

As I had expected—darkness. No! The liquid within had taken on life of its own, swirled, though I held the cup steady. Now it climbed the wall of the hollow, filling it to the brim. Still I stared at a surface that remained dark. Then …

A glow—so faint—still it held steady there. Perhaps the urgency of my fear and desire gave power to my sight at that moment when I longed so, needed this so much. There—there was the gryphon! The small beast was alive with light, and behind it—I fought against the dark, I tried to compel greater sight with my will. I must see! Slowly, very slowly, I did. There was only a shadow of a face, but the eyes were open, it was the face of the living—Joisan!

Hallucination, meant to deceive?

No! Somehow I was certain that the gryphon, that my wrist band, would not allow a false vision. I saw Joisan alive. She was not dead, crushed in the earth. But where was she—and how might I find her?

The liquid began to subside, fall back in the hollow. I cried out, “No! I must see—learn where she is.”

Too late, as one part of my mind was forced to accept. Now there was only a small portion at the very bottom of the cup. The vision was lost.

Elys took the cup out of my now shaking hands. I looked to her as I had not done for a long time to anyone—with pleading—for she was my only link with Joisan.

“Where? And how may I come to her?” My tongue seemed thick, swollen, so I could hardly mouth those questions.

With the tutored prudence of a Wisewoman, she went from me to pour away the liquid—not upon the churned soil, but beyond, where the ground was still undisturbed, gesturing with her other hand. Only when she had done with such ritual did she again face me.

“One is only shown what the Power can produce at that moment. And,” she looked about her somberly, “we have used the talent in a place that has been disturbed by that which is certainly not friendly to us, which may not be of the Light at all. It is best now for us to push on—away from all influences that may arise here.”

“But where is Joisan?” I did not move from where I stood in the deep ruts of the freshly turned ground.

Jervon was at work, pulling some pack bags out of the dirt. Those I had brought had completely disappeared, but apparently others, carried by their party, had been so near the edge of the disturbance as to escape burial. There was no sign of the horses.

I crossed the disturbed ground directly to Elys, determined to have from her any hint that would aid me to find my lady.

She did not look up, rather busied herself with the rewrapping of the cup. I could already guess her answer. There are limits to all talents. Perhaps hers had been reached when she had shown me that Joisan had survived. In what direction Joisan had vanished, except down, or what further peril threatened her—those one could only imagine. I strove, with all the force of will I could summon, to keep certain dire mind-pictures out of my thoughts.

Jervon had piled up what he had salvaged. Now, facing east, he put two fingers to his lips and whistled. The sound carried as clearly as had those notes Herrel had used to quiet my horses. Elys, the wrapped cup cradled against her in one arm, now raised her right hand in a summoning gesture.

I turned to look in that direction. Twilight was fast upon us now and I saw nothing. Then, pushing through a rim of brush, a horse trotted, to stop short, snort, and plant its hooves hard in the ground, expressing plainly a refusal to advance any nearer that evil-smelling spread of torn earth.

Jervon, voicing those sounds an expert horseman uses to soothe an excited and frightened beast, advanced slowly toward the animal. Twice it snorted, the whites of its eyes showing, once half wheeling as if to make off again. However, some strong tie between rider and mount held fast, so that the Dalesman was able to lay hand flat against the sweating neck. The horse, after one more toss of head, nosed against the man’s shoulder, allowing him to comb its mane with his fingers.

Elys followed him, still making beckoning gestures. Before she reached her companion, a second horse appeared at a slow and reluctant pace. Thus they summoned to them two that were excellent mounts of the type used and cherished by the fighters of the Dales. After them trailed another, a smaller mare of mountain breed, and lastly a pack pony. Of my own desert mounts there was no trace. Probably suited to this land, they had joyfully taken their freedom once they had fled. I divined that, by long association, these two who had companioned Joisan in her search had established close communication with their own horses—and perhaps those in turn had influenced the mare Joisan had ridden. For I recognized it to be one of the sort commonly seen in Norsdale. I had no hope that my own would ever appear.

Because at the moment I did not know what lay before me now, I went to where Jervon and Elys were stroking the sweating, still-frightened horses, using soft words of reassurance. The man glanced at me.

“Elys is right—we had best move on. Even these know better than to stay where the Dark has been at work.”

We brought saddles and packs and made ready, though the dark was gathering fast. Then, on Joisan’s mare, I swung out across the open land, away from the forest of the Weres, the place where Joisan had last been. I did not want to leave, but neither could I linger on there. If I only had some clue…. My hands tightened on the reins and my wrist band seemed to flare with a last flicker of light.

Though the dusk became thicker, Jervon, who had drawn up beside me, leading the pack horse, did not pause. Then Elys came even with him, so we three rode abreast into the night.

Both their mounts suddenly whinnied and broke into a trot, my mare following. It was so we reached a waterway, cut deeply into the surface of the plain. The water which had worn that gully was now but a small stream running through a narrow middle channel. However, the banks, down which our horses half slid when we allowed them their heads, gave one a sense of protection. We made camp there as the full dark closed in. For want of any better hope I had come this far—what I would do next I had no idea.

There crossed my mind what I had said to Hyron, that I would ride north and west in quest of my own kind (if any such existed). That declaration had small meaning now. Once before I had sought Joisan across this same imperiled country—when she had been taken by my enemies. I knew without any question that now I must seek her a second time—save that I had no trail to follow.

If you traced the tangle of our lives back to its beginning, where did the interlocking of our fates begin—that interlocking which had now endangered her twice over? Was it because she had been axe-wedded to me in both our childhoods—or because I had given her the gryphon and so made her of importance to Rogear? Had my life not touched hers with these dangers she would have never fallen to this last peril.

If she had not believed that she had a duty to me, because she was my lady (even though I had fully released her from her vows), she would never have followed me into this new danger. Therefore mine was the fault, and if she could be saved, I must do it. At the moment I know that this stood above any task Imgry had set on me. What did I care for the Dales, even in their death throes, when Joisan was lost in some web of the Dark?

Joisan

IN SPITE OF MY TIRED BODY, OF MY HUNGER, OF THE NAGGING FEAR that I was trapped forever here—so that the very dark itself pressed against me with a force I could almost feel, I forgot for a space all this—for I was possessed by this idea of the use of will. So slender and frail a thing as thought alone—might this indeed be for me more of a key than …

A key! It was as if I came fully alive, waking out of a nightmare-laden sleep. Neevor had said it—and I had marshalled only human thoughts of locks and doors—not of this! If I were right … !

Once more I set my shoulders against the support of the wall, ready to do battle in another way—with a part of myself. I cradled the globe, high against my breast, dared to take the chance of closing out my senses for a space, all that lay about me, centering my attention only on the gryphon—on its red eyes.

Now I did not fight to reach Kerovan—no. This was of even greater importance in the here and now—my own escape. If will—my untrained will—held any force, all of it must be focused on my key!

“Out!” I do not know whether I whispered, cried, shouted that aloud, or if it rang only through my mind, answered by the strain I laid upon myself. “Out!”

Slowly, with such an effort as even an hour before I had not believed lay within me, I envisioned a wall such as that against which I now leaned—save with one difference. In it was an opening—a door … out!

The globe blazed with heat, it burned. Still I held and willed that heat away from me. I had no body, no pain, I had only a will—a will demanding obedience.

Out!

Once more the globe burst bright with fire, dazzling me by shooting forth white rays. Those shifted, though I did not change the position of my hand or what it held. The rays joined into one, became an oddly thick rod of pearl color—as if the light had taken on tangible substance.

I turned in the direction it now pointed, began to walk, keeping—with every fraction of energy locked on it—the picture in my mind of what I sought, of what I must find. At that moment nothing in the world must be allowed to exist save that ray of light. I would have been easy prey for the creatures of the dark—had they chosen to move in upon me then.

The ray crooked, turned, struck, as a spear is sent flying at a target—not the wall but a crevice, a long, vertical crack. Into that spun my radiant spear and I followed. The way was rough and I stumbled over loose rocks and slippery gravel.

Just as my arm had tired when I had used the belt lash over and over, so now my will was beginning to falter. The ray rippled, no longer so solid. This narrow crevice sloped sharply upward and I climbed; each time my footing shifted the light dimmed a fraction as the focus of my thought was disturbed.

It began to seem that I had been trapped forever in an evil dream, condemned to ever climb over a constantly shifting footing where I fought for balance. The fingers of my left hand were raw-tipped from scrambling for holds on the wall, while my other wrist was stiff and numb as I held the globe out before me. The illumination from it grew fainter; I was nearing the limit of the compulsion I could put upon my will.

Now the gleam was hardly brighter than it had been back in the cavern. I was forced, in spite of myself, to climb and climb without knowing what a misstep might bring. Finally the impression came dimly, through my exhaustion, that my path was leveling out once again. Also, the stench that had polluted the lower region was gone. I lifted my chin a fraction, drew a deep, sobbing breath. Surely what had touched against my cheeks just then had been a thin current—of fresh air!

Hope gave me a last spurt of energy. I pushed forward to half fall out of the crevice into a very different place, where I stood amazed, staring about, first in bewilderment and then in growing wonder.

This still lay underground, though far above was a circular opening to the sky. For I was sure the dark expanse I sighted, with those points of light, could be no other than night sky and distant stars. However the cavern was filled with a pale illumination that did not come from any torch, lamp, or fire. Instead the walls themselves gave off a diffused glow, pale and wan, but enough for me to see.

The chamber, cave, or whatever it might be, was a hemisphere with a level flooring. Round walls curved up on all sides. Such perfect symmetry could not be of nature’s devising.

The floor was divided by a large number of low partitions, which followed no logical pattern, cutting across or joining each other to form a crazy maze of sharp-angled spaces. There was no design nor could I imagine any purpose for such a meticulous network of squares, triangles, and other odd forms. Some looked far too small even to set foot into, others were wide enough to provide short paths, which led nowhere.

I decided to edge along the outer walls and thus seek any exit. For to reach that roof opening was far beyond my ability. But there did exist an unwalled space between the first of the maze walls and the circumference of the cavern.

It was not until I squeezed into that space and set out that my hand (which I still slipped along the curve to steady me, for to my rising concern I was growing more and more unsteady on my feet) discovered this wall was not as smooth as it looked. Instead it bore a regular series of indentations. Peering more closely at them, I decided they were runes, though in what forgotten language they had been wrought must remain a mystery.

When, as a child, I had visited Norsdale Abbey with my aunt and had there been allowed to delve into the archives, I had seen manuscripts that reproduced fragments of inscriptions from the places of the Old Ones. Though for my own people these remained a tongue locked against their knowing, these discoveries had been preserved because they marked this or that place that had had some influence upon the
Dalesman.

How Fiercely I longed to be able to read what was inscribed here. Perhaps the very information I needed—how to get out—lay in those lines under my fingers. However, even though I could not master their secret, I continued to slip my hand along over those lost messages as I went.

I had won a good third of the way around that curved rise, and as far as I could see ahead, there was no break in the wall, nothing to let me out into the world, the sky of which hung so tantalizingly overhead. I was tired.

At last, my legs shaking under me, I perched on one of the maze walls and let my hands fall to my knees. I was thirsty and my thoughts kept running back to that pool I had found in the dark, the icy sweetness of the water there. This place was utterly sterile and dead. No water—no food—I had come to the end of my escape way to discover but another trap.

Nor did I believe that I could summon up once again that strength of concentration to bring the globe alive. Even as I rested there my energy seeped away as though I were deep wounded, losing heart’s blood. My confidence drained in the same way, I huddled where I was, apathetic, in a state of uncaring.

I could not have slept, but I must have fallen into a half-dreamlike state, for I did not blink and look about me again until I realized that the gray light of the chamber was changing. Glancing up I could no longer see those pinpoints of stars. Rather, there came a paling of the sky. In that outer world I could not reach, a new day must be at dawn.

The sight of that portion of sky now was a dull torment to me. I might as well wish for wings, such as the gryphon sported, to raise me out of here; there was no other escape. However, the sight of day broke through the state of uncaring that had held me. Somehow I wavered to my feet, stood swaying. My mouth was dry—my whole throat parched and raw. Almost I could turn again to the dark way that had brought me here, return to seek the basin into which that blessed water dripped in constant flow.

The rest of the curved wall was still to be explored, to no purpose. I turned unsteadily and viewed it all—no break save that ragged seam through which I had first come. To go stumbling in and out of that crazy mixtures of spaces on the floor was utter folly.

Drawing on a very small store of strength, I began again to move, without any real hope, only because I could not simply sit and wait for death to enfold me. The light above grew ever stronger. Day did not pierce to the walls of the chamber, there the gray still held. Then a sudden sharp flash to my right brought my head around.

Daylight had awakened a glittering response from edges of those low dividing walls that were immediately under the dome opening. The response was one of rich color.

I stood in wonder to gaze at gem-bright sparks of red, of gold, of brilliant green, of purple, amber, blue—winging from stone that only moments before had been lifelessly dull. It looked as if a casket had been opened above, loosing in careless profusion such jewels as even the wealthiest of the Dalelords had never hoped to possess.

There was—I began now to perceive it—some arrangement, some pattern about those sparks. They lay thick in some places, thin in others, not at all in a few sections. A design perhaps, but one (the idea awoke sluggishly in a mind that had been overtired by my earlier efforts) that could only be properly viewed and understood if one could see it from above.

Could a person standing on one of the low walls see it? I leaned back against the curved wall, an uncomfortable position, to consider that. What good could it possibly do for me to make such an effort? This was only another unsolvable mystery and nothing to give me any aid.

The glitter grew steadily stronger. I could almost imagine that I saw mists of color flaring upward even as flames arise from wood being consumed. There was certainly something of import out there, tenuous, but perhaps having more substance than light alone.

In spite of my telling myself that this was a useless puzzle beyond my solving, I began to make my way, creeping from one of the enclosures into the next, toward that spread of radiance. While I was still some distance from it, I scrambled up on top of one of the dividing walls, teetered there, hands thrown out to balance me.

At first I thought that if there was any design I could not reach a height high enough to discern its outlines. However, the longer I traced one color to the next, or the joining of the glistening walls that, formed the base, the more I began to perceive that what I looked at was in reality the representation of a symbol I had seen before—carefully lined upon a sheet of very old parchment in the Abbey library.

The general outline was that of a winged creature, but not a bird or any of the fanciful, monstrous beasts Dalesmen were pleased to use to identify their House clans. The outspread wings, the point of one of which stretched quite close to the wall on which I now perched, were blue. Seeing that color gave me a little heart. It was well known that those places of the Old Ones—that held Power that was safe, or at least unharmful, to my race—were always touched with that color.

A round globe rested between the wings, the expanse marked by a circular center for the maze. This glowed amber-gold. While to the fore and back of that were other colors in bright gem shades, as if the thing wore a double crown, one at either side of what might represent either a bodiless head or a headless body.

The longer I stared at that pattern the clearer it became, while the colors were now bright enough to dazzle my eyes. I wavered back and forth on my perch, my weariness fighting against my will. Only I was as one entangled in a strong spell, for I could not turn my back and move away.

My hands closed about the gryphon globe, half expecting that to be afire, gathering force from what I looked upon. Perhaps I was too exhausted, had drawn too much upon its energy in the cavern, for it did not awaken.

If I were enspelled, that bondage held, not only held, but drew me. Still I did not walk straight toward the center; rather it was as if there was another in command of my movements. For some reason, I did not find this either strange or frightening.

My path from one space to the next was odd, sometimes I circled, sometimes I retreated a step, a whole square, a curve, then went forward at a different angle. I think I laughed lightheadedly when it struck me that I might seem, to any onlooker, to be engaged in the movements of some formal dance, such as we foot in the Dale keeps at mid-year when the kin gather for feasting.

Back, forward, sidewise, straight, my feet moved, sometimes having to squeeze into a space where my battered boots scraped both sides of the dividers. Still, to all things there comes an end, and at last I stepped across the final one of the low walls to stand in that golden center, not knowing why it was important that I be here, only that it was.

The light thickened as it streamed upward, walling me in with a veil I could no longer see through. It made a curtain, but I did not stir to sweep it aside; I had reached the place I was meant to be, from here there was no going on.

Now all my great weariness of body and mind settled in full force upon me, actually bearing me to the pavement, so that I wilted as if my knees were now as soft as the bruised flesh that encased them. I was thirsty, I was hungry, I was afraid. I would end here—there was no longer hope of reaching the world I had known.

I curled about in that gold-walled circle as might a child who has wept herself near to sleep. There was a dulling of thought and that pushed away the fear, banished the remaining scraps of wonder—then even memory. I watched drowsily, without marveling any more, the golden light grow thicker and thicker.

Now I could no longer see even the low wall from which it rose. The light billowed, began to spin. First slowly and then faster and faster. Because it made me dizzy to watch, I closed my eyes to shut out that whirl.

There followed a moment of cold, utter cold, sharp enough to bring a cry of pain from me. Then a feeling of deep horror that I was—elsewhere—in a place where no one of my kind should ever venture. Through this nowhere I was swept, or pulled, or pushed. I felt all three such urgings. The terror of the nowhere seeped into my head, drove out the part that was truly me. My inner self, so threatened, fled thankfully into deep darkness and I knew nothing at all.

I opened my eyes. There was no curtain of golden light enclosing me. Instead sunlight wrapped me round, so warmly that my mail shirt was an overheated burden, and my skin stung from a beginning burn. I sat up.

This was not the full light of day, through some opening overhead, that bathed me in heat. I did not still lie in the round of the circular chamber—I was in the open again!

Did I dream? I pinched my own flesh sharply between thumb and forefinger to test that—achieving so pain but no change in what I saw, No rock walls here, rather tufts of coarse-bladed grass and bushes. Not too far away a flock of birds weighed branches—as they pecked eagerly at a bountiful harvest of scarlet berries—so the whole growth, down to its roots, trembled and swung under their assault.

Very slowly, still afraid that I might break this spell—which was certainly good instead of ill—I turned my head. No, this was not deserted country. There were walls, or the remains of such. They stood at a little distance and it was plain they had been tumbled by time, their stone much overgrown with moss. One squat tower was actually topped by a small tree, which had rooted itself there to take the place of a keep lord’s banner.

How had I come here?

Just at that moment I did not care. What drew me was the harvest of berries. I knew their like. Had I not gathered such many times over—the excess being reduced to a thick jam for winter use? They had never looked so plump, so abundant in the Dales though. Now their sweet, yet slightly tart taste promised delight to my hot, dry mouth. I started for the bushes on my hands and knees, not sure I had strength enough to get to my feet.

The birds wheeled up and away, scolding angrily, as I began to raid their feeding place. I culled handfuls from the branches, crammed them into my mouth, their juice relieving my thirst, their substance my hunger. I ate without thought for anything else, without prudence. If this were a dream after all, it was the first one in which I had ever feasted with such satisfaction and delight.

After the first edge was off my thirst and hunger, I allowed myself time to survey my surroundings more closely. The bushes I attacked (I was raking berries from the third bush by this time) had been planted in order, in spite of their now sprawling growth, at what had once been equal distance from one another—a fact still visible.

Beyond stood several similar rows of trees. The closer I knew also as a fruit bearer, though what it now bore was just beginning to grow pink. This was another native of the Dales, which any keep-dweller, finding on his land, guarded and cherished.

So I was in what had manifestly once been a garden. Now I looked to the walls, the three-crowned tower—all were certainly part of a keep. Wonderingly (having eaten what was, for that moment, my fill), I pulled myself up, still caught by the puzzle of how I had come here.

When I had opened my eyes, I had been lying—right there!

There was a slab of stone much moss-grown. As I made my way back to it I saw that some of the green cover had been scraped away, was now in ragged tatters. It looked as if, when I had landed—or somehow arrived there—I had done so with violence. Now I knelt and tore loose more of the moss. Deep-carved right under where my head had rested was the symbol of the ball with the outstretched wings.

Sitting back on my heels, I tried to think logically. I had fallen asleep, or been rendered unconscious, in the deep earth chamber, curled in the midst of a three dimensional representation of what was carved here. Later … how much later?

I looked up at the sky. By the sun’s westering position, the time must not be too far from late afternoon. Of the same day? Another? Or a still longer period? There was no way of my knowing.

The fact remained that some agency had transferred me from the cavern into the open, saving my life in the process. I could not be sure whether that act had been deliberate on the part of an unknown intelligence, greater and more far-seeing than my own, or whether I had merely stumbled on a process that would have worked for anyone fortunate enough to follow the conditions set by an ancient spell.

I was inclined toward the latter theory, perhaps because that was the more comforting. To believe that I was under observation, being moved at the will of some Old One, was enough to raise my neck hair and bring shivers in spite of the drowsy heat.

Very well—and for now it did not matter how—I was out of the cave chamber. Only where might I be in relation to the place that had turned into an earth whirlpool? How far was I from my late companions? I was certain I had not been somehow wafted out of the Waste itself, and I was weaponless, alone, with no horse or provisions, in country I did not know, without a guide. A series of facts that were enough to make anyone quail. I had only my own wits to depend upon. Night was on its inevitable way and I had no wish to be caught in the open by any such things as might run these ridges or crawl across the land.

The answer to a quest for shelter was, of course, the ruins. Perhaps beyond those broken walls I could find a hiding hole, a shelter until morning.

The wall nearest me had fallen in convenient gaps so I did not have to seek any gateway. Through one of the gaps I entered into a paved courtyard. Empty window spaces and three doorways (one fringed by the rotting remains of a wooden door) broke the inner walls. Darkish holes those were, from which I could be spied upon, though unable myself to sight any lurker. The place was alive with birds, and I remembered Elys’s dissatisfaction with the wood because it had appeared to harbor no winged inhabitants.

Perhaps the berry feast enticed them. Still, where the ivy grew on the wall of what might have once been the great hall of whatever lord ruled there, there was a constant fluttering among its vines, which suggested nests concealed there in goodly numbers.

I did not hear any pad of foot, any rustle of the drifts of last season’s leaves that lay across the pavement, but, as I turned slowly, inspecting all I could see of the ruins, I found myself indeed under observation.

By the rotted door sat a cat—not such an animal as was esteemed in the Dales because of the slaughter it caused among rats and mice that feasted on stored grain. No, this was half again as large as one of those sleek-sided, striped tabbies. Also its fur was uniformly a yellow-brown and, between its eyes, boldly marked by a much darker growth of fur, was a V. Another such brand grew on the upper part of its lighter breast fur.

About an arm’s distance from the first was a second of the same breed, slightly smaller, a little more lithe of body, but of the like uniform color of coat and markings. The birds appeared to pay no attention to these who might well be termed natural enemies, rather wheeled back and forth overhead, intent upon their own comings and goings.

The cats were not alone. Before a second door squatted a small bear, sitting up upon its haunches and rocking a little to and fro. Catching sight of that red brown form I stiffened. My hand reached by instinct for a weapon I no longer carried.

This was a very small specimen of bear, to be sure. But if it were a cub and its mother was nearby—then I could have walked into a trap even more cruel than the earth one I had managed to escape. I knew only too well hunters’ tales. Among the worst menaces to be found in the Dales were female bears who thought, or suspected, that their offspring might be endangered.

While both the cats surveyed me with that unwinking stare that their whole species turns upon my kind upon occasion—emphasizing the gulf between us (one I have always been certain they believe was set for their purposes)—the bear paid me only fleeting attention. It snapped at a fly. then set to scratching vigorously with one long clawed paw at its own rounded paunch. I found that somewhat disarming and dared to expel the breath I had been holding, without knowing it, ever since I had caught sight of the creature.

I had been far too cautious to try to move—now I dared edge backward toward the gap that had given me entry into this too-well-occupied courtyard. Clearly, as an intruder, I was better away. And I hoped with all my heart that I would be allowed my retreat.

“A female—very young—and very stupid …”

I stopped short to stare. No one had said that! Only the cries and twitterings of the birds could be heard. No one had spoken. Then—how had I heard, and who had dismissed me so summarily? For I was certain that those words had concerned me. I fumbled with the buckle of my belt, ready once again to use it weapon wise as I had against the creatures in the dark. Only—who was the enemy here?

“To be young is a state through which all pass. And this one is not truly stupid—I think—only untaught. Which is another matter altogether.

I turned a gasp into a gulp. My hair had worked loose of its braiding since I no longer had a helm to hold it in place. I reached up with my left hand to brush away a straying lock that I might keep close attention upon those three—two cats, large, a bear, undersized. There was. I would take heart oath on that, no other life here—save the birds. And those I discounted at once.

The smaller of the cats arose leisurely and approached me. I stood my ground, even dropping my hand from the belt buckle. It advanced until it was just beyond reaching distance from me. settled again into the same dignified stance as its companion held, tail tip curled decorously over the front paws. Those unblinking yellow eyes were lifted to mine, caught—and held—my gaze. Now I knew!

“Who—what are you?” I had to moisten my lips with my tongue and use effort to ask that question. My voice echoed back from the open eyes of the windows and sounded far too small and tremulous in my own ears.

There was no answer. Still I was sure I had not been mistaken. The speaker had been this animal—or the larger one behind it. One had commented disparagingly upon me, the other had replied with more tolerance. And I had caught that speech in—my mind!

Kerovan

I WAS BUSIED WITH MY THOUGHTS, MAKING MY DECISION AS JERVON and I worked together without words, hobbling the horses after they drank, leaving them to graze through the night. When the moon arose I stood watching it, remembering the silver of the cup—a cup that could have been carved from that pure disk. Tonight the stars also seemed unusually bright, gems flashing in the cloudless sky.

Beyond the valley of the stream the land lay open, save for dark clumps of trees or brush here and there. I was used to the Dales with their protecting ridges. Now, having on impulse climbed to the edge of the river cut, I stood watching shadows grow darker until each and every one of those growths appeared lapped in a pool of dark. The sky was alight, fresh and open—but this land was secret, it held no easy road for such as us.

A rising night wind blew against me. I had taken off my helm so that the wind tugged at my hair, dried the sweat that had gathered under the band of my headgear, cooled me—perhaps too much. Silver and black was all this land—silver above, black below. It was that darker part that held us.

Inside me something awoke, stirred as if from a long sleep, then was gone before I could seize upon it. Memory? No. I had ranged the Waste twice before, yes. But never in this direction. It was not possible for me to recognize the land before me. Yet …

I shook my head firmly against such fancies. What I needed was clear-cut purpose, a centering in on what was the most important thing in the world—to find Joisan. Though how … Reluctantly I returned to our fireless camp where the others had settled. I came to stand before the two of them.

“She must be found,” I said bleakly. “Since my own horses are gone, I shall of a necessity take hers.”

“We ride with the morning,” Jervon answered me as one who stated the obvious.

“Go with safety. Bear with you my heart thanks that you have served my lady.”

“You do not understand.” Elys’s voice came through the night that veiled her face. “We ride with you.”

For a moment I tensed, so filled was I with the guilt I had drawn about me like a cloak. Since it was because of me Joisan had come here at her great peril, what part of any rescue venture belonged to these two? I was willing only to welcome anger—and to turn it against others since I burned with it myself.

Then the Wisewoman added: “Her way was our way—of free choice. We are not about to turn from it, now that it has brought this upon her. If you choose not to ride in our company, that is for you to decide. Still we shall go.”

How had Joisan so tied these two to her? Or—suspicion crawled where anger had opened a way—were they indeed Imgry’s eyes ready to turn me from my road when they had the chance? Well enough. I could watch and wait, be all fair words and thanks, and still keep my own path. Unless …

This Elys had the Power, and through that might be a way to my lady. I could not disdain any chance, however small, of a guide.

“You speak,” I said, “as if you have a road in mind. But how can that be?” Something of eagerness broke the right cover I tried to force on my feelings. Had I been jealous in part because these two had been my lady’s friends when I had left her without any outward show of feeling? I clenched my hands at my sides until my nails cut into the softer flesh of my palms.

“I know nothing of Thas—save they are of the earth. But …

I remembered! By the Warmth of the Flame and the Flash of Gonder’s Spell Sword, in that moment I remembered!

“The mountains! The Werelord said their dens were known to be among the mountains!” I swung about, but even the brightness of the moon could not show me now these distant ridges against the far sky.

“The mountains it is then,” Jervon said, much as one speaks of riding to a market to price wool, though I was sure he was not as pragmatic as he sounded.

This was a time when I could not, for Joisan’s sake, push aside any suggestion of aid. I must accept what was offered and be grateful—honestly grateful—that it was given.

I had thought that I could not sleep, that I must lie and remember too much—and fear far more. However, sometimes the body defeats the mind and brings it under domination. I found that my eyelids grew heavy and …

No—I did not dream. Or if I did … But I did not! It was no dream—nor was it any sorcery summoned up by Elys in some mistaken hope perhaps of lightening my inner burden. I was sitting up, my hands half raised to my head. There was the moon and the stars, and around me the dark. I could hear the rasping sound made by a grazing horse not too far away.

“Joisan!” I scrambled up, blundered forward a step or two—my hands outstretched to grasp something—someone—who was not there. “Joisan …”

She had been there, or here—or …

I rubbed my forehead dazedly. Out of the dark I heard movement, whirled about. “Joisan!”

“No.”

A single word of denial. One that I was hot to dispute.

“I—I saw her.” I stammered. “She was here, I tell you!”

“He is ensorcelled?” It was Jervon’s deep voice in the night. Then came an answer from the Wisewoman.

“He could not be—not with such a safeguard as he wears.”

There was a glitter of ice blue, the band on my wrist. Of course it had not been sorcery! I had seen Joisan—she had stood with bared head, her hair clotted with earth, smears of it across her face. There had been wonder in her eyes and between us—the gryphon! I had seen her.

I must have repeated that, for Elys replied to words I did not remember uttering.

“A true sending. It was surely a true sending,”

A sending! I shook my head, tried to believe that my sight of her had been more than a willed vision. But once more logic awakened in me. I dropped down on the ground, clasped my head between my hands—then changed and held the wrist with its band flat against my forehead. I closed my eyes and tried with all the force I could summon, all the will I knew, to reach out—to touch—to see … Only there was no answer—nothing but the moon above and the black land below.

A hand rested on my shoulder. I strove to shake it off but the clasp clung.

“Let be!” Elys spoke with authority. “This is no land in which to open any gates. Let be—I do not think you are an utter fool!”

Did I indeed feel in that moment, even as she spoke, that something—a faint trace—a sensation that my frantic searching had touched what should not be disturbed except by fools? I could not tell—though I shivered as I might have had a breath of winter wind swept across the gully and wrapped itself about my shoulders in a lash-cut. I dropped my hand, stared hard-eyed into the dark, knowing that my chance was gone and I would have no value to Joisan should I now—as Elys had pointed out—play the fool.

Perhaps I had never before been driven so … unless it was when I had trailed Rogear into the Waste. The ferment within me urged me on and on during the next two days. Had I traveled alone I might neither have eaten nor slept—until I fell from the saddle of a horse ridden near to death. Still it seemed that the heights toward which we headed never drew any closer. My worst fear rode with me, that suspicion that perhaps we had chosen wrongly, that we were not heading toward my lady, but away.

Was it that constant nag of fear that brought back the dreams? I never returned in sleep to that place where the gryphon-man lay. Mostly I was in the company of those whose faces I could not clearly see, whose murmuring voices I did not understand, yet in me strained the need to both see and hear. From such dreams I awoke as weak in body as if I had run for a day, sweat heavy and sticky on my body.

I did not tell my companions of these dreams. In fact I spoke very little. Still striving to free my mind from a prison of dark thoughts, I made myself watch both of them. I asked no questions concerning their past, though such questions began to crowd my mind.

Elys was a Wisewoman, more than that—for she wore the mail of a warrior with practiced ease and I saw that a sword was as familiar to her as it was to anyone who was trained in such usage for many years. Thus she was a strange puzzle—for Wisewomen and weapons have never consorted together from all I had ever heard.

By her appearance she was not of Dalesblood; perhaps her talent therefore was the stronger. Yet her tie with Jervon was very close and easy, acceptable to both. Jervon, though he was plainly of keep-kin, had no visible taint of the Old Ones—and I did not believe he was one who bore my own curse. Together they traveled without many words between them, but I was more and more aware that theirs was so strong a bond that at times it seemed as if one could read the mind of the other.

It was Jervon who interested me the most. All Dalespeople accepted Wisewomen—after a fashion. Those are born of our own blood with a talent they enlarge by learning. A girl with such a gift apprenticed herself early to one well practiced in herb lore, in minor Power control. She was thus set apart from childhood, knowing thereafter no kin-tie, even among those of her birth family, making no marriage, rearing no child, unless she in turn took an apprentice. Her knowledge was her whole life.

A Wisewoman’s arts are of healing and peace. None goes armed, none speaks of battle as Elys had made mention of skirmishes and alerts, inquiring of me how went Imgry’s training of the new forces. She was two things—each opposed to the other. How could this be?

Also, how could Jervon, who lacked any pretense of talent, accept her so wholly, feeling none of the aversion that was bred into all Dalesmen—that wariness, the latent fear of the unknown raised by the constant awareness that we dwelt in a land which was not truly our own?

This alliance of theirs—my thoughts returned ever to the strangeness of it—was by Dale standards unexplainable. Jervon was neither servant nor guard, that I had learned early during this endless ride west. They were equals in spite of their differences. Could one take two such opposing people—as one would take two different metals—and forge from their uniting a third stronger, more powerful than either alone?

Jervon accepted Elys for what she was. Could anyone so accept—me, in the same fashion?

They both spoke of Joisan, not as if they wished to add to my burden, but naturally, as if she had been brought into that shared companionship of theirs. There came a time (did my face so reveal my inner struggles) that Elys broke the silence in which I rode with an abrupt comment.

“She wished for more.”

Anger touched me, and then bewilderment. More of what? Lands? Heritage? For both of us those had been swept away by the fortunes of the war. I had given her her full freedom—I held her by no promise. What then was “more”?

If this clear-eyed warrior woman could indeed reach into the turmoil of my thoughts, did she not realize that I knew Joisan was something apart, precious—something I could not bind to me. Being what I was I would ask nothing. Not all were as accepting as she—as Jervon …

“Men fear that which has no substance, better they should look with clear eyes, open minds,” Elys continued. “Joisan told me of your heritage, that you deemed it a dire thing you cannot escape. But have you not already faced it in part—faced and defeated it?”

“I did not defeat it, Lady,” I flared up in answer. “What I wrought was against enemies—enemies who had taken my lady to bend to their will. Nor did I alone do that thing. There was another Power that took a hand—which used me as one uses a sword. Am I then to be commended? Because I am what I am, I was only a doorway …”

Memory moved. Who—what—had I been at that moment when a Power that certainly I had not summoned had turned against Rogear and my mother? I had not been Kerovan then, but another—another who was greater, stronger, whole in spirit—everything I was not, as I knew when he had withdrawn, and had never been nor could hope to be.

“Be not so swift to deny,” she countered. “There are often skills that lie sleeping within one until destiny—and need—awakens and draws them forth. You think meanly of yourself and”—there was a note in her tone that brought a flush to my cheek, a hot retort to my lips though I did not so interrupt her—“perhaps you find that to so think is a protection, a ward against doing what you were born to do. One cannot stand in the end against one’s fate.”

To that I made no answer seeing that if I spoke now what I deemed to be the truth she might only say again that I hid behind an excuse, as she had just accused me of doing. Nor did I find that I liked either of these two the more (for I brooded upon my conviction that they found in me perhaps not the monster the Dales would name me, but someone so poor-spirited that I was not of the breed to have honestly earned Joisan’s regard). Perhaps I should have been glad of that verdict, seeing that it would afford me an added excuse to hold aloof—when and if my lady was safely found. Only, contrarily, its affect upon me now was to arouse a determination to prove that I was not less than Jervon in my ability to accept. Though the acceptance would never be mine—it was Joisan’s.

On the second day the country began to change—even as desert had given way earlier to grassland—though the hills still seemed farther away. While we did not see again any such silent and thick wood as the Wereriders’ sanctuary, there were more trees. Also, we forded one good-sized river, making our way across on the remains of a stone bridge, enough of which still stood above water to give us dry footing.

Hereabouts were signs that this land had once been under cultivation, perhaps very fertile. There were fallow fields walled with stones set skillfully in place, and twice we sighted towers standing as watch points. We made no attempt to explore these, for their surroundings suggested that they had been long abandoned, and there was a fever burning, in me at least, to keep pushing on.

In midafternoon of the second day we came near a third such tower, only this was surrounded by a clump of dark trees (most of which were unseasonably bare of leaf, but with branches so matted and entwined as to form another kind of defense). The band on my wrist warmed. I pulled back my mail sleeve to see it emitting blue sparks, visible even in the sunlight. Elys reined up, watched that tower as one looked upon a defended enemy position. She had caught her lower lip between her teeth and a frown of concentration drew her brows closer together.

“Swing out!” she ordered, emphasizing that with a gesture to her left. “Can you not also feel it?”

Perhaps because I had been for so many hours wrapped in my own thoughts, I had not been too much aware of what was round about. Now her command startled me into attention. I hunched my shoulders, tightened grip on the reins so that the mare sidled under me. It was as if an unexpected blow had struck out of the very air—one I had no means of countering.

The only words I can find to describe what chanced are that in that moment I had been attacked by a wave of pure evil. Evil is the only name for the foulness of it. Cold it was, wholly inimical to my kind of life, or at least to that part of me that could claim kinship with humanity. I sensed a subtle movement in my mind, a feeble assault, as if what had launched that blow (perhaps intending invasion) had been drained through centuries until its force was only a faint shadow of what it had once been. Something coiled out there behind the dark of the trees, the tumble of stone, something full of poison against the soul, as an adder is full of poison to discharge against living flesh.

We rode on, making a wide circle around that ill-inhabited place. However, we had not gone far (though the pressure I had felt had faded entirely away) when there came the sound of wild screeching. Coiling up from the tower, in the form of a giant serpent rearing to strike, came a spiral of birds.

Once aloft they wheeled, to fly directly at us. I saw, as they drew near, that they were of the same breed as those foul scavengers I had found at the desert oasis. Their raw red heads, armed with those murderous curved beaks, were stretched forward like spears, aimed at us.

Arriving just above us, they circled, continuing to screech, a clamor loud enough to hurt the ears. From the flock some darted down, two and three at a time, skimming just above our heads. I had flung up my arm in an intuitive gesture of protection and the band on my wrist blazed like leaping flames. Our horses went wild, screaming in pure fear, tossing their heads frantically, as if they expected that their eyes were about to be plucked out of their skulls. There was no trying to hold them. Instead we gave them their heads and they ran, directly west, until we came to cover under a stand of trees. The birds followed, settling on branches above, still shrieking what may have been dire threats in their own tongue.

However, the branches prevented them from attacking us, and they raised stronger cries of rage and frustration. We discovered, as we threaded a way among the trees, that those winged demons did not seem disposed to follow beyond the very edge of the wood.

It was our hope, though there was no path, that we were not wandering in circles as we ducked down in our saddles to avoid being brushed out of them by low-hanging branches. Such ferocity in an attack made by winged things was new to me, and I marveled that they had not scored us with beak and talon. They might well have been trained, as were falcons of the Dales schooled, to hunt on command—or else they themselves possessed both a malicious form of intelligence and a purpose in harrying us.

“I trust,” Jervon commented, throwing out an arm to ward off a branch, “that they will not be awaiting us when we reach the other side of this cover. Never had I thought birds were creatures to fear. But those—they could and would tear a man’s face from his skull—given the chance.”

“Your ward is strong.” Elys spoke to me, and nodded to the wrist band. It still shone, but the fire that had awakened to life there as we had approached that tower was less brilliant. “However, what lay there was not only birds …” She turned her head a little to one side as if she were listening.

All I could hear were the cries of feathered attackers growing steadily fainter as we drew away. I regarded the band of the Old One’s metal with the same thankfulness a warrior, pushed to a last stand, looks upon his sword. I had been very well served since chance had brought it to me.

“No,” Elys continued. “Something more than birds laired in that place. Though whether it is strong enough to leave its den and come into the open by daylight … Most things of the Dark use the night for their cover—unless they are masters of evil arts. That … force is no longer strong as it once was. But I think that we had better set as much distance between us and its lurking place as we can before we camp.”

We made a slow passage but we did win at least to the other side of the covering wood. No birds had flown above to lie in wait as we had half feared. What we discovered was something far different—a broad road, better laid than any of those in the Dales, showing only small signs of erosion at the extreme edges of the smooth surface.

The highway came up from the south, but at the very point where we emerged from among the trees, it took a sharp, curving turn to the west. On either side it had been cleared of tall growth, so that anything or anyone traveling there would proceed in clear sight—an idea I did not find very much to my present taste.

I had seen a similar highway once before. The Road of Exile, which led into the Waste not far from Ulmsdale, resembled this. It had served those Old Ones who had passed from the Dales into a place and future we knew nothing of. Never would I forget how Riwal and I had sheltered from a sudden storm in a ruin standing beside that road and the vision that had come to me that night—the march of the Old Ones, only half seen—but felt, yes—felt! That heavy sorrow, which had sent them roving, arose from their ghostly passing to touch me and turn the whole world into a place of loss and heartbreak.

Here, however, lay a brightness, which that other road had lacked. Age had lain heavy on the path of the Exiles; here abode a feeling that this highway might still be in use, that at any moment a party of warriors, a train of merchants’s ponies, might come trotting into view.

Elys slipped from her saddle and Jervon gathered up the reins she released. She walked forward until the very toes of her boots touched the slight crumbling of the surface edge. There she stood for a very long moment, neither looking up nor down the way, but rather with her head bent, studying the surface itself with care, as if she sought some lost object that might lie there.

Out of curiosity I followed her, my mare treading behind me as I hauled on the reins. A moment later I, too, sighted what had caught and so held her attention.

The actual surface of the road was unbroken and smooth. However, inlaid in it were many symbols, arranged so that any who walked or rode upon it must, of necessity, tread on them in passing.

Some were undoubtedly runes, unreadable, as far as I knew, to any now living. Once more I was reminded forceably of Riwal, of how he had spent most of his life in eager search for a clue that would unlock for him the knowledge scattered in the Waste.

Among the markings of the runes were also designs that had no resemblance to writing. I saw stars of Power, their five points always filled with symbols. There were also silver outlines of footprints, not only of men (or some race nearly human) but also of beasts—hoofprints, the pad marks of what must have been outsized cats, the pointed toes of birds.

These last, judging by their length, must also have been giants of their species. The prints and the star points both glistened under the sun rays as if they were inset with some burnished metal, or even with tiny gems, though there was no color other than the silver of the Moon’s mirror about them.

Elys knelt, holding her hand out, palm down, over the point of one of the stars that was not too far from the edge of the pavement. She did not touch the surface of the road, merely moved her hand slowly back and forth. For some reason I could not understand, I was drawn to kneel and copy her gesture. In turn I put out my right hand.

My wrist band warmed gently, though it did not continue to blaze into fire as it had when we neared the tower of the birds. And—there came a calming, an easement of my mind and spirit. No one did actually stand now behind me with a comrade’s hand laid on my shoulder. Still it seemed to me that I had this comfort, that what we had found here, sorcery as it surely was, held no terror or possible harm—might in fact work for our future good. I said as much.

Elys got lightly to her feet.

“This is indeed our way,” she said soberly. If she had felt the same touch of comfort as had come to me she did not show it in either face or voice, for she spoke as one who faces a task or a test. “This holds a power meant to protect those who travel. We have perhaps been led here without our realizing it. The Old Ones have many mysteries and secrets—it could be that we have, in some manner, been selected to be hands and feet for them—for the doing of a task. If this is the way of it then the road is their reassurance—safety for us.”

I wanted instantly to protest that I was no one’s servant—either that of a Power or a lord. Though I had come at Imgry’s bidding, it had been of my own choice. The belief that I might be now used by another was one I resented hotly.

Joisan was my only concern. I was back at the side of my mare, ready to mount and ride—not to, but away from this road to which we had been led—if Elys guessed rightly. Only—where would I ride? And—Joisan …

Elys looked over her shoulder, directly into my eyes.

“You fight, thus wasting your strength; accept and hoard that. Do not believe that I also do not know what it is to be a stranger among all who are kin to one another. Once I had a father, a brother—neither could nor would accept me for what I am. I learned that through hardship and heart sorrow. You must also find your road and then hold to it. There are no easy paths for such as us.”

Perhaps something in my expression silenced her. She still gazed at me and then turned away, and I did not look after her or speak. This was my own battle that I must face.

In the Dales I knew that I was distrusted—hated—for what I was. I had managed to set that behind me for a space, just as I had left Imgry and his camp. At that moment I still longed—in a part of me—to ride away, turn my back on the road and all that it stood for, even on these two who had learned a secret for living cruelly denied to me, a secret I was perhaps not even wishful to learn. That was the human part of me. What if I forgot the Kerovan who was? What would be my way now? Would it lie as straight as the road heading toward those distant heights—taking me out of the past?

And Joisan—but, no, Joisan was not to be left in the past, she was not to be forgotten. She was—I must admit it to myself now if I never did to any other—she was all that was real now in my world.

Joisan

I STOOD ON STONE AND IT WAS SOLID UNDER ME. I felt the cool of the breeze that tugged at the ragged, earth-smeared loops of my hair where the braids had come apart, I heard the nervous twittering and calls of the birds. All this I could believe in. But the rest—could one walk half in, half out of some spell? There had been enough behind me in the past hours that could lead me to believe that I might indeed no longer be able to think straight and clearly.

“Untaught—and no longer a cub. There is nothing but folly in such a one.” A new voice in my head, a contemptuous voice. “It was not so in the other days.”

Slowly I went to my knees that my eyes might be on a closer line with the bland gaze meeting mine. Beyond the cat, the bear yawned, its small eyes ignoring me. Surely—surely it had been the bear that thought-spoke that time!

These—these animals—I had no other way to name those who transferred speech directly into my mind—how … I fought down my fear. This was the Waste, I must always remember that and be warned. In a place where remnants of Power had been loosed for more generations than my people had built and lived in the Dales, how could I—dare I—marvel at anything that I might encounter here? Cats—a bear—who thought-spoke—these were no more extraordinary than the means by which I had been lifted out of an earth-walled prison into this outer world again.

“I—can—not speak—as—you—do …” I returned haltingly.

Now the smaller cat yawned with the same boredom the bear had shown. “Why state that which is so plainly true?”

That had come in direct answer to my speech! I had not fallen easy prey to hallucination, unless it was so strong a one, or a spell, that it carried this semblance of reason.

“Allow me time.” I did not wonder at my pleading with the cat; at that moment it seemed very natural. At least there was my old liking for its kind to make this easier. I still distrusted the bear. “I thought I knew a little of your people—but this—”

“Our people?” There was disdain in that. “You have never met with our people, witling.” The yellow eyes narrowed a little. “Our like does not live with yours—or has not for more years than it has taken these walls to loose their stones.”

I searched for an apology. It was plain that if this cat knew of those who roamed Dale keeps, it considered itself of a different breed altogether.

“Your pardon,” I said hurriedly. “I have seen some like unto you. They are of the Dales. But I do not know you, and if I have offended, then please understand it is done in ignorance.”

“Ignorance? If you are ignorant why then do you wear the key? That opens doors without, minds within.” Now the voice was impatient as well as condescending. My furred questioner plainly found me one she considered of inferior intelligence—I deduced that this was the female of the pair.

The gryphon! A key—Neevor had said so. My hand closed about the globe. It would seem that even these chance-met animals knew more than I about what I carried. I wondered if they could tell me, but, before I could search for the proper words, that other voice growled into my mind.

“It is time for eating, not talking. This one has no Power, is indeed a witling. Let it go away and stop troubling us. What it does with itself is no concern of ours.”

The bear had gotten up onto four feet, was swinging around toward the same wall gap through which I had earlier come. Now it lumbered toward it, never looking back, plainly divorcing itself from me and my concerns. Still neither of the cats seemed inclined to follow it.

I had found the words for my explanation, very glad that that red-brown body had disappeared. It was far easier for me to feel more comfortable—or as much at ease as my situation would allow—with the cats alone.

“I do not know the Powers of the Old Ones—perhaps the ones who once lived here …” I gestured about the courtyard. “This”—I held the globe out a fraction so that the sun shown full on the gryphon within—“was a gift from my lord. It has powers, that is true, but I am not one trained to use them. I do not even know what they may be. Please—can you tell me where is this place—and why—or how …” I floundered.

One part of me stood aside in pure wonder at what I did, that I sat on my heels and strove to talk to a cat. The rest of me urged that this was the only way for me to learn what might be of great importance to me—that I could no longer live by Dale ways or judge by Dale standards, but must accept all that came, no matter how impossible some of it might seem.

More than cats—yes. And I—was I less than any like me they might have once known? I suspected as much. I The smaller of the two—the female—still watched me with that unwinking stare. She weighed me by some standards of her own and I suspected that I was so discovered to be sadly wanting.

“You say you do not know how to use the Key, yet you came here by the—” The concept, which followed words I did understand, was one to now leave me completely baffled. I had a faint impression of what might be wings beating the air, but that passed through my mind so swiftly I could not be sure I was I correct.

“I was trapped underground,” I explained, as I would to another person had I been welcomed into the ruins by one of my own kind. So I told my story—of the whirlpool in the earth, of the place of dark, of how I had beaten off the creatures and then found my escape by way of the gryphon, which, as I talked, I held cupped in my hand. To touch it so gave me strength, a feeling of reality, a link with the world I had always known.

I described the chamber of the low walls, and of how I had lain down in the middle of it, only to find myself transported here. While I talked the two cats watched me, nor did either of them use mind speech to comment upon, or to interrupt my tale.

“So I found myself out there.” I pointed to the gap through which the bear had gone—to that overgrown garden where I had discovered food and drink.

“It is true—you are as blind as a newborn kitten.” The female again. “You play with things beyond your knowing. All you do know is that you are hungry and that you want to find your way out—that you—“

“Kittens learn.” A milder mind-voice cut through this petulant recital of my lacks. “She will learn. Remember, it takes her kind much longer to grow from kitten to hunter—”

“Meanwhile she meddles foolishly with that which could bring notice—trouble for not only her, but for others. It has been very long since any one used the—” (again those words which had no meaning for me). “How can we be sure that the alarm of that has not belled, to awaken much it is better not to have any dealings with? Let her go and take her Key. That in itself is bait enough for many a Dark One. Such need only sense its presence with a least hint—and then—!”

The cat before me raised a paw, pads spread a little so that the claws (which were formidable looking even in this smaller animal) hooked out into the open. A threat—I thought—or at least a firm warning.

Her mate arose and stretched forefeet well before him after the manner of his kind.

“So the Thas are setting traps.” His comment meant nothing to me. The female looked around at him, her eyes became slits, her lips wrinkled back to display fangs as sharp as her claws.

“Earth-worms!” Now she spat. “Since when do such crawlers dare face the light?”

“Since when have they stirred at all—this side of the Barrier—after the Spell of the Hour was set? Their earth-moving has not spread hither for a long time. Nor have they dared leave the Range of Shifting Shadows. This one certainly did not draw them; they were already burrowing where they had no right to be. Who knows what they plan in their murky, earth-slimed minds? Or who gives them orders? For they dare not the Light unless there is some strong will urging them on.”

His range of questions apparently struck his mate as having importance—though they meant very little to me. She set her paw back on the ground and her attention shifted from me to him. I tried hard to sort out from the information I had so gained what I could.

Thas—that name I impressed in my mind. It must be that of the creatures I had battled in the dark. They had been formidable surely and I could still bring to mind the memory of their claws reaching for me. Yet—now I was a little startled at the realization—they had not pulled me down as easily as they were armed to do. I did not believe that it was my flapping efforts with that belt that had held them at bay.

“The gryphon.” I was thinking aloud rather than addressing myself to the cats. “They were afraid of the gryphon’s light. Then they were whistled away—”

“That is so. And who whistled? It was the Key that defeated their first purpose—perhaps was a bane also to that which loosed them at you,” the male cat assented. “Do not forget the Key. Whether you dealt with it out of knowledge or out of fear and need, you have used it—and it brought you here.” He looked to his mate, and I believed they were exchanging some confidence that was close to me.

The female growled deep in her throat. I thought that that warning or protest was not aimed at me. Now she drew back to the doorway beside her mate, settling herself as if she were withdrawing from proceedings that were not to her liking. The male spoke to me again.

“You are not of the old blood, nor are you one of those who come seeking what they call ‘treasure’—bits and pieces of things—some of which are better forgotten. Them we have seen—and small value do they get for all their grubbing. The real things of Power are near all safe-hidden. Why then have you come into this land, bringing that with you which can arouse both Light and Dark?”

“I seek my lord.” So I told them the other portion of my story as I might, and had in part, to Elys and Jervon. Elys—Jervon—my mind turned to them. Had they also been caught in the snare of the Thas? I had not found them in that place of utter dark—but that did not mean they had gone free. For their sakes I hoped that I had been the only one so completely entrapped.

Thus I spoke of Kerovan, and when I mentioned that he shared heritage with the Old Ones, the male cat drew a step or two closer, as if this was of importance and he must hear every word. I talked of Neevor—and that name wrought a change in both animals. Once more they looked one to the other in silent communication.

Now the female mind-spoke.

“Trouble—trouble indeed. Old truces broken if that One has interested himself in this. An ill day for all of us if the sleeping wake—there will be more than Thas overrunning, or underrunning this land.”

“Neevor cannot be of the Dark Ones!” I challenged her for the first time. I was sure of what I said.

“That is very true. Only we have had peaceful years in which Dark and Light did not strive against one another, drawing even the least of us into their battles. Each, long ago, withdrew to their chosen strongholds and did not trouble with us, who bear no allegiance to either, as long as we did not intrude upon them. Now the Thas move, they lay traps. Those worms of the deep earth obey orders—whose orders? You speak of one who calls himself Neevor—upon occasion—telling us that he wanders abroad and takes action. This lord of yours—what is he?”

Her eyes once more narrowed to slits and her ears had flattened slightly against her skull, but she did not snarl. Instead she voiced an order, sharply, as one who is well used to being obeyed.

“Show me the Key, show it to me closely!”

Before I thought, so imperative was her demand, I slipped the chain over my head and held out my hand, the globe resting in the hollow of my palm. Within that crystal, not clouded now with any radiance, the gryphon was plain to be seen. I had a strange fancy, lasting for a breath or two. that the small image held a form of life, that it made contact with the two cats who paced forward and stood with their noses close to the ball.

“Sooooo.” That was like a hiss in my brain. “He is that one!”

The male spoke first. The head of the female was still outstretched, her attitude one of sniffing, as if the ball gave forth an odor, which it was imperative that she detect.

“It cannot be!” She jerked back her head. “The time for that is long past—the very way forgotten. Not even Neevor can walk into that hall and greet him who sleeps there. Sleeps? Surely not—too many seasons have come and gone—the life force must have departed out of him long since!”

“It is true”—the male paid no attention to his mate’s comment, rather mind-spoke me—“that you do not know what you hold. There is more to the Key than any one of us can sense—it is a very special Key. No wonder the—” (again those words I knew not) “brought you here! If that Power awakes again, indeed the hills shall dance, the rivers turn in their beds, and the very land will be rewoven.”

“Take it from her!” demanded the female. “Take it and cast it into some pit—or better still—set it under a stone. Turn her out … Such a thing is not for this witling to play with, or for anyone to hold!” Now she did openly snarl and her paw arose with lightning speed to hook what I held out from my fingers. I jerked the globe back against my breast just in time.

“We cannot take away what has been given.” But there was a growl sounding from the male’s throat even as his thought-words reached me. “GIVEN—remember?”

“She can loose—she can use—” Now the female’s thought-speech ended. Instead the squawl of a cat about to launch itself into a fight arose.

The male shouldered between us, even as his mate crouched to spring. I had hurriedly once more dropped the chain over my head.

“If you tell me what you know of this—of how I may use it safely,” I began, eyeing the female warily. She was no snow cat’ to be sure, a huntress large enough to bring down a horse, kill an unwary human. Still, her mounting fury, linked with those claws and fangs, could cause grievous hurts if she indeed sprang for me.

“No!” The male made answer. “There are many Powers, one does not play with any. Perhaps it was meant that what you hold should be returned to this land in the guardianship of one who is ignorant. On your head will the consequences be, only if it is loosed. This much we must grant you as long as you wear that—you may shelter here.”

“In safety?” I looked with meaning from him to the furious female.

He moved a fraction forward, urging her also with his shoulder.

“From us you need fear nothing. We do not strive to meddle.”

The female growled, but her anger was plainly fading. She sent no other thought to me. Her mate added, “This place is safe—for now—if we give consent. Rest—and wait. There must be some plan in which you are to play a part—or Neevor would not have moved. No, chance does not send the Thas into making traps—bring him who is your lord hit her—give you the right to wear and use—that.”

Now the female did speak.

“We have no part in such plans, we want none!”

“We may believe now we have no part,” he corrected her. “We are not movers and shakers, doers and undoers—but many times such, even as we, are entangled in the nets of Great Ones. Let be! In truth, by the old promise and the covent, having come hither by the—” (those words once more), “you have a right to claim refuge. You have followed a road long unused but none the less important. Yes”—now his eyes slitted in turn—“we are not kin, nor comrade ones to your kind, nor have we, in many years, sworn aid to anyone. But because you have come to us by certain ways we are bound to shelter you. You are free to stay, or go, whichever you wish.”

Abruptly then he vanished in a long, graceful bound, the female swift behind him, leaving me alone in the ruined courtyard as the sun sank behind the heights, its light lost in the shadow of what had once been a watch tower.

Wait—he had said wait. For what—or whom? I did not altogether like the sound of that. Had it been really a command? He had also said that I could go at my desire, though I was not about to strike out across this countryside among growing shadows and the coming dark of night.

There was no evil here and it was shelter of a sort. I cupped the globe tightly between my hands. What I had heard was tantalizing, but that I could get any more information out of the cats was doubtful. Oddly enough, now that they were gone, a loneliness touched me. There was no fear—just that emptiness.

I looked at the gaping doors. No, I had no mind to enter into that place. I would spend this night right here in the courtyard under the open sky.

So I harvested armloads of grass, pulled from the thick growth in what had been the garden. This I made into a nestlike bed. Once more I ate berries, found a small stream of water and drank my fill, washed my hands and face, combed all I could of the soil from my hair, and made up my mind to try to wash it clean with the coming of the morning.

I would have liked to have set a fire—I had a spark-striker in my belt pouch—but I sought no wood for one. It seemed more prudent to me that the dark of the courtyard remain. I wanted no advertisement of my presence. The cats had said this was a safe refuge but I did not want to test the truth of that. What they might deem enemies and what I could fear might be two different things altogether.

As I stretched out on my bed, my arms beneath my head, looking up into the darkening sky, I sought to plan what I must do when morning came. The cat’s word—that I was to wait—I did not care for that … unless I had some idea of what I waited for. On the other hand, without any guide, supplies, horses—what was I to do? To go wandering off, without any aim, across a land that was far more hostile than it looked—that indeed would be rank folly.

It seemed to me, now that I had a period in which to think through events since I had left Norsdale, that so far I had been singularly favored by fortune. The meeting with Elys and Jervon—had that really happened by chance alone? Or had I, by my choice in Norsdale, my determination to cling to Kerovan, set in motion a series of events that linked, one with the other, to foster some action determined by a will beyond my reckoning?

It is never pleasant to believe that one is moved here or there by that which one does not understand. As a child I had come and gone at the bidding of my uncle or Dame Math. Then later I had been the one to give orders, to decide the fates of more than myself when I led the survivors of Ithdale into the wilderness. I had many times been uncertain of my own judgment. Still I had had to make decisions and sometimes quickly, so that I grew more confident and sure of myself.

My lord had never said do this, do that. Though according to Dales law I was as much his servant as the youngest serving wench in his hall. He had stood beside me, been like my right hand or my left when there was need, but never intruded his own orders unless such was for our good, and then in such a way that his suggestion came not as a direct command, but rather as if I, too, must see the logic of it even as he did.

Was it the Waste and its ghostly shadows that now made me doubt my independence—think that perhaps after all I had made no real choice that was of my own wishing? How far back did such an influence then exist?

Had it come about long years ago when my uncle chose my lord—when I, a child of eight, was axe-wedded to a boy I had never seen? Or did the entanglement, which I now feared existed, start when my unknown husband had sent me the gryphon? Or did it follow after the invaders’ attack upon Ithdale? Or—had our fates been decided even in the hour of our births?

Did any living thing have complete freedom of choice in this eerie country—or was what I had said to Elys the truth, that we who were born here had other heritage than human, were bound to Powers whether we knew it or not?

I knew that there was only one major truth in my life, and that was that Kerovan and I were meant to be one in the same manner as Elys and Jervon—each bringing to that unity different gifts and talents—so that the whole was greater. That Kerovan would not, or could not, admit this, did not release me, nor would it ever. No words of his, no action he might take, could make me other than I was.

Shutting my eyes upon the sky. I drew into my mind the memory of his face. The vision had not faded any during the many days we had been apart. I saw him as clearly now as I had on that morning in Norsdale, when he had put aside all I offered to ride away, as clearly as I had when trapped in the cave I had sought and had seen him. Now I strained to bring about once more that, only it did not come, no matter how much I willed it.

With Kerovan thus with me in memory, the only way I could hold him now. I drifted into sleep, holding fiercely to this small piece of comfort—the single one I knew.

I was warm—I must have slept too near the fire. Trying to edge away from the heat, I opened my eyes upon a dazzle of sunlight, which struck full upon me, turning my mail into a highly uncomfortable covering. As I sat up, my hair caught and tangled with the withered grasses on which I had slept, and I tried to shake that mass free as I looked, heavy-eyed, about me.

From the high position of the sun I must have slept clear through the night and well into the next morning. The birds still flew in and out of the vines, making a rising din with their chirpings and song. Otherwise the courtyard was deserted. There was no sign of either cats or bear.

My body ached. Though there was the padded jerkin between my body and the mail, still I missed the under-shirt I had torn in the cavern. I itched and felt as unkempt and dirty as any vagabond. I longed for cleanliness of skin, for fresh clothing. If I only had the saddlebags I had left in the camp the Thas had engulfed!

I arose slowly, stretching, wanting to feel more alert and lithe of limb. Once on my feet, I stood with my hands on my hips looking about.

This ruin must have long been just that—an abiding place for only birds and animals. Today, in the warmth of the sun, I no longer sensed that feeling of intrusion that had come upon me when I first entered the courtyard. This was only a shell from which life had long departed.

“Halloooo?” I did not know just why I tried that call. My voice was not loud, but it echoed emptily in a way that kept me from trying a second call. The cats—almost I could believe that I had dreamed them—still I knew that I had not.

Before I went to seek food and water I determined to know more of this place and I eyed the nearer tower speculatively. If the flooring within it remained intact I should be able to climb to a point high enough to see more of the country. That survey was imperative before I made even the shortest of plans ahead.

Thus I stepped through the door, which had the hanging fragments of a one-time barrier. Within, the sunlight was abruptly cut to dusk. The windows, even though no shutters remained, no parchment covered their openness, still admitted very little light, while the walls between the windows (which were wide on the courtyard side and narrowed to slits on the other) were bare stone. There were no remains of any furnishings save a couple of long benches—each fashioned to resemble an elongated cat—the head upstanding at one end, the tail erect at the other, the four supporting feet ending in clawed paws.

One of these was set against the far wall and I mounted on it to peer out of the narrow window. The same vines that overhung the courtyard also grew here in profusion and I could see very little through the veil they formed.

The floor of this large chamber was covered by paw marks in the dust—those of the cats, and some that could belong only to the bear, while there was also a strong animal smell in the room, though it had not been used as a general lair, for there were no beds of drifted leaves, no signs of the inedible parts of prey.

I passed under the archway, which gave into the lowest floor of the tower, and found what I had hoped, a stairway leading up, one side against the wall. The other, which lacked any guard rail, was open, while the steps were unusually narrow, hardly wide enough to take the length of my boots, and the rises were not as high as one would expect. However, the stones were sturdily set, though I tested each before I placed my full weight upon it.

So I climbed, emerging into another chamber as bare as the one below. Then, finally, into a third above that. Here were more window slits, and I made my way toward the closest through even deeper gloom, for the vines were thick curtains I had to push, break, and tear in order to force an opening through which I might view what lay beyond.

It would seem that this hall had been built with one side just above the edge of a sharp, down-dropping slope. There were trees rooted precariously on it, as well as a lot of brush, but where it reached the level at last, the land was wide open.

Across that, as straight as if someone had used a sword blade to cut a path—the tip of which touched heights to the west—was what could only be a road. Only this was such a road as I had never seen in the Dales, where tracks, of necessity, were narrow because of the many ridges.

Not only was it dazzling white under the sun, but broad and very smooth, though there were glints of glitter on its surface, flashing now and then. The highway lacked any travelers as far as I could see. It was just there—startling on that dull plain. There were wide stretches of open ground on each side as if all cover had been deliberately pruned away. To discourage ambush? But who had come this way in such fear—and against what or whom had those wayfarers needed to so protect themselves?

Kerovan

THIS ROAD, WHICH I KNEW AS WELL AS ELYS DID, WAS NO TRACK such as ran through the Dales. It carried the mark of sorcery even more than that which the Exiles had used, and it ran toward the heights. Though I had determined to ride west, now I was reluctant to set out upon such a way, easy as it was to travel. Not so my companions, for remounted, Elys swung out upon the pavement, nor did Jervon linger, but was at her side, the pack pony on a lead, already past me.

I mounted the mare, fighting inner turmoil. To take such a path was to expose myself to—to what? Was I such a one now as started at shadows, drew steel at the sloughing of a wind through tree branches? This shaming fact I could not yield to. I sent the mare on, where the click of her shoes on the stone of the way sounded overloud.

Whoever had laid out the way that highway traveled had paid no attention to the contour of the land, had allowed no fact of nature to dispute where it would run. Hillocks had been cut through, leveled back to allow passage, surfaces smoothed. Its making was a feat of labor that I do not think the Dales, even if all their manpower was summoned to the task, could ever have equaled.

As the pavement provided the easiest of footing, we made far better time than we had riding cross-country. Nor did we see any signs of life, except a bird or two—not flying in that threatening coil of the evil flock but high and alone. The country apparently was very bare hearabouts. or else all that lived near kept their distance from the road itself.

A little before sunset we came upon a place where the pavement curved out at one side, forming an oval section that was still attached to the highway, as a piece of fruit might lie next to a bough. Elys turned her mount in that direction and for the first time in some hours spoke, raising her voice to reach me where I still trailed a little behind.

“This will afford a safe campsite.”

Most of the surface of that oval was covered by one of the five pointed stars, so that the space might lie under some protection, a kind we should welcome, I guessed. There might not be any inns or other shelters along the highways, but those who had built it had arranged such places as this for the safe rest of the travelers.

Here the surrounding land was wide open, covered mainly with a tall-growing grass. We put our horses on picket ropes, allowing them to graze to their content. There was also (within a stride or two of the road) a basin in which water bubbled up from underground. The water was not only very clear and very cold, but it possessed a flavor all its own and … Can water be perfumed? I had never heard of such, yet when I rinsed my hands and then cupped them to make a drinking cup, I was sure that I caught a faint scent—like unto that of a garden of fresh herbs lying under the full-drawing rays of the sun.

Nor did we have to light a fire to brave the draw-in of the dark. For with the coming of night that star in which our camp was set began to glow faintly. There was a warmth in the air. Whoever had fashioned this wonder we would never know, but to me it was a fitting answer to all those who claim that only evil comes from the use of that which belongs to the Old Ones.

Elys sat crosslegged in the very heart of the star after we had eaten from our trail supplies. Her eyes were fixed on the road. At first I believed that, in truth, her sight was turned inward, and that she was near in a state of trance, which made me uneasy. With the coming of the dark a feeling of Power, which I had not sensed as we rode under the sun, gathered to hedge us in. One’s skin prickled with uneasiness, one’s hair seemed to stir with a force of deeply pent energy.

I looked from Elys’s closed face to the road. In me something came alert, waited—Would this highway also prove to be “haunted”? Would we see and hear tonight the passing of some who had long gone before? There came another thought into my mind. Power such as I now felt could certainly be drawn upon. Suppose we tried again to scry—might not the result be that I could see Joisan, learn enough to be guided directly to her?

“The cup …” I began, though I knew that breaking through her present deep absorption might alienate rather than lead Elys to agree to my plea.

She did not turn her head, she did not even break her forward stare by so much as a blink. But her answer came readily enough.

“Not here. I have not the strength to hold what might answer. I am not so learned …” In her voice there was an unhappy, longing note. “No. I could not control the forces that await here. They have not been tapped for long and long—that does not mean they have grown the less, rather they have built in strength.”

My disappointment was tinged with a fraction of anger. Still I knew that she was right. One should not meddle to raise any Power that one did not know one had the ability to control. It was very certain that our present surroundings, benevolent as they seemed, might hold a violent response to any witchery, no matter how mild or well intended.

So I sat in silence, nor did I stare as she did down that road, which promised so much and yet which we dared not trust. I did not care what ghosts might walk here. They were no kin of mine—that I chose to be so. I was myself—alone—as in reality I had always been. Yet, sometimes with Joisan …

To think of her brought pain that was not of the body, rather an inward ache, as if I had hungered all my life and now understood that I must continue to hunger until I died. There was Joisan …

I no longer saw that band of metal on my wrist, on which I had idly centered my gaze. Rather, there arose before my eyes a girl’s face, the skin sun-browned, thin … Perhaps no man who did not look the second time would call her beautiful. No man—but I was not a true man, and, to me, she was as radiant as the fabled, much-courted daughters of keeps such as the songsmiths sing of—those before whom men paraded in their pride, fought monsters, and courted death-danger that they might be noticed and admired.

She had such courage, that brown girl, so wide and deep a heart, that even an outcast who was also a “monster” had been invited into the warm core of it. I need only have said the right words and she would have come to me willingly. But I did not want willingness out of duty—I wanted …

I wanted something else, not pity, not duty, not that she came to me because we had faced evil together and come unharmed out of that battle that we had fought. I did not know just what I wanted—save it was something I had not found, nor really could put name to.

Then I heard, even through my cloud of self-pity, a soft sound from Elys, a deeper gasp that could only have come from Jervon. Startled I raised my head. The road lay radiant in the night. Each and every mark along it was alive with silver fire, even though the moon was not yet high.

Also—perhaps the cause was induced by some trick of that light, but it seemed to me that part of the patterns moved. There was a glow that came and went along the patches that resembled the footprints of man, beast, and bird, almost as if things now trod upon them, clouding them for a second here and there as an invisible foot pressed, was again lifted, while those symbols in the corners of the stars glowed stronger, a light haze arising from them as if candles had been set ablaze.

I put out my hand, without being conscious that I did, until Elys’s fingers clasped mine. Also, I knew without looking, she must be linked with Jervon in the same manner. We were nor alone! There were travelers on the road though we might not see them, even as those other ghosts had passed into exile long ago. They did not approach us. Perhaps they journeyed, not in another dimension of space, but in time itself. Great concerns we could not comprehend drew them on. We dimly felt their concern—or at least I did.

Twice I stirred as a touch reached me. Slight as it was, that contact held the sharp impact of a blow. For that single instant I had been on the brink of knowledge and understanding. Yes. I almost knew—then the meaning was lost and I was left as empty as when I had put Joisan from me to ride alone out of Norsdale. Only this had nothing to do with Joisan, rather it came to me as a greeting, a meeting with those I understood, who knew and welcomed me—but to whose attention I could not hold because I was only a part of what they were in full.

I do not know how long we sat there so hand-linked, watching what no human eyes could ever catch in full. There came at last a time when the prints no longer glowed, dimmed, glowed again, when our sensing of those hastening travelers faded. Elys’s fingers slid out from mine. My hand fell limply, to lie on the stone.

We did not speak to each other—had we even seen or felt the same things? I never knew. Rather we separated in silence, all at once full spent, worn from the watching, wrapped ourselves in our cloaks to sleep. Nor did I dream that night.

However. I awoke later in the morning than my companions. Jervon had already brought up the horses and had them saddled, the packs ready. Elys knelt, was busy dividing supplies into two pouches. As I sat up, she gestured to a portion of journey cake set aside, giving the packet that held the remainder to Jervon.

He stayed where he was but Elys arose, to stand before me as I sat chewing the dry cake, wishing that for once I had a bowl of porridge hot from the pot, such as I had seldom tasted since I rode from Ulmsdale years ago.

“Kerovan,” she said abruptly. “Here we must part company.”

At first I did not even understand her. When I did, I stared at her open-mouthed. There were dark bruises left by exhaustion under her eyes, and her face seemed gaunt, as if she were fresh out of some battle. Her hand went out in a small gesture—not to summon power, rather one that expressed helplessness.

“We—we have been forbidden …”

I was on my feet, my food forgotten. What had happened as I slept away the rising of the sun? Who had forbidden?

She no longer looked at me but to the road, white and straight under the sun. I saw a longing, as deep as the heart-wrenching sorrow that I carried (perhaps with such ill grace) in her face. She might be regarding all the wonders the world can offer, piled in a heap before her, and yet know that she could touch them not.

“This way is not for us … not yet—not yet …”

The sadness in her eyes was near a sob in her voice.

“But you—you said …” I found myself floundering for words as might a child trying to learn from an elder the why of an inexplicable change in plan.

“When I told you that we would ride together—then I believed I spoke the truth. Perhaps—perhaps we, Jervon—I—have been weighed and found wanting.” Her disappointment was hurtful for any one to see. “Believe me, it is not for us to go on. This is your road only, Kerovan. Perhaps we played our part merely in companying you to this place, even as we earlier companied your lady. There must be some reason behind the pattern of our meeting with you both. Whatever that was, it is now fulfilled. But if we have in any way served—then remember us, Kerovan, in those days when you come into your heritage. It may be that we shall … No, you ride alone, for that is where you go—to accept your own fate, whether you believe it or not.

“If there comes a time later”—her expression did not change, still I read a thread of hope in her voice—“when we shall be made free of this way, and none shall say us no—then, when that time comes, look for us, Kerovan, be sure we come with glad hearts. What we shall do from this day forward is wait—and struggle and learn—until the road lies open.”

I clasped her hand and her flesh was chill. She said no more but mounted. Then I clasped hands with Jervon also. He had eyes mainly for Elys, as if whatever burden she bore, he would seize upon as his own if he could. I was left with no words at all as I stood and watched them go leaving Joisan’s mare and the pack pony, on which they had loaded the bulk of their own supplies, a last gesture of good will for me.

Back down the road they went, leaving in me a vast loneliness, a sharply growing need. Still, such had been the force of Elys’s words and manner I could not have found any argument to stop them.

I did not at once start in the other direction along that road, which Elys had said was to be mine alone. Rather I settled on my heels after I had seen them out of sight, they never turning once to lift hand to me again. Not until now had I been aware how much their company had meant during these past few days. I had ridden into this Waste telling myself that I was my own man (though I chose to go on Imgry’s errand), that in all High Hallack now there was not one I wished to comrade with, or who cared if I might come to trouble. Save only my lady—and her I had thought safe as anyone might be in this grim and war-torn land.

There was nothing, I had thought, which I any longer desired to have, to hold, to know. As if he who had been Kerovan of Ulmsdale was dead—only a husk of him walked, rode, spoke.

I had always known I was different. They had told me early that my mother could not bear to look upon me and thus I had been sent to the very edge of my father’s holdings to be fostered. There I had had but two friends—Riwal, for whom the Waste and its secrets were a lodestone, the attraction of which he never tried to deny, and Jago, a crippled man-at-arms who had taught me the ways of war—and later died treacherously at the hands of his enemies who were also mine, those enemies I faced in time and fought.

No! Even at that battle with the Dark I had not been Kerovan of Ulmsdale; instead I had been filled by another personality, one who was out of another place (or else another time), filled with great force, one who used me as I myself would draw a sword. Save, when that presence withdrew, its will accomplished, it took with it that part of Kerovan that had warmth, a love of life, a belief in himself. Now I was empty, and only with the going of Elys and Jervon (having witnessed the strong bond between them) did I realize how empty.

My fingers sought the wrist band of the Old Ones, as one of the Dames of Norsdale might tell her prayer hoops. Only I repeated no prayers, for though as any rational person I acknowledged there were Powers beyond the comprehension of my kind, still I called upon none such. The truth was I knew not which to call. Or whether any such would still concern themselves with a husk of a man who was lost inside his empty self as much as he would be lost in the world which was theirs.

To linger on here was no answer. Nor did I altogether believe Elys’s assurance that this was the road I must take to some unknown confrontation with the future. However, it had its safeguards, and was a means to reach the heights. I mounted the mare that had been Joisan’s, fastened the lead rope of the pack pony to my saddle horn, and at last rode on.

“The sun awoke silvery glints from the patterns laid in the stone. Those varied ever (though there were always the many foot, paw, and hoof tracks cutting sometimes even across symbols). I noted that all those prints pointed in the same direction—forward, none returned—as if all traffic here lay in one direction only—toward the mountains. Just one more mystery to add to all the others.

I kept the mare to a walk. For about me, as I rode, there clung the feeling that I was not alone (perhaps that had been allayed yesterday when I did have human comrades), and neither did I believe that I passed unobserved. So I found myself watching the prints far more than the way before me. In the sunlight they did not change as they had in the night, when it appeared that invisible feet fitted and left their outlines.

This close watch on the pavement caused a feeling of detachment in my mind, induced a dreamy acceptance of all lying about me. When I suddenly realized that, I knew a pinch of fear. Was I being so ensorcelled by some long-laid spell?

Deliberately I turned the mare to the edge of the road, urged her to step off onto the turf. Unexpectedly she tossed her head, fought me, mouthing the bit angrily, planting her hooves and refusing to go. Was it the firmer footing of the pavement she wanted? Or was she under the guidance of another, even though I held her reins? Perhaps the sorcery I suspected already had her enthralled.

Even for me it no longer seemed strange that I should close my eyes for an instant now and then, and feel (when I was not looking on the emptiness around me) that I was riding in company, though none of those I sensed appeared aware of me in turn. Or, if they were, my presence meant nothing to them as they had urgent and pressing affairs elsewhere.

That feeling of urgency came to possess me also. The first slow pace I had set the mare became a trot without my conscious urging. She held her head high, her tail switched from side to side, as if she were a parade mount, proud among her kind. The pack pony crowded up on my left until he paced abreast of us.

Though we certainly traveled more swiftly than before we had taken the road, those dark heights to the west were very slow in drawing closer. It was as if they in turn retreated before our advance.

Nor did I sight any more ruins such as the towers. This part of the Waste might have always been forsaken wilderness had not the road traversed it. At intervals there were those ovals such as we had used for a campsite. Each had its basin of water, a good stand of grass inviting a traveler to rest. I drew into one at nooning, allowed the mare and the pony to graze, ate my journey cake washed down with water. Then I simply sat, no longer thinking, just accepting that this is what must be.

Lord Imgry, the Dales, the Wereriders, even Elys and Jervon, faded and diminished in my memory. I spun the band about my wrist. Holding that, I summoned up (first with an effort, and then with a fast burst of clear inner sight) my vision of Joisan. So vivid was that, I felt she actually stood somewhere ahead, waiting for me, a serious, questioning look on her face—the same expression I had seen there so many times during our last days together in Norsdalc.

“Joisan! Joisan!” I awoke to the fact that I was calling her name over and over as my fingers slipped around that band.

Within me … No! I was not just a husk of a man after all! The dream that had held me most of the morning shattered at that new force astir within. I saw again the churned earth and Jervon digging in it; I watched a cup fill itself to the brim and my lady’s face show mistily, surrounded by the heavy dark but still with the blazing gryphon in her hand. Hurriedly now I reclaimed the mare and the pony, swung into the saddle. There was a purpose in all this, as Elys had suspected. I might see only the beginning of it at the moment, but there would be more later and …

What more that might be, or how I was so important a part of it, I did not yet understand. Yet the urgency now fastened full upon me and my thoughts no longer drifted. Rather did I make a speedy return to what once I had been—a scout of the Dales’ force, marking not patterns upon the road, rather the country through which it ran. For the first time I saw that indeed my morning’s ride had brought me well ahead. There lay foothills not too far beyond—forming the fringes of the heights.

On those hills were odd outcroppings, which did not look to be natural in such places. I had thought this part of the land held no ruins, but I saw them now—and so many that I might be approaching the remains of a town as large as one of our own port cities.

The sun, however, was well westward, when I came close enough to see those tumbled walls clearly. Above them, on a tongue of higher ground licking to the east, stood towers, more walls—plainly a keep. It was of course a site such as any builder would choose for a place of defense. So perhaps there had been those also among the Old Ones who had not found life so safe that they could neglect such positions of prudent safety.

As I drew rein to gaze upward, make sure that the keep was indeed a ruin (and not perhaps one hiding such a peril as that tower around whose territory we had so carefully ridden), I caught a brilliant flash from the top of a broken wall a little below the tower itself. I raised my hand as a shade for my eyes and felt growing warmth about my wrist.

The band burned. For a moment or two I thought I had actually seen a small tongue of flame leap from its surface.

Now I dropped hand to sword hilt, even though I well knew that whatever might lie in wait there might be impervious to any steel, even that forged from Waste metal itself.

At that moment there sounded an ear-punishing squall. Out of the brush that rimmed the flat land between the road and the rise on which stood the keep, a tawny, brown-yellow body flashed in great ground-covering bounds, heading for me. Behind it came a second.

Very faint and far away, nearly drowned by the animals’ challenge. I thought I also heard a shout. My sword was out. The creatures coming for me moved fast—like arrows of gold shooting through the tall grass. My pack pony snorted and jerked back on the lead rope. However, the mare showed no fear, though she sidled around to face head-on those who came.

Both halted short at the very edge of the highway, panting from the effort that had brought them at such speed. I half expected now that one. or both, would launch into the air in a characteristic leap at prey. For I could now see they were feline, not as large as the cunning and formidable snow cats to be sure, but still big enough to cause some trouble if they did attack.

I studied them as they made no further move, to my astonishment. These might be kin-cousin to those cats living in the Dale keeps save they were much larger and of a uniform yellow-brown I had not seen before. Both of their heads, between the large eyes and on the upper breasts, showed distinct V marks.

Since they had stopped and now were settling in a seated position, I felt slightly foolish to be holding bared steel and thrust my sword back into its sheath. Their behavior was certainly not that of ordinary animals. I reminded myself once again to expect anything in the Waste. Also they were certainly not as formidable as—

“Do not be too sure of that!”

The cats had not made a sound since their initial squalls. Nor were those words sounds. They had formed in my head, and came as a clear answer to a thought I had held! In spite of my belief that the Waste could hold any surprise, I found it startling now to have my mind invaded by a coherent message—and it must have originated from one of the animals, now regarding me round-eyed.

“What do you want of me?” I strove to form that as a mind-question and then discovered it was far easier to ask it aloud.

“Nothing.” The reply was both clear and curt.

“Nothing? But you cried—you came …”

The smaller of the cats, a female, turned her head a fraction to look back over her shoulder at the slope down which she and her mate had just descended.

“We want nothing. Wait—you shall learn who does.”

Wait? For whom? That the cats might be allied with some other Waste dweller was not out of reason. I glanced at my wrist band. The metal was still warm; however, the flame I thought I had seen in play was no longer there. I was sure that I had not received a warning of evil to come, rather it had been another message—perhaps a recognition of another Power.

I slipped from the saddle and stretched. That saddle was not an easy perch for my heavier body. Both the mare and the pony watched the cats, but I detected no sign of fear such as my desert mounts had displayed at the coming of the Wererider.

“How long must I wait?” I asked after a moment.

Now the other cat also turned his head to look up-slope. I saw there a wavering of brush, as if someone, or something, was fighting a path through tough growth. A figure burst into the open, running and dodging among piles of stone that marked old ruins. From this distance it appeared human enough. Though that also could mean nothing. It was well known that many of the Old Ones were human in appearance, enough so that they could couple successfully with Dale folk and produce offspring such as myself. Was it not true that my mother’s clan had been rumored to have had such ancestry, and it was not only her sorcery that had warped my body, but also her blood?

The runner sped from the last fringe of taller growth and sprinted now through the grass that grew tall enough to brush those flashing legs knee high. Sun glinted on mail. But above that—a tangle of long hair was bunched into ragged braids flopping across slender shoulders. A woman!

Elys? But how … ? That first explanation went in a flash. This hair was not the black strands of the wise warrior-woman. It held the deep red-brown of autumn leaves in the high country. Only one had such hair—only—

I was running too, not aware of it until my boot snagged on a grass-hidden root and I nearly sprawled full-length upon the ground. Then I heard my own voice cry, as loud as the screams of those black birds of ill-omen.

“Joisan!”

Joisan

I SQUEEZED CLOSER TO THE OPENING IN THE WINDOW, LEANED AS FAR forward as I could to view the ribbon of white road that ran along the lowlands. From my vantage point, which was, of course, well removed, that highway appeared untouched by time. I expected to see riders—travelers along it. Save that, for the stretch I was able to view, it was bare of any traffic at all. Still the road itself was, in a manner, reassuring. If—or when—surely, it was when—I decided to leave this refuge and take up my journey again (though I had no idea in which direction I would go) that would be a guide.

Now I strove to study the slope descending to the plain across which that road so boldly ran. There were a number of upstanding outcrops of stone, which I believed marked other ruins, even more decayed by the action of time than that in which I stood. I wondered if this had been a fortress of greater extent than it first appeared. The narrow windows on this outer wall suggested that those who had built it might have had reason to fear some attack from the north. However, for me now, the road was more important than piles of old stone blocks.

I made the rounds of the three other sides of the tower, attempting to view more of the keep itself and its surroundings here on the upper ridge. On the courtyard side the vines had grown too thickly for me to break any peephole through. My attempts to do so brought shrill cries from the birds, a wild thrashing in the vines, so I left off such assault. To the east there was merely another drop—though this lay farther away. What lay below there showed a yellow patch, reminding me of the desert through which we had made our way into the Waste. To the west lay the long ridge, widening well out from the point on which the keep had been built. There were the remains of walled Fields, more shells of buildings, a portion of the orchard.

Sight of that brought back both hunger and thirst. I abandoned my exploration to seek out food and water. This morning, tracing the water from the spring for a short distance I came upon a stone walled pool. There I dared to slide out of mail and clothing, dipped myself, rubbing my body down with handfuls of grass to scrub me clean, then undertook to wash my hair which was still soil-clotted. Leaving it to hang free across my shoulders and wind-dry, I did such brushing and cleansing of my clothing as I could. The sun was caressingly warm on my bare body and I found myself humming, even as our keep maids had sung when they washed the linens along the water troughs.

I had drunk deeply. Now, pulling on, though I disliked their fustiness against my clean body, my breeches and jerkin, I tried to rebraid my hair, making sorry business of taming the still-damp strands. Even the bronze clip, which held the coils in place under my helm, was gone, and I tied it up as best I could with twisted bits of long, tough grass.

Then, my mail shirt slung in folds across my shoulder, I went hunting once more for the berry bushes. Only this time I had another find to chew on. There was a kind of water plant, the roots of which were crisp and sweet when washed clean. As I crunched away at those, I remembered—though it was dim—a part of a far different life, when such had been served in the summer at our high table in Ithdale. My aunt had also had a skillful hand in the making of sweets, and she had devised on her own a recipe for preserving these thin stalks, cut small, in a honey mixture for winter eating.

I looked down now at my berry-stained hands, at the mail, which lay in a coil of brilliant folds under the sun. Ithdale was so long ago, so far away, that my life there was more like the tale of a songsmith, nothing that had really happened to the Joisan who was here and now. Shrugging on the weight of mail, I went exploring farther into the orchard-garden. But I found no ripe tree fruit. There was a tangle of melon vines into which I dived eagerly and came up with two which were golden ready, small for lack of skillful cultivation—yet still to be prized. With those in hand I started back to the courtyard, which I now looked upon as my campsite.

There were furred things in the grass, which leaped or ran ahead of my passing, but I had no knife nor dart gun with which to hunt. In an odd way I could not bring myself to think of killing here—even for food. This must be a rich hunting ground for the cats—perhaps also for the bear—some of his kin were noted as relishing flesh as well as berries and such.

Juggling the melons I climbed over fallen stones and so entered the courtyard once more, planning to use the sharp edge of my belt buckle as a tool to slit the fruit. They might furnish both food and drink. The sun now beat so hot that my mail was a steadily irksome burden.

I had become so used to the loneliness of the keep since my awakening that I gave a start when I saw that both cats had returned, were lying lazily at their ease in the beam of a sun ray. The female licked at her paws, her eyes slitted against the light. Even as I came closer her mate rolled over, his paws in the air, wriggling his body back and forth against the warm stone as if he were relieving just such an itching as my own leather jerkin brought in a portion of my back that I could not reach.

Seeing them thus taking their ease I paused, feeling very much the intruder—an uninvited guest. The female blinked at me, took no other notice, but continued to curl her tongue about a paw. However, the male sat up and shook himself vigorously.

I stood there, melons in my hand, facing them both uncertainly. Surely this was the strangest confrontation that could occur even in this land. Then I rallied and found myself voicing the guest greeting of my own people. These were not animals—but much more …

“For the welcome of the gate”—I found myself speaking aloud, and my gratitude did actually stir—“my thanks. For the feasting on the board”—(though that was my own gleaning and whether the cats could be thought to have ownership over the garden was a point to be questioned, though I certainly would not do so)—“my pleasure and my good wishes. To the Lord of this roof, fair fortune.”

“Lord of this roof?” The repetition of my own words sprang into answer within my head. If such a manner of communication could express amusement that was what was plain to me now. “A pretty speech, woman of the Dales. So that is how you speak among your kind. Now let me but think a little … ah, yes. ‘To the Farer on far roads the welcome of this roof, and may fortune favor your wandering.’”

That was one version of the Dale welcome for a guest unknown personally to any lord. That this cat would quote the exact formal words was again startling. How did an inhabitant of the Waste learn our polite courtesy? However, the cat was continuing.

“You did well to listen to us—and remain here.” Now the light note had vanished from the mind-speech. Nor was I entirely surprised at the rest of what he said now.

“There has been a new stirring—”

When he added nothing to that, I moved forward to settle crosslegged on the heap of wilting grass that had been my bed (after all, he had given the guest greeting). Placing the melons on the stone before me (food was not my main interest now), I had a question ready.

“What manner of stirring? The Thas?” Since that or those had been the one menace I had met so far, my mind turned immediately in that direction. For a moment the fear that had been part of the dark and the stench awoke in me. My imagination painted a picture of tumbling walls (even such as these which had so long withstood the hammering of time), the ancient keep caught in a churning of the earth, all of it and us, too, sucked under.

“Perhaps Thas, among others.” The cat did not shrug as might a man, but some inflection of his reply signaled such a gesture. “No, not as you think now—here. Old as are the protection spells laid on Carfallin they still hold, and shall for perhaps many seasons yet. However, last night had its riders, its searchers, its seekers. Things are awake, watching, to prowl and sniff and hunt. Though as yet they are not sure of what they seek or how the hunt will begin.”

“You believe that my coming has done this? But if the Thas had already burrowed their underground ways into the land—that was surely done well before my arrival,” I protested. I deemed it certainly unfair to lay upon me the rousing up of Dark Forces, when I had not called on any Power except to save my own life. Nor had I used it, save only in the battle in the darkness, against any inhabitant of the Waste.

The Thas had fled the light, yes but I did not think that they had suffered any real hurt from its beams. No—I refused to have such burden as this laid upon me.

However, even as a man might do, this time the cat shook his sleek head from side to side.

“Even with that”—a lift of his muzzle indicated the gryphon lying on my breast—“some stir now which could not be called into action by such a talisman alone. Forces are on the move, we do not know why—as yet. It is only that all that move are of the Dark. Long ago boundaries were set, locks were made, spells were cast. Within stated ways Light and Dark could come and I go, always apart. Now there is a straining of those containing spells, a touch here, a thrust there—a testing to see if they still hold. The reason for this … who can tell?”

“The Dales have been invaded.” I seized upon that one fact—though why the inhabitants of the Waste should take that into account I did not understand. There was no doubt that they had defenses that no such invaders could pierce. They need only call upon perhaps the least of these, then return safely thereafter to their old ways of life. “I know nothing of how the war there goes now, save that the fighting so far has not favored my people. The Hounds of Alizon range far, they have more men, better weapons. Could this war now have lapped into your country?”

The female curled a scornful lip. “Men only—they hold or call no Power. Our land would not stir awake for the likes of them! The least of us could send them fleeing at will, or kill without much effort. No, what stirs is rooted in the past, has been long asleep, now it awakens. Those who rouse are not yet fully awake, or you and every living thing, between the Mountains of Arvon and the sea would know it. However, they turn and move in their sleep, and their enfolding dreams have come to an end. It may well be that the cycle of slumber has finished. We—those of our kind—never knew the appointed time of awakening. Such will cause a mighty change …”

She gave a last lick to her paw before folding it under her.

“It will not be well to be one such as you if and when the day of true awakening comes,” she commented (with something of relish, I thought resentfully). “Unless, of course, you can learn a bit—and have not only courage, but also the will to survive.”

I refused to give any ground to her. Though I had no intention of claiming any talent I did not possess, still I looked at her straightly as I answered.

“We all must learn many things during our lifetimes. If there is that which I must do—then I am ready to do it.” (I thought of my plea to Elys and of how that had come to nothing in truth because the Thas trap had put an end to it. On the other hand I had learned through that. I remembered only too easily the burden of concentrating my will on the gryphon.) “As for courage and will—we cannot measure how much of each lies within us, we can only trust that there will be sufficient to carry through trials which may lie ahead.”

I had suddenly a flash memory of my aunt—had that phrase sounded as if said in her very voice? A little so, I thought. Once the pronouncements of Dame Math had been the laws of the world to me. I brushed back the hair that I could only secure in such an untidy fashion and perhaps I sighed.

“There is another of your blood coming.” The male broke through the silence that had fallen upon us. “He may even be the one you have sought. This one, at least, dares to ride the white road. No rune or spell set there has turned him back, though these forbade the way to others in his company. He comes now with one purpose in his mind—or so he believes. I think that he is to be fitted to another.”

The melons rolled away as I got to my feet in an instant.

“Kerovan! But how do you know?” Then I had second thoughts. There could well be others of human kind in this land—scavengers, outlaws and the like. I could not count that this was indeed Kerovan.

My demand was met by a second silence. I waited for a painful moment or two, then was forced to accept the fact that these two furred ones would keep their own council. To strive to force any more information out of them, when they did not choose to give it, would lessen me in their opinion. It is very odd to feel that one is an impulsive child in the sight of such as these. My first reaction was anger. Still, I suspected that anger itself, within the bonds of the Waste, might be a most dangerous emotion unless controlled and used only at one’s desire, as a weapon—a feat I was certain I could not accomplish. Though the control part—that I must learn.

If this promised traveler was Kerovan on his way here, what mattered most was that I be prepared to meet him—to withstand his anger. If, indeed, he felt enough within that shell he had built about him to know hot human anger any longer. I must think carefully, plan alternate moves, each depending upon his attitude when we met. That we must resolve our difficulties—that was far more important to me now than any waking sleepers or stirring of long-dormant forces in the Waste.

I sat down on my heap of grass and worked to enwrap my eagerness, control a heart that had begun to beat faster, to appear as outwardly serene as the cats. Reaching for the nearest melon, I began the awkward business of sawing away at its rind with the sharpest edge of the belt buckle, thinking while I worked that it would be well when I had eaten this piece of fruit (not because I now really wanted or needed it, but because the very act of leisurely feasting would be the beginning of my prized control) that I search the rest of the ruins where I had not ventured earlier. There might just be in that supposedly barren interior something I could use as a weapon.

The melon was just at the proper stage of ripeness and I did feast on its rosy, juicy interior, inelegantly, having to spit out seeds into my hand and make a small heap of them to one side. Shining black they were. When i had been very small I had been given a coarse needle and a length of stout linen thread and had spent the whole of an absorbed morning making myself a brave necklace of just such seeds, which Harta the cook had saved for me.

Harta—she had not been one of those who had come together with us in the hills after the escape from Ithdale. So many had been lost! I wondered if some intelligence somewhere decided who would win through, who would never be seen again—or were their lives a blind gamble of fate?

I went to wash my face and hands at the spring, wipe them on sunwarmed grass, paying no attention—outwardly—to the cats who had apparently both gone to sleep in the sun. With a little more confidence than I had had to stiffen me during my first visit to the keep, I once more entered the great hall with those strange cat-shaped benches. This time I did not head for the corner tower—rather I took the other direction.

There, in the deepest gloom of this chamber, I found a huge fireplace, darkened on hearth and up the cavern of an interior with the signs of smoke and soot. Its presence suggested that the builders here had been at least human enough to need heat in the chill of winter and that the Waste was no more hospitable at that season than the seaward-reaching Dales.

On the wide and heavy overmantel, where a lord of the Dales would have had carven the badge of his house, there was a symbol deep wrought—one I had seen before. It was of the circular body with widespread wings. Save that here it was dull and time-stained, hardly to be distinguished in the poor light. On either side of it was set, on guard, the figure of a cat.

There were drifts of dried leaves, powdering into dust, on the hearth, but any remains of a welcoming fire long gone. I remained there for a moment, then let my eyes range about the room, trying to imagine how it had once been—who had held high feast days here, if such were known to these people who had drawn their stools and chairs closer to the flames in winter. What stories had their songsmiths wrought to keep their minds encased in wonder? Had they had songsmiths to take their heroes’ acts and make them live in song and tale?

I raised my hand high, striving to touch the symbol, and discovered that even when I stood on tiptoe it was still above my reach. At first I had thought it near invisible against the dull stone in which it was carved. Now … I blinked, rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes. The cats … they were far more easy to study—there was a glint of fire in their wide-open, staring eyes.

Was it some illusion of the dusk caught within this room, or could it be that one of those heads was slightly larger, heavier of jowl, than the other? I looked from left to right and back again, began to believe that my guess was correct. The cat heads were not in duplicate, but individual. Also I believed I had seen them before, mounted on living, breathing bodies, lying at sleepy ease out in the courtyard. Some worker in stone long ago had caught both male and female; the same animals? Even with all the tricks and talents of the Waste I could hardly accept that the two I saw outside had been those whose portraits were sculptured here. Time might stretch long for the Old Ones (and were any Old Ones animals?), but surely not to that extent. If these were not the portraits of the same cats, they must be distant forefather and foremother and the strain had held true.

I stepped into the cavernous mouth of the fireplace, kicking at the leaves, hoping against hope to turn up some piece of the metal, the fire dogs that had once supported the burning wood, some other fragment that would be promising. There was nothing left.

To my right a doorway in the inner wall led to whatever survived at the other end of the building. Deserting the fireplace with its knowing guard cats, I passed through that. The hall beyond was wide enough to be a gallery and here lay the first signs of furnishing I had seen, other than the stone cat benches. All I wanted!

With a cry, I sped forward, to snatch at the black-tarnished hilt of a sword. Only to find that what I held when I pulled it from out the litter on the floor was a jagged stub. I tried it against one finger, the metal flaked away thinly. There were other weapons lying along the wall as if they had fallen from stone pegs, which were still set there. Nothing had survived that could be used. At last in my disappointment I sent the stuff flying, with a kick that shattered it even more into a dust of rust.

There was another square room beyond, a second stair like unto the one I had found in the outlook tower. I judged that this must serve the second tower I had noted earlier—the one that supported a living tree in place of the lord’s banner. The steps appeared secure enough, as long as one crowded against the wall on the left, so I climbed.

On the second floor there was another doorway, as well as the continuation of the steps leading upward, and I judged that the doorless opening gave upon rooms that must have been built above the arms gallery. I took that way now in turn.

Another hall here but a very much narrower one, hardly more than a passage where perhaps two of my own girth could walk abreast, and, to my left, three doorways.

There had been doors here also—two of them, like the one in the courtyard, showed rotted bits of wood, the fallen debris, that had once formed barriers. But the one in the middle …

The wood of that looked firm and whole. I could detect no crack brought about by time, no skim of rust upon the metal fittings. There was a locking bar across it—from the outside! Had I come across such precaution on the lower floor, or in whatever cellars might be found in this place (I had no desire to go prying into such as those), I would have said this was a prison. It was perhaps a “safe” chamber such as some lords had for the protection of their more valuable belongings when they were from home, save that the bar lacked any of the ponderous locking devices usually in use on such.

I went forward very slowly to touch the wood above that bar, half expecting to have it crumble. Against the pressure of my hand as I applied more strength, it had a very solid feeling. There was no one to forbid me to draw that bar, and the shaft itself looked as if it lay lightly in the two loops through which it rested. At last, after some hesitation (I must not surrender to any fear), I knew I had to learn why one door in all the deep remained in the same condition it must have been when the building was at its most complete, the bar still sturdy, while elsewhere armor and weapons flaked away to the touch. There are many legends of how curiosity brought into peril those of the Dales who were unable to resist mysteries left by the Old Ones. At that moment I could understand the need that had driven those unfortunates, for I was under just such a compulsion to draw the bar that I could no longer fight it. Draw I did.

Perhaps it was the bar alone that, by some trick of its makers, had kept the door intact. For, as I pulled it to one side, and the door itself began to swing slowly toward me, cracks appeared in its surface, ran with a speed I could follow by my eyes, over the wood. There was a grating, a puff of stale air blown outward. The door slipped drunkenly on one hinge as the other snapped with sound sharp enough to make me start.

Half open, the door was fast falling into the same sorry condition as its two neighbors to the right and left. Pieces of the wood broke, crumbled in dusty puffs as they hit the stone pavement.

I shrank as that disintegration began, but now that it appeared to cease, with a last clatter, as the bar finally fell and snapped in two, I made myself edge forward to look into the room beyond.

I had only a moment or so to see—to look upon what had been sealed from time until I rashly had let in the years, and age itself wrecked, with fury, whatever the spell (I was sure I had broken a spell) had protected.

This room had not been bare. There were tapestries on the wall, and, though I saw their splendor only for two or three of the breaths I had drawn in wonder, they were so rich I could not believe that any human hand or hands had been able to stitch such. There was a bed, with a tall canopy, the posts of which were seated cats, each taller than myself. On the bed lay rich coverings of a tawny yellow like the fur of the cats, which grayed into ash brown, then were gone, as were the coverings on the floor. A table had stood against one wall and on it a mirror, its carved frame topped by a cat’s head. On that table were boxes—whose richness I had very little time to see, other things gone fast to dust before I could identify them.

Were there chairs, stools, a tall, upright wardrobe chest such as might hold gowns any keep lady would find herself hot with desire even to hold? I am sure there were. I am certain I can remember having a hasty glimpse of such. I had not stepped across the threshold; I only stood and watched a glory that made me ache for its beauty become suddenly nothing. Windows were revealed now as the curtains that had been drawn across them withered away far faster even than a delicate flower can wither if it is left in the full light of the sun, having been idly plucked for no real purpose.

The light from those windows streamed in (there appeared to be no curtaining vine outside here). In its beams, the dust motes dance a thousand fold. Then … there was nothing—just nothing at all …

No, that was not true.

In the midst of one of those shining panels of sunlight there was a gleam, something that appeared to catch the sun and then reflect it forth again, not in a hard glitter but in a soft glow. I hesitated to cross that chamber. Only, just as I had been unable to resist opening the spell-locked door, so I could not now stop myself.

The dust was very thick. I coughed, waved my hands before my face, strove to clear the air that I might breathe long enough to reach what lay in the mote-clogged sunbeam. When my boot toe near-nudged it, I stooped to pick up a ring.

Unlike the rest of the metal in the room it had not flaked into nothingness. The band felt as firm as if it had been fashioned only yesterday. But the setting was unlike any stone I had ever seen in my life. We of the Dales are poor in precious things. We have a little gold, washed out of streams, we have amber, which is greatly prized. A few of the very wealthy lords may have for their wearing at high feast days some colored gems from overseas. But those are mainly small, polished but uncut. I held now something far different from those.

The stone (if stone it was) was near the size of my thumb, though the hoop which held it was small, clearly meant for a woman’s wearing. This gem or stone had not been cut, nor did it need to be polished. For it had been fashioned by some freakish twist of nature herself into the semblance of a cat’s head and the surface was neither pink, nor yellow, but a fusing of the two with an iridescent cast to the surface, over which rainbow lights slipped as I turned it this way and that. I slipped the band over my finger. It was as if it clung there, made for no other’s wearing—also it felt as if it were in its rightful place at long last.

Moving closer to the window I turned my hand this way and that, marveling at such a thing showing against the brownness of my skin where the scratches of berry briars drew many rough lines. I did not know what it was but—it was mine! I was sure of that as if the ring had been slipped solemnly on that finger in some formal gifting. Once more I turned it again for the sun to catch it fair, then I heard …

A yowling arose, so sharp and clear it could have come from immediately below my window. I was looking out, down the slope toward the road. Both the cats were leaping from stone to stone, winding about bushes, disappearing, as they made their way through the jumble of ruins and stone that lay there below.

Beyond … there was a rider on the road! A rider! I saw sun flare in bluish gleam, small and far away—a mailed rider. He whom the cats had said would come? Kerovan?

Forgetting everything but what had drawn me for so many days, I turned and ran, dust rising up above me in a cloud that set me choking and gasping, but still I ran. I must know who rode the white highway. I could guess, I could hope—but I must know!

Kerovan

THAT JOISAN WAS HERE BESIDE THE WHITE HIGHWAY OF THE OLD ones—not trapped in dark and danger—was the only thought that filled my mind. Then she was in my arms, and I held her with such a grip as would keep her safe against the worst the Dark might send against us—so would I keep her as long as my strength lasted.

She was crying, her face wet with tears, as her hands closed on my shoulders in a grasp I could feel even through my mail. I forgot all the thoughts that had ridden me through long hard days, as i bent my head to find her lips, tasting the salt of her tears. A fire arose and raged through me as we so clung, forgetting all else but each other.

Only such moments cannot last. I loosed her a little, remembering who I was and why this great joy might not continue for me. This was a time when once more I must don inner armor, not for my protection, but hers.

If my hold loosened, hers did not. She only pushed back a fraction so that she might look directly into my face as her sobs came as ragged and uneven breaths.

“Kerovan—truly Kerovan …” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.

Kerovan—my name completed the breaking of the spell. I moved to put her away from me but she would not let me. Rather she shook her head from side to side as might a child who refuses to give up something upon which she has set her heart’s desire.

“No, you shall not leave me again! You were here—now you try to go—but you shall not!”

I was here? What did she mean? Then the warmth still consuming me made that plain. The husk that had been Kerovan now held life. All my good intentions, my knowing this was wrong, that I was tainted—they were threatened by that warmth, by her words …

Setting my teeth I raised my hands to her wrists. By main strength I must break her hold, push her away from me. Still she shook her head. Now she also writhed in my hold, fought me as if she had been one of the tawny cats.

“No!” Her denial arose louder. “Do you not understand? You shall never be free of me—you cannot. We—we must be—”

Her voice faltered. I do not know what expression my face wore, but hers became one of growing despair. Then her shoulders slumped, her hands went limp in my grasp. It was she who edged away.

“Let me go,” she said in a low voice. “I shall not trouble you so again. I thought that …” Her voice trailed off; she raised one hand to smear it across her cheeks. Then she flung back her head, tossing her disordered hair out of her eyes, away from her face.

I could not answer, it took all my resolution to curb the rebellious desire within me. I could only stand—alone. Her chin lifted, strength of purpose shone from her eyes. There was that in her carriage, her voice—such will and self-confidence—which would provide a safeguard as strong as the armor and leather she wore.

“I have no pride,” she said, even when every inch of her taut, straight body, proclaimed her right to that. “I listen to your voice saying, ‘You are not my lady, I have no wish to be your lord’—but I cannot accept those words as a woman should. So I come after you because—only with you, Kerovan, am I a person in whom I can believe. Therefore, if you deny me again, and ride on for whatever mission Imgry has set you—and how is it that such as he dares say ‘do this and do that’ to you—I shall follow. Even if you are sworn to his service.”

As she studied me through slightly narrowed eyes, I could not even yet find the power of tongue to answer her. If I could not command my inner self, how then could I man my defenses against her? Not with this wild mutiny growing within me.

I shook my head, glad in a small way to be able to answer a lesser question.

“I swore no oath.” I found those words easily enough. “I came at my own will. Had it not been my choice I would not have ridden forth.”

Perhaps then, because I was so glad to find an excuse not to meet her personal challenge. I spoke of my mission—of what Imgry had learned about Alizon’s search for a “power.”

To my relief she listened with growing interest.

“And what success have you had in marshalling any of the Waste?”

I told her of the Wereriders.

“So—and now whom do you seek?” she asked.

I drew a ragged breath and shook my head. Instead I told her of my return to my camp, of the devastation I found there. At my mention of Elys and Jervon, she put out her hands, catching at my arm.

“Then they live—were left above ground! I thought—I hoped—that might be so.”

I had a question of my own. “Where were you?”

She moved back a little, her hands busy now with her hair. For the first time I became aware of a rising wind, the fact that the sun had gone behind clouds. She frowned at the sky.

“There is a storm coming. You can feel it in the air. Up there”—she pointed to the rough, steep slope—“there is shelter—come!”

I could find no reason to refuse. Leading the mare and the pony. I followed her. For the first time I remembered the cats. There was no sign of them now.

The ascent was not an easy one, and above the clouds grew ever thicker and darker. As we rounded the side of a wall and entered into a courtyard the first drops of rain began to fall. Lashes of lightning cracked across the sky to the west. The roll of thunder was heavier than the nimble of Alizon war machines crowding through the throat of some narrow dale.

I loosed the pack pony and the mare from their burdens, Joisan stooped to catch up a share of the bags and packs, helping to draw these into a dark chilly hall. She caught at a smaller pack from the pony.

“Elys’s thought—I am glad of this. But where is she? And Jervon? Did you send them away—or did they deem me dead and …”

“It was when we came to that road. Only this morning she said that they would travel no farther—for some reason that was forbidden. A Wisewoman who carries a sword is a thing I had never heard of. She cannot be of the Dales—”

“If it were meant that they should not come, she would know, of course. No, she is not of the Dales—nor the Waste either—her parents came from a wreck on the coast. And, though she was born here, her blood is strange.”

Gloom of near-night darkness came quickly with the rush of rain outside. Her face was only a blur to me.

“She has power,” Joisan was continuing. “And Jervon”—for a moment she paused, then continued in an even tone—“he accepts her for what she is. He is not the less in her eyes, nor she the greater in his. They are two halves well-fitted together to form something stronger than either, This may not happen easy or often, but when it does … Ah. then it is as if both have found a treasure—a treasure beyond dreams of other men!”

There was a ring of something close to defiance in her tone. I knew I must not confront her again on this subject, which lay heavy in both our minds. Instead I asked once more what had happened after the earth swallowed her.

So I heard the strange tale of her being caught in thick dark and hunted through that dark by the Thas. Also of how the gryphon had been her salvation.

“I do not know just how it was awakened to my aid. Somehow the strength of my will, my need, brought it to life. It was the light that showed me the door into a place—a very strange place.”

She spoke then of a chamber wherein lay a maze of low walls, of how she had won to the center of that having perceived a pattern. In the middle she had taken refuge and fallen asleep—or into the web of another sorcery—and had awakened outside this keep.

“There was fruit and water here …” Before I could move she dashed out again into the courtyard, returned near as swiftly, laughing and shaking raindrops from her hair, bringing with her a melon, which she dumped on the floor between us.

“Give me your knife. Mine—all my weapons—were taken from me in the dark.” Joisan plucked my knife from the belt sheath to slash open the melon. She pressed half of it into my hands.

The fruit was sweet, filled with juice—better than I could ever remember eating—bringing comfort to my mouth and throat. I produced in turn a cake of journey bread which we also shared—Joisan having gone to wash her hands in the fall of water beyond the door, shaking them as dry as she could.

“There are more of these—and berries, water plants—I did not go hungry once I reached here.”

“And the cats?”

Joisan had settled herself cross-legged beside me, well within touching distance, only her hands lay loosely together on one knee. She made no move to reach out to me.

“Yes, the cats. You may not believe this, Kerovan, but those two are not animals as we know them. They understand one’s thoughts and speech and mind-speak in return. There is—was, for I have not seen him since my first coming—also a small bear who can do likewise. The cats told me to wait, that one was coming. I climbed the tower and saw the road. But I wonder …” I saw her lift one hand now and regard it closely. Then she held out that hand to me and asked a question.

“Kerovan, you have been much more up and down the Dales than I. Have you seen the like of this before?”

I could see, even through the storm gloom, that there was a ring on one finger of the hand she had raised. Though I did not want—feared now—any touch contact with her, I did take that hand in mine and brought it closer that I might see the ring.

The stone was an irregularly shaped gem of some kind. And, oddly enough, once I had taken her hand in mine it became more visible, so that I could see the hue of the stone (if stone it truly was). It was unlike any color I had seen—both rose and yellow—the colors melting into one another.

“Kerovan!”

I did not need that alerting cry of my name. I had taken her hand in my right one. On my wrist, the band half-hidden by the drooping of the mail shirt was bright and clear, shining so that its light reached the strange ring and seemed to feed the gem. Thus its own glow grew the greater.

Joisan freed herself from the hold I had unintentionally tightened, brought her hand and the ring up breast high so that the gem near-touched the crystal gryphon. But there was no reaction from that talisman and Power-holder.

She put up the fingers of her other hand as if she would catch at the gem-set hoop, tear it off, and then she stopped.

“It contains no harm, I think …” she said slowly. “Perhaps you cannot see it clearly. But the stone itself is shaped in the form of a cat’s head, though it was not cut so by men. The cats—”

“You are sure they are real?”

“Not hallucinations? You saw them for yourself—they are as real as this!” She held out her hand once again. “Did you believe them illusions when they stopped you on the road?”

“No.” I was sure—whatever those two beasts might be, whomever they might serve (if servants they were)—I was certain they were real. I had been led to this place for a purpose even as Elys had suggested. I wanted to banish that conclusion, but I could not.

“Where did you gel that?”

She told me of her explorations of the ruined keep in which we now sheltered, of a barred door—barred on the outside—where within until she had, as she said, “let the years in,” there had existed a reminder of the past in furnishings. And of how all had vanished into dust before her eyes, leaving only the ring in a pool of sunlight.

It was such a tale as a songsmith might devise, but I believed every word of it.

“I have never seen its like …” I began slowly. “This”—I fingered the wrist band—“suggests it has some tie with Power.”

“There are many things in the Waste—is that not what our legends always say? Somehow I think that this was meant—” She glanced at me—or at least she turned her head a fraction in my direction though it was too dark to see her expression. “Was meant,” she repeated, “to be found when the door was opened. But why such a spell was ever laid and its meaning …”

“It is not of the Dark.”

“I know,” she agreed simply, her hand once more caressing the gryphon at her breast. “This would have warned me. It is very beautiful—and strange—and the way that it came … I feel it is a gift.”

There was a hint of defiance in her tone as if she believed that I would urge her to throw the ring from her. But that was not in my thoughts. There had been so little of beauty for Joisan since she and her people had fled Ithdale—and perhaps even during the years before. I had been able to give her no bride gift except the gryphon—and that too had come by chance out of the Waste. I wished for a moment of sorrow that the ring had been my gift, also—a thing for her to cherish.

I had searched blindly for Joisan and I had found her—no thanks to any real effort of my own. Such fortune was only barely possible. That I had been helped, or guided, in the right direction by some other intelligence—that explanation seemed to me a little more credible. That was a bitter conclusion and one I did not want to accept. I … perhaps we … were caught up in—in whose web … and why?

That we must remain together from now on I must also probably accept, for I was now without any guide to take us out of the Waste and I could not let her go alone—in fact I knew she would not.

Which meant I must speedily regain my inner armor, make myself believe that any close feeling between us was wrong, that if I yielded now—the easy choice—it would be worse for her.

I remained wary of even the smallest hint of surrender to that other self. I had fought so hard to contain my desires, my longings. Even now that struggle rose anew in me and I ached throughout my body for Joisan to come into my arms once more.

By her own efforts, and with no help from me, she had escaped worse danger than I had faced for a long time. I did not want to think ahead—that we two might be led into new perils. As my thoughts so twisted and curled, and I forced them into hard conclusions, she spoke again.

“This is not a place of peace, such as one finds even in the Dales. I was in one of those once, Kerovan—the night Toross brought me out of the invaders’ hands at the taking of Ithdale. That was a place of wonder … and he died there. So I have always known in my heart that he rests easy. This does not hold anything except many years of time’s dust. Still we are safe here—as the cats promised. Do you not also feel that is so?”

Now her ringed hand reached, found mine. I could not help myself, but locked fingers with hers. This was Joisan, she was here with me—safe—while outside the storm rolled on and did not reach us. I felt nothing of old Power stirring here. In spite of her story of the long ensorcelled room, there was only a warmth that came from the two of us and was not born of any spell.

During that night, as Joisan and I shared shelter in the ruined keep, I dreamed again—as strong a dream as the one that had shown me the sleeper days earlier. But this was not a dream filled with any light for me to see by—rather total dark (or else I was blind)—for I could perceive nothing. I only felt—or heard.

“You labor to no purpose.” A voice cut through that dark, the arrogance in it as sharp as any blow. “Our difference was settled long ago.”

“Difference?” The wry amusement which colored that answer was plain. Though the first voice had been heavy with Power, this second speaker was not impressed. “That is an odd way to describe what passed between us then, Galkur.”

I felt now a welling of anger warming fast to red rage, lapping about me in that sightless place as if to crisp me into ashes. The emotion swelled high—then vanished. I sensed that the being exuding that raw anger had it under control now, behind a wall that could not yield to any surprise assault.

“You play with words.” This time he—or it—sounded possessed by icy contempt—or was that would-be contempt?

I discovered then that, in some way strange to me, I was not listening entirely to words, rather striving to weigh emotions—for those were of the greater importance here.

“I play with nothing,” came again that lighter, amused voice, unruffled, betraying no more than surface interest in their exchange. “Most of all—not with men. They are very imperfect tools at the best. Have you not yet learned that, Galkur?”

“You name names!” The first voice snarled—like the snow cat I had seen Herrel become. Still I knew that these were not Weres, nor were they men.

“Why not? Do you now stoop to that small belief of men, that a name gives one Power over another? Ha, Galkur, I would not have believed you so diminished, even though the years have spun you far from what you were.”

“Time has spun me nowhere!” Once more the heat of fury blazed, died, as the speaker rapidly checked it. “I am still what I have always been—and shall continue to be!”

“Now that interests me, Galkur.” The second voice appeared to enjoy repeating the name. “What you are, and what you will continue to be, a statement you appear to take pride in making. What were you on the night when a certain female of the Dales used her puny talent to summon you? That plan was carefully thought out, guarded well, or so she believed. You were to pour yourself into her own lord, as water can be poured into a cup. Through him you would father the son he craved, while she saw (very poorly and ineptly, I must say) an eventual use for such a child, to her own purposes. You were never a fool, Galkur. Could you not foresee that a spell spun by such a one was not strong enough to hold even a fraction of Power, Dark or Light? Was a need for corporal life once more so strong in you? Having so poorly wrought, do you still say now that you are as you once were?”

A note of pity in that—enough to sting. Perhaps not real pity. I thought, rather a shadow of that, rooted in contempt.

“So,” the second voice continued, “you willingly lent yourself (or tried to do so) to the fumbling incantations of a female whose pride and arrogance, among her own kind, were almost as great as yours have always been. And what came of it?”

There was no intelligible reply, but the control the other held broke. I heard a mighty cry, felt the blast of the smothering, fiery fury of his rage.

“You failed. You, Galkur, who in the past moved hills about as a player moves a counter on a game board—you could not mend a faulty spell. So what you deemed, in your pride, to be a small act became instead a large defeat. That game you began is not yet played out. Do you suppose that the sleeper does not sense what you move to do now? That you think once more to work through men to achieve your ends? He shall wake, and rest assured you shall not relish meeting him a second time, Galkur. Can you not understand? It was not his full essence that entered into the coupling, which was to serve you. Taking your place in that conception drew upon only a fraction of his Power. He did not even stir in his slumber as he launched a single shaft of will to defeat your plan.

“The Daleslord had his son, a little strange to be sure. But, when one petitions aid from our kind, there is apt to be a change in mind or body, which always discloses such bargain. Your female knew from the birth hour that what she had brought forth was not of her calling. She paid for that, did she not, Galkur? Now you shall have to reckon with the sleeper, since this time I think he will do more than just dream another life into being. You have meddled, and for that you must face the consequences. So do not look to your new pieces to be any more potent that that other was.”

Once more the surge of anger scorched me with flames of hate.

“Our roads do not meet. What lies on mine you cannot begin to understand.”

“I do not think that you understand either, Galkur. You were always too impulsive for your own good.”

That calm second voice. I listened more closely, not only to catch the words, but for something else … Memory? I had heard it before, of that I was certain. There had been a ridge top—a man in gray who gave me a horse … A man whose eyes were so piercing that I felt them strike deep into my mind, read there every thought, good or ill, that I had ever harbored.

Neevor! He had said that that was his name for some people—he had—

Joisan—she had seen him, too. He had promised her—promised her—as I tried to catch that other shred of memory, I was suddenly aware of a new sensation. Hidden in the dark, as I was, with only those two voices to assure me I was not alone—when I had thought of Neevor there had come a change. They were now aware of—me!

“Sasssss!”

The dark broke with a lightning swift strike of light, so intense my sight was seared and a new dark enclosed me. I hung, I felt, in empty air, unsupported over a vast gulf into which I would drop—to fall on and on forever and ever! Fear tasted bitter in my mouth, I swayed back and forth in the midst of a vast whirlpool of force that struggled within itself—with me as the prize.

There was nothing I could do for my safety. I was helpless, at the mercy of whichever portion of those battled, intertwined powers won. In the meantime I endured such terror as I had never known. For if I hurtled into that gulf I knew well that all that I was—Kerovan—would be gone, without hope—an extinction worse than physical death.

Then …

As if a loop of cord I could not see shot through the dark to settle about me, I was aware of a firm support that drew me from where Power still strove with Power. The dark was no less at first. Then, far down below (though not in the gulf, that was safely behind me now) there came a glimmer. Weak with the aftermath of terror I hung in the embrace of this new force, watching that light grow larger and stronger.

Once more I was drawn into the hall of many pillars. This time I was very near the dais. That which had sustained and brought me here ebbed away.

I looked down at the body of the Sleeper. What might have been grotesque by human standards was, I now perceived, glory and power. I felt no shrinking. In this sleeper was embodied grace and majesty no human lord could aspire to.

Even as I stood there, still weak from my ordeal above that evil gulf of dark, I saw the eyelids twitch, arise slowly. I looked downward and our gaze locked …

Then—I could not remember! I could not remember! It became an ever-increasing ache, for my dream broke at that instant. There was left a need, a strong need, for me to learn—Learn what? Even that I did not understand, save that I was the less because I was not strong enough to hold and remember as I should have done.

I awoke into day and the ruined keep, with Joisan watching me—deep concern on her face. I did not want this—I wanted to be back there—to know …

Joisan—the desolation that had filled me when I thought she had been fatally caught in one of the evil traps of this land—the great burst of liberating joy that had been mine only yesterday as she had come running into my arms and I knew not only that she was safe, but was where I could hold her …

Where had those feelings now gone? They might stir feebly still—somewhere. I think that they did, now so hidden and overridden by a drive possessing me that I wished for nothing more than to have her gone.

So I actually urged her to go, out of my tormenting thirst for this other quest. Though I knew, even as I spoke, that not only would her determination keep her with me, but if she had chosen to return to the Dales I would be constricted to see her out of the Waste and into safety and I could not have forced myself to take the time for such a journey. This land held me now. I was sure I would never be free of its witchery—would be less than the half-man I already was if I attempted to leave it.

As we rode out of the keep, found our way down again to the highway, I could force no words, make no effort to explain. She must have thought me deranged—or ensorcelled. I was aware now and then that she was watching me with a frown of deep concern, that she made an effort to keep close beside me.

But Joisan was only a shadow now, moving through a shadow world. What was real were those two voices in the dark—Neevor and Galkur. That the latter was one of the to-be-dreaded Dark Lords I had no doubt at all. Then—the sleeper … What had I seen when his eyes opened and sought mine? What tie lay between us? A loose one, perhaps, but one that would tighten—must tighten—of that I was convinced.

We rode through the morning and there were no words between us—at least I remember none. Then we camped at the edge of a great cut the Old Ones had slashed through the heights so that their road of many symbols and signs remained smooth and level. I sensed, even on the safety of that starred ground, that there was peril nearby, closing in. It was true—the enemy I did not know was making his first move.

Joisan

WHAT I DESIRED MOST OF MY LORD WAS THAT HE UNDERSTAND ME. Understanding comes from within, it cannot be poured from another source. His greeting to me had been far warmer than I had dared to hope—even though he as speedily withdrew from the embrace. I would not make demands on him—I must approach him as warily as a scout spying on an enemy camp.

Rain curtained the keep when we reached it, making of Kerovan only a shadow among other shadows. I wished for light that I might see him better, but there was not even a fire. Because I must hear his voice I urged him to the telling of his adventure—of his meeting with the Wereriders.

The idea of shape-shifting was not new. We of the Dales knew from childhood strange legends and scraps of lore. Still one could never be sure such tales were true. This was the first time I heard one with a core of hard fact.

“They must be masters of illusion,” I ventured after he told me of a stallion who had reared behind the high lord’s table, a snow cat crouched snarling beside him. Illusions were the principal weapons of the Old Ones when dealing with men.

”I do not think so. Though they go armed and armoured, still their greatest weapon is their change. Even were that an illusion, it is a more potent one than I have ever heard tell of—enough to rock any man.”

“Do you think they will ride to join with the Dales?”

“I do not know. If they do, it will be the result of some bargain. They know that trouble is also rising in the Waste and they may fear battle nearer home. They did not like my story of the Thas—those creatures of the underground.

“lmgry is a planner of battles, a builder of armies—that is true. I think it is also true that he has learned those from overseas came not just to harry the Dales. What they seek is a thing we do not yet understand.”

“Some Power.” I nodded in agreement. “Also a Dark one, for the invaders, showing themselves to be what they are, could not treat with the Light.” I felt my upper lip tighten as if to lift in a cat’s snarl.

The cats! With the rain without they must have taken refuge somewhere but not with us. Where were they, I wondered fleetingly.

“A Dark Power,” Kerovan mused. “Could such a Power sense that it was being sought, gather in anticipation its own servants such as the Thas?”

“To what purpose? Any Dark Power would be to the Hounds as a Dale’s lord to the outlaws,” I pointed out. “The invaders would soon discover that the evocation of the forbidden must make them slaves under such a master as they could not dream of—”

“Dream.” Again he spoke as if for his own hearing. “Yes—a dream—”

“What kind of a dream?”

That he spoke of something important to him, I sensed. I wanted to know, I needed so much to know, all I could of him, his ways, his thoughts, even his dreams. This need was a rising surge of desire in me. I had to use all my control to contain and subdue it lest I break out with a myriad questions and he turn from me again with even more coldness than he had shown. For until he opened gates, I could not enter—nor could I dare to try and force them.

“Just a dream.” Now it was plain that he spoke to me in firm refusal to let me share some important part of his life. Instead he spoke swiftly, as if he would push all references to this from both my mind and his, asking of me an account of my own adventures.

I wished again for light—that I could see his face, read any emotion that might show there. Talking so in the dark was like lying under a hindering blindness.

We spoke also of Elys and Jervon whose escape from the Thas still lightened my inner gloom. However, I longed so much to ask my lord if he had noted how well they fared together—that they were two whom the Dales would say could not be joined in harmony yet still they were. Only that was another subject I knew, instinctively, I dare not speak of now.

So I made as plain a story as I could of my escape from the darkness through the strange spell of the winged globe. And we talked of the cats. Later I showed Kerovan the ring that was the only remaining treasure of what must once have been a room of treasures, before I let in Time itself to loot and pillage.

When I showed the ring to him, his wristlet blazed so we both knew that my find was in some way touched with Power. Yet I was certain that all it held about it was the shadow of the old spell, for it never warmed for me as did the gryphon, though it fitted itself to my finger as if that hoop had been fashioned to my size on purpose.

I dared greatly then to reach out my hand and clasp his. To my joy his fingers tightened around mine, did not repulse me.

“If there was only some way to get you out of the Waste.” He spoke forcibly and his hand tightened on mine so that it brought pain. Still, the last thing I would do was try to free myself, “lmgry has his contact, that was all he desired. We could ride east …”

I did not try to argue with him. However, I knew, as well as if it had been shouted through the air of that dank, dark hall, that we would never ride back. The Waste had set its mark on both of us—neither of us could stray far from it again. I had nothing to return to—everything to lose if I went. Perhaps here I could also dream and find my dream was true …

We settled for the night, apart—always apart. I wept a little, silently, in the dark at another bit of hope that had come to nothing. It was not long before he slept. I could hear his even breathing—and I so longed to see his face, to watch over him as he slept … why I do not know, except that it then was a dear, deep wish—as if so I could keep all harm and sorrow from him, stand between him and ill dreams.

The gryphon at my breast glowed gently as I sat up again and laced my fingers about my knees, thinking things that hurt and made me despair. Then I saw a glow—eyes in the dark …

My hand twitched for the hilt of the knife my lord had given me. Still, almost at once, I guessed who came thus silently, and fearing to speak aloud that I might wake my lord, I strove to set up thought-speech of my own.

“What passes?”

“Nothing passes,” returned to me swiftly, and I believed I could recognize the mind-speech of the male cat. “What do you wear on your finger, daughter of strangers?”

I held out my hand. The gem in the ring was also glowing a little, though less than the gryphon.

Once more I shaped mind-words: “That which I found—in the barred chamber,” though it came to me that the cat somehow already knew of my exploration. Did he resent my prying into a secret I did not understand? I put out the fingers of my other hand ready to rid myself of the ring should he demand that I do so.

“She who wore that once was a great lady.” His thought was born out of some memory I could never share. “If you found it remaining—then take it as her free gift. Through her will alone could it pass to another—”

“Who was she?” I dared to ask then.

“Names vanish with the years. She lived, she loved deeply, she had courage and drew to her others of great heart. She went from us by her own choosing, in the time that was right for her. Be content with that, daughter of strangers. But I think she has this day favored you beyond even your understanding.”

The eyes were gone, just as he was gone out of my mind. I wanted—yes—just as I desired Kerovan’s confidence, I wanted to learn more. But I knew that I never would. I lifted my ringed hand to my cheek, pressed the stone against my flesh. It was smooth, it was … I had no words for what flowed out of it to comfort me then—like a hand laid on a fever-hot forehead, a cool drink held to parched lips. I lay down once again and now I rested content, pushing away the future, knowing only that my lord rested within my reach and slept, and we were together so that anything might come of that—and I did not think what would follow from this hour would rend my heart.

I slept lightly so that, as the morning light found a thin way inward, I sat up, grimacing as I stretched against the stiffness of limbs. There had been no bed of grass this night and the saddlebag on which I had pillowed my head had not been the softest of supports.

There was a sound. I looked quickly to Kerovan. His hair lay dank on a sweated forehead, there was that in his face which made me gasp. His eyes were shut—a dream? But what manner of dream could bring such agony as now he showed?

Then that twisted expression smoothed away and his face held a curious unalive look. His features might have been chiseled from warm brown stone—lacking any spark of life. He was as a monument raised to honor some hero long since gone.

I had not seen him lie so for a long time—stripped of the defenses he used when he waked. He had been thus for the first two or three days when we had traveled out of the Waste on our way back from the battle with Rogear and that she-devil who might have given birth to my lord but was no mother. Then he had been weak and shaken from the ordeal of meeting those two Power to Power.

Now for the first time I speculated about Neevor’s words after that struggle. He had called my lord “kinsman” and had said that Kerovan had been someone else in part. Also I remembered how my lord had tossed a name at his mother as one might hurl a spear, and how she had been struck by the force of it.

What lay behind all this I could not know. Nor had Kerovan after that action ever spoken of it. The Wereriders had told him to find his kind. Perhaps that was what the two of us must now do.

The Dales—I shook my head determinedly. We had done our duty there. My people were as safe as I could make them, Kerovan had carried out Imgry’s orders. We were free of High Hal lack.

Then I realized the strangeness of that thought, for I am full Dales blood. Yet—I cupped the gryphon globe, pressed it tightly to me. All my life I had been told that it was a perilous thing for one of my heritage to have any dealings with the things of the Old Ones. I thought of my appeal to Elys—that she tutor me in use of a talent like unto that which she controlled. I had been wrong. She had known that and had evaded me. That was not the way for me. One could learn some things, yes—the wording of spells, the incantations necessary to build up within one’s self the strength of the Power. But Power itself did not come so—it lay within.

The gryphon had served me in the dark when I needed it, only I had discovered its value and use for myself. I had willed it. What else might it do if I tried? I fingered it now and speculated.

I was not the same Joisan who had fled with her people out of Ithdale. What was I then? That I must discover for myself. Even as my lord must discover who he was and what he was. I accepted at last that the quest was for him at that moment the most important factor in his whole existence.

As this fell into place in my mind and I knew such understanding, Kerovan’s eyes opened. However, that stony, locked-in look did not fade.

“A good day.” I summoned cheerfulness, making sure that I would not be turned aside by any coldness from him. “A smooth road lies yonder in the plains—and it will lead us …” I used some of the old morning greeting then, adding to it such words as favored our purposes.

He sat up, running fingers through his hair, so that the tumble of it stood nearly as erect as a cock comb. His eyes slid away, would not meet mine. I saw his lips thin and tighten, as if he faced up to some duty he disliked but could not avoid.

I longed to ask what was the matter, knew the greater wisdom lay in remaining silent, awaiting what he chose to tell me. Until he opened a door for me, I must not strive to reach the inner part, which I was sure was the real Kerovan—the one who hid himself with such desperation.

He arose without a word. Turning his back on me, he strode to the doorway, looked out into the courtyard, as if for some reason he did not want me to see his face. Or was it that he did not want to look upon mine?

“Will you take the mare, the pack pony, and ride? You need only head due east.” He said that with his back firmly to me.

Then he whirled about, as if he heard the scrape of an enemy’s boot, was prepared to front the foe. That locked-in look was gone from his face. I read instead twisted pain there—a pain that brought me to my feet and a step or two toward him.

He flung out a hand to ward me off. In spite of my good resolution of holding to patience, I felt torment then.

“I—cannot—go.” The pause came between each word as if those were forced out of him, that the very shaping of them hurt.

“By the heat of the True Flame!” His voice soared like a battle cry meant to rally a forlorn hope, “I must go—west!” His hands lifted to cover his face and, from behind that screen, came more words, muffled and with a chill of despair. “This may be a trap—I cannot save myself—but you—go you must!”

“Kerovan!” I used his name with authority, determined that he listen to me. “I, too, have a choice—” My control broke. I covered the distance between us and my fingers closed about his wrists. With a strength I did not know I possessed, I pulled his hands down, so I could look into his eyes.

His face was certainly alive now! There was a wry twist to his lips, his eyes blazed like pieces of amber in the full of the sun. I have seen flaming anger written on men’s faces before, but this was a rage, controlled, still enough to shake me. However, I did not loose my hold on him. So we stood, linked by touch, though I knew at any moment he might fling me off.

“I ride with you.” I said levelly. “As has always been my choice. You could leave me here bound and captive, and in some way I would free myself to follow.”

“Don’t you understand?” he demanded harshly. “I do not want you. You are nothing but a hindrance, I do not hold you by any duty. I have said that many times over. I want no lady! Also—I am done with the Dales! Wholly done with you!”

Now that I observed him closely, I could detect that there was an oddness about him. He would not meet my eyes, and as emphatically as he spoke, there was a note in his voice as if he were saying words that were put into his mouth. This was not any Kerovan whom I had seen. I remembered the anguish of his sleeping face—and I drew a deep breath.

He did not hurt me with words that came that way, though he acted now as if even my person disgusted him—so that I might never hope to find with him what Elys had found with Jervon. Yes—this was what he was meant to do—meant to do! What spell had been laid upon him in his sleep? Now that I looked at him keenly, I could see that, though his eyes were turned in my direction, there was an odd, unfocused look to them as if he did not see me, or perhaps even know where he was and what he did.

Only I was no maid soft from keep living. I had thrown aside all that when I rode forth from Norsdale. I had learned—a little. I felt that something dire lay ahead—a battle perhaps, a bitter one. Still I could face that when it came. He might not drive me away with words.

“Well enough.” I spoke slowly now. “We are two people alone in a land that is not welcoming. Just as alone we shall go on to whatever lies ahead.”

He blinked as one who was only just waking. At the change in his face I dropped my hold on him. He shook his head as one shaking away some tenuous thing fallen across one’s face.

“The rain has stopped. It is not a bad day …”

I stood confounded by the change in him. He might only now have come to the doorway. All those wild hurting words he had uttered might never have been voiced. Because I must have some explanation for this I dared to ask, “Have you dreamed again?”

“Dreamed?” he repeated as might one who had never heard that word before, or did not understand it. “Perhaps. When one sleeps, dreams come. I—I think”—he spoke hesitatingly as one who is a little dazed—“I am under command again—and this time none of Imgry’s. It is better you do not ride with me.”

“You have often professed”—I pointed out carefully (I mistrusted his manner. Had the real Kerovan again been taken over by another in some fashion? I knew that I must be very alert now)—“that you care enough for me not to want me to come to harm. I cannot ride alone here.” I stressed my helplessness—a helplessness I did not in the least feel. “Have I not already barely survived one of the Dark traps, and that by such good fortune as I may never hope to meet again?”

“You are free,” he said dully, all the fire and life seeping out of him, the shut-away look back again, as if he were encased by a barrier I could not pierce.

“But you are not? Remember, Kerovan, once I did not go free either. I was taken to serve the Dark. What did you then?”

He swung away from me as if he did not hear my words any more. Years of age might have settled on him. “You do not understand,” he mumbled.

I wanted to shake him, to tear out of him somehow what made him this way. At the same time I knew that such action would be no use. He had dropped down beside the pack he had lifted from the pony last night, was fumbling out the packet of food.

“They do not suspect—” He was speaking in a monotone and I shivered, realizing that he did not talk to me—he was lost somewhere and I had no way of drawing him forth from the shadows where he now wandered. “No. they do not know what they would rouse—those fools from overseas. Their attack on the Dales—but a ruse. He has summoned them.”

“Kerovan”—I knelt beside him to ask gently, “who is this he? Is he out of your dream?”

He shook his head. “I cannot tell. It is not ‘will not’ but ‘cannot’. I was—No, I do not know where I was. But there is one who waits—and I must go.”

“So we ride.” I answered with all the courage I could summon. I felt almost as if I companied now with a dying man, one who moved and spoke, but whose inner part might be extinguished—or near that. I tried to remember the name he had called in that battle of Powers—but I could not. Perhaps it was the kind of name lips such as mine might not even shape.

I found this Joss of the Kerovan I knew far more fearsome than when he rode out of Norsdale. Had we shared more, had we known each other in a true uniting, perhaps he could not have been so easily enspelled. Yet I would not let him go. There must be some way I could bring to life again the real Kerovan.

Eating but little, I busied myself with the packets Elys had left among the pony’s gear. I had fresh underlinen at last, and a comb to put my hair in order. I longed for the weapons I had lost to the Thas. Kerovan had not asked that I return his knife so I slipped it into my own belt sheath.

Before we left I took the chance of gathering some more of the melons, adding them to our food supply. There was no sign of the cats.

Kerovan kept silence, one I did not try to break. Sometimes his eyes crossed me, but it was as if I were invisible. So we went forth from the ruins, leading our animals down to the highway. Kerovan insisted that I ride the mare, while he led the pony and walked beside me.

The wrack of the storm was visible in broken branches and sodden grass, but overhead the sun arose. While always the road bored on toward the heights, or as we discovered—through them!

The labor that had gone into the making of that cut, allowing forbidding walls to remain on either side, amazed me. This must have taken the work of years—or else was the result of potent magic, well beyond the comprehension of our breed. We stopped just before entering that cut to eat and drink, allowing the animals to graze.

Many times during our journey I had felt that, while Kerovan’s body strode beside me, the real man was gone. I was chilled, my hopes dwindled. If he was in the grip of an adept of the Old Ones, how could/free him?

As I used the knife to cut a melon he suddenly spoke. “You have not chosen well.”

“The choice was mine,” I returned shortly.

“Therefore the results shall be on your own—”

What harsh or bitter prophecy he might have added was never voiced. I saw his eyes go wide; his gaze shifted from me to a point beyond my shoulder. There was a strong sensation of cold—as if a wind blew over numbing ice—striking my upper back.

Kerovan was on his feet, that trance-like state broken. I saw, under the shadow of his helm, the same face he must have shown to any Hounds he met steel to steel.

That cold bored into me. This was no tangible weapon—yet it could kill. I threw myself to one side, rolled, and then levered my body up again. Kerovan stood, a little crouched, as if ready to spring. He had not, however, drawn sword. While what waited there just beyond the border of the road …

A woman, dark of hair, slender of body, her face contorted in a mask of hatred and despair, a demon’s countenance, was there. Though a breeze stirred the grass about her, her robe did not sway, nor did her veil move. I knew her … But she was dead! Consumed by her own foul magic.

The Lady Temphera, who had consorted with the Dark to produce a son, then failed when that son proved to be other than she had planned, stood watching us with the stark hatred of her last moments of life.

She was dead! I would not accept what I saw. This was some trickery.

Kerovan moved as I stumbled to my feet, held tightly to the gryphon. I refused to be frightened by a shadow out of the past.

There was no wand in her hand. No, that had been shattered with the core of her Power during that other meeting. Nor did she raise her hands in any gesture to summon forces. She only stood, staring at her repudiated son with those burning eyes. Not eyes—rather holes in a skull from which skin and flesh withered as I watched.

“Fool!” That was Kerovan who spoke. Once more his face was impassive. “Fool!” He held up his hand. On his wrist that band of blue blazed. A streamer of light shot toward the woman’s death head. The ray appeared to strike a barrier, spread out horizontally across it.

“Show yourself!” Kerovan’s lips drew back in a wolfs grin. He commanded as one very sure of himself and his own might.

The illusion (if it were that) moved. Swiftly the right arm swung up. She showed a clenched hand as the long sleeve fell away. Then she threw what she held. A flashing streak came through the air.

Straight for Kerovan’s head spun that missile. He moved as swiftly, his arm across his face. I heard a noise as loud as a thunder clap—saw a burst of radiance, so that I blinked and blinked to clear my sight.

Through a watery haze I watched the woman sway. The bale-fire hate, which burned in the eyeholes, spread, consumed, until the head of the apparition was a horrible, blackened mass. The blaze ate on down her body. She seemed to be trying to raise her hands in futile defense, the fingers left trails of black in the air. I wanted to close my eyes, still I could not.

“Is this the best you can send against me?” Kerovan’s voice swelled, carried, so that the walls of the cut ahead echoed it back to us. “To evoke the dead is a weakness.”

“Weakness—weakness …” echoed back.

The horror shriveled, grew smaller, was gone. Kerovan stood, stone-faced, to watch it be so consumed. When the last blackened shred vanished he turned to me.

“This is only the first sending. Perhaps the least of such, merely to test us, or as a warning.”

“It is—or was—a very impotent one.” I found my voice.

Kerovan shook his head. “We cannot be sure. We can never be sure of any Power …” He stroked the band on his wrist with his other hand. “I think that we shall never again walk, or lie, or rest easy in this land—never until we have a final meeting—”

“With Temphera? But she is dead—”

“With another whose identity I do not know, who will use against me—and you because you are with me—all he can summon, perhaps to our ending.”

Still he did not look hopeless or even troubled, as he said that. Nor was his face again closed or bleak. A new life had appeared there. I sensed he was excited, had been stirred fully awake rather than alarmed by what had been meant as a dire warning.

Kerovan

WHEN I FRONTED WHAT HAD ARISEN, BLACK AND SEAR, OUT OF THE past I felt that time had turned upon itself. This was she who had given me birth but had never been a mother. Only now she stood alone, lacking Rogear with all his ill-used, half-learned Power. Also, that symbol of her authority, the wand, was gone, having been shattered into nothingness when we had fought out our struggle in the past. Still, my hand arose, as if my arm was weighted with a shield and not with the wrist band that had served me so well.

Words came to me, not so much my own thoughts, as they were those of that other who was rousing now, once more within me, a presence—an essence—I feared. Still I could not wall out that intruder any more than all our struggles had served to keep Alizon’s Hounds from baying across the Dales.

Even while I spoke those words, as if I were trained in sorcery, I turned my will upon the band, calling for a force that lay within it. I did not consciously understand what I said, what I did, only that this was the way I must meet this—this thing. For that it was a dead woman restored to malicious life—that I did not quite believe.

A spear of light answered my plea, struck at the head of the illusion, met a shield of such strength that it could not break it, ran across the shield seeking a way through, to consume the dead-alive.

I saw her turn into the specter of death. Her hands moved jerkily then as if cords were fastened to her wrists pulling them this way and that. To no purpose, for she had not been aided by any fear from me—she who was the embodiment (or meant to be) of horror and disgust. Without any emotion from us to strengthen her, she was burning away. Her old hate once more consumed her utterly. Who had striven to use her thus—and why?

Foul black trails in the air streamed from those hands. But they faltered, could not Finish any symbol they so fought to form. I felt a contempt within me. If this was a show of Dark Power it was a paltry one. Surely no real adept had brought such a champion into our struggle.

Was the illusion then indeed Temphera herself, a long-lasting residue of evil once more provided with visible form because her strong hatred of me had survived even death itself? Perhaps in the Waste even so flawed a talent as hers could do this when signs and portents were right.

Only—she failed. Death ate her up a second time, perhaps firing her own hate to such a heat that it was able to consume her. She was gone. I watched for a long moment after her semblance had crumbled into ash, half expecting a second attempt. If this was some work of that Galkur—yet surely such as he could have provided a much stronger threat.

Joisan’s voice startled me. During those moments when I had confronted hatred come alive I had forgotten her.

“She was an illusion—was she not an illusion, Kerovan? She—I know she is dead!”

Had I been quicker-witted, less still caught up in what had happened, I might have answered more prudently, rather than with what might well have been the truth.

“She hated me very much. Perhaps—in this country of Power—some portion of her did live on and when it gathered strength enough—”

“Can it be true that hate lives past death?” I saw Joisan shiver as she stared now at me.

The shell that had encased me since my dream of the night had cracked, fallen away when I had roused to do battle. I went to her and took her into my arms. They played with us, these holders of Power. Now I wanted nothing of them—neither aid nor attack. What I desired was to fight against them—all of them! There was only one way to do that, I now sensed. I must keep myself part of the real world—be Kerovan. Joisan was my anchor. My anchor? That sounded as if the poison of Power had already touched me, that I had begun to look upon her as an object to be used for my own purposes.

Joisan was real. She was love, not hate, though I could not release any answering emotion that I could believe was truly love. I was not using Joisan—I would not! But, even as I so argued and doubted within myself, I held her tighter.

Her body fitted itself to mine as if two halves had been joined to form—at last—a whole. I kissed her for the second time since I had known her, had come to realize the depth of her courage and spirit. She herself was the truest and finest thing a man might ever discover in a world full of deceit, mystery, and the darkness of evil.

We clung together, and now I was glad that my mother’s rage had sought us out. For this joining was surely stronger than any intrigue of the Waste.

A lock of her hair fell free across her face and I kissed that also, gently, aware of a fragrance that clung to it as if she had worn a garland of sweet-scented flowers until their life had become a part of her. Her hands lay again on my shoulders, feather light, still I could feel the dear pressure of them through both mail and leather—and so I always would.

“Kerovan”—she was a little breathless—“if it takes foul illusion to so bring you to me, then may we be often so assailed!”

Once more I set my lips to hers, hoping that she could not read me. For only a few moments snatched out of time I had been a man—a whole man. Now that other compulsion—though I tried to fight it—settled about me once more, with an even tighter grip. I kissed her … but the feeling had gone.

She set her hands swiftly against my chest and pushed herself free for I had at once relinquished my hold. When she looked at me, there was desolation in her eyes and her hurt reached me even though I was fast losing the sense of feeling. I could no longer respond as I longed—yes!—as I longed, even under the spell, to do.

“You—you have left me again.” Her voice was very low and uneven as if she were close to tears, save that pride stiffened her. “Why do you so? What is there in me to which you cannot warm?” She wrung her scratched and sun-browned hands together with a gesture of one who is pushed close to the edge of endurance. The rosy hue of her ring—even it appeared to be touched with gray at this moment.

I swung around, no longer any more able to look upon her standing there—the brightness of her look, the beauty of her eyes, her face. That other inside me was fighting hard to stay alive—fighting with a strength that would have rocked my very body from side to side had I given way to it. Only for him there was no hope. I was bound to a future I did not understand or desire, into which perhaps not even Joisan, for all her greatness of heart, could follow me.

“The fault lies not in you—never in you,” I got out harshly. “Never believe that it is you who have failed.” To allow her to think that was a cruelty I could not bear. “It is mine—a curse laid upon me. Believe that, it is true, believe it!”

Once more I made myself face her. I wanted to lay hands upon her shoulders, to shake her until she promised me she would do as I asked. This was the stark truth—that I had nothing to give her, and I would not take and take until she was as ashy as the ring upon her hand—a love token I had not been able to give her. She must understand!

“I believe,” she answered me then. Her hands fell to her sides. She stood straight, head up, her face sober, but with that heart-tearing look gone out of it. “I believe, yes. Only, I also believe that there is still my Lord Amber imprisoned somewhere inside of you, and he shall come to me again.”

Lord Amber? For a moment I was puzzled—until the cords of memory tightened. That was the name she had given me when I first found her in the wilderness, leading her people—when she had accepted me as one of the Old Ones, who had somehow been moved to come to their aid.

“You are him, and you are Kerovan,” she was continuing, “also you may be another. But in all of you I have found nothing that will send me from you. Nor can you do this—ever!”

There was no arguing with her. I must accept that her will was unbendable as the sword at my belt. I was afraid—for her. I wanted to ride—to run—but I must accept.

We prepared to spend the night at that campsite in spite of the evil thing that had materialized there. Before us lay the high-walled cut where the road ran on—already shadowed—and I had no desire to travel it in a time when the dusk was double thick. Once more, unable to really rest, I watched the footprints that appeared, clouded and then clear, as if many walked there, unseen, unheard in this world. Sleep was very far away. In fact I did not want to yield to it since dreams might lay in wait. I had had my fill of dreams.

Nor did it appear that Joisan wanted rest either. Instead, she sat beside me, also watching the road, one hand cupping the englobed gryphon tightly against her breast.

“They walk—” She broke the long silence between us in so soft a voice it was hardly above a whisper. “I wonder—are those unseen ones alive but ensorcelled, so that they must endlessly journey this road? Or are they but shadows out of the past whose memories linger so?”

I was surprised, though I should not have been, that she also was able to mark the slight dimming and brightening of those prints.

“I think,” she added, “that they go upon some mission—yet their time, their world is no longer ours. Kerovan”—she changed the subject so quickly that she startled me into answering as I had not meant to—“what of your dream? Was it perhaps of another world or time?”

“I do not know. I—” A hand might then have been slapped hard across my mouth, silencing me. I could not, even if I would, tell her of that dream. If dream it was.

“Kerovan!” Joisan’s hand caught now at my arm, though she had been careful not to touch me since I had closed my heart to her earlier. “Look!”

Farther along, within the walls of the cut, where the road lay like a white ribbon between two towering, blank walls—that was where she was pointing. Something else could be seen beside the night-induced shine of the symbols, the stars, and the flow of footprints.

Dark clots fell from the heights to strike upon the pavement, spread out in evil-appearing blots across its surface. I could think of nothing save the action of one of those war machines I had seen under construction in Imgry’s camp, designed to hurl rocks into the heart of an enemy advance.

There was, in turn, a rising shimmer of light from the road itself. The fall of stones (the sharp impact of which we could hear) and the earth continued. Was this some effort to bury the highway, seal off what protection existed along that moon-bright length?

I was on my feet, reaching down to draw Joisan up beside me.

“We must go—now!” If the road was sealed we were lost! Again knowledge that was not mine came alive in my mind as if it had been planted there to await this very happening.

She looked at me steadily and then nodded. “If this must be done—then let us to it. Leave the packs. I can ride the pony—you take Bural.”

We grabbed the closest of our supplies and water bottles, leaving the rest of the gear. As usual, neither animal showed any fear of the road—not at first. Ahead black masses heaped together, but they did not stay so for long. Rather the mounds melted, running off in besmirching rivulets. The very touch of the pavement appeared to transform solid into liquid and send it flowing.

“That smell—Thas!” Joisan cried.

I caught it, too, the same stench that had arisen from the churned earth back in the meadow trap, only stronger, more offensive. Now the mare threw up her head with a loud whinny, answered by the pony. They balked, so it was all I could do to force my mount forward. Joisan would not allow her smaller steed to hold back; I could hear her voice crooning encouragement.

The fallen earth was running in streams from the road’s surface as rain might be channeled from stone, while that stomach-turning stench grew the worse. I saw movement higher above, far up the sides of the cut walls, though I could not make out clearly the form of the creatures laboring so frenziedly there, attempting to wall us away from the mountain land. They did grow more visible as they dropped farther down in their endeavor to start landslides. Perhaps, as they appeared to be failing in their struggle to barricade the road, they were now determined to launch a personal attack—to catch us as they had netted Joisan—using the earth as best they could, since that was their tool of power.

The mare’s front hooves thudded into the first runnel of the black soil. She cried out as I had never heard one of her kind give voice before, gave a convulsive leap forward as if she had stepped into a mass of live coals. I heard a heavy sucking as her feet pulled free.

“Keep moving—fast!” I flung the order back at Joisan and drew my sword.

She did not need that command, for she was slappig the pony’s rump with one hand, flogging the small beast on. The black flood was thick around the feet of both animals, seeming to circle about as if it was trying, like a bog, to suck us down. Then I saw that the globed gryphon was waxing brighter and brighter. From it came a beam of bright light. Around my own wrist the band awoke to life in a circle of cold flame.

Joisan lifted the chain from around her neck and began to swing the globe. As it passed thus through the air the light blazed even higher and brighter. I watched the sticky black tide on the road curl back from that radiance, as living flesh might shrink from a threat of pain or dissolution.

My companion kneed her pony on, and the animal quieted, as did the mare, once that blaze swept briefly across her head. Now my lady Jed, and the black earth not only melted from her path, but those masses of earth and stone that were still falling were deflected, providing us with a narrow path of safety.

I could hear our attackers. Where before they had moved in silence, scuttling through the dark which was their cover, now they uttered guttural cries from the heights on either hand. Their shadowy forms scrambled and shifted, I was sure they had sent parties down both walls to intercept us. Only they could not, dared not, venture on the road itself.

Our two mounts were sweating; the rank animal smell cut off some of the stench of the Thas. The beasts tossed their heads, but they kept steadily on until we reached the far side of the earth slides.

The scrambling along the cliffs intensified. I braced myself for an attack, which might well come if they were desperate enough at our escape. Joisan actually then tossed the globe in the air as if it were a ball. By the wide sweep of its light I saw clearly, for an instant, a creature that threw a stubby arm across its eyes, squealed, and fled, clinging to the wall as it climbed, after the way of a lizard. Haired all over it was, and from the tangled mass that covered the lump of its head, pale disks, marking eyes, were turned in our direction before it gained the dark beyond the light’s reach.

Now safe beyond the bombardment of the avalanche, our mounts broke into their fastest gait and we did not try to halt their boneshaking run. Better to gain as much distance beyond the present perches of the Thas as we could. I hoped that those creatures could not keep up with us, though the form I had seen had not suggested that its stunted body was meant for longdistance running.

Straight as a sword blade, and now as bright as the moonlight would lie on such a blade, the road lay open before us. We needed that brightness, as the gleam of Joisan’s ball torch waned steadily, while the rise of the dark cliffs on either side increased with every stride mare and pony covered. We might be riding at the bottom of a deep gulf …

A deep gulf? I felt cold rise in me—the gulf of my dream! Only here I was at the bottom, not riding through the sky—or the space above. I turned my head up and back. Now I could see the night sky—a sprinkling of pallid stars there, so far above … It was as if I were caught, encased. I tried to breathe deeply, to fill my lungs with air, which my body suddenly craved, as if I had been indeed buried in the fluid earth that now lay behind.

I looked to Joisan, saw, to my alarm, that her body was drooping. She gripped with both hands, not the rope hackmore we had improvised for the pony, but the animal’s mane.

“Joisan!”

I urged the mare closer. At my cry she raised her head a fraction, turned a face that was hardly more than a white blur toward me. Just in time I reached her side, caught and steadied her body as she went limp, her eyes closed, ready to slide from her perch on the pony’s back.

“Joisan!”

I held her by an arm about her waist, though the pony snorted as my mare nudged against it and strove to draw away. Somehow I managed to take my lady fully into my arms where she lay unmoving, her head against my shoulder, face upward, her eyes still closed.

“Joisan!” For the third time, and most urgently, I called her name.

The globe on her breast was dead, not even a small, wan light marked its power. Burned out? Had that valiant use of it to bring us safely through the Thas attack exhausted whatever energy could be summoned from it?

And Joisan—what had that drain of will done to her? I remembered her story of how she had willed the gryphon to lead her from the cavern underground and that its response had weakened her. Perhaps to use it again in such a short time had been too much for her. I raged at my own impotence. It had been Joisan alone who had brought us through this battle with the Dark—no credit to me. Now what could I do to bring her aid—or comfort …

“Joisan!”

At my fourth call I saw her eyelids flutter. She sighed, but neither looked at me nor spoke. I doubted that the mare could carry double for long. So I must push as far as I could, for it was plain that Joisan was in no condition to ride the pony now. To stay where these earth cliffs loomed above was folly. What the Thas had tried once they could easily assay again, and this time they might well be successful. We must win through this gorge—if it had any end—which, looking ahead, I began grimly to wonder.

I bound my lady to the mare’s saddle—her lighter weight would be easier on the mount. The pony could not carry me, but I had those sturdy hooves—and I could put them to good use. The pavement was very smooth underfoot. I began to trot, discovering I could easily match my speed to that of the mare. The pony edged up beside me on the other side, for I kept close to Joisan, fearing that the lashings might slip and allow her to fall.

She was like one in a deep sleep, not moving except to the swing of the mare. I divided my attention between her and the heights on either side. Though I tried to listen for any sound above the clop of hooves from our two beasts. I heard nothing.

That stench was no longer in my nostrils. However, I knew that the earth itself obeyed the will of those hairy creatures and it might be they could still summon up some peril from it to strike at us. I dared not trust any surface beyond that of the road itself.

The rest of that night (it was not a dream, for my dreams had been more real than this—at least the dreams that had plagued me of late) finally passed. I moved as I had in the cold season when I had been on scout and caught in some storm wherein the misery of my body pulled at me until I might come to camp.

Pain shot up my stiffened legs as I footed on. After an interval I realized that the pace of the mare had fallen to a walk, that she breathed in great snorts, while the pony now plodded three or four lengths behind, its head drooping. Still it followed doggedly.

Dull-eyed, I looked about me. The heights had dropped somewhat. They no longer appeared to reach to the sky. I stood for a space, the mare blowing again. Fumbling at the saddle I brought out my water bottle, took a sip. which left me avid for more. Yet we had left our camp so quickly this was all we had and Joisan would need it, too.

She lay forward, stretched with one arm on either side of the mare’s neck, her face half hidden in rough strands of mane. I made no effort to rouse her. Better that she sleep until we could reach some point of safety—if sleep she now did. I felt her dangling hand and it seemed warm to my touch—was she fevered? But I could not see to her yet, not as long as we remained within the least rise of those walls.

I urged the mare on, though she moved no faster than a walk, would stop now and then until I pulled at the reins, or slapped her rump. So intent was I on keeping her moving that I had not realized we had worn out the night until I saw the gray gleams of predawn lighting the mounds of earth on either side, the paling of the road.

It was a matter of the stumbler leading the stumbling when we came at last to the end of that cut, crossed a valley and—

The road came to an end!

I wavered on my feet staring up at the rockwall of what was a mountain, a mountain planted directly before our faces. Straight into that the road ran—and stopped as if the mountain had been raised from its stone roots somewhere else and dumped to cut off our path.

Somehow I got Joisan down. There was no going farther. We were enough in the open so that we could not be attacked here without seeing the enemy well in advance of any rush. I was done out, and both mounts exhausted. The valley had a trickling stream, which flowed not too far away and there was grass growing. I laid Joisan down, to be supported by the pack which I rolled from its straps, making her as comfortable as I could.

Her face was pale, she lay limp under my hands. If she still slept, the rest was very deep. Unsaddled, the mare sought water, to dip muzzle deep into the stream beside the pony. I dropped down beside Joisan, took her beringed hand in both of mine, my own head nodded, in spite of the need I knew to be on guard.

I was too tired now to think of what lay ahead—save that the “rise of that mountain drew the heart out of me. That we should win up its stark sides with no supplies, no sustenance, in this grim land—no, that was beyond any power.

My head must have fallen forward …

Then …

The need—the burning need—which seized upon me filled me so it drove out all I had clung to—that part of Kerovan who was a man—the part that reached to Joisan and a life he understood. I was—another …

Joisan

I AWOKE IN THE LIGHT OF DAY. Rousing out of confused dreams and fear. There had been a great darkness, and, veiled by it, evil had moved. Even faint memories of that made me shudder. The specter of the Lady Temphera might not have been potent, but worse had faced us in our flight up the road. That the Dark had not raised power enough to engulf us wholly puzzled me, for I did not see in what manner we could have withstood such an attack. I had once more used my will upon the globe and—

Now I raised my head to look about. I lay on the surface of the road, half supported by a small pack. There was no lingering stench of Thas here. Turning very slowly, for action was, I discovered, a great effort to which I had to bend all my will and energy, I saw that the heights of the cut no longer loomed over us. We must have somehow won through though I had no memory of the latter part of that flight. Before us now was the wall of a true mountain, its crest so wreathed by mist or clouds that one could not tell how high it reached into the sky.

The road ran straight into the first upward slope and then … At that point it was as cleanly cut as if some Power had moved the mountain here as an insurmountable barrier. There was only rock—cracked, stained—bearing signs. I believed, of having stood a heavy assault by some fierce force.

Directly before this stood Kerovan, his back to me, his arms hanging by his sides. His fingers continually wrapped into fists, only to loosen again. His body was taut, tense, as if he were half devoured by the need to gain what he wanted.

Somehow I got to my feet, took an unsteady step. My body was again as weak as if I had but crawled out of a bed wherein fever had sapped my strength. Yet, when I moved, there came a slow inflow of energy. Kerovan remained oblivious, as if only the mountain now mattered.

I staggered to where I could see his face. His features were grimly set in a mask of determination. Suddenly he drew his sword, took a quick step forward, and tried to force the tip of the blade into a crack that ran jaggedly down the stone.

When I looked more closely at the wall, in this full light, I could see that once there must have existed an opening there, which had been sealed by force, for the stone was fire darkened, and, in some places, looked as congealed as the lumps of metal scavengers brought out of the Waste. Though what could possibly melt rock?

He thrust fruitlessly at the crack, prying until his steel rang in warning and I half expected to see the blade break off short. With a gesture born of anger and frustration, Kerovan threw the sword from him, to clatter across the roadway, while he strode forward, to stand with his hands pressed palm flat on the rock, his head a little forward until his helm clashed against the mountain barrier.

I had half raised my hands. Then it caught at me. The gryphon—I clutched at it quickly—a protective talisman. Kerovan—could it be Kerovan who sent forth such waves of energy as left me trembling?

His shoulders tensed the stiffer. Outward spread that aura of power, now holding me where I was. I even believed that I saw a haze of light outline his body. My skin prickled and the short hairs about my forehead stirred of themselves. Between my hands the globe began to glow.

He was using his will—all the inner strength he could call upon, even as I had done. That backwash of force caught me, held me prisoner, immobile now, unable even to speak.

His body became slowly tenuous, as if solid flesh and bone thinned, was only a vessel holding something else. I found that sight so frightening I strove to close my eyes—yet I could do nothing else but watch that titanic battle; for battle it was—a man’s strength pitted against ancient, immovable stone.

Thinner grew Kerovan’s form, he was only a shadow of a man now. My own fear made me draw once more on what lay within me. If Kerovan was to vanish, then I must still seek him—he must not leave me so! I had thought, upon awakening, that my strength of will was exhausted. I discovered now that there are reserves within us all that are not known to exist unless some great task must be faced.

The globe—I had only that. I lifted it in both hands, held it above the level of Kerovan’s hunched shoulders. If he must, for some reason, win through this rock, then I would do what I could to aid.

This time it was not the globe that took on life and fire—but the gryphon itself! I saw its small figure move and that was not just my fancy. The globe shattered—fragments as thin as powder shifted through my fingers. A prisoner long confined was at last free! Not only free, but growing. For a moment its weight rested between my palms. Then those wings fanned the air …

The gryphon trumpeted, voicing such a note of triumph and exultation that my heart leaped in answer. Then the creature spiraled up, beating wings against the air so long denied it. For the space of a breath or two it circled about our heads, always growing—first as large as a mountain eagle, then so huge that the very shadow of its outstretching wings shut out the sun.

Those red eyes were aglow with fierce fire, its hooked beak opened, and once more it sounded its cry. Having tried its wings, it wheeled, to fly straight at the barrier against which Kerovan, seemingly unaware of it, still labored uselessly to force an entrance.

I caught my breath. The great flying thing (it might have topped Kerovan had it alighted on the road) did not swerve, rather hurtled like a bolt at the wall. And—just as Kerovan had earlier appeared to grow tenuous, so now did the wall become smoke. Into that winged the gryphon, vanishing from sight. Behind, Kerovan stumbled ahead, as well he might when the solid barrier against which he had leaned was suddenly withdrawn. Able to move once again I threw myself after him, fearing that the two of them might be lost to me.

There followed a fear-filled sensation of deep dark and cold, of being hurtled through a space in which my kind had no life. I could not breathe, yet I willed myself on.

Then I was in another place. Those are the only words I can find to describe it—another place. For I will always believe that I went out of the world meant to nourish my people, entering into one so different, so answerable to other laws and customs that I was or would be forever lost. For, in my folly, I had gone unprepared and alone.

No, I was not alone. I saw Kerovan rise from his knees. He must have sprawled on his face as the barrier gave way. Ahead, fast vanishing into a misty cloud, the gryphon beat wide-stretching wings.

Kerovan stood, his face dull and lifeless, showing, I believed, the countenance of some man caught in a sorcerous dream. I knew I could not reach him, that if I screamed aloud, even beat upon his body, he would not hear or feel. He glanced from side to side, and I sensed that what he saw was not altogether strange to him. Now he strode on, following the gryphon, at the fast pace of one obeying a summons. I would not be left behind so I broke into a short run to keep up with him.

From time to time (I was afraid to take my eyes long from Kerovan lest he vanish in some way peculiar to this other where place) I glanced around. There was light, though it came from neither torch nor lamp. We traveled down a long aisle between huge pillars, so large I do not think that two men standing, holding their arms full length, could have touched fingers about that girth.

Those pillars were carved with lines of a long-forgotten tongue—if the language had ever been known in my own world (which I doubted). There was a cloud of mist hanging above us that drifted—as real clouds might—while ahead shone a core of stronger light, which I believed was Kerovan’s goal.

He moved ever faster, until at last he ran. Gasping, I tried to keep up with him, but that fatigue with which I had awakened, the draining of the globe, slowed me. A sharp pain struck beneath my ribs, making me gasp and slow even more.

I was afraid. If Kerovan got beyond my sight I might lose him forever. Still there was no way I could break the spell that held him, of that I was sure.

On and on—that brighter light grew larger. I could see more details of the pillar carvings. Not that they meant anything, save that the message they must record was of greater import than I could know or guess. The Waste was a place of wonders, both of good and evil. Here, I knew, was a place of great Power—yet I could sense neither evil nor good. Was there a third way, neither of the Light nor Dark, that had laws of its own?

Then came a sound rising above the clatter of our boots, a crooning, a singing. From deep notes, which were akin to the rumble of drums, the song rose to the freedom of trumpets proclaiming victory—only to fall again.

The light flared brighter still. Had it risen so in answer to that song? I saw, in the heart of it, a dais from which a point projected in the direction from which we had come. On that platform rested a long case of some transparent substance. At the head of that the gryphon reared, its bird foreclaws resting upon the case, its beast hind paws firm set on the dais. The wings of silver white fanned the air gently, while from its beak issued that song.

Kerovan halted at the foot of the dais, stood swaying. One hand rose to his head as if he were so mazed he did not know where he was or what he did. The gryphon did not turn those glowing eyes on either of us. It held its own head high, still giving voice. I thought I heard a pleading note growing stronger in that song.

Slowly Kerovan stepped upon the dais, fell rather than leaned forward, so that both his outflung arms rested across the case as he knelt there, his head drooping between his arms. He remained as if he had come to the end of all striving, could make no further effort. The gryphon bent its crested head in turn, its cruelly pointed beak aimed—

I tried to cry out a warning, but there was a barrier in my throat, a sealing on my lips. Using my will as a lash upon my falling body. I staggered on toward Kerovan. If he could not defend himself against that rapacious beak, perhaps there was something I could do. Englobed, the gryphon had served me. Free … ? I did not know—I could only hope.

Before I reached my lord’s side I saw that it was not at his head or shoulders that beak was aimed. The winged creature now pecked determinedly at the covering of the box. As I came to lay hands on my lord, attempting to draw him out of danger, I saw what lay within and it froze me for a long moment.

Man? No! Monster? Again no. There was nothing evil about that sleeper, strangely shaped though his body might be. Here was the gryphon fused with what was partly man. But this encoffined one was far greater than both in his own way—yes, I knew that also.

I found myself on my knees. My hold on Kerovan’s shoulders tightened so I was able to draw him a little toward me, away from where that great beak strove to break the surface of the sleeper’s coffin. Thus we were clinging together when there was a crackle—lines of splintered transparency ran swiftly outward, even as earlier the globe had broken in my hands.

My lord tried to rise, half fell back against me, so I steadied him once more against my own body. Our eyes were not for each other now, rather for what was happening to the case. Those cracks grew wider. Fragments flew outward as the gryphon, seemingly heartened by its success, struck faster and deeper.

Then all the substance of that encoffining fell away, became powdery dust. Once more the gryphon reared above the sleeper and opened its beak. Only this time it did not sing, instead it gave a shout, perhaps an alarm.

The eyes of the sleeper opened. They shone red, as fiery as those of the bird-beast towering above. One hand was lifted from its grasp on a sword still resting on the stranger’s breast. The beast bent its crested head and I saw the man’s fingers move in a caress, scratching among the feathers as one gentles a favorite hound.

Now he, who had been so freed and awakened, looked around at my lord. After a long moment his eyes met mine in turn. There was awesome wisdom in those eyes, other emotions I did not know nor could I name—which no one of human birth might understand. I could not turn away, though I winced, for it seemed that this other invaded my mind, learned more from that single glance than any of my own kind could in a full lifetime.

Then he turned again to Kerovan as he drew himself up, the sword loosely held in one hand, the other arms resting across the gryphon’s neck as the creature squatted closer, offering to lend him its support. With that wicked-looking beak it was smoothing its master’s own feather-crested head.

There was no change in the blankness of Kerovan’s expression, no sign of the fear and awe that were mingled in me. The gryphon-man leaned forward, laid the sword aside, set his hand, which was more like the taloned foot of a bird, under my lord’s chin, raising his head, to peer more intently into those blind eyes.

Fear overcame awe in me. As I had earlier sought to protect Kerovan from the beak of the gryphon, so now did I fling out a hand to strike at that hold. Once more those fiery eyes swung on me. I sensed a feeling of surprise, a questioning—then again that mind invasion which I could not understand.

He reached back and picked up the sword with his other hand, to use it, as a Wisewoman uses her wand, drawing lazy smoke curls in the air. I was forced to my feet, pushed back. The gryphon uttered another sharp cry, bobbed its head in my direction. Its newly awakened master lowered the blade to point at my breast.

There came a weight, a force I could not withstand, urging me away from the dais, putting me against the nearest pillar. Then the sword point shifted, but I discovered that I could not move so much as a finger. The gryphon-man, having so disposed of me, gave Kerovan once more his full attention.

He stretched even as might a human awakening from a deep sleep. Though he wore no clothing his silver-white body was robed with power which flooded about him. I felt that I might easily become what Kerovan now appeared to be—a mindless servant.

Though I sensed no evil, I knew a growing anger that my lord had been so reduced to another’s will—be that one of the great Old Ones or not. So I struggled within for my freedom—or if not, to project to Kerovan the knowledge that he was the equal of any—should he choose to be. My dear Lord Amber should not bow or serve …

The gryphon-man leaped lightly from the dais and approached me. If there was an expression on his alien face the strangeness of his features hid it from me.

There shot into my mind, burning enough that I might have cried out with the pain, speech—so strong that it was a shout in my head.

“Why do you fear for him so? Do blood-kin war?”

This was far more powerful mind-talk than the cats had used but having met with that I was ready.

“What have you done to him then? And who are you?” Old One or not, I would grant no courtesy as long as I saw Kerovan so.

“I do nothing with him, save lead him to his true heritage.”

The gryphon roared—such a sound as I would not have believed could rip from that bird beak. It reared on its hind paws, presented its talons as it might for defense. The beast was facing away from us, staring down an aisle beyond.

Its master whirled about, leaped back and caught at the sword. He gestured. Kerovan moved toward me, still as one who walks in sleep. Then the Old One joined us as the gryphon took wing, flew in the direction it had been watching.

The gryphon-man’s arm moved like a flash of light through the air. With the point of the sword he drew a circle around the three of us—for I had found I could move forward again, in fact I was urged so. The circle glowed, flaring up from it a radiance through which we could see, yet it sent streamers far above our heads.

From the direction the gryphon had taken there appeared a whirl of dark shadow—advancing jerkily, as if it found difficulty in its path. It puffed forward, retreated, and then puffed again. Though we could no longer see the beast, which had gone to confront it. we could hear its continued roars of challenge.

I clutched at Kerovan. Under my feet the floor shifted. Near the shadow the pavement buckled upward, to let a black stream spew outward. The gryphon-man set his sword between his knees; both of his hands moved in a series of signs. Around us the haze wall thickened and blazed at the same time. Kerovan’s arms came about me, his face was alive again.

There followed the sensation of being lifted by a whirlwind. I dared not look down lest I see nothing below. We were sealed in by the light, and now the gryphon-man laid one taloned hand on Kerovan’s shoulder, the other on mine.

That light touch brought warmth, drove out my fear. No matter, however, if this stranger so sought to comfort me, what counted most was that my lord held me in his arms.

The streams of light whirled enough to make me giddy. I closed my eyes, but the sensation of flying was not lost. I no longer heard the gryphon’s roars. Had the creature been overwhelmed? I hoped passionately that was not so.

“Telpher is in no danger.”

The stranger had reassured me then. Who was he? Then—we swooped downward with such speed that I held even more tightly to my lord, felt his grasp also stiffen.

Fresh air … I opened my eyes. We stood in sunlight. Here were flowers—a feeling we had returned to our own time and world. Again came a trumpet call as a winged body passed over us. The gryphon flew to perch above the wide arch of a gate.

Though we stood in the open there were still four walls boxing us about. Each was pierced by a wide arched gate, three of which showed hard usage from time by fallen stone, but the fourth, where the gryphon had landed, was intact. Flowers grew in drifts of soil that spread in from the ruined gateways. There was even a tree or two that had taken root here.

The gryphon-man stood a little apart from us now. Even in the full light of the sun there remained that glow clothing him. He turned slowly, facing each of those doorways in turn. I do not think he meant us to hear him, but perhaps his earlier invasions of our minds may have linked us. for I caught thoughts carrying overtones of grief.

“Matr, Yoer, Rlleneé! Has it then been so long, and you gone so far?”

To each door he made a small gesture of the head as one uses in bidding farewell to a companion-friend. It was only then that he turned his attention once more to the two of us.

“We have but little time. If Galkur dared to invade the hall, he will follow swiftly.” He once more studied Kerovan with the same searching intensity he had used before. This time my lord, now awake, looked as straightly back.

“Yes,” the Old One continued. “I can well understand now what moves Galkur. Only his power appears somewhat lessened, perhaps by time. Now…!”

He flung up his head and, from his beaklike mouth, there sounded a roar not unlike that which the gryphon had uttered before it flew into the dark. The sound was oddly magnified; it filled, I thought, both heaven and earth. There was an answer.

A man who appeared as human as a Dalesman walked toward us under the arch where the gryphon crouched. His gray clothing was that of any wandering merchant. Only I knew him and spoke his name—with relief.

“Neevor!”

His answering smile was as kindly as that of my uncle when, as a small child, I had sought him out over some matter of unhappiness or doubt. A human smile, surely, and a warm one. From him flowed reassurance like a warm cloak placed about my shoulders in the chill of winter.

My naming of him came only moments before my lord did likewise. Kerovan took a step away from me. I believe that at that moment he reached for the same assurance that had comforted me.

“So—Neevor—your hand is in this matter also?” The gryphon lord thought-spoke.

“Was it not from the beginning, Landisl? I come now to take my part in the ending. When Galkur made mischief did not the dream of it enter your slumber? He thought then to shape a man-tool”—Neevor nodded toward Kerovan—“to his patterning and his purpose, taking advantage of a fool. But then, whose power essence interfered? Now what have you to say concerning the result of your dreaming, Landisl?”

The gryphon-man’s beak-mouth opened on a sound that was not human laughter but carried the same note.

“Yes, it was I who spoiled Galkur’s plot—even in my sleep. As to this one”—talons touched Kerovan’s shoulder gently, then gripped tight—“I have yet to prove him. You know the Law, Neevor—the future depends upon—”

Neevor interrupted him. “Just now it may depend upon Galkur. And you stand alone of the Sky-Ones. It took four of you to defeat him once.”

Landisl’s eyes glittered like sun-touched rubies. “Some powers wax with time, some wane. I believe that Galkur has lost somewhat. Or surely he would not have played games with the aid of a self-taught fool of a sorceress to foster a plot so easily overturned. What are his new plans, Neevor? It was your choice to spend years wandering, what have you learned during that restless travel to and fro?”

“Never to underestimate such as Galkur. His game has new elements. Landisl. There is a race of flawed and evil men overseas who entered this world through one of the gates. They are of the Dark, doubly so, though their learning is of another kind that does not answer to our Law. Therefore it is twice dangerous. They are embattled now and they need a new force for aid.

“Through their own ways of detection—and some reaching out on Galkur’s part—they have learned of Arvon and what may be tapped here. Though their conception of Power is distorted, and they do not understand our usage, they come seeking. They sent war into the Dales, endeavoring so to clear a path to us. And they are of a kind who can always provide a rallying point for many who have nourished the Dark here.

“Galkur ponders now on giving them more aid. So many of our Great Ones have gone, seeking gates of their own—new worlds beyond. Of those who remain, very few are full adepts—only a handful as learned as Galkur. So …”

“So you use your spells to send these two to awaken me?”

“Send, no. It is by your doing that even one stands here, that you have already acknowledged.” He nodded toward Kerovan. “It is by their own will and courage that they have won here.” There was a sharpness in that. “Those qualities they have in plenty. Kerovan’s birthright none may take from him. Daughter”—now he looked directly at me, once more smiled with such sweet gentleness that I longed to throw myself into his arms—“I told you once that you had a Key—to be used in the right time and place. You have done well with it. Now it remains for us to do as well with what will follow.”

Above the arch the gryphon roared.

Neevor half turned to look behind him through the gate.

“It seems that our time for doing so is now,” he observed.

Kerovan

ONCE I HAD PACED A CERTAIN HALL IN A DREAM, THEN I did it waking—or was all a dream? What is illusion and what is truth when the Old Ones choose to weave patterns beyond the understanding of men? Was I more than one of strange blood? What part weighs in me the strongest?

This time I watched the sleeper wake; then came the first trial of strength between old, long-opposed Powers. Now we stood again in the world that the human half of me knew and welcomed. Struggle lay before us, though four was now five—a small army indeed. This would be such a battle as once before I had known when, to save my dear lady, I went up against the Dark.

There was a reason, going back to my birth—or before that even—which bound me to this course, and, through it, bound Joisan. Perhaps I was even first fashioned to play a part here—but that was not so for my lady.

Had I been able at that moment I would have caught her up, hurled her from us into safety. As I gazed at her that part of the inner self, which I had kept under such tight restraint and tried to banish, awakened as had the sleeper. I knew then, for all my fears, I could never set her apart. We were indeed bound together for good or ill.

Not because we had once been used by our elders to insure an alliance of the Dales. There was something far stronger to unite us. Her eyes met mine with level courage. The spirit that burned in her fought that cold within me, warming my best part back to life. I lost the icy touch forever.

My sword sheath hung empty. I had no bow, not even a knife. Also I believed that what we awaited could not be harmed by any weapon forged by men. Neevor carried only a staff of rough wood such as might be cut from any sapling, bits of bark still clinging to it. The sleeper—he held a sword, yes, but in some way I dimly understood it was not made for thrust or parry, cut and slash, in crude open warfare. The gryphon on the gate perch moved a fraction, its beak a little open so its serpent tongue lolled out, its wings slowly fanned the air.

I do not know why or how at that moment my hand sought my belt pouch—my left hand. Fingers fumbled with the clasp and then groped within. What I drew forth was that bit of blue metal I had found in the noisome nest of the Waste.

It was a broken piece of metal, about which my fingers now curled tight—surely of no use in any battle. But, weaponless as I was, I stood shoulder to shoulder with Joisan. I saw her fingers go to her breast, fall away empty, as she remembered the globe was now gone.

A tongue of thick dark such as we had seen in the aisle of the sleeper’s hall burst from out the ground just beyond the gate. The very earth might be vomiting forth evil it could not stomach. This was an offense against the light of day, the air, the place where we stood.

Once more the gryphon roared a challenge. This time, however, it did not fly forth to meet what came. I looked to Neevor, to Landisl. Neither showed any surprise, certainly no hint of dismay. Still I sensed in them a wariness, in spite of their outward appearance of ease.

Joisan’s hand sought mine. She closed her fingers slowly as if she half expected I would shake off her touch. The warmth of her flesh against mine was what I needed most—again she was giving fully, openly, all I lacked.

Echoes of the gryphon’s roar died slowly. Beyond the gate the black mass whirled, grew smaller, thicker, more solid. In an eye’s blink there was no dark—only a man. Or … could one name him man?

He was tall and, like Landisl, bare of body. To the waist he was well proportioned, fully human-seeming. His head was crested with a thick growth of curling dark hair and his face sternly handsome. Those features might have formed the countenance of some ancient hero-king.

Only—that half-heroic body with its noble head, was belied by what lay below. From the waist down he was clothed by a wiry pelt much coarser than any hair or fur, and his thick legs ended in—

I glanced quickly away. Hooves! Hyron had suggested that I seek kin. Was this one of my own blood—the other half of me?

The mixture of noble and worse than bestial which he presented raised in me such a feeling of loathing as made me want to kill him. Or else run to hide myself from the eyes of those among whom I stood because I carried that same stamp upon my own body. There awoke in me once more that cold loneliness with which I had lived for so long. I shared blood with … Perhaps this beast-man could even claim my kin allegiance.

“No!”

It was not I who cried that denial aloud, nor had it come from either Neevor or Landisl. Joisan! She did not eye that monster, coming ever nearer the gryphon-shrouded gate, her eyes were for me, demandingly, even as her hold on me tightened.

“No—you are no part of him!” I saw her lips shape the words, but I heard them in my mind. That thought-send was rich, filled with what was needed to soothe the bleakness about my heart.

“A new day; another meeting …” Galkur (if this was Galkur) broke through that short moment of oneness with my lady. His voice was also deep, rich, and was meant, I thought, to be beguiling. He spoke aloud, not using the mind-speech.

Neither Neevor nor Landisl replied. The half-man smiled. This was a smile which, if one did not look below the face, might have charmed even a prudent doubter.

Did I stir then, or had he already considered that there might be some cord between us which he could draw upon?

“You stand in strange company, my son.” He used the last two words with deliberation, emphasizing them.

His stamp was on my body, perhaps had always been my bane. I carried a taint of the Dark—was such truth coming to light at long last? My self-doubts returned in hard array.

Neevor raised his staff. The rod of wood made a barrier before me. I strove to shake free of Joisan’s hold. This was the truth! I was kin-bound to the Dark. Could they not see it? My mother’s ambition, the will of this Dark Lord, had made me tainted stock. If I remained with them I would bring down in defeat those about me. As an unwilling enemy in their midst, I would be a key by which he could enter their stronghold.

“Only if you believe—accept—the lie. The choice lies with you, Kerovan.”

Joisan! She would not release my hand, holding it and me prisoner as she cupped it against her breast, even as I had so many times seen her cup the gryphon.

“Keep your lady, if you so desire, my son.” Again that warm enticing smile. “Who wishes to part devoted lovers?”

Mockery in that. My other hand clenched. But, may all Powers forgive me, a part of me answered to him. What did I want with this girl out of the Dales, I, who could summon, could have, any female I wished?

Pictures trailed languishingly through my mind, clear, detailed. I was reduced to a slavering dog trailing a bitch in heat. This was foul, and I was invited to wallow in the filth. Joisan was no part of me.

I tore my hand free with strength enough to send her staggering backward. Inwardly I faced that seeping foulness, which spread until I longed to sear the flesh from my bones to rid myself of such stinking evil.

“Come.” He beckoned to me. The sorcery he put into that single word set my whole body trembling. Where else could such as I go? It was only fit that kin should go to kin …

I bit my lower lip, feeling no pain, though my own blood dribbled down my chin, clenched both fists. I was a part of this monster, so I must withdraw from those who were clean in body and mind.

“Kerovan!”

I shook my head—I must withdraw from her most of all. I was of the Dark—evil and foul. These others had tried to save me—or they had deceived and used me for some purpose of their own. They could keep me no longer.

Joisan had fallen to her knees, I stooped and tore from her belt the knife I had given her. Good clean steel, very sharp, ready for what I must do. I could not attack that thing waiting out there—calling me so. But I could do the next best thing—remove his key, make sure I could not be a traitor!

My hand moved with the practiced ease I had learned long ago as a boy sweating under the tutelage of a master fighting man. The sharp edge neared my throat. Fire blazed, burned at the wrist of my knife hand—thrust up into my eyes. My arm fell as if dragged back by a great weight. Fire burned in my other hand—the pain reaching deep into me. Only there it found nothing to feed upon—to slay …

I looked down dazedly at my hands. The blade lay on the pavement at my feet, but the fire still ran about my wrist, shown between the fingers that grasped that metal fragment from the nest.

“Kerovan!” Joisan once more flung herself at me, catching that weighted arm as if she feared I might again raise it. There followed swift on her cry a thought.

“Only those of the Light can hold or wear quan-iron, boy. Trust yourself first.”

Landisl? Yes! I was not, I could never be kin to Galkur. I thought his name with the same savagery that I would have shouted a battle slogan. I was drained, weak, but afire now with anger. My fate lay in my own two hands. I had just had material proof of that. Had any here the right to decide for me what my future would be? I had walked, ridden, slept and awakened again, for so long seeking the truth. Now I knew it.

Save that this was not the matter of my own awakening; it was a matter of the age-old confrontation of Light with Dark—in which I bore only a part, perhaps a small part. I stared at that beast-man. Though he still smiled, the deep warmth had vanished—in its place was a sly contempt.

Anger burned higher in me. I had no Power as these reckoned it. My anger was of human kind. Perhaps the Old Ones could play upon the inner core of a man, shaping him for their use. But there comes a time when even a slave may break for freedom. Though I wore the mark of the Dark One—he did not possess me. Nor was I of the Light. I was myself.

Will—will is the core of some kinds of Power. I had wrought with my will before. Slowly I fought that weakness in me, raised my left hand. Remember, I told myself fiercely, what Landisl reminded you of—the wristlet, the broken piece of metal. They were of the Light, as you always guessed. You are Kerovan. It does not matter whose seed, whose sorcery, brought your life, in whose womb you grew—you are you alone. What you make of life lies within you.

Silence held us. Joisan stood with her arms crossed on her breast watching me now, as if what she saw was not one she knew, but neither was he a monster. I was me. I was not to be pushed, used, possessed. I was free to make such choices as I deemed best, and from this moment I had no past, nor kin, only myself—and Joisan! Always Joisan!

We were allied, I had chosen to be allied—Neevor, Landisl, the gryphon, Joisan, and I.

“Galkur …” I found satisfaction in naming the enemy. Meager as any strength of mine might be, I needed that fraction of support that his naming might bring; thus I called his name aloud.

There was no smile on his face now. The shadow of nobility that had masked it vanished. These were the features of one of the Dark Ones swollen with awful pride.

“Son …” he returned. His voice was still honeyed, but he leered crookedly.

“No son of yours!” I returned, welcoming the heat of metal about my wrist, balanced by that piece near-piercing my other palm.

“You bear my seal.” He gestured to my hooves.

“A man may have yellow hair and still not be Sulcar.” I did not know from whence came that ease of speech.

“My son—come to me!”

He snapped that as an order. A stir toward him answered in me, faint now, was still in me. I clenched my left hand tighter about the fire I held. I was Kerovan!

His hand came up to draw symbols in the air. I watched them form like smears of greasy oil dribbled across cleanliness, fouling the sunlight.

Again the tug within me—stronger. I planted my hooves, stood straight. I was Kerovan.

“I am no running hound for you, Galkur.” I did not raise my voice, rather used it as if I spoke of unimportant things. “You needed a servant, you strove to fashion one. But you have neither son nor servant.

His face grew hard, cold, with very little of the human remaining in it.

“Hound you are, slave you are, mine you are.”

I heard then a harsh crow, not human laughter, but carrying with it the ghost of that.

“Galkur, when will you admit that your sorcery failed? Surely you must have known that from its very inception. You did not used to be a fool.”

The cold mask tore; underneath was seething hate.

“What matter is this of yours?” he spat at Landisl. “There are Laws—”

“Laws? Do you take refuge in such now? Did you believe you would weave with Power and I would not know it, even though I lay in the Long Rest, and you thought me safely caged so? You sought out the Lord of Ulmsdale even as his lady desired—you strove to fill him with your inner force—then … Tell me now, Galkur, what did happen. What really happened?”

The Dark One turned his head from side to side, his face was that of a demon out of a night’s worst dream.

“Look at his body! He bears my mark upon him for all men to see. You cannot deny that. I shall yet prove him mine!”

His eyes caught my gaze—held. They grew larger, were pits of fire, dark depths preparing to swallow me. All else vanished, narrowed to those waiting pits. I would be swallowed …

I was Kerovan! I was myself. That fire, the dark, the stench was not mine. Belief in myself was my shield. I was no Dark One’s spawn.

“Do you still claim him, Galkur?”

Beyond the fire pits the voice rang clear.

“Do I, or Neevor, lend him aid now to stand against you? He fights his own battle because he is what he himself has made—and that is not one of your line, Indeed his birth came not from your desires—nor from his mother’s wish—though that set upon his body your mark because she wanted a claim upon you. But in the very moment of his birth she knew she had failed! My doing, Galkur—mine!”

“You could not—” The fire pits shrank, flames no longer sought to lick me down. They were only eyes in a beastly face. “You could not—under the Law—”

“That Law you broke, Galkur, when you so meddled. And, in the breaking released me. He is Uric’s true son—in part—a fraction of his mother’s … but there is something more. In time he shall choose, if he will, another path. Do not seek to hide behind the Law now. Face us all!”

Energy poured out of me, fusing with other sources of Power—that from Landisl, from Neevor, whose staff once more rested point down—yes, and from Joisan. The gryphon voiced its roar. Joisan’s face grew pale and strained. I wanted to hold her close—but this was a time when all our strength must be turned elsewhere.

Forms congealed in the air behind Galkur, ready to feed into him energy in the same way we combined our own forces. There were horrors among them from which any sane man must avert his gaze, others which might have passed for Dalesmen and women. I half expected to see Temphera among them.

The drain of energy became stronger. Above my head a snake of flame lashed, would have sunk its fangs into my eyes. I was Kerovan—these were illusions of the enemy. He had failed to entice me—he would fail again. Neevor’s staff cracked, broke into two pieces. The jagged end of one flew into his face. It was met by a band of blue flame. I had flung out my wrist without thinking, instinct had willed that.

Joisan swung halfway around, fell to her knees, her arms flung up above her head to ward off invisible blows. I saw blood start out on her cheek.

Rage, as fiery as those eyes had been, filled me. I turned my wrist; a blue beam shot toward Galkur. One of his misshapen followers darted between, exploded, leaving behind only a stench.

At last the gryphon took wing, planed down from its arch perch to stand over Joisan’s body where she had sunk, face down, on the pavement. It covered her, its beak open in an enraged hiss. The broken ends of Neevor’s staff look on life, rising, darting through the gate at the Dark forces. They did not touch the Dark Lord, but they struck like well-aimed spears at the figures capering about him.

I moved forward, step by step, no longer trying to bring down Galkur himself, but aiming the ray at his band. Each one of those taken out of this struggle would drain him of strength.

The Dark Lord caught up one of his own monstrous servants, rolled the creature into a ball that he hurled at me. Then behind that attack, he himself leaped forward.

There was another beside me as I swept that balled thing out of existence. Landisl, his sword high, stood between me and the hoofed one.

Galkur skidded to a quick stop. His body began to swell. I saw some of his followers fade as he absorbed their substance. The bristly hair on his lower body fluffed, its ends giving off yellowish light.

Landisl’s silver body shone as bright as the sword he now held with both hands. Waves of force burst from its sky-pointing tip, rippled down the length of the blade to encircle his body. He became a pillar of light.

The Dark Lord changed, also. Black flame burst from him, swirled and thickened again into something giant high, which reached out a huge appendage to slap at the burning torch Landisl had become—slap and flinch, without landing a blow.

For a long moment it seemed that both were so equally matched neither could move. The point of the white light fell forward as if it were a swift sword. It touched the swelling Dark. A black stain from that spread up the light, dimming the glory of the white. I staggered as the pull upon my energy grew heavier. Through a mist of weakness I saw Neevor hunch far over, his face as gray as his clothing, his eyes closed. The gryphon and Joisan were now behind me; I felt their united energy pass me on its way to Landisl.

That stain spread no farther, the white held. Then there came a great upward flare of light, blinding me. Almost too late I flung my arm over my eyes. I fell to my knees, sprawled forward—there was no strength left in me.

Joisan

I THOUGHT THAT NEVER AGAIN WOULD I SEE SUCH STRIFE AS THAT IN which my lord had faced his own kin in the Waste on that other day of torment. But that was only a skirmish with outlaws on a border raid compared to the battle with the Dark Lord Galkur.

Though I did not even see the end clearly, my whole life force near drawn out of me, I knew when it came for I had roused a little into a warmth. The gryphon crouched between me and all evil, curving its claws about my shoulders, holding me to its breast, even as it had once rested against mine, I knew then such a feeling of peace and safety, in spite of my weakness, that I think I whimpered a little, as might a child begging for comfort, finding it at long last.

I saw only a great upward surge of light and then it struck down upon the foul darkness that threatened us. The black thinned, drew in upon itself. Once more that white blade lifted—now it was like a great pointing finger. Down it jabbed in turn.

A sound rent the air. It tore through my body, not my ears—that scream of defeat, of death and defiance still, mingled altogether. I slid then into shadows which welcomed me but were not of any evil sending.

“Joisan!”

There was no longer the softness of the gryphon’s silvery mane against my cheek, rather the hardness of mail. I opened my eyes and saw what I had longed for. Perhaps all my life I had desired this without realizing what my full lack had been until it was at last mine.

My dear lord—not looking down at me with his face closed, his lips straight, his eyes hooded, so disciplined by his will that he could chill my heart. Rather this was my lord as I had always dreamed he could and would be some day.

I raised my hand, though that was difficult, for my own flesh was like a heavy weight. Still I persevered until I could draw fingertips down his cheek, make sure by touch that this was he indeed, no illusion born out of my lonely longing. On my finger the gem from the past pulsed and grew redder as if it held heart’s blood full within it.

It was a lover’s ring. I knew, and now it was a lamp leading me into another heart, wide open, ready to receive me.

“Kerovan …”

He had called my name loudly to summon me back to life. But I said his softly because it was so dear to me.

“It is done,” he told me.

What was done—the battle? That no longer mattered. It lay in the past and the past no longer held us. It was what lay ahead that I yearned toward.

“So …

Beyond Kerovan’s shoulder I saw Neevor, the gray man. His face was thin, older. When he spoke my lord looked up and around. For a moment I was afraid again, for a shadow of his old stem self—the one I had fought against for so long—crossed his face.

“It is done!” He said that to Neevor defiantly.

“The gryphon-man?” I tried to raise myself higher to look about. “My gryphon…?”

It was Neevor who answered, while my lord’s arms were so tightly about me that his mail bruised one. But I cherished that small pain because of its cause.

“They have completed their pattern,” Neevor answered me.

I did not miss Landisl—he was so alien a being that he awoke in me only awe and some fear. But my hand strayed to my breast where the gryphon had once hung, and I remembered how it had come to shelter me during the last of that battle. I felt an emptiness of sadness and loss.

“Kerovan.” Neevor again addressed my lord with a sharpness I had not heard from him before. “Remember this, their plotting went awry. Though he tried to make you, Galkur had no part of it.”

My lord smiled oddly. There was a ruefulness in his expression, yet such peace as I had never seen in his face before.

“No hand in my making, only in my marring, is that what you wish to impress on me, Lord? Well enough. And Landisl—what was he?”

The age I had seen in Neevor appeared to be fading.

“He had a part in you—so that in time you may—”

“No!” my lord interrupted, shaking his head. “No, Neevor. I will follow no road to the holding of Power—that one you would like for me to choose. I may have some small right to claim such, but I want not to be the master of any force. I am myself, Kerovan. I want nothing to make me more—or less.”

“You agree, in truth.” Neevor had been watching us both closely. He made a small gesture with his hand as if he tossed something to the wind, to be borne away. “This is then your free choice? There may never be another time to choose otherwise, you understand.” The gray-clad man did not draw back, still suddenly there seemed to be a growing distance between us.

“My choice is to be Kerovan, lord of nothing, man of no great talent,” but my lord spoke more to me than to Neevor, as if it were very necessary that I understand. “I am only myself.”

“Which is the one important thing,” I found words easily. “You are my dear lord, what else you desire shall come through your own efforts always. I think you are to fashion a fine new fortune for us both.”

Neevor laughed.

“Well done, children. Enter into the world of your choice. I foretell you shall find it in no way lacking, and perhaps you shall encounter a surprise or two along the way.”

Then, as one can puff out a candle flame, he was gone. I settled back into my lord’s arms with a sigh of content.

“Our world.” I caught his head and drew him down until our lips met with a warmth which became pure flame—to light us both—forever.

Horn Crown

1.

The rain fell with sullen persistence to make one’s travel cloak a sodden burden weighing upon the shoulders, even as fear can weigh heavily on heart and mind. Those among us who were simple and unlettered, who had never stirred far from the fields they tilled or the herd pastures known to their long-kin before them, muttered together of Glom the Weeper and looked upon the gray sky as if they expected moment after moment to see her two welling, tear-filled eyes above us, her sorrow hanging as heavily as a curse.

Even those who were lettered and learned could be disturbed by the thought of curses and condemnation after this exile came to us.

Were our Bard-Sages right to use their knowledge so that when we passed through the Gate, household by household, lord-kin by lord-kin, we not only left behind us our homeland, but also a part of all memory? Now we might question for a while why we had come to ride this rain-washed, dreary land. However that questioning diminished as we rode north. That the reason for our flight was dire we carried ever in our minds. Not only did Sword Brothers ready for instant alarm ride before us to scout this strange land, but a full company of them were the last at the Gate as a rearguard. With them were Laudat and Ouse, whose singing had opened that world portal and who now closed it with the clack-clack of their spirit-drums so that there could be no retreat, and perhaps, mercifully, no pursuit.

Those who rode in the van as our guides had met us this side of the Gate. They had been near a full moontally of days here, spying out what must be faced. Their report was strange. They told of tall hills and dales, once held by men—or else some life-form which was near enough like our own to pass for men—for our scouts had found the land now deserted, save for relics of that earlier race.

Not that the land was entirely safe. There were places here and there where other forces had been awakened and lingered, which we must take good care to avoid. However, there was much clear land waiting for the plow, hillsides rich in tall growing grass to feed our sheep, our cattle, the horses which carried our packs and pulled heavily loaded wains.

Each lord-kin moved in company, possessions well stacked, and the old and the very young riding either on wagons or on the most docile of our mounts, while swordsmen and liegemen of each clan kept on alert to wall them in.

We moved at a slow pace. Sheep and cattle cannot be overdriven. Also, I think, the strangeness of this land weighed upon us, perhaps because, as we went, we sighted certain pillars or structures here and there and, too, the sun did not make a welcome warmth or light for us.

My Lord was Garn and our household was not equal to most in either wealth of gear or strength of liegemen. Our small flock of sheep were easily numbered and we had only a single bull and five cows to watch. Relics of the old life we had brought with us filled only three wagons, and some of the younger women rode, many with a child before and another behind, holding to their girdles.

I was lord-kin, though not heir, being a late-born son of Garn’s father’s brother. Still I carried kin-shield and there were four crossbow men who rode at my command—a very small company to be sure. I was young enough to be seriously concerned with my responsibilities, and now, as I rode with my men strung out behind me at intervals, I kept to the right flank of the clan, searching among the hills for sight of anything that might move.

We had debated—or rather the Lords had, when they had come through the Gate—the advisability of this route. Only the Sword Brothers had affirmed that it led straight through a deserted land and there were none of the other people’s traces near it.

It was, however, a true road—running straight, the blocks of its making showing now and again through the overgrowth of grass and plants. Our wagons jolted along it with better going than we might have found had we taken to open country.

The rain was not all that veiled this new-old land from us. There were patches of mist which hung about the crowns of some of the hills on either side. In places, that mist was not the expected gray-white but had a bluish gleam, or was darker, which gave one a feeling of uneasiness.

One of the Sword Brothers spurred past me, heading from the rear guard toward the fore. I watched his passage with outright envy. They were men apart, owing no kin once they had taken Sword Oath, having no clan ties. Their skill with sword, bow, and short-spear was so well known that they carried much authority without ever having to touch steel. However, they made no demands upon the kin, supplying themselves from their own flocks and herds which the foot-brothers tended.

To be accepted into their number was the dream of most of the youth of the clans. For most that dream was never realized, for they remained always the same in numbers, adding no one except on the death of a brother.

After the passing of the rider my own overlord, Garn, came at a lesser pace, his two sworn men at his back, checking upon those of us who rode as a side guard. He was a man near as dour as this land and the weeping sky over us, not given much to talking, but with a quick eye for any failure in service, or possible cause of trouble. Silence was the best praise a man could hope for from Garn. I felt my hands tighten on the reins as his hawk face turned toward where my small company trotted. I had expected him either to voice some disparaging comment on my deploying of that part of his forces, or to check upon the rear guard who were ordered by his son Everad. Instead his horse matched pace with mine, his escort dropping back a little, until he rode stirrup to stirrup with me.

I did not expect any comments from him about the land about us, the discouraging weather, or the past. I merely waited, recalling hurriedly all I might have done lately that was not to his liking. His head turned slowly as his gaze swept from one ridge bordering the road to the other—though I did not think he was trying to see the rear riders of the Household clan of Rarast which preceded us.

“There is good forage.” I was astonished at his words, though I knew that Lord Garn was one to judge well the worth of land and the uses it might be put to. I knew all those around me, I knew their likes and dislikes, their faults and virtues, and how we were allied one to the other. I knew my own part in the kin-clan, the training in weaponry which I had had, I knew—everything but why we had come into this other world and what danger we had eluded by coming.

“There shall be a council at the night camp,” Garn was continuing. “Then shall be decided where we settle. The Sword Brothers have scouted well. This land is wide. Fortune may favor even those of us who have not grown so great in the past.”

I still sought the reason for this frankness of speech from him. It was as unlikely as if my plodding horse had spoken. What Garn said began to sink into my mind past the surprise that he spoke so at all. A large land—open for settlement. There was near a hundred clans, most of them far beyond us in numbers of kin, stock, all which might put a lord into the first consideration. Only no lord would want to spread his meiny so thinly that it could not be easily defended. Thus there was a very good chance that even so small a clan as ours might come into land riches.

Garn was continuing: “Those of the kin-blood will be present and there will be a drawing of lots. This has been agreed upon—that there will be only one choice. Either for shore lands or for the inner ways. Siwen, Uric, Farkon, Dawuan have already spoken for the shore. The rest of us will have the choice. I think,” he hesitated, “I would speak with you, Hewlin, and Everad, also with Stig, when we halt for nooning.”

My agreement was perhaps unheard, for abruptly he wheeled his mount and rode to where Everad held his place in our march. He left me still surprised. Garn made his own decisions; there would be no need for any consulting, even of his heir. It was doubly startling that he would ask any advice of Stig, who was the headman of the field workers, the non-kin.

What was in his mind? Why had he mentioned the shore lands? We had had no such settlement in the past. To turn aside from long custom was not in our way of life. Still—we had come into a new world, which was perhaps reason enough to break with that custom and lead us into new ways.

I tried to remember how far we might be from the shore, which the Sword Brothers had explored only in very small part. There had been talk of harsh cliffs and reefs leading cruelly into the sea. We were not a sea-going people, though those of the four clans Garn had mentioned were fisherfolk—or had been.

The morning drizzle was lifting. Before nooning a watery, pallid sun shone. Under it the land shook off some of the brooding shadow which had made it so alien to our eyes. We camped where we were on the road, not pulling the wains away, the households strung out along its length like loosened beads on a too-long string.

Those small braziers of coals which had been so carefully tended in the foremost wain were brought out and charcoal sparingly fed into them—enough to warm pots of the herb drink which strengthened the traveler, washed down bites of journey cake. I hurried over my share that I might not keep Garn waiting.

He sat a little apart on a stool which had also been taken from the gear and waved us to less lofty seating on a strip of thick woven matting which had been unrolled at his feet. I noted that beside Everad and Stig, was Hewlin, who was the eldest of his guard, his face near as grim as his lord’s.

“There is the choice,” Garn began as soon as we were seated. “I have had word with Quaine who rode the shore way the farthest.” He took from his belt pouch a strip of skin which had been rolled into a thin tube, spread this out so that, leaning forward, our heads close together, we could see running on it a number of dark lines.

There was one heavy black line which curved in and out, and feeding into that from one side, three thinner ways, also uneven. Two indentations of the larger line were already marked with a thick black cross, and to these Garn pointed first.

“This is the shore as Quaine has seen it. Here and there are bays which are open and this land will be taken by two of those who have already said they want only the sea.” His fingertip now moved on, still along the pictured coastland, until it tapped against a much smaller indentation.

“Here is a river, not as great a stream as the others, but of good water and it leads inland to a wide dale. A river is an easy road for traveling, for the carrying of wool to market—”

Wool! I thought of our sorry herd of sheep. What did we have to market? All that was ever shorn from their backs was woven and worn by our own people and there was never more than enough for perhaps a new kirtle, a new under jerkin, at three or four years’ time.

It was Everad who dared ask the question that was in all our minds: “This is what you would choose, my lord, if the lot comes to you and it is not already taken?”

“Yes,” Garn said shortly. “There are other things—” He stopped short and none of us had the courage to ask what those other things might be.

I stared at the lines on the bit of skin and tried to imagine what they were meant to represent—land and sea, river and wide dales to welcome our plows, our small herds and flocks. Only they remained stubbornly but lines on skin and I could not see beyond them.

Garn invited no advice or comments from us. I had not expected that he would. He had called us together only that we might know his will and be prepared for the decision he was about to make if all went favorably for him at the lot drawing.

That river he had Indicated lay well to the north, beyond the bays which he had said would be the first choices of the sea lords. I wondered how long a journey northward it would be, also how many days of foot travel it would take us. The time was spring, we should be getting into the ground the precious bags of seeds which weighed down half of our last wain—if we expected any sort of a crop at all this year.

There was no telling how chill the winter seasons might be here, or how swiftly they would come, how short or long the growing time could last. Too lengthy a journey might bring us under the dark shadow of winter want, a specter to haunt any clan. Still, the choice was Garn’s and no lord ever led his people into outright disaster if he could help it.

The night’s council was held at the midsection of our strung out line of march, near where Lord Farkon’s long parade of wains and folk wagons were in place. They had ready a fire and around that the lords sat, their blood kin behind them while Laudat and Ouse, both pulling their gray cloaks close about them as if they felt the damp chill even more than any others, and Wavent, Captain of the Sword Brothers for this Ten Year, were in the center of that circle.

Both the Bards looked thin, tired, their faces nearer to gray in color. The opening and the closing of the Gate might have worn them close to death, but they held themselves to the task before them. However, it was Wavent who spoke.

He described again the land ahead, saying that it was uneven, lacking any strength of plains. Rather, it was ridged by hills and between those were dales, some wide and well covered with vegetation, some narrow and stony. He also spoke of the rivers that were on Garn’s crude map and of the two well shaped and open bays.

He had scarcely finished when Lord Farkon broke in: “You have said little, I note, Sword Captain, of these strange places left by an Elder People—or of such people themselves. Do any linger—and if so will they not take sword to defend their own lands as any lord will do?”

There was a murmur which ran from lord to lord. I saw Ouse’s shoulders straighten, almost as if he were about to rise and speak in answer. Still he did not, but left that to Wavent.

“Yes, this was once a land well held,” the Captain admitted readily. “But those who held it have gone. We have found things of theirs—but in most there is no harm. In fact, there are places of peace and safety which are welcoming. But there are others, and I do not deceive you, my lords, which are pools of evil. These you shall know by the very stench of them. Also, it is well that you have no dealing with any building or ruin which you may find. We of the Sword have quartered and requartered this land and have seen nothing but beasts, have found no trace of any land holder. It is empty now; we do not know why.”

Lord Rolfin shook his head, the firelight flashing from the three bits of red gem set in his helm just above his eyes.

“You do not know why those others withdrew,” he repeated. “Thus we may be facing an unknown, unseen enemy here.”

Again there was a stir and murmur among the lords. This time Ouse did stand, shrugging the hood of his cloak back so that his gray-haired head was fully bared and all could see his thin, lined face.

“The land,” he said quietly, “is empty. Since we have come into it we have sensed nothing which we may term enemy. This night before you came to council, my lords, Laudet and I sang the warn words and lit the torches of the Flame. It burned fair, there was no stir at our invocation. There are traces of old power—of a kind we do not know—but the Flame can burn nowhere when there is war rising and evil moving in.”

I heard a grunt from Lord Rolfin. He was ever apt, as all men knew, to go seeking menaces in each new place, though he could have no answer to Ouse’s reassurance. It was true that the Undying and One Flame could not survive if evil ringed us round, and I am sure that I heard several sighs of relief at that reply.

Now Wavent pushed forward with his right foot a basin of bronze which Laudet had set out for him. The Captain stooped and picked this up, holding it with both hands.

“Here, Lords of Hallack,” his voice becoming more formal, as if speaking ritual words, “are your choices by lot. In the Light of the One Flame are all kin-chiefs equal. Thus it was in the past, so shall it be here. Let each of you now draw by chance, for at midmorning tomorrow we shall reach the first of the open dales and one of you may there withdraw from our journey to take up a new home.”

Holding the bowl just above the eye level of the circle of lords, he then passed from right to left, pausing before each man who reached up, scrabbling fingers among the strips of hide he could not see and bringing out the lot which fortune dealt him, though all knew that afterward there could be changes made if both parties agreed.

Ouse let Wavent come well along before he followed with a smaller bowl, this one being of silver somewhat tarnished, which he offered to a handful of lords who had refused the first choosing. This we knew represented the chances of the seacoast. As he had told us he would, Garn refrained from drawing from Wavent’s bowl, a happening which appeared to make his near neighbors glance at him in surprise. When Ouse reached him his hand went up forthwith and there was something of eagerness in his action though no emotion showed on his impassive face.

None looked yet upon their luck but waited until all had drawn. There were some slips left in Wavent’s bowl but Ouse, though he had few takers, turned his upside down before he was well around the circle and went back to his own place.

It was only when Wavent also returned to stand by the fire that each lord unrolled the scrap of hide his groping fingers had brought him and looked down at the runes marked there—for the Sword Brothers, together with the Bards, had made these for guidance even before we had come through the Gate, and each carried clear directions for travelers and settlers.

We were eager to know Garn’s luck, though he did not turn to show his drawing to his kin as many of the lords were doing. The hum of talk arose and already there were those who bargained for exchange, some wanting more pasturage, others more land for crops. We waited with what patience we could summon until at last Garn did speak: “The Flame has favored us. We have the river land.”

It was a piece of fortune such as men seldom come across. That he should have drawn the very land he had marked down for his own seemed almost too well done, as if fortune (which is always undependable) had been this time reinforced by a more powerful ally.

I saw one of the Sword Brothers coming through the shadows beyond the inner circle to which the fire gave light. It was Quaine, he who had first told our lord of this possible holding. Now he joined Garn and asked: “What luck, my lord?”

Garn had arisen, the piece of hide stretched taut between his two hands. He favored Quaine with one of those piercing, near accusing glances by which he was able to reduce any man to instant acknowledgment of his orders. Yet Quaine was not of his meiny or kin, but stood easily as if he spoke but of pleasant weather.

Quaine was Wavent’s age, and he had been Captain in the last Ten Time. He was, I thought, near Garn’s own years, though there was no gray in his hair and his body was slim as any youth’s. He walked with the grace of a fighting man who was well trained in the most skillful of swordplay.

“I have it,” Garn returned shortly in answer to the question. “It is yet a long journey.” He made no question of that, still he continued to look at Quaine as if he waited for some other and more important word from the Sword Brother.

Quaine made no comment and Garn glanced now from him into the flames beyond. He was a man whose thoughts one could never read, though at that moment I wondered if he were not as well pleased with the result of the drawing as he might have us believe. I held to a small shred of doubt that this fortune came to him by luck alone, although neither Wavent nor Ouse would have lent himself to any arrangement of favor for even the greatest lord among us, and Garn was one of the least of that company when it came to wealth or ranks of kin.

“It is best,” Quaine continued, “that those for the shore take trail together. There is another road leading east and then north, but it is much older and it may prove difficult passage. If you ride together then there is aid at hand should any accident occur.”

Garn nodded sharply, thrusting his drawing into his belt pouch. Then he only spoke four names, making a question of them: “Siwen, Uric, Farkon, and Dawuan?”

“Also Milos and Tugness,” Quaine added.

Now Garn did stare at him, while I let hand go to sword hilt without my realizing what I did until my fingers crooked hard about the metal. We might have had old memories erased as we passed the Gate, but there were some which lingered. Among the Lords, Tugness was no friend to any of Garn’s household. It was an old feud which had meant bloodletting once, but now it was only that we did not friend-visit with them at any season nor come to a hosting in which they had a part.

Again Garn made his question curt: “Where?”

Quaine shrugged. “I have not asked. Yours lies farthest north—the last dale we rode across in our quartering. Doubtless he will settle south of that.”

“Well enough.”

“We turn from the road near sunset,” Quaine continued. “I will lead the Brothers for the sea party.”

Garn nodded, giving no farewell, as he turned on his heel and, with the rest of us, tramped back to our own camp which was some little distance from the council place, saying nothing to us.

Though I was well tired by the journeying of the day—the everlasting matching of our pace to the slow turn of wain wheels—yet as I drew my cloak about me and used my saddle pad as a pillow, I did not at once fall asleep. One could hear the small sounds of the camp. A child was crying in a weak, fretting way where the women sheltered—probably Stig’s grandson who ailed. I could hear, too, the movements of our stock as they grazed the tough, thick grass already well above the earth’s edge for spring, and now and then the snort of a sleeper or a snore. Garn had gone into the small tent which was his alone. From where I lay I could see the spark of a strike light and then the thin gleam of a lantern candle. Perhaps he was again studying the lot fortune had given him.

I had thought fortune too favoring and been wary, then I had heard of Tugncss’s luck and believed that this was the ill part which I had sought to find. If our future holding marched with his we must learn to live in a state better than an uneasy truce. This was an unknown land from whence the former inhabitants had withdrawn—the why we did not know. Though the Bards and the Scouts had stressed that there were no enemies, still there was a loneliness, a kind of withdrawal, which I, for one, felt the farther I rode. We might well need to depend on neighbors even if such lived a day’s journey away. This would be the time when all men of Hallack must stand together, old quarrels and enmities forgotten.

This was not Hallack—that lay behind, lost forever. Those of our company had come to call it High Hallack, since it was a country of many hills. This it would be named in bardic memory from the hour we crossed into it.

Still sleep did not come, though the lantern candle winked out. I turned my head to look up into the night, seeking stars I knew. Then there was a coldness which crept across me, roughened my skin, and brought a prickling beneath my hair. For none of those groupings of stars was what I had known all my life. Where was the Arrow, the Bull, the Hunter’s Horn? There was no tracing of any such to be seen.

The rain had stopped hours ago, and the clouds cleared This sky was a background for many clusters and sweeps of sparkling light—but they were all new! Where had our journey through that Gate taken us? To the sight, this land about us was just such earth, grass, bush and tree as we had always known. Only the stars were different. We were in a land which would support us, but we were very far from where we had been born.

I lay shivering at the sight of the unknown stars which, more than just passing through the Gates (much as we had been warned that those would influence us), brought home to me that we were indeed exiles and that we had now only our own strengths to carry us on, our own weaknesses to fight. Which lay the more threatening before us? I thought of the sea, of Garn’s choice, and part of me felt excitement and a wish to explore the new. Another part of me searched for a shield against that same new and the dangers it might hold—until I dropped at last from the chaos of my thoughts and fears into sleep.

2.

Behind us lay the wide valleys, which now held the people of Farkon, of Siwen, of Uric, Dawuan, and to our right still pounded the sea as our company grew smaller and smaller. We could take heart only that the land did remain empty, though there were in plenty the remains of those who had gone before us, even at times stretches of ancient road which we followed with greater ease. Quaine and three of the Sword Brothers scouted ahead, pointed out those places of the unknown; some they would counsel avoiding, mistrusting the emanations.

There were towers, stretches of pavement surrounded by pillars, piles of rough stones, even monoliths, about which we cautiously edged. I was ever curious as to the manner of folk which had labored to set such stones one upon the other, wondering at the purposes which had led them to such labors.

The largest and most fertile of those sea-fronting lowlands were now behind us. We had been twenty days on our northward crawl. Twice it had been necessary to strike inland for near a day’s journeying to find a ford across rivers, which, to our thankfulness, were lazy enough of current—at least at that season—to allow us safe crossings.

On the twenty-fourth day Lord Milos’s people left us, turning westward up the throat of a narrower valley, one of the scouts riding as guide. This held no river and we were forced out upon the sea’s sandy shore in order to round two ranges of steep hills which guarded it. We called farewells, made promises of future meetings come festival time. Still I think that in all of us, whether we went forward or remained in a stretch of new clan land, a loneliness grew, the uneasy feeling that one more tie with the old was broken and that we might well rue this later on.

It was true that we had drawn closer together during that long march because of the very fact that we were alone in a strange land. There remained, on the surface, none of any ancient enmity with Tugness and his people. All of us labored together to lighten wains as they crossed on the fords, to carry sheep across our saddles there, whether they wore the ear brand of our House or not. Though at night we each made our own camps, still there was visiting back and forth.

Which is how I came first to see that slim withe of a girl who rode a shaggy, sure-footed pony which bore her and two fat hide bags without complaint, though her mount showed rolling eyes and yellowish teeth when anyone else approached it. For all her seeming fragility of body, she was as strong as any lad as she went about her tasks with a brisk independence which had none of the weary acceptance of a field woman, and certainly no hint of manner of one used to the high table in a lord’s hall.

It was on the third day of our northern trek that I marked her as one different from the other women who rode and were there to lend a hand, to the extent of their strength. She traveled beside a smaller cart—hardly larger than the tilt carrier which a fieldman would use to take his over-yield to market. To this were hitched two more of the same rough-coated beasts as she rode, their gray coats the same dull shade as the cart itself. Though our people have long taken pride in painting their wains and carts, no such decoration had been given this, so among our company it was more visible for that very reason.

It had a canopy, well lashed to side staves, of finely tanned and stretched hide, and it was driven also by a woman, whose kirtle and cloak were of the same prevailing gray, and who I knew at first glance to be a Wise Woman.

The pair of travelers appeared to be by themselves, attached to no lord’s company. I noted that Ouse came once to ride beside the cart for a space and exchange speech with the driver, while the girl dropped behind to give him room. That the bard chose so to single out this woman meant that she was of note among those who had the Inner Knowledge, even though she went so poorly and quietly.

I had thought that they would turn aside with one of the great lords where a larger company would give the Wise Woman full occupation tending ills and averting dangers of the spirit. However, at each lessening of our company, the two and their cart remained.

One asks no question concerning a Wise Woman. They do not call upon the Flame, yet men do not question or raise voice against them for that. Their skills are inner born and they are free to come and go, as they serve all without question. Many a fighting man, many a woman in child labor, has reason to bless their shadows and give thanks for what they have to offer.

However, if one wishes any matter enough one can learn. Thus I discovered that the girl was named Gathea and that she was a foundling whom the Wise Woman had taken for fostering and made her handmaid and pupil. Thus she was set apart and went her own way, not to be judged by the manner and customs of either the field people or those of the hall.

One could not call her comely. She was too narrow of body, her skin too brown, her features too sharp. But there was something about her, perhaps the freedom with which she walked and rode, her independence, which lingered in a man’s mind. Or at least it lingered in mine and I found myself once or twice wondering how she might look with the long robe and tabard of a feast day over that slim body, in place of a shirt jerkin and breeches which were akin to my own, with that long braid of hair wound so tightly about her head shaken loose and interwoven with a silver chain of sweet tinkling bells such as Garn’s daughter Iynne wore upon occasion. I could not imagine Iynne splashing through a river with a kicking sheep across her mount, one hand fast in its wool, the other beating the pony on its rump to urge it on.

When the Wise Woman did not turn inward at Milo’s choice I was startled. For I had not thought that she was with Tugness’s people. She and her handmaid did not camp near them at night, but rather kept their own fire a little apart. This was according to custom, for the Wise Women never lived completely in any community of a holding; they sought their own place, where they might grow their herbs and follow their ways, some of which were secret and not to be overlooked by those unlearned in their craft.

We found the beach difficult pulling for the wains and now we crawled even more slowly. That night we camped on the shore itself, with our backs to the cliff. To most of us the sea was strange and we eyed it uncertainly. Only the children went hunting shells along the edge of the waves and stood, their heads far back, watching the screaming, swooping birds who hunted their prey within the waters.

Once camp was set, curiosity brought me down to where wave pursued wave, to lap and die upon the sand. The air from over the water had a richness which made a man want to fill his lungs and breathe deep. I gazed out over the darkening waters and wondered a little at the courage of those who build shells of wood to venture out on that immensity, following an art of their own, which was shield and sword against any wrath of the waves.

I caught a glint of water between rocks and went on to discover that pools were cupped by the tall stones, fed by the washing sea. Those pools had inhabitants—strange forms I had never seen, but which surprised and interested me, and I squatted on my heels to watch them for a space as they darted here and there or half hid under stones. For they were hunters all and each followed their own way of seeking food.

A splashing roused me from my study of these wily hunters and their tricks and I turned to see Gathea, her boots shed, her breeches loose from their ankle thongs and rolled up above her knees, making her way from a small reef of rock, pulling, with the full strength of her hands, a length of red, vinelike stuff from which hung great leaves dripping water. The sea vine seemed to be securely anchored, for, though she strained, it yielded only a little to her pull.

Before I thought, I pulled off my own boots and, without stopping to roll up my breeches, I waded into the wash of the water and set my hands on the slimy cord a little behind hers, lending my strength to the battle. She looked over her shoulder, a shadow of a frown at first between her sun-bleached brows. Then she gave a nod, acknowledging my offer of help, and we jerked mightily together.

In spite of the force we used that stubborn length would not give. Thus, after two such pulls, I loosed my hold and drew my sword. She nodded again but held out her hand demandingly, so I found that, in spite of myself, I allowed her to take the weapon from me, splash farther out, and while I held the vine taut, she brought the steel down cutting the cord through in two swings. She returned to grasp the end of the vine with one hand, with the other, she preferred my sword, hilt toward me.

“My thanks, Elron of Garn’s House.” Her voice was low, a little hoarse, as if she seldom used it. That she knew my name I found surprising, for none of our party had had speech with her mistress during the journey. Nor was I noteworthy among my Lord’s meiny. Not that Garn could boast of such a battle force as a full war band.

“What will you do with this?” I waded back to the beach and, though she neither asked for nor refused my aid, I still held to the vine and helped drag it after us.

“The leaves dried and pounded,” she said as a man would discuss the setting of a plow into new ground, “can enrich the soil for planting. Also it has other properties which Zabina knows. This is a good find, taken at the best of its growing season.”

I surveyed the slimy length we pulled free of the water, sand now matting down its long tendril leaves, and thought that indeed strange things must be better than they appeared.

Then she was gone, without another word, towing the weed along behind her while I rubbed sand from my legs before drawing on my boots once again. The evening shadows were well advanced and I went back to our own camp to eat and wonder what the next day would bring and how much longer we would travel on before we found the land of Garn’s choice.

As I held a bowl of crumbled journey bread, softened with several dollops of stew meat made from dried meat, and spooned up its contents, I stopped, with the spoon halfway to my mouth, staring as two newcomers came into the full light of our central fire. Quaine, who had been sitting cross-legged beside Garn, waved them on, though Garn himself did not raise a hand and only regarded them with a cold, level stare across the rim of his drinking horn.

Though I had seen Lord Tugness a number of times during these last days of journeying, this was the first time he had been so close that I might have put out a hand and flicked finger upon the end of his sword scabbard.

He was a short man, heavy shouldered, since his favorite weapon was the battle axe, and much practice with that had given him the muscular strength which, in another man, would have been in sword arm or thinned away by the need for agility. On horseback he was impressive; on foot he walked with a short stride which made him appear top-heavy.

Like the rest of us, he wore a mail shirt over travel jerkin, but tonight he carried his created helm, the wind blowing through his thick, ragged growth of red-brown hair. Unlike most of our race he also had a noticeable growth of facial hair, a matter in which he appeared, against custom, to take pride, and this he had trained into a fringe of beard about his wide mouth. Above that his nose was not much more than a blob of flesh so that his breath came constantly in snorts—the broken and flattened cartilage the result of a fight in his youth.

Beside Garn he slouched and looked far more like a rough blank-shield hired for some slightly unsavory task of secret rapine than a lord of lineage as long and as well songed by the bards as any House which had come through the Gate.

Taller than his father and much sparer of frame was his son-heir, who came into the full light a step behind. He was a spear-shaft of a youth who shambled as he walked, his arms hanging. Of course, those who knew him or had heard of him were well aware he was not the staring simpleton he looked. His skill with the crossbow was a matter of comment. But he was a silent shadow of his father, having little to do with those his own age. If one addressed him he was likely to stare round-eyed and answer slowly in as few words as possible.

Lord Tugness came straight to the point, just as he would ride with axe ready against any opponent. However, it was to Quaine that he spoke, ignoring Garn, even hunching a shoulder a little as if to shut out the sight of his old-time enemy.

“When do we get free of this devil’s stew?” he demanded, kicking into the loose sand, sending bits of grit flying to make sure that the Sword Brother understood his meaning. “My fore team is already neck-galled from pulling and we have no spare beasts. You have promised us land, Sworder, where is it?”

Quaine showed no sign of affront. He had arisen and stood facing Tugness, his fingers locked in the fore of his belt as he met the clan lord’s stare.

“If the Flame favors us, Lord Tugness, we shall be within arrow flight of your land before sundown tomorrow.”

Tugness gave one of his heavy snorts. I saw his fingers curl as if they held an axe. His eyes, under the brush of his heavy brows, demanded recognition from the Sword Brother.

“We would be on good land.” Again he stamped with his boot into the sand. “This stuff gets even between a man’s teeth when he eats, down his throat when he drinks. We have had our fill of it! Be matters as you say, Sworder!” His last words might almost be a threat, as he swung his heavy body about, sending sand spurting on those nearby. Behind, Thorg, his son-heir, trod with a lightfootedness which might almost be that of a scout in enemy land. Also as he went Thorg suddenly lifted his head a little and I found him looking straight at me.

I was young and Garn recked me of little account, as I have well known since childhood. Still I am able to see promises which men’s eyes may hold, even though the rest of their faces give no sign of feeling. I stopped in mid-bite when I caught that look from Thorg. My first reaction was surprise. Then I hoped with all my might a moment later, I had not shown it For why should the son-heir of Tugness, whom I had never had any reason to cross in any way, show me black and deadly hate? I told myself that I was not—that I could not have been—his enemy except that I was of my House and he of his, but I could not put aside the belief that there was more to his. feeling concerning me than any formal feud. His look, then, troubled me.

There was a moon that night, fair and cold, and silver-clear. Its beam helped to hide those stars which were not as they should have been. There are old tales that the moon plays a part in the lives of men, setting upon them its touch in mind and heart, even as the sun can show its mark on skin by browning with its fire-heat. But moon power is not for men, it is a thing of the women and those among them especially who have the wise knowledge.

I had drawn a little apart from the row of men who were asleep, waiting to take their turn at night sentry duty. I rested some distance from the wains. Thus it was that I saw in the moonlight the Wise Woman stride, tall and with a hurried step, along the sands. Behind her but a step or two came Gathea, a bundle in her arms held close to her breast, as if she carried a child or some treasure which must be closely guarded, even from the moon’s rays.

North they went along the sands and I knew that no sentry would dare to speak with them, or even perhaps let them know that he saw them passing. For it was very plain that the Wise Woman was now about some business of her own craft. Yet there was one who moved in the shadows, came to a line of rocks which were the last bit of cover before the open beach.

I edged over on my side, pushed away the cloak which covered me. It was important to me, though I did not question why, that I know who it was who had followed those two up the beach and now watched their going from his own hiding place.

Though I might not be as skilled as a Sword Brother, I had hunted game, yes, and taken much training in the methods of fighting known best to us—a sudden surprise and quick attack meaning more than any sustained battle. Now, on hands and knees, taking advantage of another upthrust tooth of rock, I found a vantage point from which I could spy upon that watcher.

For what seemed like a very long time we remained so—he in his hiding, I in mine. Then he came away from his post—for the women were gone and there was nothing to be seen under the moon now but the ever restless inward sweep of the waves. I could not see his face, but by his walk I knew him. Why had Thorg followed the Wise Woman and her handmaid? He had broken custom and would have brought on him swift punishment had he been sighted. Not perhaps from the men, but the women of his own house and clan might have set upon him, as was their right. For in the things of women’s knowledge no man might meddle and their vengeance to protect that right was keen and swift.

He was gone back toward Tugness’s camp and I did not follow him. I was left to wonder why he had dared flout custom. He could not have an eye for Gathea—the very thought of that was enough to unsteady one. Still—

I shook my head against my own wild thoughts and dozed until I was called to the last sentry go, when dawn was not far away and I was able to see the sun rise. It was an odd rising, for to seaward rested a vast bank of clouds close to the water, yet in the early morning those clouds looked solid, like an island, as far as one could see, lying offshore. There were peaks and lowlands, and all in heavy shadow so that I would have sworn one could take boat and go out to set foot on a land freshly born in the night offshore. Never had I seen such a cloudbank and it held me amazed. Then when I heard a faint clink behind me I had sword out before I swung around, and felt foolish to see Quaine standing there, his hands once more hooked in his belt, staring as I had out to sea.

I resheathed my sword as he spoke.

“One would think that land—”

“I do not know the sea,” I said. “Perhaps that is common in the dawning hereabouts.”

He shook his head. “No—it is like having the far sight Look!”

There was urgency in his voice and I followed with my eyes the hand he flung out. I had noticed that there were mountains upon that cloud land, stark against the reddening sky. Now against the side of one of those was defined more sharply than any of the other smooth contours of the cloud place, what was surely very like a keep, a square-walled fortress from which arose two towers, one a fraction shorter than the other. So complete and solid did that appear that I would have sworn the place existed. The coming of the light, though it faded the dark of the rest of the cloudbank, did not change the darkness of that blot.

It had been solid, easy to see, then it was gone! Not wafted away by the slow change and drift of clouds, but winking out, as if it were a torch or lamp which had been blown into nothingness. Still so clear was its outline in my mind that I could have taken a stick and drawn its outline on the smooth sands.

I looked to Quaine, for I was sure that this was no freak of night but something strange, perhaps a part of those wonders of this land concerning which we had been warned. Also I had so strong a feeling that somewhere the keep I had seen did exist that I was moved by a wish to search it out. I spoke part of my thought aloud:

“The keep—it—it was real—”

Quaine looked at me sharply, a look I expected mainly from Garn when I was at fault in a matter. “What did you see?” he asked and his voice was soft, like a whisper, which barely sounded above the constant wash of the waves.

“A keep, double-towered. But how could such stand upon clouds—?”

“Clouds can form many things if one watches them,” he returned. I felt ashamed as might a child who sees all that lies in a songsmith’s tale taking shape about him, making monsters from rocks, and magic by his own inner thinking.

Yet Quaine continued to stand and watch the cloud island until it was fully revealed for what it was. There had been no dark spot where that keep had been for a long time, and I could hear our camp stirring into wakefulness. Then the Sword Brother turned away from the sea and gazed again at me as if he sought in some way to search out my thoughts.

“This is a strange land.” Again he spoke very low as if he were sharing a secret. “There is much in it which we cannot understand. The wise man will leave such alone. But—” He hesitated and then continued. “To some of us curiosity is good. We have that in us which must learn more and more. Only here there are no trail guides and the fool may well vanish into his folly. Walk you with care, young Elron. I think that perhaps you are one with the Burden—”

“The Burden?” I repeated without understanding.

“The wise, or those who think them so, call it that There are others who might name, it a ‘gift.’ It is how you use it or abuse it which counts—and how you learn what you must learn. I will say this to you—do not go recklessly in this land. It is doubly perilous to those who have more than first sight.”

He strode off abruptly even as he uttered that last word of warning—a warning against what I could not tell. Nor did I understand why he spoke of a “burden” and a “gift.” I was only a very small part of my lord’s following, just as his House was a very poor and weak one. What I had mainly were the clothes on my back, the sword and mail shirt and helm which had been my father’s before me, and a thin pack of possessions in one of the wains: a ballad book of old runes which I could puzzle out, though the runes were different from those we used today; a tunic of good wool for feast days; some body linen and a belt knife, jeweled and fancifully hilted, which had been my mother’s. Certainly no burden—

As we moved out that morning I kept remembering that keep I had seen among the cloud mountains. Had Quaine seen it also? When he had asked me to tell him of my discovery he had not acknowledged it, although he had drawn my attention to it at first. The Sword Brothers had their own form of knowledge. They had explored this land before we had braved the Gate. It could be that something of what they had learned they kept to themselves, or shared only with the senior members of the council.

Still I carried with me as I rode slowly on, matching the pace of the wains, two mysteries to mull over: first why Thorg had followed the Wise Woman and her maid as if he were a spy trailing some enemy; second, what I had seen in the clouds. For a part of me stubbornly declared, past all calm reasoning, that I had seen something which was different and to be noted only because we traveled a land steeped in all that was alien to what we had always known.

Quaine was right. We did come, at last, to another indentation among the cliffs and so out into a dale which, though its sea entrance was narrow and it had no means of acting as a port, widened out well into a broad sweep of lowlands, now brilliant green with the grass of spring, such a fair country as even Lord Tugness could not fault. There his people turned aside, one of Quaine’s two men riding with them.

We made brief farewells since there was no friendship between us, only the fact that we were fellow travelers from the same source. I heard our fieldsmen comment upon the rich look of the soil, and express their hopes that we would be served as well when we came to our own place. But what mattered somehow more to me was that the Wise Woman also turned her cart into the way marked by Tugness’s heavier wagons. I was sorry to see that she had chosen to remain here rather than go with us.

Our own train, now reduced, rolled slowly on. Once more we camped upon the beach and this time the moon was veiled in clouds. This time I did not, when I took my watch in the early hours, see any cloud island offshore. Instead a wind drove at us, spattering salt spray at times, though we camped well above the waterline. The next morning the rain was once more upon us. The wagons found heavy work of it. Often we had to dismount and set our shoulders to the push, or fasten our mounts with extra lead ropes to add their strength.

We were worn with the fatigue of that fight against the land itself when we rounded once more a cliff wall and found a bay, much smaller than those farther south and menaced by reefs which showed brokenly in ledges out to sea, so that it would give little welcome to-any seafarers. But into it flowed a river and I did not need Garn’s hail to know that we had reached our abiding place.

The cart animals made a last pull, we lifted sheep, drove cattle up along the riverbank which ran for a short length between cliffs in which sea birds roosted, the rocks stained white with the droppings of many years.

Those winged ones wheeled angrily above us, voicing sharp cries which echoed even more loudly from the stone walls about. Then we were at last through that passage and came out into a land which seemed as fair at first sight as that which Lord Tugness had claimed. The sheep and cattle fell at once to cropping the new grass and we pulled up the wains by the riverside, for the moment content to rest and rejoice that we were at last in what would be our own land—clan land for us and our blood forever more.

3.

I had fought my way up a steep rise where the rock bones of the land had pushed through soil which grew thinner until it only lay in pockets, sometimes enough to give rootage to coarse grass or wind-twisted bushes. Not until I reached the top of that cliff and felt the keener wind of the heights about me did I turn to gaze down into Garnsdale.

In the woods, which looked from here like a lumpy carpeting of greenery (for spring passed swiftly and leaves doubled in size overnight), I could see those openings where trees had already fallen to busy axes, to be denuded of branches and drawn down to that place which Garn had selected for a temporary keep.

Four of the wain horses were engaged in that transport. The other six were already at plows used for the heavy work of breaking thick sod to open ground for planting. There was constant labor to which each man and woman lent their strength, whether of lord-kin or field clan. I was free this day because it was my turn at patrol along the heights. For, as open as the land seemed, and as empty, still Garn did not take for granted that it lacked possible dangers. In addition those patrolling the heights were also named hunters and anything they could add to the pot was welcome.

Quaine and his two men had stayed with us for ten days and then had gone, heading back westward in a general sweep into the unknown. Even as I played sentry on the dale ridges, so were they to patrol the whole of the western borders, they and their brothers, sentinels and guards for all the new settled dales. One of their duties was to seek out and map for us any remains of those vanished beings we had begun to call the Old Ones, they who had left this land before our coming.

One reminder of them was placed above this very valley. Though it was unimpressive—according to Quaine—compared to those seen elsewhere, still it was a place each patrol warrior watched and made himself familiar with—as I was about to do.

I went in mail, helmed, carried my crossbow as well as my sword, almost as if I were indeed prepared to meet attack, though certainly we could well have come into a deserted world for all we had seen. Now I jumped a crevice in the rocks and turned westward to begin the prowling along what we all accepted as the southern border of our new holding. So few were our party that Garn could only detach two fighting men at a time for this duty and we were expected to provide him with a full report upon our return.

There was animal life to be found here. The wild creatures were not too different, save perhaps in color or size, from those I had hunted all my life. A species of deer, very fleet of foot, had used the dale for pasturage until our coming; now fled and seldom seen. However, there was also a creature which lived in the upper rocks, nearly as large as a new-thrown foal, but heavy of body. It had wicked claws and fangs and a temper to match so that one was wary in the hunt, but it was excellent eating.

Always there were birds, some brilliant of wing, bright flashes against the sky. Another species were black and somehow unpleasant to look at. Those roosted in flocks upon the trees, screeching in rage at our axemen. When they took to the sky, they winged westward as if they sped to report the devastation we wrought in what had been their stronghold. I saw them rise now and wheel once over the forest—then speed away just above the height of the ridge.

I kept close watch on what might come among these rocks. Roff had reported from his tour of duty yesterday that he had discovered odd tracks, deep printed in one of the pockets of earth, as if that which had made them had come to the very edge of the ridge and perhaps spied upon us. Save that the tracks were those of a large padded paw, as wide as his own hand. It might well be that he had found a trace of some native animal which was more dangerous—a hunter who would come hunting us.

Thus I had shed my boots before the climb, putting on rather the softer and almost shapeless foot coverings which hunters used, through which my feet could feel the surface of the rock as I went, making as little noise as possible. The air was fresh and clean, and I believed that it did carry in it the faint scent of growing things, sometimes even a trace of what might have come from wind-stirred branches of blooming trees or bushes.

That there were such here I discovered shortly, for there was a dip in the westernmost part of the ridge, and, advancing with caution to the rim of that, I looked down into a cup of land which held our own trace of the Old Ones. Trees hardly taller than my own head, but old, judging by the gnarled trunks and crooked branches, were set evenly spaced about a square of pavement.

Those trees were in full blossom, their flowers being of a creamy pink-white, large and nearly flat, the tip of each wide petal rimmed with a darker pink. Many of those petals, already wind loosened, had shifted down to lie upon the stretch of stone pavement. Though the petals lay there no grass clump had taken root, nor was there any trace of moss on the stones’ surfaces. Inlaid in the center of the square was a symbol in the form of a moon-shaped curve—this fashioned of a bluish stone, quite unlike that about it, which appeared to have a metallic sheen under the sun’s touch. Each corner of the square was also marked by a column which rose to near my own height. These were topped by bold carvings: a circle, and then half circle, quarter circle, and a dark disc of another sort, dead black, though the others were of the glistening blue.

Since this place had been first sighted a few of us had discussed it often. Iynne, who had made a secret visit with her brother, had declared that it was moon magic of a sort and that the carvings denoted the moon itself in its four phases. She had been most excited and had spoken several times of how she wished to see it under a full moon to test if some ancient power had centered there. That she would dare such a venture of her own I doubted. Nor did I believe that any man would aid her in it. Garn’s hand would be heavy and quick to punish any such rank folly.

In fact, his orders were that no one of us must even venture foot into that pocket of land. We were to view it at least twice on each sentry go, but leave it inviolate. Which was prudent.

But prudence was not always a virtue of the young, and I longed to go down to see if those symbols and carvings were inlaid metal which had survived the erosion of time and weather. Also there was nothing of a threat here. Instead, even as I stood above and watched petals gently fall upon the stone, I felt a kind of peace and a strange longing, I could not have said for what, save that it was in me. Thus I shook myself, as if another put hands on me to awaken me sharply to my duty, and moved on, though it seemed that there also moved with me the scent of the blossoms, even a faint tugging, as if the unknown would hold me back.

I was not, I had always believed, one who was given to fancies and dreams. Such could not have lasted in Garn’s house without alteration of his own ways of thought. To my lord all which dealt with feeling was suspect. Now, since I had come through the Gate, I knew restlessness. I was plucked by a desire to stride out across this land without any ties, as if I were a Sword Brother, free to learn both its good and evil. I slept badly, had to fight that unease and longing, to set my hand to the work before us with strong self-discipline. It was no labor for me to patrol; rather, I looked forward to my duty day with a light heart and a surge of pleasure which I was careful not to mention.

The rounds of the dale walls took all of the day, from the morning sun to the long twilight of summer, and one could not linger on the way. Now I set forth at my best walking speed, keeping to the track I already knew.

To the south the ridge was very wide, its coating of rocks bare of any growth, dark gray and somber. This wilderness of wind-worn stone could be crossed to come into Tugness’s hold, but none of us went that way. To the west the ridges bordered the stream to form a second narrow throat where cliffs rose even higher, leaving a sheer drop into the water both on south and north bank. So broken were the stone walls there that one went with caution. There was no crossing of the river from above so there were two of us who patrolled—one to the north and one to the south—usually making rendezvous at the stream cliffs and waving to one another across the chasm.

Hewlin had alternate duty this day and such was his authority I had no desire to be late in reaching the point of meeting, though afterwards we would eat our rations at our pleasure, and consider the prospect of a hunt before we returned, to descend to the valley floor.

Hewlin was a little before me, leaning back against a postlike rock. He raised a hand and I answered his salute. Also I noted that he had better luck than I, for by his feet lay one of the rock beasts, cleaned and ready to be turned over to the cook. I waved to him in a gesture of congratulation, to which he made no answer, dour as ever. Then he picked up his kill and went off. I lingered where I was to eat my ration and drink the warmish water from my canteen.

There was another flight of the black birds, winging down the passage carved by the stream, so low I could see them easily from my perch. Their eyes were a brilliant red, and there was raw lapping of red flesh about their strong black bills so that they had a diseased look which added to their unpleasant appearance. Two of them broke from the flock as they approached, to circle directly above my head, their coarse, harsh cries breaking that peace I had felt ever since I had looked on the Moon Shrine.

One swooped straight for me without warning. As I flung up my arm in haste, its claws actually tore at the leather sleeve of my jerkin. I drew my sword and scrambled to my feet as the two continued to circle in a manner I had before never seen birds use against a man.

The glint of their red eyes was bright, their open bills continued to loose cries. Again one swooped. I swung at the bundle of feather. It eluded me easily. The other now was already on its way down to attack. For the first time I was uneasy. My defense could only be clumsy, I had no real way of avoiding those claws and beaks if they continued so. Unless I found cover. I glanced quickly around to sight a leaning stone, which should give me protection if I set my back to it, even though that would force me into a hunched position.

Those two winged furies tied me into that scrap of cover. Though the rest of the flock were gone, it would seem that these were determined to carry to the finish whatever quarrel they fancied they had with my kind.

The shelving rock protected my head and shoulders. If they would come at me now they must fly low and in, where I could meet any such attack with a calculated swing of steel. So I waited. However, it was almost as if the flyers had the power of reasoning and were too wary to give me any advantage. Instead they continued to keep me besieged.

My anger grew. That two birds could so use a man, almost playing with him (or so it appeared to me at that moment) fueled that anger. My greatest uneasiness for some time was that their constant cries might bring a return of the entire flock. While it seemed out of all reason that birds would attack—would be able In overpower an armed man—I began to believe that these could well do so. Certainly they could if I were In the open giving them room to fly as they pleased.

I tried to think of my next move. My crossbow was slung on my shoulder but its bolts were never meant for the hunting of birds and I did not believe that I could make good use of such a weapon here. How then was I to break out of hiding, for they showed no sign of withdrawing? They might have arranged to hold me at bay awaiting reinforcements to move in, even as those hounds which the greater lords bred for the chase did with some quarry too large or dangerous for them to pull down by their own efforts.

They still swooped and circled about my rock refuge and then—so suddenly that they left me near off balance—they both shot up into the sky uttering squawks which sounded different from their hunting cries, more as if they themselves were under attack, though I could not see what would send them so away.

I waited a long moment. However, the birds were definitely gone, winging off still squawking, to follow the vanished flock. In spite of that, I kept steel in hand as I emerged from my refuge, for I could not put aside the idea that they had been driven off by no effort of mine but by something else that walked here.

In a moment I saw her.

Gathea, the Wise Woman’s handmaid, stood on a taller rock so that I must look up at her. Her hands were held high as her fingers wove patterns in the air. I saw, too, that her lips moved, but I could hear none of the words.

So I saw her and behind her—

I cried a quick warning, readied my crossbow to take aim. Then my finger froze to the trigger as if I had been suddenly encased in the stone about me. I saw her right hand point to me and realized, with a rush of sheer fear, that some power I could not understand, something this girl could use even as I used bolt and sword, held me prisoner.

Still—behind her— She must be warned!

I shouted then and perhaps my fear, mingled with growing anger (because she had mastered me so) made the shout echo back from the cliffs.

Behind the rock on which Gathea stood showed the furred, fanged head of a great cat. It arose on hindquarters, planting wide, well-clawed paws on either side of the girl’s feet. Its head lifting so that it could stare yellow-eyed around her legs directly at me. It snarled and those huge curved fangs in its upper jaw looked as long and sharp as a table dagger, and much more deadly.

Gathea turned her head to look down at the beast. This time I saw no movement of her eyes, only that its head moved so that their gazes met and held for a long moment. Then it dropped back on the ground and padded around, to stand between us, still eyeing me, but with those gaping jaws closed. I could not doubt that in some way (perhaps the same way that she had controlled the birds) she also had dominion over this formidable beast.

Her hand gestured. I was free. But I was also wise enough to lower my weapon, offering no threat. Still the strangeness of this meeting held me where I was, almost as if I still were bespelled. The cat was a thing of wild beauty. I was willing to acknowledge that. Its coat was a silvery gray-white with a faint mottling of darker silver along the back and haunches. I had never seen its like before.

“He—he is tame—” I found words which were neither quite statement nor question. This animal had not traveled with her certainly, thus it was a beast of the dales. How had this girl discovered it in so short a time, bent its will to hers?

“Not tame.” She shook her head firmly. “For that would mean that his will is broken to that of man. Such is an abomination with his kin-kind. He recognized that I mean him no harm—that I am a seeker. Perhaps long ago his kind knew other seekers and were friend-kin to them. This is a land rich in much—” Her hands went out in a small gesture as if she would gather to her something proffered which was her life desire. I saw excitement and longing in her eyes then, yes, and a kind of joy which was wild and free. “If we do not take it harshly then we shall be repaid many times over. Only—” Now her eyes turned as fierce as the cat’s—"it seems it is not the way of men to do anything but pit their strength and impose their will wherever they go.”

“You—what did you do with the birds?” I did not want to argue with her. Also, I was still angry—a little because she had seen no harm in bending me to her will, though she denied that she would use an animal so, more at the fact that she had brought an end to an attack I had seen no way of countering in so easy a fashion.

“I—no, that is not for the telling, Elron of Garn’s House. Let it be that those who live at peace with all living things and do not strive to make them slaves and servants have in turn certain authority they may call upon at their need.”

“The birds are hardly servants!” I retorted.

“None of ours, no. They are servants, I think, of ancient evil. Perhaps they were once sentries. There is a covey of such also in Tugness’s dale—though Zabina is seeking to discover why they watch and where they go—”

I was caught by what might have earlier seemed to me to be sheer fancy. Could birds be trained to spy, to report? If so, to whom did they carry news? Should Garm be warned? I thought I could see already his look of scorn if I advanced such a theory to him.

“Your Wise Woman,” I said, “if she discovers—will she share such knowledge?”

“If it would be necessary for the good of all, yes.” Gathea nodded. “We have seen them watch and fly, but before this they have never tried to attack. What did you do to awaken their rage?”

I was irritated that she would immediately assume that I was the provoker of that very one-sided engagement.

“Nothing but stand here—watch them fly west. They sit most days in the wood to spy upon the loggers, before they scream and fly.”

“So they have done also in Tugness’s date. It may be that now they would try their strength. I would warn those you know to take care. They could well worry sheep, even cattle, to their deaths. Take an eye from a man … Look to the mark you bear now.”

She pointed to the sleeved arm I had raised to protect myself at the first attack. The leather was scored and torn.

Before I could answer, she leaped lightly down from the rock on which she had taken her stand. The cat, who had been blinking sleepily, arose. His head was near to her shoulder and she dropped one hand on the thicker fur which nearly formed a ruff at his forequarters.

“Do you go alone? There may be worse than evil birds—” I knew even as I spoke that my words sounded not at all firm as I had intended but rather as a weak warning which she would be likely to meet with the same scorn as Garn might show at my bird story.

“I am in search of that which is strong for what we need,” she answered obliquely. “Zabina has used the Sight, but here there are veilings so one cannot work too much with the Talent for fear of awaking that which is better left to slumber. This land is, in many ways, a trap. We may not have had much choice in our coming, but now we must walk as one does between two armies, both of which are our enemies.”

In spite of myself, she impressed me. We did not remember what had driven us through the Gate (it must have been fear—some disaster which had given us no other choice). Now in spite of the Sword Brothers’ reassurance, I accepted that this land might also have, as she called them, traps, elements that even those scouts and warriors had not yet chanced to discover.

Still we were here and there was no going back. What came to us we must face, with steel if need be, or perhaps by believing in such messages as this Wise Woman’s maid had just given me.

She was moving on, and, since her path ran the way of my patrol, I hurried after her. The cat, coming to its feet, padded soft-footedly ahead, pausing now and then to sniff at one of the rocks, though I could see no reason for such interest.

“Have you any of the Old Ones’ places in your dale?”

She had her head up, turned away from me, to gaze straight ahead, and sometimes she paused, looking to her right, her nostrils expanding as if, like the cat, what she sought she could first scent.

“No—nor is it our dale,” she returned with a sharpness which I would not allow to quell my curiosity, or my need to learn more from her—and of her. “We are no clan-kin of Lord Tugness—nor others.” She frowned. “There was a need, thus we went with his people. Whether we remain,” she shrugged, “that will be for the future deciding. Ah—”

She flashed ahead, darting around tumbled rocks, streaking across open spaces with the fleetness of the gray deer which our coming had driven out of the dale. Before her bounded the silver cat, overleaping some of the obstructions she had to round. Because I must discover for myself what had sent her off so eagerly, I pounded after, dropping well back, unable to match her pace, weighed down as I was by my weapons and gear.

Then I realized in what direction she moved. She was heading straight for that small hidden valley of the Moon Shrine. Remembering Garn’s orders, I pushed my pace. None were to enter there, he had warned. We were not to explore whatever was made by those who had long gone. But that I could keep Gathea away was a vain hope.

I called out twice. It was as if both she and the cat were deaf; neither turned head nor slowed their pace. By the time I reached the edge of that hidden place, the girl was standing between the two trees which fronted the square. Her hands were pressed tight to her breast, her eyes flexed upon the pavement, as if it enshrined some great wonder visible to her alone.

Behind her crouched the cat, this time its eyes were not half closed, but alert, also watching.

Gathea took a step forward.

“No!” I raised my voice, tried to leap over the rim, to forestall her before she ventured onto the pavement.

I tried to leap, only to sprawl backward in a tumble of limbs and body, the crossbow flying away, myself kicking to regain my balance as might a beetle which has been turned on its back.

I scrambled to my knees, flung out an arm ahead. I might have driven my fist against a wall of the same rock as lay all about. There was a barrier there—one I could neither see nor force. Now I used the fingertips of both hands, feeling up and up until I stood once more. Both my hands ran across something—something which held me out yet appeared to have let Gathea past.

When I looked down I saw her standing just on the edge of the square. To her right was lifted on the pillar that dark disc, to her left one of brilliant blue. Her eyes were still fixed in that stare and I watched her lips again move in soundless speech.

Slowly she went down to her knees, her hands sweeping out, her head bowed forward, as if she paid the most formal of homage to some great lord. Petals still drifted through the air; several fell to lie upon her head.

Her hands moved once more as she gently swept some of those which lay upon the pavement, gathering them into the hollow of her right palm. Once more her head lifted so I could see her face. Her eyes were closed and she had a listening look as if she heard some message of import which she must remember and deliver to another.

Again she bowed, but this time she held against her heart the palmful of petals. Then she arose, and, at the same time that she turned away, like one who had completed a task, the surface against which my hands had been pressed vanished.

I pushed again farther on—to encounter nothing. Still I did not leap down into the dell as I had planned to do. Here, that would have seemed more than discourtesy—an outrage of a sort. I shook my head, trying to free it of such fancies. Only I knew that these were no fancies, that what I thought was real. I dared not intrude upon the Moon Shrine, though there was no threat of evil, merely the realization that it was not for such as me. Tramping in, I would break some beautiful thing which was precious beyond my imagining.

Now I lingered for Gathea to rejoin me and it was not until she was some distance away that I understood she was headed south. Apparently she had no intention of sharing a path any farther. The cat followed her for a space, while I stood and watched her, uncertain of what to do or say.

Then that silver body again flashed up into the air in a graceful leap as the cat left her, heading westward and south, apparently seeking its own way along the rim of the other dale. I remained alone as Gathea walked steadily forward, and not once did she look back or speak any farewell.

When I finally realized that she was on her way back to her mistress I started my patrol once more. How much of what had happened would I report? Never before had I thought to conceal from Garn any part of what I had seen. Only this time I had a feeling that what I had just witnessed had not only been no business of mine, but also it was not for Garn’s prying. For he might possibly order perhaps even the destruction of the Moon Shrine (yes, that crossed my mind). He detested, I well knew by now, all elements of the unknown that could not be met by physical force, and he would be angry that Gathea had manifestly found something here of power. I had, too. That invisible wall which had held for awhile was certainly no dream.

The birds, yes, of those I would tell him. For it might be as Gathea had warned, those could turn against us and our animals. So we would have to be forewarned and forearmed against that danger.

Thus was carefully building up my report as I made my way back down to the dale. At the same time I also longed to know what had been present in the moon shrine Gathea had paid homage to—and what other things might be found in this land—of good or ill—if one was free to go seeking such.

4.

Though I was first to meet the hostility of the birds, I was not the last. As we cut deeper into the wood, brought out more trimmed trees to be used for the building of a long hall to shelter our small clan for at least a season, the birds gathered more thickly about the scene of our labors. Then the children who had the herding of our few sheep raised shouts of alarm, and went in, flailing with staffs, to keep deadly beaks from six newborn lambs upon whose lives depended much future promise.

Finally Garn had to withdraw men from necessary labor to use hunters’ bows and keep watch with the herd. The birds appeared to have uncanny skill in avoiding even the best of our marksmen. Thus tempers grew ragged, Garn’s cold displeasure ever present, as what had seemed a petty thing grew into a constant threat.

It was not until we had thinned the trees which were the strongest and the most likely to serve as good building material that we found at last what was perhaps the reason for that baffling attack. For when one morning a giant fell beneath our axes it took with it a mass of creeper already well in leaf, flattened thick brush, to show us that the Moon Shrine was not after all the only relic of the Old Ones in our chosen dale.

Again pillars stood, having avoided the flattening of whatever had screened them, as if they had power to hold away the tree. There were seven of these, near the height of Garn himself, placed closely together so that perhaps only a hand might be slipped between the column of one and the next.

Unlike the rocks of the ridges which formed our boundaries these were of a dull yellow stone, oddly un-pleasing to the eye. Also their surfaces had a smooth look in spite of what must have been long exposure to plants, wind and rain, reminding one of a foul mud frozen into shape. Each of them bore, halfway down one side, an incised panel on which was carved a single symbol, all differing one from the other.

When our clearing exposed these to the sun there was an instant boiling up of the birds whose cries and circling of the workers were so threatening that Garn gave an order to fall back, leaving our laboriously axed tree lying where it had fallen for the time being.

Luckily, as we thought then, the birds kept up their clamor, their low flights, only for a short time. Then they flocked together, winging their way west, paying no more attention to what had been wrought. Nor did they return. Thus after three days of freedom from their noisome company Garn ordered the tree to be brought out by the aid of our horses. He did not need to warn any against going near those pillars, nor did we cut any more in that direction. We all by now disliked the sight of such relics.

The heavy work of plowing the first fields was complete, our carefully hoarded seed sown. Still we, fieldmen and kin alike, were not easy in our minds until the first sprouts showed, proving that what we had brought with us had indeed taken root in this alien soil. Now, sparing disasters only too well known to those who till the fields, we would not lack for a crop this season, small though that might be.

Some of the women, under the eye of Fastafsa, the Lady Iynne’s old nurse, now keeper of the house for Garn, sought out other growing things. There were berries beginning to ripen, and certain herbs which the women recognized as stuff fit for the pot. Those stars over our heads might be strange, but this country seemed in some ways like the land from which we had come.

We had the walls of the hall raised -- not of stone, rather logs dressed to the best of our ability. This first shelter was one long building, which was partitioned to serve the families of the clan: a wide central space where we might eat together as did all kin and clan, at high and low tables. There were wide fireplaces at either end of the building and a third at the side of the hall, these cunningly constructed by Stigg’s orders from specially selected stones taken from the stream bottom where water had washed them smooth. When the roof of poles, cut and well fastened to three long central beams, supported within by firm pillars, was complete, we had a small feasting to celebrate the completion of our first shelter. Stigg’s youngest son was chosen to climb and fasten to the roof peak that bunch of lucky herbs the women had prepared.

For the flock and the herd, their numbers being small, we set up pole shelters. As yet we did not know how severe the ice months might be in this new land. Mean-while, the building being over, those of us who had hunters’ skills went out daily to bring in what we could of meat to be smoked over fires carefully tended for that purpose. There were fish to be taken, too, and enough were netted to fill several barrels.

In that time of steady labor we saw no others except those of our own clan. I had half expected the Sword Brothers to return. Yet none came, nor did any of Tugness’s people make the journey across ridges to see how we might fare. Still, each time I patrolled in the heights -- as Garn still continued to have us do -- I would pause by the Moon Shrine and search for some sign that Gathea had been there.

The blossoms of spring were long since gone, and the trees about that pavement grew leaves strange to me. These were of a darker green than usual and very, very glossy; also they were vined with a color which showed as blue in the full sunlight as the symbols left by the long-vanished builders.

Twice I surprised Iynne there, gazing into the shrine as if she sought something. Each time she appeared startled by my coming. At the first such meeting she begged me not to speak of her seeking this place. It was wrong but I obeyed her wishes, not because Garn’s daughter was any I might look upon as heart-lady, for we were too close kin and had been more as brother-sister for most of our lives.

Still, her secret visits to this place bothered me. Firstly Iynne was not such as went adventuring. By nature she had always been a shy and timid girl, one who found quiet pleasure in women’s tasks within the keep. She was very clever with her needle, and near as good as old Fastafsa herself at brewing and baking, the ordering of a household.

I knew that Garn had sworn her hand to the second son of Lord Farkon. An excellent match, one which would bring Garn and all the kin a strong backing. Though as yet the time for Flame and Cup had not been set. We of the kin did not wed by choice, rather to further the good of our House and it was much a matter of fortune how matters went after we had come to the marriage bed.

The field people were freer, though still there was sometimes hurt and suffering because one sire or another would arrange a union to make sure that there was some small advantage for both households. Once or twice I had seen Iynne at the handfasting of some field girl, watching intently the smiling face of the bride. Did she ever think of the long journey down coast which would come in due time after which she might not ever see again this dale which her father governed?

We did not talk of such things; it was against custom, but I believed that Iynne’s sweet face and quiet, competent ways must earn her a favored place in any keep to which she would go. I had seen Lord Farkon’s son—a tall young man, comely enough, having both his father’s favor and his brother’s liking, an unusual combination among our people—so I believed she should be one of the fortunate ones in the end.

Why she now broke with all the rules of our people to steal away secretly to this place she did not tell me, though I asked. All she would reply was that she had to. Then she was confused and near weeping so I did not push her further, though I warned her against danger and tried to make her promise that she would not venture so again.

Each time she did so, swearing so vehemently that I believed her. Still I would find her there crouched at the edge of the pavement as though she were at the door of a chamber she would enter but had not yet the courage to attempt. The second time I told her that I could no longer believe her promise, that I would speak to Fastafsa to make sure that she was warded within the dale and could not slip away without the knowledge of the women. That day she cried, slowly and pitifully, as one who is bereft of a treasure for which there is no substitute. She did obey me, but so drearly that I felt a brutal overlord, though what I had done was to protect her.

The bite of fall was in the air soon after we completed the keep. Together kin and clan labored as one to hurry the harvest. Our seed had done well in this virgin soil. Stigg beamed at an ingathering which was more than he had hoped, as he said again and again—already making plans for the breaking of new fields in the next planting season.

Hewlin, during a hunting expedition at the far western end of the dale, came upon, at about the same time, a third sign that this land had once had other lords and people. For he followed the thread of our stream between those high cliffs, to discover a second and wider stretch of open land. There he had found trees heavy with fruit—what the birds and a type of wild boar had not already harvested. There was no mistaking that these had been planted, for they stood in order, with here and there a gap where one had died, leaving only a worm-eaten stump.

We went in a party to harvest what was left of that crop: Fastafsa and her women, Everad, I, and three of the household armsmen. Iynne did not choose to join us, saying that she did not feel well. Fastafsa left her bedded in one of the kin rooms of the keep.

We made a two-day journey of it since the passage up the cliff-walled stream was not too easy. In spring, if the waters arose as they must do, this way would be totally closed, I believed, noticing the high marking of past floods on the walls.

Once there we worked steadily. The armsmen ever on guard, the rest carrying and emptying baskets while Everad and I made short explorations into this second dale, seeing land which held excellent promise for our own future, advantages which would come if we could persuade Garn to expand our holding in this direction.

Save for that orchard of the past we found no other sigh of the Old Ones, which was reassuring. Neither were there any birds here to raise grim warning. By the morning of the third day we were up early, ready to return down-stream, each taking a hand with the loaded hampers, so that there were always two men free with sword and crossbow. It would seem that in us there was always a deep uneasiness, no matter how fair or pleasant or open this country—as if we dwelt on the border of some enemy land. I found myself wondering why this was so. Except for the venture of the birds—and those were long gone—we had come across nothing threatening here. Yet we went as if we ever expected a surprise attack.

We returned to trouble, as if that which we had unconsciously feared had at last gathered force enough to strike full and hard. Hewlin came spurring his mount straight for us, well armored and in full war gear. At the sight, we men drew together, the women huddled behind us, suddenly silent where moments before there had been light laughter and singing.

The marshal of Garn’s force drew rein, his sharp eyes flickering over us as if he sought one who was not there.

“The Lady Iynne,” he pulled up before Everad, “she has not been with you?”

“No—but she was ill—she said—Fastafsa!” Everad turned his head to the house mistress who now pushed forward, her eyes wide, her face pale beneath the usual ruddy color.

“My lady—what do you say of her?” She elbowed past Everad, spoke to Hewlin with force and fierceness. “She was in the keep—I gave her a sleep draught before I went. With Trudas to sit near and see to her. What have you done with her?”

“She is gone. She told the maid that she felt better, asked her to get her a wallet of food and said that they would both take after you. When the girl returned—our lady was gone!”

At that moment my own guilt stung me. I could think of one place where Iynne might have gone. But if she had vanished just after we had left, then she must have been lost for a night and a day! I had only one duty and that was now to tell what I knew and take the consequences.

When I faced Garn I knew that my life rested in his hands—yet that was as nothing when I thought of Iynne exposed to such as the cat which Gathea might choose as a trail mate but which my cousin could certainly not hold in mastery. Thus I spoke clearly of what I had seen—of the Moon Shrine and Iynne’s seeking it out secretly.

I saw Garn’s fist rise, encased in a metal enforced glove. And I stood unresisting the blow which sent me sprawling, the taste of my own blood in my mouth. His hand flashed to his sword. He had that half drawn as I lay before him, making no defense. It was his right to slit my throat if he desired that in payment. For I was foresworn to my lord, and had broken blood-bond—as everyone who circled about us knew. Duty holds to one’s lord and is our strongest law. To break that makes one kinless and clanless.

He turned on his heel then, as if I were not worth the killing, bellowing orders to those who were still his household. They left me as if in that moment I had lost existence, as, in a manner of long custom, I had.

I levered myself up, my head still spinning from that blow. Yet worse than any blow which Garn could give with his hand, was that which had come from my own treachery to my lord. There was no life here for me anymore; I could expect none to acknowledge me.

When I pulled to my feet I watched them start for that slope climbing to the Moon Shrine. Somehow I was also certain that they would not find Iynne there. Though I was foresworn and now clan-kin-dead there was one small thing left for me.

Nothing would return me to life in Garn’s eyes, or in those of the clan. Still I lived, though I would rather that my lord had taken the lesser revenge and killed me, as his face showed that he had first thought to do. No, I could not turn back time and do as I should have done, but there was perhaps one way I could aid Iynne.

I had, in my blurting out concerning the Moon Shrine and her secret visits there, said nothing of Gathea, being too full of my own careless and disastrous action. If I could now reach the Wise Woman and her maid (they knew far more of the shrine than any of us, of that I was sure) there was a thin chance I might discover a trail to my cousin.

Nameless, kinless, I had no right to anything, even the sword I still wore. Garn had not taken that from me and I would keep it; perhaps I might still use it for a purpose which would—not redeem my betrayal—but at least aid Iynne.

Thus on foot I turned my back on the cliff and the people who followed Garn. Rather I moved seaward, planning to enter Tugness’s dale by the other way and find the Wise Woman. My helm with its House badge I left lying where it had fallen from my head at Garn’s blow, and with it my crossbow. Bare of head, empty of hands, staggering because my head rang, my eyes seeing sometimes two images of what lay before instead of one, I started downriver.

I spent the night on the shore. To a sea pool I crawled and bathed my aching face in water which stung like fire. One eye was swollen shut and the pain in my head was a pounding which made it hard for me to hold any thoughts—save one, that I must find the Wise Woman—or her maid—who knew most of the Moon Shrine and what power lay there.

I might well be a hunted man, once Garn found no trace of his daughter. Somehow I was sure that would be true—that there would be no trail left to follow among the rocks of the ridge. Yes, Garn’s hate and vengeance might flame high. Any one of my own clan who brought me down would have his favor. If I were to stay alive long enough to do Iynne any service I must take care. Save that my head let thoughts slip in and out crazily, and I kept rousing to find that I had fallen in the sand, or was creeping in a mindless way along where waves dashed up-ward to wet my face, bringing me to consciousness again.

Night and day, I caught at what strength I had to battle my way on. At times I thought I heard shouts behind me. Once I wheeled about, waiting to see the sword raised again to cut me down. But there were only the sea birds crying in the sky.

Somehow I found my way to that place where Tugness’s wains had turned from our road. There I leaned against a rock and fought for a clear head. To go openly into the dale was to court disaster at once. Though he was no friend to Garn—or rather because he was no friend to Garn—he would take pleasure in offering me up to any who had followed me. It would be a sweet morsel to roll upon the tongue for Tugness, that one of Lord Garn’s own close kin had played him false. An outlaw was fair game for any man, but I would be more valuable as a prisoner to be returned to shame those whose name I had once borne.

Thus I must use what craft remained in my aching head, such skill as I had, to avoid any of Tugness’s people and search out by stealth the Wise Woman. I could not even be sure whether she would give me aid, all I had was the knowledge that those of her calling did not always hold by kin and clan custom, and that she might, in her role of healer, take pity enough on me to point me in the direction whereby I might serve the lady of Garn’s House as I had not done in truth.

I do not know how I won into the dale. Some instinct stronger than my conscious self must have aided me. I was aware of fields, of a distant log-walled building or rather a cluster of three such—unless my eyes were again playing me false. I think that part of the day I lay within a cup of rocks unknowing, though I had a confused dream afterward of a black bird which swooped to peck sharply at my face so that the pain of his assault stung deep. But that may only have been a dream. It was deep dark of night when I awoke with a raging thirst, my skin as hot to the touch as if I were clothed in burning brands.

I kept close to the edge of the cliff, where the ridge rise was steeper even than it was in Garn’s land. A single thought held me to my path, that it was along here somewhere Gathea had found her way up, and perhaps so I might elude anyone on watch around the holding buildings and fields, and also come across some trace of a way to the Wise Woman’s place. For, remembering how she had held apart during our journeying, I was firm in the belief that she would not have become one of Tugness’s household.

After a while in the dark when I fell and rose again more times than I could count, that fever which possessed me was victor; I took a last stumble which brought me down with such force that it not only drove the breath out of me but also sent me into a dark which was not sleep but something deeper and less easy for body and mind.

Thus it was in the end that those whom I sought found me, for I awoke by unhappy degrees, seeming to fight that awakening, to look up into a low roofing of poles woven and tied together with dried vines so that the whole looked like a field which had been harvested and only the dead stalks left. From this dangled bunches of drying stems and leaves, fastened together to form a kind of upside down garden, autumn killed.

My head still ached dully; however that fire which had burnt into me was gone, though when I tried to raise my hand it obeyed me only slowly and I felt such a weakness as sent a small thrill of fear through me. Now I strove to turn my head. The ache became a piercing throb but I was able to see, yet only one-eyed. What I saw was that the bed place I occupied was against the wall of a hut which was far removed from the stout building of Garn’s keep. Nor were there more than stools to sit upon and the hearth, on which a small fire smouldered, was of stones dabbed with baked clay. More stones had been used to form standards for boards laid across to make shelves. There were crowded with more bundles of dried things, as well as a number of small clay jars and pots and boxes of wood.

The air was filled with many scents, some spicy and good, some strange and distasteful. On the fire a large metal pot sat three-legged, bubbling and giving out still another odor, which made my stomach suddenly feel as empty and aching as my head.

There was movement just beyond the range of my vision until I managed to turn my head a fraction again, to see, in the half gloom of the room (for the only light filtered through two very narrow slits in the walls and from a doorway), the Wise Woman. She glanced in my direction and then came directly to me, her hand touching my forehead where once more pain flashed and I must have flinched, though I tried to hold back all sign of what torment that lightest of contacts had caused me.

“The fever is broke.” Her voice was low but it somehow held a note close to that of Garn’s harshest voice. “That is good. Now—” She went to the fire, ladling out of the pot a dipper of dark liquid which she poured into a rudely fashioned clay cup, adding thereto some water from a bucket, then two or three pinches of dried stuff she took from her array of pots and boxes.

I saw that, though during our journey she had worn the decent robes of any clan woman, now her kirtle had been shed for a smocklike garment which came no farther than her knees. Below that she had breeches and the same soft hunters’ footgear I had worn on patrol.

She was back beside me, her arm beneath my head, lifting me up with an ease I had not thought a woman could manage, holding the still hot contents of the pannikin to my sore lips.

“Drink!” She ordered and I obeyed, as any child would obey the head of the house.

The stuff was bitter and hot, not what I might have chosen. Still I gulped it down, refusing to show any of my distaste for what I was sure was a healing brew. When I had the last of it and she would have risen, I managed to bring up my hand and tightened my fingers in the edge of her sleeve, keeping her by me while I spoke the truth, knowing that I must do this now that I was myself again in clearness of thought, for not to speak would be a second and perhaps worse betrayal.

“I am not-kin—” My own voice surprised me, for the words which formed so easily in my mind came out with halts between as if my tongue and lips were weighted.

She lowered me to the pallet, then reached up and loosened my hold.

“You are ill,” she returned as if that fact could excuse a sin no matter how dark. “You will rest—”

When I tried to speak again, to make her understand, she set her fingers firmly across my lips so that once again I flinched from the pain in my swollen and distorted flesh. Then she arose and paid no more attention to me, moving around her house place as she counted those bundles and boxes on her shelves, now and again pulling one out and placing it back in another place as if there were a need that all be in a certain order.

Perhaps it was her brew which made me sleepy for I discovered that I could not keep my eyes open. Once more I fell into a state mercifully free of dreams.

When I awoke the second time it was Gathea who stood by the fire. The pot still seethed there and she was stirring its contents with a long-handled spoon so that she could remain at a little distance. Which was well, I noted, for now and then that liquid sputtered, and a spatter of its contents flew out and down into the low fire which blazed in answer. I must have made some sound of which I was not aware, or else she was set to watch me, for my eyes had not opened for more than a few breaths before she looked to me, withdrew the spoon which she laid on one of the shelves and came over, having brought another cup with her.

This time I levered myself up on one elbow, not wanting her help, and found that what she had to offer was clear water. I drained the full contents of the cup and never had anything tasted so good as that cold draft. When I was done I brought myself to make plain what her mistress had not seemed to understand:

“They have made me non-kin—” I kept my chin up, my eyes on hers. The shame was mine, but also how I bore it was mine and I could do that well or ill. “Lord Tugness shall find profit in sending me back to Garn. He may hold your Wise Woman at fault if she does not reveal where I am—”

The girl interrupted me and she was frowning. “Zabina is no kin-blood to Lord Tugness. What he will or will not do is no matter of hers. You are hurt, you need her help—that is according to her craft and let no one question her concerning that!”

I felt that she still did not understand. Among our people one who is not-kin is cursed and those who give shelter to such can also raise trouble for themselves. Henceforth no man or woman would speak me fair. I was the undead walking, and who would company with one who was nameless, clanless?

“It is because of the Lady Iynne—” That which had brought me here—not to beg their tending—filled my mind. “She went to your Moon Shrine. I found her there several times but I did not tell Lord Garn. Now she is gone, perhaps drawn into some evil spell of this land.”

“We know—” she nodded.

“You know?” I struggled to sit up and managed that somehow, though my head felt as heavy as if helm of double iron now weighed it down. “You have seen her?” The thought that perhaps Iynne had encountered this girl and maybe even sheltered with her—though why she would do so—

“You talked when the fever was in you.” Thus she dashed my first small hope. “Also Lord Garn came of himself to the dale in hunt. They rode westward afterward for there was no word of her here.”

“West—” I echoed. Into that unknown country which even the Sword Brothers treated as a place to beware of—what would have taken Iynne there?

“She may have been called—” Gathea said as if she lifted that question from out of my thoughts. “She went to the shrine at moon’s full and she was one who had no shield or protection.”

“Called—by whom and to where?” I demanded.

“Perhaps it was not your right to know that. Zabina will decide. Now,” she had gone to another shelf and brought me a wafer of bread fresh baked, with it a bowl of fruit stewed into a soft mass which only caused me slight pain when I ate, “fill your stomach and grow strong. There is perhaps a road for you—and others.”

Leaving the meal in my shaking hands, she left the hut and I had no one left to question save myself. And I had no answers.

5.

I fought against weakness, striving to make myself strong enough to leave this place. For I still knew that, Wise Woman or not, Zabina courted trouble by sheltering me. Lord Tugness, I was certain, was not one to be ruled by custom when it was to his advantage to move otherwise. Though all I knew of him came by rumor only, still in the core of such always lies a hard grain of truth.

My head still ached with dull persistence but I could see now through the eye earlier puffed shut, and my fingers, touching my skull gingerly, found that tightly clothed by a bandage. I had, in spite of waves of dizziness, managed to draw on my breeches, slide my feet into the softer trail boots and was picking up my linen undershirt (which had been fresh washed and carefully folded over my other clothing) when the Wise Woman returned.

She straightway crossed the small room to stand before me, frowning.

“What would you do?”

I pulled the shirt down over my head, tensed against the wince which came in answer to even such slight a touch on the bandage about my head. “Lady,” I could not dare to bow, but I gave her courtesy of address, “I would be out of your house with what speed I can. I am kin-less—” I got no further when she made an abrupt gesture to silence me before she asked a question of her own:

“Do you know what ill tie lies between Tugness and Garn?”

“Not between them.” She surprised the answer out of me. “It is an old feud between the Houses.”

“Yes. Old indeed … Why do foolish men cling to such matters?” Her tone was one of impatience. She made another abrupt motion with one hand as if she so swept away what she had deemed foolishness. “It was started long before Garn’s father came from the womb—being marriage by capture.”

I sat very still, making no more move to press the shirt under the belt of my breeches. Though my head still buzzed, I was not so lacking in wit that I could not guess what she meant.

“Tugness’s son?”

That Iynne’s. disappearance might be a simple—or simpler—matter of human contriving had not crossed my mind until that moment. Now it was far easier for me to accept that my cousin had vanished because of some stealthy act on the part of our old enemies than that she had been rift away through forces loosed in a forgotten shrine. But, this being so, how much more was I the guilty one! To achieve such an act Thorg must have spied long—lain in wait for the coming of Iynne—watched her movements until he could make sure of her. While I, who had been sent to patrol the heights, had not even suspected that we were under his eyes. I had been foolish, stupidly too interested in the strangeness of this land to take thought of old trouble.

The idea she planted in my mind grew fast. Out of it was born strength so that I was on my feet now. I might not have been able to face with success a battle with the unknown (though that would not have kept me from trying), but I could bring down Thorg. Give me only steel in hand to do so!

Now I said with authority that I might not have used moments earlier:

“Your handmaiden spoke of the force of the Moon Shrine; now you push my mind toward Thorg and old struggles. Which is the right?”

Her frown grew darker and I saw that she had caught her lower lip a little between her teeth as if to hold back some impatient or betraying words. Then she said:

“Thorg has volunteered many times through these days to go hunting. He has passed by on his way to the heights, but it would seem that his skill fails at times, for two days out of three he returns with empty hands. Also, he is not trothed to any maid. There were none who would accept Tugness’s offer on his behalf. I have had to give him warning when I found him looking too often after Gathea. He is one who is hot now for a woman. It is a quarrelsome family and few can say good of their house for three generations or more. Also, there was Kam-puhr—”

“Kampuhr?” I could readily accept all that she said save that last allusion which held no meaning at all for me.

She shrugged. “It is of no matter, save that it lies in the past. But it was enough to make men wonder where Lord Tugness truly stood on a certain concern that was of importance in its day—which is now past!”

Her eyes caught and held mine as if by her very will she would now impress upon me that this was to be forgotten, that she had made a slip she regretted—or had she? Somehow I believed that Zabina was not given to such errors, that perhaps she had uttered that name as a test for me—though I could not understand why.

“And Thorg?” I was willing to let the matter of her reasons be. It was far more important to think of the present than to delve into the past at this moment. “He now shelters in the Keep House?”

She shook her head. “He went forth with yesterday’s first sun; he has not returned. Before that he was gone for a full day also.”

So he had had a good chance to do even as the Wise Woman suggested, either meet with Iynne and in some way win her favor, or else make sure that he knew her ways, lie in wait, and carry her into some hiding place of which there were far too many in this untracked land. Yes, that was all far easier to believe than that Garn’s daughter had been spirited away by the unseen.

Thorg was a man and, in spite of any hunter’s cunning he might possess, I believed that I could match him. Though I knew nothing of his skills and had seen him only a few times during our trek north, still he was human only and therefore human wits could bring him down.

What he had done was once the custom among our people and many were the feuds which grew out of it. So many, that, years past, before my own birth, there had been a solemn covenant made that the youths and maidens of the Keep-kin be early betrothed. Then any man seeking to break such a bond was at once kinless.

Had Thorg believed that because we were in a new land and there were few maids (also Farkon’s son being far away) he might do this thing without penalty? I knew very little of him but that could well be so. It would take days of riding for any of Lord Farkon’s host to come, and Garn had only a handful of men, none of them knowing much of the broken lands to the west. Lord Tugness might make a show of joining with them just in order to set up subtle delays, insuring thus his son achieved his purpose. For, once Thorg lay with Iynne, then she was his by bed-right, though her kin would be considered sworn to Lord Farkon and he might levy on them any bride price he desired.

I could see two dales—perhaps three—locked in a bloody battle, and because of me. Had I not made it possible for Iynne to seek out that shrine, had I not gone blind myself while our enemy slunk and spied—then this would never have come to pass. Right indeed had been Garn’s judgment of me.

There was nothing for me now but to seek out Thorg’s trail as best I could. He would not yet be aware I was kinless. Thus if I challenged he must answer. I could—I must—kill, washing out with his blood this insult to our—no, Garn’s House.

“Lord Tugness knew?” I had settled my shirt in place. Now I picked up the quilted under-jerkin which cushioned my shoulders against the weight of mail.

She shrugged, saying: “You are kinless—”

“Thorg does not know that,” I answered, schooling myself to accept my disgrace. “If I can reach him first—”

The Wise Woman smiled but there was nothing pleasant in that strength of lips. I owed her much—the tending of my wounds, my return perhaps to health, weak though I felt. Still I did not believe she tended me because of a liking for a stranger. No, it was because of her craft, to which she was pledged, as all men knew. The sooner, perhaps, I was out from under her roof the better she would like it.

“Your head needs fresh dressing—” She turned away to her many shelves, taking up a pot of salve here, some powdered stuff which lay within a box there. These she set on the lowest and widest shelf, and set to working the powder into a generous ladling of the salve, mixing them with her fingers before spreading the result across a strip of cloth in a thick smear.

“You were lucky,” she commented as she came back, holding the bandage from which arose a scent of herbs, fresh and clean. “Your skull was cracked—Garn must have a heady fist indeed. But there is no damage within or you would not be sitting here.”

“That knock was not my lord’s doing—it came when I fell. This was of his hand.” I touched my swollen cheek with a cautious fingertip. I remembered my helm left back in the meadowland of Garn’s dale. It was my only gain that he had not stripped my sword from me then, as he had every right to do. Perhaps his anger had made him forget the final degradation due me.

She said nothing, unwinding the old bandage from my aching head to put on the fresh. Then without warning she caught my chin with a firm hand and held me, searching into my eyes.

“Do you see double?” she demanded.

“Not now.”

“Well enough then. But I warn you—go upon the trail before you are fit and you will end a dead man, accomplishing nothing.”

“Lady, it is because I accomplished nothing when I should have, that I am here. If I can follow Thorg, then I am returning to Lord Garn a small portion of what my folly cheated him of these past days.”

“Folly!” she made an impatient sound. “Carry your burden of unneedful guilt then. Each man walks the road which is appointed to him—that may take many twists and turns. He thinks that he rules his life, he does not know that some threads were already tightly woven before he came to work upon the loom.”

I got again to my feet. “Lady, you have my full thanks for all you have done for me. There is a call-debt now between us—if a kinless one can be allowed to acknowledge such. But I have an older one to Lord Garn. I may no longer be of his house, but I can still move in this matter.”

“Go your own way, as all men do. I warn you to take care—but again you will be moved only by your own desires.” She turned her back on me as I reached for my mail shirt.

As I made a fumbling job of putting that on (for I vowed I would not ask for her help and it would seem that she had done with me now even as Garn had done with me earlier) I saw that she had taken up from that lower shelf a bowl—not of wood or of clay—but of silver, burnished and bright. She held that in both hands, looking down into the cup of it for a long moment before she raised her head to glance once more at me. It was as if she strove to make some decision which was of importance. Whatever that might be she came to it quickly, setting the bowl back in its place.

Instead she now picked up a wallet such as a traveler might carry slung over one shoulder. Into this she began to fit things. There was the remainder of the salve which she had put on my bandage, then she made quick choices among some of her other small boxes, slipping each within, as I tightened my sword belt about me, loosening the blade, pulling it out a little that it might move the quicker.

In addition to the boxes she had stored within the wallet she now packed also journey cakes, though she added no dried sticks of meat, and I remembered that those of her calling did generally not eat flesh. There was a twist of hide also which held dried fruits. Last of all she picked up a water bottle which I recognized as the one I had carried on my last trip down the stream gorge.

“Fill this at the spring. It is good water—moon-blessed.” Both the wallet and the bottle she dropped on the pallet by my side. I felt oddly alone. It was as if here, too, the curse Lord Garn had set on me held. For all her care of me, it would seem that she wanted me gone. Nor could I blame her.

Still, though I was on my feet now, and had beaten back that weakness which strove to put me down again, I could not go without more acknowledgment of the debt between us. There was only one way that those of my calling could take the full balance of payment upon them. Now I slid my sword all the way from its sheath and, grasping the blade, held it out to her hilt first. Though I fully expected her to spurn what I offered, since I was of the undead who had no right even to speak to such as she.

Zabina looked at the blade and then once more at me with that searching, measuring gaze. But, even as I had thought, she did not touch the hilt, refusing me even so little a heartening of spirit.

“We do not deal with steel and sword edge,” she said. “Nor do I take homage. But what lies behind your offer, Elron—yes, that I shall accept. Perhaps in time there may come the day when I shall claim your services.”

I sent the blade back into my scabbard, feeling an even greater burden for an instant or two. Then that faded and I straightened my back, pushed aside whatever filled my mind. The Wise Woman was no lord, no clan leader, but she had meant what she said, and to her at least I was not totally outlawed and of the undead. I picked up the wallet and gave her thanks, though my deeper thanks were for what she had just done.

“There are things for wounds within,” she pointed to the pouch. “Their uses are marked on the lids of the boxes. Do not leave off the salve and the cover for your head wound until the full ache is gone. And go with blessing—” Zabina shaped a sign which was not of that sacred Flame which the Bards guarded. However it was plain that to her this symbol was a potent one. Again I bowed my head in thanks.

I would have liked to have had speech with Gathea also—thank her for her part in taking care of me. Only she was not there and I knew that I had now been dismissed. There was no reason for me to linger.

It was past midday by the look of the sun when I came out of the Wise Woman’s rough-walled hut. I could see to the east the fields and the wood-walled keep of Tugness. The Wise Woman’s dwelling had been built back against the rise of the ridge and I thought that not far above must lie the Moon Shrine which Iynne had so foolishly visited.

Certainly there was the best place to begin a tracing of any trail. Garn’s men must already have combed all the top of the ridge. Did they suspect also the hint the Wise Woman had given me—that no supernatural thing or previous dweller had taken my cousin, but rather she had been made captive by our ancient enemy?

If so there must now be sentries above ready to loose a bolt at any coming from this dale. They would like nothing better than to make me part of their bag.

I filled my water bottle at a stream which leaped vigorously down from the height to form a brook near the hut. Then, with the weight of that on my hip, I made my way along the foot of the ridge rise. There was a trail of sorts, made perhaps by Gathea in her comings and goings. That the shrine was of importance to her I well knew. I stood at the beginning of that and looked back, out over what I could see of the dale.

There was a flock of sheep at graze to the west. Men worked in the fields. I saw no riders and the aspect of the land was one of peace. Could I accept that as meaning Lord Tugness had no suspicion of the activities of his son? Or was this quiet all a sham, meant to deceive any who might be spying? It could be either answer and I knew so little of Lord Tugness. I must go on as one against whom would be turned every bolt and sword point were he to be seen.

Though it would perhaps have been better to begin my search when twilight veiled me from any in the dale, still there was also the need for light to view any traces Thorg had left. For it was now firm in my mind that indeed Lord Garn’s old enemies had moved, since that explanation of Iynne’s disappearance was far more logical.

Accordingly I took that upward path, sure that there was no better place to begin my search than the shrine itself. Had Iynne’s preoccupation with that been wholly because of its strangeness? Or had she in fact been meeting Thorg secretly?

I found that suggestion presented me with a far different picture of my cousin than the one I had always had. Meek, compliant, wholly absorbed in the matters of the household—a colorless, timid girl who abided by the customs of our people—was she really just that? Or had such “virtues” been only a cloak which she had thrown off readily when she found a new freedom in the Dales? Looking back now there was little of Iynne that I discovered I knew. That astonished me as much as if a tree suddenly opened a bark mouth and spoke. She had been part of the background of my life since we were both small children, but after that, by kin customs, her life had been lived in another pattern altogether. What I recalled seemed to make her a colorless stranger.

What had it meant to her that she was promised to an unknown man without any reference to her own choice? That was custom, but until this day I had not thought much of that. For Iynne, such a decision might be another matter—a thing to fear. Had she taken some dislike to her betrothed which Thorg could play upon to get her to flout all the rules of our people? Iynne was coming alive in my mind, shaking off the shell my past way of thought had cast so tightly about her.

I won up to the top of the ridge, though I found I must take that climb slowly. Not only did I study all which lay about me as I looked for any sign that this path had been recently in use, but also my lingering weakness forced me to rest several times during that climb.

The only traces of any before me which I saw was a single track which could only have been left by that great cat which had accompanied Gathea, a paw-mark deep printed in a pocket of earth. I slipped from one bit of cover to the next, using my periods of rest to listen, though I could hear nothing, only now and then a bird call. If there were any waiting in hiding above they were keeping the silence of an ambush.

To approach the Moon Shrine from this side was easier for my purpose for there were a number of large rocks to afford cover. Whether they had been purposefully set for shelter I did not know—but their stone had not been worked.

Finally I reached the last one, from which I could plainly see the trees sheltering the sign, now so full leafed that they near hid pillars and pavement. Branches had been ruthlessly broken from one of the nearest of those trees as if to force a way. Yet only a few had been torn aside so wantonly. I believed that whoever had wanted to come at the shrine itself had lost that desire before they had summoned courage enough to achieve it fully.

For long moments I listened and waited, even raising my head high to sniff the breeze which blew from the direction of Lord Garn’s holdings—north to south. There was no taint which I could detect in that. If any lay in hiding here they were very well concealed.

Then I tensed, for from between the tree which had lost its lower branches and that next to it, moved a light figure. The great cat pushed into the open to stand sentry. Its head swung about deliberately, then paused as it looked in my direction. Whether it could indeed see me by virtue of that keener sight which is given to those wearing fur, or whether it scented me, I could not tell. Only I was very sure it knew that I was there.

However, that it was here was also reassurance for me that there had been no guard placed on this spot by Garn; I was certain that the beast would never have stood so boldly in the open if it had had to face more than one man. Now I arose to my full height, moving away from the rock behind which I had taken cover. If the cat was here—could I then expect that Gathea would also appear? Or if the animal was alone, would it allow me to approach and search for the traces of Thorg and his captive, or his enticed companion?

I was right in my first guess. Zabina’s handmaiden slipped, with the same silent ease of the cat, from out of the trees’ shadow. As she had on the trail, Gathea wore the leather and heavy jacket of a far traveler, and her hair must have been bound tightly about her head, for she had drawn over it a tightly knit cap of the same brown-gray as her clothing. Now she stood away from the trees, also facing in my direction. Nor did she seem surprised to see me, rather it was as if she had been awaiting my arrival, impatient that I had taken so long in coming.

As I did, she carried a wallet bulging full, even a larger one than mine, and a water bottle. Only she bore no weapons, at her belt was just the sheathed knife one would use for eating or small tasks of a camp.

She watched me approach soberly, giving no greeting, as if between us there was no need for that. The cat wrinkled an upper lip, but if he meant a warning it was a soundless one.

“So you came—”

I found her words a little puzzling. Had she thought that I would not? I might never redeem myself in the eyes of my kin, but for my own belief in myself there was only the one thing I could do, and that take any trail which would lead me to Iynne.

“If there is a trail, it should begin here,” I made short answer. “This is where I found her—where he must have met her—or somewhere nearby. There would have been no other way for them to—”

“He—they—?” she repeated, interrupting me sharply. There was puzzlement on her face.

“Thorg,” it was my turn to be impatient. “He would play old Garnes—gain a wife and put dishonor on a House enemy.”

“What has Thorg to do with this?” she wavered without turning her head, indicating the tree-hidden shrine.

“He must have seen Iynne here, led her into folly, or else took her bodily. She was easily frightened.” I was not altogether sure of that, but for the honor of Garn’s House I hoped it was the truth—that my cousin had been taken against her will.

Gathea moved forward a step or two. As the Wise Woman had regarded me earlier that day with that searching stare to read my thoughts, so did her assistant now also study me.

“Why do you think this of Thorg?” she asked. “Your own mistress said it so—”

“Did she? Are you sure?” her voice came even sharper, quick and emphatic enough to make me recall what words I had had with Zabina. Had she actually said Thorg had done this thing? I put remembered word to word. No, she had not said it—she had only asked a question or two, made a statement of things past, and the rest had been my own interpretation.

Gathea must have read that conclusion in my expression as quickly as I reached it. She nodded.

“Zabina did not say that,” the girl stated flatly. “You have put words into her mouth.”

“What she said led me to think so.”

“She is not responsible for the thoughts of one who wishes to find an easy enemy.”

“Which I was not looking for—until she spoke so!” I countered hotly. “When I said that I would trail him she did not deny that I had reason for my belief.”

“Why should she? What difference would it make to her to have you embroiled with another of your kind? If trouble came it would spread only from your crooked thinking, not draw in that which is not yours, could never be—”

I took a long stride forward, angry at the growing belief that these two women were playing with me. They had tended my body well. But that was of their way of life and came not, as I knew well, from any liking or interest in me as I was myself. When I was near healed they wanted none of me. Zabina had but subtly sent me packing on a trail which lead nowhere and this girl was openly hostile. Yet, why had she not agreed readily with her mistress’s suggestion and not disowned it so readily? She could well have cozened me on into the western wilderness on a false trail until I was long lost.

“Where is Lady Iynne?” I thought this was no longer a time to be mistaken about what might or might not be. There was only one form of action left for me—that was to repair my folly in leaving my cousin prey to whatever had taken her, whether it was some man of the dales or else something worse and more feared which lurked here, an exile from an earlier and to be feared time.

“I do not know.”

I believed her. Only—she might not know where Iynne was, but that she had some knowledge of what might have happened to my cousin, I was still convinced.

At that moment I was prepared to shake the truth out of her, so strong was my rising anger, the belief that I had been played with, pushed out of their way. However the cat snarled, bared fangs, so I remained where I was.

“She was called.” Gathea spoke slowly. “For I watched her, and she did not come here in idle curiosity as you believed. No, within her a woman’s deepest instincts were rising to the full. She was—is—of an age when the Great Lady summons womankind to ripeness. Even such as your Iynne who has all her life dwelt by man’s laws and customs, will answer to women’s magic, if that be strong and full enough. So she was drawn to a place in which moon-touch lay potent still. However, because she was not armored with the strength we know, she lay too open to the full flow of that.”

“I do not know what you mean. She went to the shrine. Well, then what happened? She could not have vanished into the air, sunk into stone, been carried away save by a man—Thorg.”

To my surprise Gathea laughed. “Shut your mind doors and bar them as you and your kind always have. So Iynne is gone and you would hunt her. Well, enough—if you have the courage. There are mysteries in this land; seek them out and perhaps you will find a thread which will lead you properly—perhaps you will not—you can only try.”

She shifted the wallet strap higher on her shoulder and turned away, the cat still between us, padding along beside her. She headed west with the confidence of one who knew exactly what she would do.

6.

I watched her go, certain that I would get no more out of her than she had already said. Still I knew she believed it was not Thorg who had gone wife-raiding. Convinced in part, I turned to the shrine. I came only to that thin opening between the trees which guarded it when I was shocked by the knowledge that I could not enter.

Once more I was met by a wall with force enough to shake my whole body. This place did again have invisibile barriers, a defense which I had no power to breach. Though I tried, yes, I put forth all my strength to fight that which stood between me and that square of pavement.

It was not in my past training to understand such a thing. The clans swore by the Flame, paid homage to the Everburning at the proper festival. We listened to the words of the Bards who had the record-keeping of our past, and who sang of men who won battles or went down to defeat. Yet never had any one of our blood, as far as I knew, met the unseen force against which perhaps even the riders of an entire clan could exhaust themselves or be easily defeated.

At that moment I was not awed, only angry—with my own lacks, with my ignorance, yes, and with Zabina and her Maiden. For I was well assured that they knew far more than they told—if they had told me anything except to mislead and mystify.

So I could not force my way in to view closer a place of empty stone? Well enough. Iynne was not here. She had not returned to Garn’s holding, therefore it remained that she was somewhere. I swung around to stare in the direction Gathea and her beast had taken. It could be that Iynne had, in some way, made common cause with this arrogant pacer-of-unknown-trails, for what purpose I could not say. I only remembered the well-filled wallet the girl had, and I thought of a supply of food being carried to someone in hiding. I could see no reason for such action on my cousin’s part, but it was not given me to understand the mind of a maid, and it might well be that she had been dazzled by Zabina’s teaching.

Wise Women—I searched my own memory for what I knew of them. They were healers, and had also (according to rumor) the use of certain powers. Those they were pledged to use only for good, so that no man ever raised hand against them and they went where they would as they chose. Even picked her own successor, to be trained and fostered. Once such a maid was chosen, she was straightway clanless and kinless, no matter what name or House she had been born with and into. But I have never heard of any woman taking two such followers. What would Zabina want with Iynne when she already had Gathea? Also such assistants and hand-maidens were chosen when they were still small children, not when they were grown and ripe for the marriage bed.

However I was certain that Gathea, at least, knew more than she had told me, and that if I were to find Garn’s daughter, it would only be through her. I turned to follow the trail she had taken, keeping close watch for the cat, since I had an idea that she might use the beast as a rearguard to make sure that I would not uncover any of her secrets.

There was no distinct trail. Still, from time to time, I found a fresh paw mark of the cat, set almost deliberately as if to lure me on. That trail did not run far along the ridge, rather almost abruptly it descended into a narrow cleft, much narrower than a valley or a dale, in the rock providing a hidden way. Then I came upon a mark which was left so flauntingly clear I began to question my own decision. Surely she whom I followed would not have left such an open guide. I reached out and pulled from a thorn-studded limb of a small bush a bit of veil—thin stuff such as I had seen Iynne often use to shield her face from the full rays of the sun.

First the paw marks and then this! They must believe me an utter fool! Only the fact that I had no other trail and I could not quite believe that the Wise Woman would ally herself and her maid with Tugness’s son kept me going.

I made another discovery, that this narrow way had niches of steps set into it as if it were a stair. Old and worn, the tread very narrow, these were surely steps chiseled out of rock for a purpose. They were too regular to be any freak of nature’s building.

Earth had shifted over them in some places and on those, in clear marking, were first the prints of trail boots, then, overlaying those, the paws of the cat. Thus it was no wonder that Gathea had vanished so quickly from sight, she had dropped into this way down from the ridge.

She must have moved with speed for I did not catch sight of her ahead. Now I increased my own pace, becoming more and more sure that if I could only catch up with her I might learn enough to find Iynne speedily.

The crude staircase did not descend very far, ending in a narrow way where there were two deep symbols cut in the walls, one on either side of the final step. One was a pair of upward pointing horns and the other a fantastical curving of lines which could be some runic word or sign in a language which was or must be long since dead.

I had put out my hand by chance as I reached the last step so my fingers brushed across the horns. My cry of astonishment echoed hollowly down the way ahead as I jerked back. For there had been such heat there it was as if I had tried to pluck a glowing coal from the heart of a fire’s blaze.

In fact I examined my fingertips, half expecting to see blisters rising, so intense had been that pain. I sidled on, trying to keep as far from what looked no more than barren, gray rock, as I could.

Now I did sight Gathea, for no growth cloaked this way. She was well down along it, though into shadows. Shortly after one left the end of the stairway the sides of this runway sloped inward, meeting in places for a space and then opening again in a crack which gave a small measure of light.

“Gathea!” I dared to call, even though I guessed that my summons would do no good. As it did not, for she neither looked over her shoulder nor slackened her swift pace. Nor did the cat behind her pay me any attention.

Thus I was left to follow as the stinging in my hand died away, and my determination to have a straight answer from her grew.

The way of the cut was lengthy, yet the girl ahead never shortened step. Nor was I able, even though I lengthened pace, to catch up to her. Which became another puzzle, adding more fuel to my anger. Always there was the distance between us—though she did not run and my strides were close to a trot.

There was more light ahead. I thought perhaps we were coming to the end of this hidden way. Would it bring us out at the far end of Tugness’s land, or into Garn’s dale? Either way I would have a second difficulty added to the first. Not only must I keep Gathea in sight, but I must also watch for any search parties as might be out.

Gathea and her cat were gone—into that opening. Now I did run in truth, fearing that they might vanish so completely that I could not find them if they entered open land ahead. We did face that, I discovered moments later.

I did not recognize what I saw before me as any part of Garn’s dale. Here was no spread of grass, no easy, sloping away. Instead the land was sterile of any growth, rock-paved, with spurs of tall stone standing. These latter were set, grim, unworked, solid stone, in a circle with, beyond the outermost fringe, a second inner circle of slightly shorter stones, and within that a third. They had not the finish of the pillars I had seen at the Moon Shrine, but certainly, like the carven staircase behind, this arrangement was a work of intelligent purpose, though what purpose I could not guess. It could never have been intended for any defensive fort, for there was a man-wide space left open between one stone and the next.

I plunged forward. At the same moment there leaped from among the rocks to my right a gray-white body, bowling me over so that in a moment I lay flat, the heavy forepaws of the cat planted on my breast, pinning me to the ground, while its long fangs were very near my throat. I fought against the weight, striving to get my hand to my sword hilt, even to reach my belt knife, but the beast held me helpless. Yet it did not follow up that leaping attack with any swoop of those jaws to tear out my throat.

Out of the air sounded a call, a word perhaps, but none I could understand. The cat wrinkled lips in a silent, warning snarl. Then it raised the bulk of its weight from me, though it did not back away, instead crouched as if well ready to pull me down a second time should the need arise.

I could get my hand on sword hilt now and I was already drawing blade when Gathea stepped from among the same screen of rocks where the beast had lain hidden to survey me disdainfully.

“Am I Thorg, warrior, that you hunt me?” Her voice was scornful.

“Do you think that I am hiding your Lady Iynne—to her dishonor?”

“Yes,” I returned flatly, and then added: “perhaps not for her dishonor, but for some reason of your own.”

She must have felt safe in the presence of her furred liegeman for she laughed. And, as she stood there, hand on hips, watching me, my anger passed from hot to cold, as it has always done, making me now very sure of myself and of what I must do.

“Put up your steel,” she ordered, a taunting amusement now at the corners of her mouth—wide and thin-lipped. “Be glad that you were stopped from the folly of plunging into that!” With a jerk of her chin she indicated the first circle of the standing stones.

“What harm lies there?” I remembered how the symbol on the wall had burnt my fingers, and uncertainty broke through my anger. How could one guess what dangers lay hereabout?

“You would find out soon enough—”

I thought she was trying to evade me. With a wary eye on the cat which watched me unblinkingly, I got to my feet to front her, feeling better in command of myself when I could do that.

“That,” she said brusquely, “is a trap. Come here and see for yourself.”

She reached out and caught my jerkin sleeve, drawing me with her to the north side where there was clear sight into the center of this stone wheel. In there a man sprawled out face down. He lay unmoving, but when I would have gone to him Gathea tightened her hold, and the cat slipped in between me and the rocks of the first wall, snarling.

“He is dead,” she said without emotion. “One Jamil of Lord Tugness’s meiny. He followed me—as Thorg has also done—because he was hungry for a woman and he deemed me fit prey. Once within those circles he came not out again. I think some madness struck him, for he ran about and about until he fell and then he died.”

How much of that tale could I believe? No man raised hand against one with the Wise learning. But then Zabina had also hinted that Gathea had been sought by the Lord’s own heir. She must have seen my doubt for she added:

“You know not Lord Tugness and his ways. Among those who ride for his House are oath-breakers and worse. They—” She shook her head. “I do not think, nor does Zabina, that the Bards were wise when they allowed the Gate to hide so much of our past. It would seem to me that something of our own evil crept through to flower here. If so, Jamil learned that there are forces even he could not front.”

Again I did not doubt that she spoke the truth as she saw it. The thing which had been that dead man’s intent was a monstrous act which no sane man could have conceived. As for the Gate—I, too, had wondered if a new life without certain memories had been altogether wise. I questioned that the more now after hearing her story.

“What killed him?”

“Power,” she answered somberly. “This was a place of such power as we cannot understand. Gruu here can tread those ways.” Her hand dropped to fondle the ears of the cat. “I have seen other living things cross it without concern. But for my life’s sake, and for the sake of that inner part of me which is more important than the life of my body, I would not venture in there. Do you not feel it at all?”

Since she watched me, and I needed to recover from the fiasco of my capture by Gruu, I moved closer to the stones, stretching out my hand. Perhaps there was no invisible wall there, but I was ready to discover one. There was not, but my flesh began to tingle as I neared the outer circle. Not only that, but there arose within me a feeling of sudden danger, that I must leap forward into that circle which was the only safe shelter from an ominous shadow I could not put name to.

So forceful became that drawing that once more I was jerked to a stop by Gathea’s grasp, by the cat pushing against my knees making me stumble backward. I felt my anger stiffen into a chill of sheer fear. For that pull upon me, until the two who were with me urged me back, was such a compulsion that I wanted to fight them, free myself, fly into the safety of the circle—

“Not safety—never there!” Could she read my mind or had some experiment of her own made her understand what moved me?

I was well back now, away from the influence of the stones, free—and very much shaken.

“Iynne!” I could think only what might have happened had she come this way. There lay only one body in the center of that monstrous trap but now that I stared more closely, I saw that Jamil did not rest alone. There were bones there, gray-white in the day’s light, which was beginning to fade. I do not know how many might have been before him, but there was enough evidence that what abided there still held its captives.

“She was never here.” Gathea loosened her hold on me. “As I told you, she was drawn by another magic—”

I pointed to her wallet. “You have her hidden, you take her food. Does she hide from Thorg, or have you witched her with your ways so she would become like you?”

“Like me? You ask that, warrior, as if you find me less than a keep lady with her imprisoned mind, her soft body, her willingness to be driven to the marriage market as an ewe is driven to be sold to the highest bidder!” She flashed back. “No, perhaps in your soft little lady there lies a spark of the talent so overladen by years of being a keep daughter that she never realized what slumbered within until she found a place of power and that hidden part of her stirred to life, awakened from a lifetime of sleep. I do not hide Iynne and steal away to give her food and comfort. She has gone—but I cannot tell you where, though I shall try to find her. For what she discovered was wasted on her.” Now there was some of the same scorn she had shown me coloring her tone. “I—I would have known how to weave, and bind and tie. I was not there when the life of the shrine returned. She was taken when I was meant to be the one!” Now there was anger, as cold as my own, in her voice. “She took my birthright and what she will make of it, being who and what she is, that I cannot guess. I go now not to rescue your little lady, warrior, but that I may repair the damage her curiosity has caused!”

“Where?”

“Where?” she repeated, her chin lifted. “There—” Now she swung out one arm, pointed west. “I follow no trail such as you would understand. My guide lies here.” She touched her forehead between the eyes. “And here.” And this time that pointing finger dropped to her breast. “It may be that I have not the power I hoped for, still I can try—one can always try.”

“You believe this,” I answered slowly, “that Iynne blundered into ensorcellment and was taken, that you may be able to find her. After seeing that,” I motioned to the stone trap, “how can I say that anything may or may not be true in this country? But if there is a chance to find my lady and you can act as guide, then do I go also.”

She frowned at me. “This is woman’s power,” she said slowly. “I doubt that you can follow where I may lead.”

I shook my head. “I know not one power from another. I do know that it is laid on me as a debt of honor that I go where there may be a chance to aid Iynne. I think that your Wise Woman knew this of me,” I continued. “She may have thought to mislead me with her hints of Thorg, but she gave me this,” I motioned to the wallet I, too, bore, “and she did not warn me away from what I intended.”

Gathea smiled with a certain stretch of lips. I disliked that more each time I saw it.

“There is one thing Zabina understands, that many times it is useless to argue when a mind is closed. Doubtless she read that yours was—tightly.”

“As is yours, perhaps?”

Her frown grew sterner. “You guess too much.” She turned. “If you will push into such peril as you cannot begin to dream, kinless one, then come. Night is not far away and in this land it is best to find shelter.”

She started on, without another glance at me, skirting carefully about the edge of the circles, across a country which was rough going. For here had been many slides of stone, some running nearly to touch the standing pillars. Those we scrambled over (for I was close on her heels) with care, lest some tumble of them carry us out into the influence of the trap.

The cat went ahead, much to my relief, for I did not trust him, no matter how he served my companion. We had passed that ominous set of circles, were in the rock-covered country beyond, before we found him waiting for us under an overhanging ledge at the edge of wilderness country where a few splotches of green showed, but which was mostly rocks and upstarting ridges in a chaotic mixture of broken stone.

There was no wood for a fire. Nor would I have wanted to light one in this wilderness, drawing to us—what? Garn’s men, or things far more dangerous even than that lord in his rage? The sun seemed to linger, as if favoring us enough to allow me at least to mark every approach to the shelter Gruu had discovered. The big cat had vanished into that wilderness of rock, intent, I was sure, on hunting. Gathea and I ate sparingly of the food we carried and drank only scant mouthfuls of water. I had seen no trace of any stream in the land ahead, unless one of those splotches of growth a goodly distance away marked some spring or rain-catch basin.

We did not talk, though there were questions enough I would have liked to have asked. However she turned a shut face upon me, making it plain that her thoughts were elsewhere, so that for stubbornness of will I would not break the silence which lay between us.

Instead I continued to study the land lying ahead, attempting to mark the easiest path among those sharp upcrops and ridges. It was as desolate, and, in its way, as threatening a land as I had ever seen. That it had ever held life surprised me. Unless that circle trap had been built as a barrier against some coast invader, only the first, perhaps, of deadly surprises.

“This is not Garn’s land,” I said at last, mainly to hear my own voice, for her continued silence built the barrier higher and higher between us. If we were to go on together we must work out a way of communication so that we might front the dangers I was sure lay before us together as companions-of-the-trail at least and not as enemies standing well apart.

“It is not Tugness’s either,” Gathea surprised me with her answer. “This land lies under another rule. No, do not ask me whose—for that I cannot tell. Only here we are intruders and must go warily.”

Was she in those words obliquely agreeing to a partnership? At least there was no impatience in her voice and she no longer wore a frown. The sun banners were fading fast from the sky. Shadows reached out from the rocks before us as if they were hands to grasp and hold anything venturing near.

“This is a cursed land, and we’re the fools for taking lordship of it!” I burst out.

“Cursed, blessed, and all manner of such in between. Still we were meant to come, or that Gate would not have opened to us. Therefore there is a purpose and a reason and it is for us to discover what those may be.”

“The Gate,” I said slowly. “I know that the Bards sang it open, that also it wiped from our minds the reason why we came. Why was that done unless—My thoughts turned direly in a new direction. “Unless that was so that we might bend all our wits and strength to front new enemies here to deal with in the future not the past. Yet I wonder why we came—”

She had put away more than half her journey cake, made fast the loop latch of her wallet.

“Ask that of the Bards—but expect no answers. This land may be more blessed than cursed—”

She halted, for a sound arose into the evening air. I caught my breath. They say that the Bards, if they so wish, can sing the soul out of a man, leaving him but an empty husk. I had thought those but the idle words of men who try to add more to any story. Now the sound which arose and fell across the stone world before us was such singing as I had never heard in my life—not even when the Arch Bard Ouse sang at midsummer feasting.

Nor was this any man’s voice, but rather the soaring voices of more than one woman, reaching notes as high as any bird could carol. And it came from behind us!

I was on my feet and out from under the ledge, looking back along our pathway, only dimly aware, so bemused was I by that singing, that Gathea stood beside me so closely now that her shoulder rubbed against my own.

It was a hymn of praise—no, it was a song for lovers, beckoning. It was a trilling of victory, welcoming to safe homes those who had fought well and dared much. It was—

I could see them now. Women, yes, though their faces were mostly hidden by long hair, which stirred about them as if blown by a wind I could not feel here. Was it only long flowing hair which covered their slender bodies—or wore they robes as thin and frail as those locks which blew through the air? Silver was that hair, silver their bodies. They were far from me and yet as each one paced, singing, facing me, I thought that I caught sight of bright eyes, fire-bright, for they were the color of ruddy flames, which held steady sight in spite of the veiling of their hair.

Hand in hand they went, yet with a space between each of them as they circled—and there was another circle behind them and beyond that. Three circles! I uttered a small sound of my own.

Where the stone pillar of the trap had stood, that was where these singers now trod their way. Did I still see the pillars, or had twilight shrouded them? The silver bodies, the spinning hair, had a light of their own, thin and wan—

Still they wove then- way singing. Peace and happiness, love, longing fulfilled, life everlasting, but life of a new kind—a wondrous kind. One needed only to go to them and all this would be given. Sweeter, lower, more enticing became that song. I moved yet I had not willingly or consciously taken those steps. But I must go—

Again I was thrown with painful roughness into rock, this time rolling over with the force of the blow which had sent me down. Then a second body joined me and we struggled together in a tangle of arms and legs until a large and heavy furred weight landed crosswise, pinning us both to the earth.

I smelled the strong breath of the cat, heard the rumble of a growl, so low it was more a vibration through his body than an actual sound. The singing held high and true, but our struggles to throw off Gruu were useless.

Then I heard Gathea’s voice through that heart-wrenching singing. Her face was so close to mine that her breath was warm on my cheek as she spoke.

“Fingers—in—ears—lure—”

I felt her squirming, and guessed that she was doing just that, thrusting her fingers into her ears to block out that sound. Half dazedly, for my head was beginning once more to ache woefully after this second assault, I, too, loosened my arms, though I did not struggle to free myself, so sealing out that singing with my fingers.

Gruu however did not stir, nor did Gathea attempt to free herself from where she lay half over me, the beast pressing us both down. I could smell the scent of herbs, sharp and clean, which must come from the hair which had shaken a little loose in her fall and now lay with the braid end close to my nose.

Guessing that this was a second part of the stone trap, and that it was an even more dangerous lure than the first, I strove to shut out sound, to concentrate on other things, such as how soon we might get away from this ever-present peril, and how many of such plague spots we might be apt to meet in this unknown land.

Very faintly I could still hear the singing, and it dragged at me, making me want to squirm free, to seek out those singers. Then, slowly, it died away. Perhaps we lost ourselves in a daze, for I cannot remember well what happened until there was the chill white of moonlight across us.

Gruu heaved himself up at last. I felt bruised and sore from being flattened so against the stone and was slow in drawing to my knees, so Gathea arose before me. She faced into the full rays of the moon and I saw her hands move in what could only be the gestures of some ritual.

It was a very bright moon, making the stone around us either silver or dead black, as shadows dictated. I dropped my hands from my ears. The night was so quiet I could only hear a whisper of sound from the girl as she recited words not meant for me to understand. I drew a little away from her and stood to look back at the circles of stone. They looked very far away, just as the singers had seemed so much closer. And they were only that once more—stones set on end for a purpose which I did not like to consider. The singers of the evening were gone, only the moon hung over us as Gruu pressed close to Gathea with a rumble of purr louder than her whisper voice.

7.

“More of your traps?” I demanded, shaken in spite of my efforts to appear well in control.

“Not my traps.” However her tone was light. I believed I saw a shadow of excitement on her moonlit face. “Sirens—yes—and meant to lure.” Now she flung her arms wide. “What wonder lingers here? Who wrought such spells and sorcery? What they must have learned—beyond the simple knowledge we have always thought so great!” She asked those questions not of me but of the night. It was as if she had come eagerly to an abundant feast table and could not begin to choose what was to be the first sweet or appetizing taste on her tongue.

Perhaps because she was already touched with learning beyond the control of rules and customs, this was indeed for her the opening of a door. Only for me it was otherwise. Save that I could not deny that my wariness of mind, my uneasiness of spirit, also held within seeds of curiosity.

We heard no more in the night and she had set Gruu on watch, assuring me that the great cat was far more likely to detect any danger than the most acute of human sentries. I had to agree that it was his quickness which had saved me once, and perhaps a second time, along with her, from the traps. Thus I did sleep, and if I dreamed no memory of that dream reached past my first awakening, to find the sun already throwing beams across the sky.

Gathea was seated crosslegged a little beyond, her back to the sun as well as to the dales where our own kind strove to shelter. Her head was up as she studied the broken land ahead, and I read into the tense angle of her shoulders the same alertness as would grip a hunter before he started on a warm trail.

Under the sun the land looked even more barren than it had when the moon had laid the silver of light, the dark of shadow across it. There were small gullies riven in the bare rock, as well as stretches which were as smooth as pavement. However, I was very glad to see, no standing stones which were more than those nature herself must have set on end and then smoothed through long seasons of sand blown by the wind.

This forsaken land was so empty that I doubted Gathea’s quest, unless I had been right and she knew well enough just where Iynne hid because she had aided her to that hole herself. However, I knew enough to keep still on that suspicion and lend myself to the devices of the Wise Woman’s girl, even if she meant only to confuse me, though some stubbornness within me argued that Gathea was more intent on traveling on into the unknown for her own reasons that she was in Iynne’s plight or my own part in that.

I wondered, too, if the Sword Brothers had ridden this way during their exploration. If so they had certainly made it safely past that trap of the standing stones.

“Which way do we go?” I asked in a carefully neutral voice as I sat up.

Gruu had vanished again. Much as I mistrusted the beast, for I was not used to companying with an animal out of the wilds that manifestly had some form of communication with my companion, at the same time he could offer defenses which I believed we might need.

“Westward,” she replied. Nor did she turn her head, but spoke almost absently, as if her mind already ranged well ahead of her body.

Once more we broke our fast in silence, and then arose to cross that broken land. At midmorning, as far as I could guess by the sun, we came upon one of those cups of green among the stones which did indeed house spring-a boon, for two others we had earlier investigated had no water. Here water rippled forth ran for a short distance, and then was lost in a stone bole into which water poured.

There two trees of reasonable size here, and number of bushes, from which started birds and some furred things which streaked across the ground so swiftly that one could not catch good sight of them. The bushes had been their reason for showing for the branches were heavily laden with fruit—larger than any berry which I knew. These were rich, dark red in color and some had burst open from the full strength of their own sweet flesh or had fallen to the ground where they had been pecked and gnawed.

Gathea broke one of the globes free, lifted a piece of its skin with a fingernail, sniffed long at the inner flesh and then set the tip of her tongue to the break. A moment later she drew it all into her mouth and was chewing lustily. While I, depending on her knowledge of growing things, followed her example. After our long journey across the broken lands and the sun-heated stone nothing tasted so good. These provided both food and drink we helped ourselves until we could eat no more. Then we gathered handfuls to be carried with us, cradled in leaves which Gathea pulled from a plant that grew at border of that very short stream and fastened together with small thorny twigs. I took both her water bottle and my own emptied what little remained in each, rinsed and filled them until there was only room to pound in their stop-

We had passed no more relics of the unknown people during the morning. The farther we had withdrawn from the circles, the emptier this land appeared, the more my spirits recovered. When I had finished replenishing our water supply I hitched my way up to the top of an out crop which helped to shelter the pocket of the spring and, shading my eyes to the sun’s glare, strove to ahead the easier of the ways which might be offered us.

During the morning the distant line on the horizon had not only risen but grown still more sharply outlined against the cloudless sky. I thought that it marked heights—perhaps even mountains. But my inner uneasiness grew. I did not care how long a head start Iynne had had, surely she could not have come this way without any supplies or aid. Had I been deceived when I had been in a manner lured away from my first belief that she was taken by Thorg? No one who was not well hardened to the trail could have beaten us this far. While Iynne had been much shielded all her life—even during our trek north when she had spent all her hours of travel within that wain which had been made the most comfortable for her alone. Garn was not in the least soft of speech or manner, but he valued his daughter, if for no other reason than for the alliance her eventual marriage would bring to his small house—he would risk nothing concerning her.

Having decided that she could not have come this way alone, I determined to have plain speech once again with Gathea, and slid down the rock, pushing through the brush to where she was washing her hands in the running water.

She did not look up at me but she spoke, startling me:

“You turn again to thoughts of Thorg. You believe that I do not know—or care—what happened to your Keep lady. Not so!” Now she did raise her head to stare at me, a fierce light in her eyes such as I have seen a hawk wear when it surveyed its own hunting territory and thought of the swift flight, the final pounce, which was to come. “I know this: There was power in the shrine which would be an open door—at the right time. Why do you think I sought it? I—I was meant to take that path! Your lady gathered up a harvest which was to be mine! She is a fool and will not know or understand what she had chanced into. But she shall not have the good of it—no, she shall not!”

“I know she could not have come this far alone,” I pushed aside her heat of voice. “She was not one who could trail so. Thus—I must have missed some sign or—”

“Or you think I have misled you? Why? She has what is mine. I will have it! If you can take her back—then I shall rejoice. I tell you she meddled ignorantly and we have yet to find the end of a trail which may never touch on the ground of this land at all!”

Gathea arose and shook the water from her hands, then ran her damp palms across her face.

“There were no signs of any mounts—” I held stubbornly to my own thought.

“There may be here such mounts as you cannot begin to dream of,” she snapped. “Or other ways of travel. I do not think that the door she found open gave on this land before us—but that its source does lie ahead.”

Because I had no answer for myself, I again had to take her word as we went on. There was no sign of Gruu. If the cat still accompanied us, he either scouted before or ranged at some distance beyond our sighting. However we were not far along from the cup of the spring before we came to a way which was some relief against the straight beams of the sun whose glare on the rocks struck back at us with a heavy heat like that of an autumn fire.

There was another cut in the broken lands, this a narrow valley. No water ran here, but as we dropped into it we found that in places the stone walls arose to arch across the way and there was cooler air, which now and then puffed full into our faces, as if a wind deliberately chose to make our way easier. Also the floor of this cleft was free of any falls of stone from the rim and ran almost as straight as a road westward. I searched carefully for any sign that this had been made by intent but there were no marks on the stone to suggest that man or some other intelligence had wrought this.

Gathea strode forward as if she knew exactly where she was going, and there was a need for haste. I went perhaps more slowly, keeping not only an eye on the edges of the cliff well above our heads, but an ear to listen for any sound which was not made by the pad of our own trail boots.

Perhaps because of that extra awareness I sighted what I might not have noticed had I trod in the dales or along the trail we had come from the Gate. It was neither sound nor sight, but rather uncurled within me, as might a thread of thought which I had not consciously summoned. It is difficult to describe inner awareness that has no visible existence.

Had I walked under the sun I would have thought that I was dazzled by the heat, my mind affected enough to see those mirages which travelers are supposed to view in desert lands—often to their destruction if they are beguiled to leave the trail. Only there was not enough heat here. In fact, the farther we advanced, the more the cliffs above drew together to shade us and the oftener those wandering puffs of air came to cool our bodies.

Still—can a man form pictures in his mind alone? Scenes which were not born of memory or from some tale he had heard many times over so that the descriptions which are a part of it take on reality? I did not know—save this, which began to linger in small quick snatches of inner sight, was from no dream of mine, and certainly not out of memory.

Twice I closed my eyes for the space of three or four strides. When I did so I knew that I did not walk on naked rock in a desolate land. No, I marched with purpose along a way well known to me and there was an urgency upon me that some task hard set must be carried through, lest evil come. Nor did walls of rock rise on either hand. I saw, from the corners of my eyes (or seemed to) brilliantly colored buildings among which people moved—though I had only a flutter of shadow to mark them. When I opened eyes again I was in the cleft—and—still—that other half-sight was also with me.

Whether Gathea experienced that same strange overlay of one with another I did not know. Nor did I want to ask. There was sound in my closed-eye place also. Not the sweetness of evil such as the singers in the night had used to draw, rather this was a kind of whispering—if one could hear distant cries or orders or urging to action as whispers instead of shouting.

I think I was caught in that maze of one world upon another passage for a long time. For suddenly, when I roused, there was no longer the other scene about me; the sun was well to the west and our cleft opened out into a wide valley as green and open as the dales behind, appearing to be a land in which enchantment had no place.

Animals grazed some distance away. One, on the outskirts of that herd, raised a head on which branched horns glinted with a sheen as if they were coated with burnished silver. It was larger than the deer we had seen in the sea-girt dales, and its coat was paler, a silver-gray, marked with lines of a dark shade about the forelegs.

It gave a bellowing call and then was gone with a great leap, the rest of the herd dashing after it. But not swiftly enough, for out of the tall grass flashed a furred hunter that could only be Gruu. He brought down a younger buck, one with far less of the horned majesty of the herd’s leader, killing it by a single well-placed blow.

Thus, as we came up to the cat, he was licking eagerly at the blood, raising his head to stare at us and growl.

There was a goodly amount of meat and I found myself eager to set knife to it, to build a fire and toast strips which would be better eating by far than the dry journey cakes. However I knew better than to dispute with Gruu over the prey he had himself pulled down.

So I hesitated but Gathea went forward quickly, the cat allowing her to come near. She stooped and put her hand on the head of the dead creature, touching it lightly between those silver horns, as she spoke aloud:

“Honor to the Great One of the herd. Our thanks to That Which Speak for the four-footed that we may eat—we take not save that which is freely given.”

Gruu raised his head also and sounded forth a roar as if he added to her words. She turned and beckoned and we did share Gruu’s kill—taking only that portion which we would eat that night and leaving the rest for the cat. Nor did I attempt to hide the fire I built, collecting wood from some trees nearby—for there was a feeling here that the night would not hold danger.

Gathea opened the second pocket of her wallet and brought forth a small bag fastened with a drawstring. Into the palm of one hand she cautiously sifted some of the contents with such care that she might be measuring sigils meaning great good or ill. Then, with a sudden toss, she threw what she held into the midst of the fire I had fed into a steady blaze. There was a puff of smoke—bright and searing blue—and with it a strong odor which was of some herb, though I was not schooled enough in such matters to be able to name it.

Having dropped the retied bag upon her knee, the girl leaned forward and, with small waves of her hand, sent that odorous smoke wafting first in one direction and then another, until it had blown, obedient to her coaxing, north, south, east, and finally west. She had, as we searched for dead wood under the trees, stopped often to look upon bushes and trees still alive, and had finally cut from one shrub a length near as long as my sword. As I had gathered my spoil to put my spark snap to it she stripped the leaves from her trophy. Now she picked that bare wand up, to pass it back and forth through what smoke still lingered.

Having so held her switch into the vapor as long as it might be noticed at all, she got to her feet and began to move around the fire, marking out in the soil, for I had chosen a bare place near some rocks (perhaps the last remnant of the hard land through which we had come) on which to establish our camp. Gathea drew a circle and beyond and enclosing that, she made the sharp angles which formed a star. Into each point she shook a drop or two of blood from the butchered deer, adding a pinch more from her supplies, in the form of some withered bits of leaves. Having so wrought she returned and sat down across the fire, planting her wand upright like the pole of a lord’s banner—save that no strip of emblazoned cloth fluttered from its tip.

I would ask no questions since it had been increasingly irksome that, each time I had done so after this journey of ours had begun, she had been condescending and spoke as if in her way she was far more learned than I could ever hope to be. Thus I accepted in silence that she had once more used some ritual of her craft to put safeguards about us, though it puzzled me, for, since we had come into this open and goodly green land, I had felt no alarms, rather that we trod in safety. This was to prove once more that I indeed walked blind among open pit-falls.

Night drew in as I watched the sun disappear behind that line of heights which was now even more manifest to the west—their upper crowns forming sharpened points against the sky.

Since Gathea remained silent, I did the same, though I was startled into an exclamation as Gruu sprang upon us-suddenly, seeming from out of nowhere, taking shelter also by the fire.

I had earlier cut and smoothed a number of spit sticks and on these I skewered sections of the meat, setting them so to roast at the fire’s edge, the juices trickling down to bring small bursts from the flames. The smell of the roast was mouth-watering and I waited impatiently for the flesh to be seared enough for us to taste, tending my spits carefully to brown well on all sides. This was an old hunter’s ploy taking me back to the days before the Gate—though my memory was misty.

At length I handed my companion one of the sticks with its sizzling burden and took another, swinging it a little in the air to cool it enough to mouth, though Gathea sat holding hers as if she had no great interest in it, after all.

I thought at first that she watched those singularly jagged looking mountains, and then I realized that her gaze was limited to a point nearer at hand. As far as I could see nothing moved out in that open valley since the deer had fled at Gruu’s attack. Not even a bird crossed the night sky.

Still I would ask no questions, but ate stolidly, chewing the meat with that relish which comes best when one has not tasted such for too long a time. Gruu lay at ease on the other side of the fire, his eyes near closed, though he still licked now and then at one paw. If anything moved beyond he had no interest in it.

The dark came very quickly after the sun had vanished, that last striping of the sky overspread by dark clouds. I thought a storm might be on the way and wondered if we would not better search for cover—even so limited shelter as that stand of trees from which we had brought our wood. I was about to say that when I saw Gathea’s whole body go tense. At the same time Gruu’s head came up, his eyes went wide as he, too, stared outward—and westward—into the twilight.

There was no singing, no weaving of silver shadows this night. What came upon us did not entice, it hunted on soft feet—if it had feet at all—moving in over the open plain. Gruu’s hair stiffened along his spine. He no longer lay at ease, but drew his limbs under him as if he prepared for a crouch to spring. His lips wrinkled but his snarl did not sound aloud.

I do not know what my companions saw, but in my eyes it was as if sections of the shadows split one from the other, fluttering, some even rising from the ground as if they leapt upward and landed on the earth again, unable to take to the air as they desired to do. They were only darker blots against the twilight, which came so quickly. However, it was plain that they came, in their queer leaping way, closer to our fire, and never had I felt so naked and defenseless.

In truth I had drawn my sword—though what use that might be against these formless, half-floating things, which appeared to well up from the grass-covered earth itself, might be I could not sensibly say. However, my action brought for the first time quiet words from my companion.

“Well done. Cold iron is sometimes a defense, even though one cannot use directly its point, or sharpened blade. I do not know what these are—save they are not of the Light—” And the way she said “Light” made me realize that what she spoke of was not a matter of seeing but of feeling—true as weighed against false.

Gathea reached out and laced fingers around the wand she had set in the earth, though she did not pull it free of the soil, rather waited, even as I did, holding my sword hilt. The dark looked very thick to me. I could no longer distinguish movement by eye. Only, in a queer way, new to me and frightening (had I allowed it to be so), I sensed that outside our star-girt circle there was that which paced menacingly, strove to press forward, and was denied.

What did reach us first was a kind of hunger backed by confidence, as if what slunk beyond was as competent as Gruu in bringing down whatever it had cornered. Then impatience followed, as it met a resistance it could not master—surprise, growing anger that anything dared to stand against it. I knew it was there, I could have turned my head at any moment to face it, as it—or them—made the round of our protected campsite. Still I had no idea what form these besiegers took, nor how dangerous they might be.

Once more I was startled, as, into the outer edge of the firelight there flashed for an instant a hand—or was it a claw?—withered, yellowish flesh stretched tightly across bone. It could have been either, as I sighted it only for an instant before it jerked back. The sight of it aroused all my instinctive fear for, unlike the silvery singers of the night before, this clearly advertised its evil by its very look.

Gathea pulled the wand from the earth with one easy movement. She dropped the far tip to point to the star angle directly before her where she had sprinkled the blood and placed the broken bits of dead leaf of herbage. At the same time she spoke, not to me, but commandingly, in words I could not understand.

There was movement from the spot to which she had pointed. It seemed to me that the ground itself began to spin, shooting upward part of its substance. As she began to sing, louder and faster, so did the whirling become a twirl of movement, a pillar of flying dust particles growing solid.

Then there crouched in the point of the star a figure which in a crude way was human. At least it had two legs, two arms, a trunk of body, a round ball of head perched thereupon, though it was such a thing as a child might fashion out of mud in play, crudely done. When it stood erect, Gathea brought down her wand in a sharp slap against the earth and uttered a single loud cry.

That thing which had come out of the ground ambled forward, stumping on feet which were clumsy and ill shaped. However, it was able to keep erect and move with more speed than I would have believed that such an ill-wrought body could show.

“Quick!” Gathea looked now to me for the first time. “Your knife—cold steel—to secure the doorway—” Her wand twitched across the ground to indicate where that must go.

I unsheathed my knife. Still keeping my other hand fast on sword hilt, I tossed the shorter blade as if I played some scoring game. It thudded true and stood quivering, hilt uppermost, set well into the earth at the very spot which that shambling figure had just left to go into the dark.

Gathea now seemed to listen—and I did likewise, finding myself even keeping my own breathing as noiseless and shallow as I could so that I might hear better. No night bird called; there was nothing to trouble the silence beyond our circle. But I sensed that that which had earlier tried our defenses was gone—if only for a space.

The girl did not relax. Taking my cue from her, I did not either. The cat at last gave a sigh and blinked. But if Gruu was satisfied my companion was not.

“Not yet—” It was as if she admonished herself, refused the comfort of believing that her sorcery was successful.

“What you made—” I felt that I could go no longer without asking at least some of the questions nagging at me—"did it lead away what waited out there?”

She nodded. “For a while it may play the quarry for those—but it may not last long. Listen!”

Perhaps this was what she had been waiting for. There rang through the night, echoing as if we were in some great cavern and not under a cloud-filled sky, a cry, a wailing, so filled with malice and the promise of evil anger to come, as to bring me to my feet, sword point out, ready to fight, though I could not see what enemy had sounded that call of fury.

“Do not, for your life,” the girl said, “go beyond the circle. It will return—and fooled once, it will be twice as ireful.”

“What is it?” I demanded.

“Not a thing which can be brought down by that,” she nodded to my sword, “though steel is rightfully its bane. But only as a defense not a weapon for use. I do not think that it can be sent on a second fruitless hunt. As to what it truly is—I cannot put any name to it. I did not even know it might come. My precautions were taken because this is a strange land and we had spilled blood. Blood is life—it draws the Dark Ones where they are to be found.”

“You used it to seal us in.”

“As I said, blood is life, from it can be conjured counterfeits, though those would not move or have being in the day. They, too, draw from the dark. Now—”

Her wand came up once more, pointing even as did my sword. Those things which prowled were back, weaving back and forth where we could not see—only feel them. Twice claw-hands swung in at the edge of the star point where my dagger stood, only to jerk back again. But they could not pass and I felt raised against me the growing heat of an anger as hot in my mind as the fire was upon my body. That emotion pressed, sought, battled to reach us with a dark and ugly hunger flowing as a high warning of what we might expect should it win inward.

Gruu arose, threw up his head, and gave such a roar as made my head ring. I thought at first it was an echo of his cry I heard, until it was repeated from afar. Then I could not mistake the ring of it as it sounded a second time. I had heard such before but never as full toned and holding the notes so strongly. So did any lord’s marshal sound his warn horn at the edge of a neighbor’s land!

Out in that blackest of the night there was another now—and he sent forth his challenge.

8.

For the third time that horn rang. I believed I could hear, under the edge of its echoing, another sound which was between a bay and a squawl—certainly made by animal. Gruu answered fiercely. He patted first one clawed paw against the earth and then the other, as if he were leashed and wished for release—to be freed to attack in the dark. Gathea took a step forward to rest her hand on the beast’s head. He looked up at her, showing his tongue between his openly displayed teeth in a dire grin.

Though the horn did not sound again, I saw a flash of light through the night, and heard a crackle as if someone had harnessed the power of lightning itself, had fashioned it into a weapon. The dark was so thick that flash came and went before I could catch any sight of what lay about. The flash hit again, and again, as the clamor of what might be a hunting pack drew closer.

I could not see, but I could sense. Whatever had besieged us was now at the back of the circle, cowering with us between it and what coursed through the night, using a weapon of flame, urging forward some hunting “hounds.” So it continued to cower until Gathea took a hand. She faced about. Her wand arose once again as with its tip she wrote upon the air.

Symbols appeared, curved up and down—green those were—and yet blue—as water mingles such shades along the shore of the sea. Out spun the signs, not fading, rather flying as might small birds released to be free. They gathered outside our defense lines to hang in the air.

There was no audible snarl of rage but a sense of burning anger strove to strike us. Then that was gone, as suddenly as if a door had opened and closed. That which had striven to reach us was now shut away from our world.

We heard a rushing in the night which sounded as if a company had divided, one part going to the north, one the south of our defense. Then that, too, was swallowed by silence. I felt an emptiness, through which one could hear the clear, clean rustle of wind across the stand of grass but nothing else. Gruu settled down—this time dropping his head to rest upon one curve of leg. Gathea, her wand still in hand, curled beside him, leaving to me the other side of the fire. The girl pillowed her head on the cat’s shoulder, her eyes closed as if she—and we—had nothing more to fear. Still I sat, reliving all that had happened this night. It seemed to me that when I had staggered out of Garn’s dale—no, even before that, when I had first looked upon the Moon Shrine—my life had begun to change; I was no longer the same Elron who had ridden through the Gate, liegeman to a clan lord, knowing nothing much beyond the duties of my place and the security of my standing with my fellows.

I should have been stricken more deeply by Lord Garn’s blow, which had not only marked my body but had cut me off from all the clan. Now that act appeared of little consequence. I had come not only into a country that those of my blood had no knowledge of, but there was a part of me which said: See, I am kinless, yet I am not a nothing; I have walked with danger and faced squarely that beyond reckoning.

Yet no skill of mine had saved us. That, too, I must face. Gathea’s talent had come again and again to stand between both of us and disaster. Such an admission was not a pleasant thing—or an easy one—for me to face honestly.

Perhaps my discomfort arose because I was used only to the women of the keeps—the clan maidens whose skills were in the ways of common living which I knew instinctively that Gathea scorned. She was unlike any maid I had ever known, as I had realized since our first meeting by the sea. One could not say to her: This is not your battle, let me stand forth to defend you as is the rightful custom. I knew a kind of shame because I knew I did not want to grant all due her or admit that in our journey so far she had borne the brunt of action.

Gathea’s desire to reach the west, the hint that she had given me that Iynne had somehow intervened between her and what was rightfully hers, power connected with the Moon Shrine, that I now accepted. Much in this land one must accept blindly, even though it was beyond all man’s experience, perhaps even a Bard’s tale.

I wondered what hunter had moved in the dark out there to bring us aid. Had he answered Gathea’s summons? Or was he already a field seeking that evil which had crawled about our camp? Man, I felt, he was not. Why did I even think “he,” save that my training said that the chase as well as battle were for my sex alone? He or it—

Such things I thought—or tried to arrange in some pattern—as I fed the fire, though I had to let it die a little for lack of fuel. I kept watch because those thoughts so troubled me, and I played ever with the hilt of my sword, for the solid feel of that gave me a sense of linkage to that other me who had been so sure and certain, before this land of many mysteries had engulfed our people. How much time passed I do not know. The sky remained heavily clouded, though no rain fell nor storm arose. There was not even one of those strange stars to be sighted. We had our small fire and the circle. Beyond that lay a thick darkness without a break—curtaining us securely in.

I heard a soft sound and glanced at the girl and the cat. Gruu’s eyes were open, regarding me in his searching, weighing manner. Then he blinked, turned to look once more into the dark. Thus it came to me that the beast was signaling in his own manner that he would now take sentry duty, leaving me to rest.

So I stretched out, though I kept my sword bared, the hilt under my hand, using twists of grass which we had brought for kindling for a pillow. The bandages I had worn over my wound seemed tight and the skin beneath them itched. Sleep came in spite of that minor discomfort. I awoke as if I had been called. Yet I did not know who did the summoning, for Gathea still lay with her head pillowed against Gruu, and the beast’s eyes were open, watching. Our fire had burned away, but its light was no longer needed. The lighter gray of predawn let me see, as I sat up, what lay immediately about.

There was movement out there in the grass, grazing animals. The deer made lighter patches against the growth on which they fed. Farther yet from them larger beasts also fed, none approaching us. I got to my feet, sheathing my sword. Curiosity now stirred in me. I wanted to see what tracks whatever had besieged us might have left, so I might guess at its nature. Also—I wanted to know if the hunter in turn had left any readable sign of his passing.

I went to that star point where my belt knife still stood and pulled it free, wiping the blade on a wisp of grass before returning it to the sheath at my side. Then I stepped out boldly beyond the protection Gathea had woven, to look around.

There was a dark mass some strides distant, toward which I first turned—lumps of earth, moist enough so they clung together after a fashion, but not enough to give the heap any true shape. I stirred the mass cautiously with the toe of my boot and the lumps shifted, breaking apart. This must be what was left of that earthen image which Gathea had called up to fool the attacking evil. Nothing but earth; I could not understand how it had been given not only shape, but semblance of life. What had she said? That Blood was life. There was our familiar ceremony of the first fall hunt when a certain portion of the kill was hung in the open to drip and dry and remained untouched save by the birds—an ancient rite of offering we of the here and now no longer understood.

I squatted near that mound of earth, searching the ground about for tracks. There were several indentations that I measured with a forefinger as I tried to imagine what manner of thing had left them. I thought I had seen either a claw or a withered hand attempt to reach us over the barrier last night. The clearest of those prints was more like that of a claw, if such a foot or fore appendage possessed five distinct toes.

Also I believed that it had gone on two feet. The creature must have been of considerable size, for not only was that print larger than the hand I stretched just above it, but it was deep pressed into the earth. I followed the trail and found here and there enough other prints to assure me that the thing or things (for I could not tell whether this sign was left by one or more) had indeed encircled our camp.

Now I cast farther out, seeking any track left by those others—the hunter and his pack. Of those there were no traces, even though many stretches of bare earth lay in the direction from which that horn had sounded.

So puzzled was I by that lack of trail, that I continued farther and farther away from our campsite, searching the ground. Thus I came upon an unsavory thing. Insects, even this early in the day, had found and were buzzing about what looked to be a bloody lump of flesh. I stooped close enough to see that what lay there was part of a clawed appendage such as I had seen in the firelight. There were only two of the long claws still attached, as if the thing had been badly mangled, and both ended in talons as sharply pointed as my knife. The remains of the covering skin were a yellow-white and shriveled. I disliked the sight of it so much that I tore loose a clump of grass, planting its roots and earth on top of the trophy. It would seem that our hunter had had some luck in his sport after all.

“Elron!”

Gathea waved to me and I went gladly enough—pleased that I need no longer force myself to go hunting other traces. Nor did I mention my find when I reached our campsite to discover she had already started upon a meal, including some of the cold meat from the night before, and had set out my wallet for me to do likewise. As usual she had little to say. I wanted to choose among many questions—for to reveal my own ignorance irked me more and more. If she had knowledge which was of value to us, I reasoned, then she should share it without my constant probing.

Thus I waited, chewing irritation along with my food. The supplies Zabina had given me were fast being exhausted. I trusted that the herds on this wide valley land would continue to provide us food, though it might be well if we halted long enough after some kills to smoke meat for future use. There must be water nearby and that was even more important than meat. Perhaps Gathea was also preoccupied by such practical matters.

She lifted her head to stare out along the deep grass until a furred head arose into sight—Gruu, licking his lips, a long green feather caught upon his ruff as if he had varied his dining this morning. The girl and cat met eye to eye in an exchange I could not share. Gruu began to trot away in a general line more to the north as Gathea caught up her wallet, taking also the wand from the night before.

“There is water—that way—” She broke silence for the first time as I fell in, a little behind her, she trailing the cat. Here the grass grew near waist high, hiding most of Gruu, so we marked his passing mainly by the wild waving of that cover. There were birds in the air. I watched those warily. Could that claw-foot-hand have come from a winged thing? I was sure that our besiegers had indeed covered the ground by limited attempts at flight when they had closed in on us last night. Also there were those other unwholesome black creatures which had caused trouble in Garn’s dale and which might well lair or nest near here.

But those I saw in the sky here were true birds, drab of color. They appeared intent on circling above the grazing beasts. Perhaps they fed on insects which the trampling of the herds disturbed from the grass. The way Gruu took suddenly became a real trail, deep slotted and marked with hoofprints—undoubtedly a much used way to water. This footing was rough but we were no longer whipped by the grass, some blades of which had edges sharp enough to cut the skin. It was not long until we came to the top of a steep walled declivity in which ran a stream of river size, the mid-current of which, judged by ripples, flowed quite swiftly. This flow probably originated in those heights which hedged the western sky, and it swirled with a lacing of foam around rocks.

We descended cautiously to make good use of the abundance of water. I left Gathea with Gruu. by a clump of brushes, going downstream to a stand of rocks jutting out into the water. There I stripped eagerly, splashing the water over my body. The bandage about my head grew wet and I dragged it off, touching my cheek and forehead gingerly, though I was sure that much of the swelling had gone and my wound was well on the way to healing. I washed and wrung out the bandage, being prudent enough to roll it carefully, certain that in this land it might prove to have future value.

Gathea greeted me upon my return with a slight frown and a demand to let her see the cut upon my head. Having surveyed that searchingly, she admitted it was now closed and healing so I might go without a cover over it. She had made a change in her own appearance, for her hair, still wet in spite of what must have been valiant efforts to wring and toss it dry, hung in a long, lank tail down her back, and she had bound it back with a bit of leather thong.

We would have liked to have used the stream bank as our path but the waters were swollen enough to wash the banks high, sending us climbing back to the grasslands above. However we did then parallel our march along the cut in which it ran.

Gruu, having led us to water, drunk his own fill, disappeared. I was certain that my companion had some means of communicating with the cat even at a distance and could summon him at need.

Those clouds which had masked the moon and stars from us last night had not been much dispelled by the sun which had arisen, only to be visited with a lowering mist which hid all at a distance in a haze. The herds kept well out on the grasslands. Perhaps they had their regular time of day for seeking water, for none approached as we tramped through what looked like a wilderness country. But I had learned ever to be on guard here.

I noticed that Gathea still carried her wand, holding it in her left hand as if it were as important to her as my sword was to me, even though it was only a straight branch cut from a thicket. At length the continued silence between us grew as oppressive as the day under those clouds, and I broke my resolution to leave any communication to her to ask:

“That which bayed at us in the camp—that which hunted—you have heard of their like before?”

She shook her head, a single sharp jerk. “I do not know what either was—only that the nature of one was of the Dark. Thus it could be met by those devices which are a protection against evil. Of the hunter—” she paused so long that I thought she would not continue before she said: “Perhaps it was also of the Dark, but it was no friend to that which strove to reach us. Its nature—that I could not read. We deal with both Light and Dark, but there may be those in this country that are neither, or that can be both at will. I know—so little!” There was unhappiness in her voice. I wondered if she meant her words for me at all or if they were only a cry against her own lack.

“Oh, I have a measure of the talent,” she added, “otherwise I would not have been trained from first childhood by Zabina. Like knows like even if one looks upon a babe in the cradle. Also I know that I have in me more than Zabina can bring to flower or fruit. I learned of her in the same way that you, you know yourself to be a swordsman, were once put to fence with wooden blade among the younger boys. She has called me impatient, a fool, and foreseen dire disaster for me because I push and push to know more. But the moment I came through the Gate—then it was as if I had set foot on a homeward path which I did not know before could exist—there lay ready to my hand such wonders as those of Zabina’s craft have only touched upon in dreams! This,” Gathea flung forth her arms wide, on her face a fierce pride and hunger, “this is a place which I have dreamed of though I knew it not. I went to that moon shrine for the first time as if I had walked its path all my days. What was there welcomed me as daughter and handmaiden. Therefore,” and the fierceness of her voice matched her look, “can you not see what your dainty keep maid has robbed me of? She, who has none of the talent in her—or else it is far buried under training of custom and of House—reaped where I was meant to harvest! Much good shall it do her!”

“You have spoken in riddles all along,” I returned with matching sharpness. “What has happened to the Lady Iynne?”

She glanced at me over her shoulder, for she always kept a stride or so in advance, as if impatient. Around her sun-browned face there were loose tendrils of hair which had dried and now blew free, giving her a less severe and remote look.

“A gate of sorts opened.” Her reply was tense. “Oh, not into another world, like that Gate which brought us here. Rather it is a way of finding another and more powerful shrine elsewhere—in the west—for the places of power left here are largely emptied, or whatever once filled them is much enfeebled and drained. To the Moon Shrine I brought knowledge which was a key, but the lock was old, it had not been turned for perhaps hundreds of seasons. I worked the ritual—I called down the Moon—I—” She raised her free hand and laid it between her breasts. “I did this! Then I was delayed on the night when there should be an answer and your reckless lady walked in where she should have feared to set so much as the toe of her slipper. Thus she gained, and I lost—”

I thought of Lady Iynne caught in some trap—for it must seem so to her—ensorcelled in a distant place. Though how she might have been so transported I still did not understand. Fear must have caught her—it might be enough to strike her wits from her. Realizing this I turned on the girl with me.

“You knew that she was visiting the shrine, still you did not warn her!” I accused.

“Warn her? But I did! Only there are calls against which no warning will hold unless the hearer is so trained, so staunch in spirit, that he or she is armed and armored. Iynne is a woman, a maid, so she, as all of the clan folk, was and is Moon’s daughter. Moon magic rises in all women, though most deny it. Or, feeling it, do not understand that one must work with it and not against it, She has been so sheltered, so bound about by all the shall nots and do nots of a keep that she answered that call in spite of herself every time she stole away to look upon that shrine. You might have kept her in bonds, by door locks, but the quest already worked in her and her first visit there locked her in its power.”

I glanced about at that wide plain of the valley, at the hills beyond which were hidden now by mists, so that now and then a dark bit of them loomed against the sky, only to be hidden once again.

“You believe you can find her.” I did not make a question of that, for I was sure that she thought she could.

“Yes. For it is my magic that she dabbled in and—look you!”

She paused then, turning to face the north. On her out-held palm lay balanced the wand, and she stared at it with a tense concentration there was no mistaking. I looked from her fixed eyes to the wand and then I saw—

That tree branch, lying on her flattened palm where in no way she could control it by some trick of hand, began to move. It had pointed north and south, now it swung slowly but unmistakingly so that the narrow tip of the wood length indicated the misty heights westward.

“You see!” she demanded. “That which I summoned and worked so hard to gain has grown within me. It pulls me on, so that I may be truly whole as I was meant to be! Where I go—there will she be.”

I had seen her do so much, I did not doubt she believed entirely in what she said. Perhaps this was no different from the other strange things in this land—that I should follow a maid who was certain she sought high magic, and that it had the strength, not only to call her, but to take another to it.

We found no traces of any other powers within that valley, only the herds of animals which kept their distance. It took us two days to cross that expanse and each night we cleared a patch of earth for Gathea to make a safe camp with circle and star. There were no visitors out of the dark. On the second night the moon was clear, the clouds were gone. Gathea had stood then in the full light of silver glow and sang—though I could neither understand the words nor remember them after. Between us an unseen wall grew thicker. This was no place for me, a man and a warrior; I was her companion on the trail by sufferance only.

At midmorning of the third day we entered the foothills of the heights. Now Gathea picked her way slowly with halts to allow her wand to point the way. There was no mistaking its swing, enticing us on into a broken country where the tall grass disappeared and outcrops of stone, gray, sometimes veined with dull red or a faint yellow, were more common. Though we had left the river behind us as its source lay farther north, we discovered mountain springs—or rather Gruu nosed them out, just as he hunted and we ate of his kills. I began to feel that we had traveled for seasons across land which was barren of any but animal life.

Now we discovered a valley leading back into the hills where there was more vegetation, stands of dark trees, which I thought curiously stunted and misshapen and which I did not like the look of. That night when we camped Gathea was so alive with excitement that she could not sit still. Time and time again she was on her feet, staring up that valley way, muttering to herself, slipping the wand back and forth through her fingers, as if to remind herself of what must be accomplished soon. Gruu, too, was uneasy, pacing around the fire, his eyes turned in the same direction as the girl’s, as if he searched for a possible source of trouble.

“Feel it!” Gathea threw back her head. She had not bound her hair in the tight braids again since we had left the river; now I witnessed a strange thing. Those loose tendrils about her face lifted of themselves, not blown by any breeze (here the air was heavy and weighed upon me). Perhaps it was otherwise for Gathea, as, in turn, the ends of her longer strands of hair stirred also, as if her whole body soaked up some force which then manifested itself so.

She held out the wand, and, I will swear the Blood Oath of the Flame, I saw upon its tip a star of light dance for an instant.

“Here—I am here!” She shouted as if standing before a deep gate where she had every reason to call for entrance and could not be denied.

Then—

Gathea began to run. So startled was I that, for a moment or so, I did not move. Then I caught up our two wallets, for she had dropped hers, and started after her. Gruu had bounded ahead, a silver streak, weaving a path among the trees where she had already vanished. Into the night I pounded after, though it appeared that, though I tried to keep directly on Gathea’s track, I had not chosen well. Trees’ low branches made me duck and swerve (they had not obstructed the progress of those other two). I ran into one trunk which I had not seen even a moment earlier, nearly stunning myself, and bringing a fresh ache to the old head wound.

Branches caught at me, tripped me up, struck me hard blows, until, afraid to lose Gathea in this place and never to find her again, I had out my sword, slashed and cut to clear the way as best I could.

The crash of my own passing covered any other sounds. In truth, I was afraid to stop and listen for fear I would be left so far behind I might never catch up with her.

There were things roosting or living in those trees which added raucous squeakings and hootings to the disturbance I made. Twice something flew directly into my face, once scoring my bruised cheek with either bill or talons. I tried to protect my face with my arm as I chopped a path. Sweat flowed down my face, plastered my too-well-worn undershirt to my body. It was stifling under those trees and I gasped for breath, yet I fought on.

A fight it was. I began to believe that these trees possessed an awareness of who and what I was and were determined to prevent my invasion. I fancied I heard faint cries, as from a distant battle. I was near overcome by the heat and my own exertions. Still I kept on because something in me took command and sent me forward, until at length I stumbled up a last hard slope, nearly losing my balance, breaking past the last thorn-studded limb of a tree into the open.

9.

I had reached the crest of a ridge bare of any growth, thus could look some distance ahead. There was no sign of either Gathea or Grau—only bare rock. Not too far away a cliffside led upward again. I listened, wondering if cat and girl still struggled as I had to fight a way free of the trees and if I had outpaced them. There came no sound to tell me that was so. They might have been snatched up bodily or perhaps vanished through one of those “Gates” I had come to distrust.

Slowly I advanced across the open. The moon was on the wane; it offered just light enough to see the ground, where I tried to pick up some track left by either girl or cat. On this ledge of stone there was little hope of that.

So I approached the cliffs foot to see what had not been visible from afar. Deep cut into the surface of the stone was a series of regular holes large enough for hands and feet. However, I could not believe that Gathea had taken this path with such speed as to be out of sight completely before I had reached the end of the wood. Surely, I would have seen her still climbing!

Like a hunter who has lost the trail, I cast about. If she were yet in the wood, then to go on would serve no purpose. Finally I had to accept that she was indeed beyond my finding—unless I tried that rude stairway.

Slinging the straps of both wallets over my shoulders, making sure that my sword and belt knife were well anchored in their sheaths, I began to climb. It was not easy, for I discovered that the spaces between those holds had been designed for someone taller than myself, so that I had to stretch to reach each hold. How Gathea might have managed this ascent confused me.

Doggedly I kept on and up, testing each fresh hollow before I shifted my weight. My fingers scooped deep into dust filling those pockets, so I become convinced that the girl had not come this way. However, I determined to get to the top and from there gain a wider view of the countryside.

Breathing hard, I pulled myself over the lip of that cliff, to stare ahead at what faced me. This was not the top of the rise—rather a platform ledge which had been leveled by the work of some intelligence.

What dominated that space towered so above me, that I had to hold my head well back to view it in entirety. Great skill had gone into its making. At the same time the very finish of that skill suggested that whoever, or whatever, had conceived such a portraiture had been of an alien turn of mind, perverse, ill-tuned to consort with my own kind.

The represented form, which had been cut from the cliff’s face so deeply that it was enclosed in an arched niche, stood erect on hind feet. However, it had only its stance in common with human beings, for it was clearly avian in form, and just as clearly female—blatantly so. It went unclothed, unless a wide and ornate collar could be considered covering of a sort.

The slender legs were stretched far apart, and its hands were outstretched from the ends of upper limbs, reaching forward, while the face beneath an upstanding crest of tall feathers was barely like my own. There were two eyes, but these were overlarge and set slanting in the skull; also they had been inlaid with red stones, perhaps gems, which glowed in the dim light as if they carried at their core a spark of burning fire.

Those reaching hands were claw-fingered, taloned. Looking upon them I thought of that lump of torn flesh I had buried back on the plain, though these were not mere skin and bone as that had been.

The expression the unknown carver had given the face agreed with the menace suggested by those claws, for most of it was a great beak, slightly open as if to tear, while the whole of the upper part of the body stood framed by wings which drooped, only a quarter open, behind each thin shoulder.

Between those arching legs a dark hole had been left as a doorway into the cliff. As I crouched where I was, staring, from that black archway wafted an odor which was rank and foul. Some beast of unclean habits might well lair there. My gaze kept, in spite of me, returning to those red eyes. I had a growing uneasy feeling that something watched me.

I did not accept that Gathea had gone into that hole. This was no Moon Shrine with a feeling of peace and well being. No, this was as threatening as the Silver Singers, or those crawlers in the dark who had menaced us in our first camp on the plain.

Slowly I arose, and, with a real effort, broke the bond of gaze those eyes had laid upon me. I would not take that door the thing guarded. There must be another way ahead.

It was then I discovered I was averse to turning my back on that carved figure. The sense of a waiting intelligence had been so well caught by the sculptor I could believe that, stone or not, it only remained here at its own choice. Thus I moved along that wide ledge crab fashion, so I could both search for another path and yet keep a wary eye on the leering bird-female.

Here were no more carved handholds to aid my escape. At the northern end of the smoothed ledge there was, however, a break in the cliff which might afford me a way to climb beyond.

I had no more than reached that promising crevice and was giving a last wary look to the figure when there was a stirring within the dark hollow between its legs. I swung swiftly about, my back to the wall and my sword out. There was a rustling, and then a loud hoot.

Into the wan light crawled a thing misshapen and hunched. It crouched for a moment before pulling upward to stand on clawed feet. Unlike the figure which guarded its lair it was a male and much shorter—near bone thin, still it possessed the same talons, the same beak.

The head turned on crooked shoulders (it appeared to be deformed when compared with the statue—and closer to the alien even than that). Only its eyes were as red and glowing—and utterly evil!

Those wings sprouting from its shoulders did not open to the full as it came about to face me squarely. The creature seemed to use its pinions as a balance as it leaped at me, making for me, talons outstretched and ready. At the same moment it let loose a deep scream.

Now fanning the wings, it attacked. I was ready with my blade. Whether the thing had ever been fronted by a determined fighter before I could not tell, but it left itself open to my counterblows as if it had expected no opposition at all.

The cutting edge of my sword struck true, between the rise of one wing and the thing’s throat as its talons shredded the straps of the wallets, grated and scraped along my mail.

That head flopped onto the other shoulder as great gouts of dark stuff sprouted high, some drops hitting my hand, to sting my skin like fire. The creature stumbled back, striking fruitlessly into the air with both armored forepaws, wings now fully extended and beating hard so that their activity lifted it from the ledge and it was actually airborne. I thought that blow must bring death when it fell just as I aimed it, but it appeared far from ending our duel.

The head now dropped onto its chest, attached still to the body only by a strip of flesh and cartilage. Blood spouted fountain high about it as the creature came again at me. I might have to hew it to pieces to stop its attack.

Once more I struck, this time bringing the blade down across one of those raking forepaws. The edge again cut through, so that the claw fell to the stone before me. Only —from the corner of my eye I saw, as I prepared to face the monster’s third rush—that severed hand now took on life of its own, crawling toward me as if the fingertips were legs of some noisome insect.

A great gout of blood from the severed wrist (which the thing still held out before it as if it yet possessed the missing talons to rake me down) spattered on my sword hand. Again flames not only licked my flesh but seared deeply. I kept hold of sword hilt by sheer will, through the path which continued to eat at me.

Perhaps this creature which would not die sensed or already knew my torment for it whirled its maimed arm in the air (keeping its body beyond my reach) spattering the dark blood outward. Flying drops stung my cheek; more brought flaming agony to my throat where there was no helm guard to protect me. I feared for my eyes when a third gout struck high on my cheekbone.

Still, in spite of my seared fingers, I attacked once more, coming in low so that the next shower of blood fell on my mail-covered back and shoulders. Protected thus, I struck upward into the belly of the thing, then leaped back, its blood running down me, living fire where it touched flesh.

There seemed no way of killing it. That ripping blow which had opened its body from ribs to crotch only added to the blood flow, as if I had broken through a filled water skin. I could not believe that the thick liquid which flowed so steadily, which spouted afar, would so long continue to drain from that thin body, as if, beneath its outer hide, this creature was hollow, filled only with blood. For its attacks it visibly depended more and more on wings for support. I must dare the spouting poison from its hurts to slash at those. Then I nearly lost my balance, skidding forward into the slippery pool of blood. Furiously I struck down at what had so near tripped me, caught on the point of my sword the living hand, to flick it away, even as the creature moved in, arms still outstretched, though surely, with its head dangling so upon its breast it could no longer see me.

In a way that attack by the crawling hand had saved me by sending me off to the side. For the thing fluttered to my right, near enough for me to risk a blow at the other wing. Again steel sheared straighter than I dared hope.

My attacker fell away, still flapping the maimed wing, the other one fanning air with great sweeps. That onesided effort dashed it into the side of the cliff, and it went down, sprawling forward. I leaped to strike the second wing, then stabbed downward between its shoulders.

A moment later, breathless, I reeled back against the cliff myself, watching in dull horror as that mutilated thing strove to rise, to come at me. While the full tide of its poisonous blood spread out and out and I cringed away from the deadly pool.

I thought the thing was helpless now. However, had it been the only one of its kind in the statue-guarded hole? There was no movement within, but if this creature was nocturnal its fellows might be already a field. The sooner I was away the better, though to try to climb the cliff with more winged monsters arriving to pluck at me was risky. I could only hope to be allowed to reach the top without another fight.

Letting my fouled sword hang from my wrist by its cord, not daring to allow the blood near my flesh, I wiped my blistered hand hastily against my breeches. The splashes which had struck my cheek burned with increasing agony.

Catching up the wallets by their sheared straps, I knotted them to my belt, turning with all haste to the crack in the cliff’s surface. Fortune had decided to favor me, for, not far above, the crack widened out far enough I might edge my body into it, leaving very little chance for any other winged attacker to grasp or tear. The creature I had wounded was not dead. Still it flopped about,

The sight and the sound of that floundering body gave me fresh strength for escape, made me forget the pain in my hand as I hunted for holds to draw me up. My need to escape, to find some better defense than this tissue in the cliff face offered, lent me both the strength and speed to win to the very crest of the heights.

Here was a second gift of fortune. For on the plateau was a stand of trees. Toward those I went at a stumbling run, sure that the winged things, if more of them came, could not reach me beneath that roof of branch and leaf.

Even as I had forced my way through that wood below, so now I thrust forward into this one, eager to win under-could not reach me beneath that roof of branch and leaf. I grabbed handfuls of leaves to cleanse my sword as best I could, before opening my wallet to hunt out those salves which Zabina had packed for me. Breathlessly I rubbed sticky stuff first across the back of my hand and then along cheek and jaw.

Gradually the pain eased, and I only hoped that the creature’s poison was assuaged. Of that I could not be sure, for I began to shiver with a cold which was certainly not of the night. Also I retched and retched again, so shaken with nausea that my head whirled. Nor could I hold myself upright without clinging to a tree.

Maybe that poison also reached my mind, for I kept slipping to a daze during which all I saw was the cleft, scuttling up it that severed hand, still trailing blood, sent ahead like a hound to hunt for its master. Then I would become alert and aware, knowing dimly where I was. Yet I looked about me for that crawling thing, listening for a scrabbling sound announcing its coming.

I must have drifted in and out of such horrors for a lengthy time, for when I roused from a last dream in which the hand confronted me and I was too weak to draw my sword against it, day had arrived to lay patches of sun here and there on the ground, for these trees were not so tightly banded together as to shut out that welcome light. Thirst made an ache in my throat, and I drank from my water bottle, which I held with shaking hands.

The stench of those now dry stains which covered much of my mail front and back again brought sour bile rising in my throat. When I tried to get to my feet I discovered I must cling to the tree. My hand bore a brown brand across the back, which cracked when I moved my fingers, making me grimace with pain. I had no idea of where I would go, save that I must find water to cleanse my clothing and mail and see again to my hurts.

Where in this wilderness I could find any spring or stream I did not know, but maybe fortune would not turn her face from me now.

Insects buzzed out of nowhere to plague me, drawn, I supposed, by the odor which clung to my clothing. I staggered from one tree to the next, lingering at each to hold for a moment or two, fighting for strength to carry me on, until, at length, I wavered into the brightness of the full sun at the edge of that copse to stand blinking, gathering more energy to forge ahead. I was somehow sure that the creature I had tried to slay, or its like, was of the night, and that the day would favor me while I could put distance between me and its ledge lair.

There were more heights to the west, but I had headed north to keep under the cover of the trees. Now I hesitated, still steadying myself against the last trees while I sought to map out a new path which would not tax further my remaining dregs of energy. Grass grew here in ragged patches between bones of rocks that pierced the earth. The slope was upward and did not look too hard to climb. Thus I took that way, for I was sure that I could not gather strength enough again to fight a cliff.

I was some distance from the trees before I noticed that I walked on what could only be pavement, smoothed blocks of stone set with such skill that even the earth could not be seen in the cracks between them. This trace was not wide enough to be a road such as would accommodate one of the wains of the clans, but it would have provided easy riding for mounted men. For me now it was another stroke of luck. I still went slowly, having to pause now and again, resting out those dizzy spells which struck without warning, causing stabs of fear.

This paved path—I did not name it “road"—ran north for a space. Then, like the land to my left, the western heights, arose higher and higher, into a gap between two pinnacles which towered, sky touching high, on either hand.

The shade in that cut soothed my aching head, though there seemed no relief for my burning throat. In spite of the heat of the sun I had been shaken all during that journey by waves of chill, sometimes so strong that I had to halt and steady myself against some convenient rock until they passed.

This gap way was wider, though only the centermost portion was paved, a clearing open on either hand so that none of the loose rocks neared any portion of the block strip. Had it been tended as a precaution against ambush by those who might travel here? Thinking that, I became alert to what lay about. There might well be more of the winged things spying on me from some crevice aloft. Thus I pushed my strength to carry me as far as possible for as long as daylight held.

I no longer thought of Gathea or Gruu. Having my own danger to face, I needed to concentrate on the here and now.

Again my lost road sloped upward, but so easy was the incline that I could keep to a hurried pace. Also a clean, cool wind blew here, pulling away the stink of the dried splotches I was forced to carry with me. I came at last into what was undoubtedly a pass, and so could look down at what lay behind the first bastion of the western heights.

The descent looked far more rugged than the ascent had been. But there was one boon: those who had made this way had marked the summit of their road with a basin of stone into which spouted a steady stream of water. I stumbled rather than strode to it, going to my knees and stretching out of my hands to let the sharp, snow-cold liquid wash across my seared skin.

Nor could I withstand further temptation. Though I laid my sword ready to hand I freed myself from my mail shirt and under jerkin, rubbing both down with handfuls of wet sand from the bottom of the basin, dipping up more water to lave my face, to wash away all the signs of battle. The raw places on my face and throat stung and burned. I anointed them again with the salve—trusting that I was doing right. The brownish scab on my hand sloughed away, leaving a red band like a broad scar where the skin still pulled as I flexed my fingers.

Having rid myself of the poison stains I had been forced to carry, I was able at last to stomach some food. Once more I rinsed and refilled my water bottle, sitting cross-legged by the basin and studying, as I drank deeply, the world before me.

Below lay an odd patchwork of land. Parts I believed to be desert for they showed harshly yellow and white under the sun, with no relief of green to rest the eye or promise better traveling. The road marked out as a ribbon of lighter rock turned south, hugging the side of the heights as it descended, following what might have been a ledge hacked back in the cliff side. The sheer labor of such an undertaking impressed me. I knew what difficulty it was even to prepare a packed-earth way for travel from one dale to another—a plan discussed among the lords on our way north but dismissed because it would require more manpower than even the largest of our clans could hope to muster. Yet here the side of a small mountain had been routed out and those blocks laid with a nicety beyond the skill of any but a master builder. How long had it taken, and what lord or ruler had had need of such a thing that he could assemble enough men to carry through the task?

The road ended once more in a patch of trees of which I could only see the tops as a billowing of greenery. Not having a distance glass, I could not tell if the way broke free from those on the other side. I debated as I rested whether I should go on or stay where I was for the night-Was I still so close to that dangerous cavern that I might expect more of the winged people to search me out? Could I even make it all the way down that long road to the trees? And what of trees in this unknown country—could they not also shield new dangers?

At length the thought of a possible attack by the winged ones in greater force spurred me on. My rest by the spring and food and drink had strengthened me. If there was moon tonight, even a waning one such as shone the night before, it would be my aid. I looked to the horizon in all directions to see if there was any hint of clouds and saw none. Surely I ought to be able to camp at the edge of that wood below.

With a much firmer step and a sense that I had made the wisest decision, I set off down that long incline. As I went I thought of the Sword Brothers, wondering if any of them had chanced this way, and what they had made of the creature I had fought, or of the Silver Singers—the hunter in the dark—What wonders had they chanced upon that they had not spoken of, or only learned of after they had led us to the lands along the sea? Once, I had envied their chance to explore, to search out the strange in new lands. Now, alone, I found the exploration far different from my wistful dreams.

The road carried me at a good pace, never dipping too steeply, running as if designed for traffic that needed steadiness of foot. Thus it led for quite a distance south again, taking me well past the cliff I had won my way up earlier. The rock was the same as I had seen elsewhere—gray broken by red and yellow veins. However, the pavement was of different stone altogether and must have been brought from elsewhere, for it was of a gray white and thus stood out sharply against the darker shade of the cliff.

I had descended perhaps a third of the way between the pass and lower country when I noticed that those blocks over which I trod were no longer smooth. Instead, set upon or in each one in such a way that the foot of the traveler must fit square upon it was a symbol. Some of these were black, a thick, inky black which reminded me unpleasantly of the color of the flying creature’s blood in the moonlight; others were a faded red, again not unlike my blood had it been shed and soaked into the stone.

The symbols themselves were very intricate and I found it difficult to view them in detail. Once one’s glance was caught by some portion of the pattern, the eye was held and one’s gaze carried forward, in and out, around about. I jerked my attention swiftly from them, avoiding their complexity. At the same time I had the old feeling that the reason why they had been so set was to establish the strength of those who used this way, that they might tread underfoot some sign of power which they found wrong and evil. But that may only have been a fancy and I tried not to allow my imagination to roam too far.

It was enough that the color was distasteful and I did not want to be reminded of what it represented, so I soon kept my eyes resolutely away from those patterned stones. Not all the stones were so marked. Often there were long sections of clear blocks and it was on those that I paused now and then to rest, to look down at the treetops, which appeared to remain obstinately well away from me.

That clean wind which had been refreshing in the pass was lost here. Once or twice a breeze did reach me—blown over, I believed, that section of land which was desert, since it was hot and dry. When I did head west once again, I made up my mind, I would avoid that portion of the country.

Head west? With Gathea gone and no guide, where was I heading? For the first time (I had so concentrated on escaping from the place of the winged things) I realized I had not thought of what would come next. If Gathea had really the secret of the Lady Iynne’s fate, she had given me: no clue. To flounder around in this wild country seeking a trail which might not even exist was sheer folly.

Still, what else was left for me? Westward was the only hint I had, and westward I could go. For me, nameless and clanless now, what other fate remained? I chewed on that bitterness as I walked another space of the symbol-set blocks and then—because the twilight was closing in -I broke into a trot which, at last, brought me to the end of the descent where the road spun on into the wood. I hesitated, trying to make up my mind as to whether I should continue on into that shadowed place with night so near.

10.

I prepared my campsite with care, breaking off branches, which I leaned against stout limbs I had driven into the ground, fashioning so a roof to hide me from sight of flying things. Whether the winged creatures could track by scent like other hunters I could not tell—but I would light no fire in this country to attract any prowler of the dark hours.

Remembering what Gathea had said concerning the power of cold iron against the unknown, I drew my belt knife and set it upright in the earth before my shelter, while my bared sword lay ready. The girl’s wallet I put to one side; my own I explored for food, which I must ration carefully.

My headache had returned and the pain of my burns, though the salve had assuaged that somewhat, was still enough to keep me wakeful. I watched and listened.

The wood near my camp was not silent. There were small noises, a thin cheeping now and then, the rustle of leaves and brush as if the life sheltered there had come awake by night and was now going about affairs of its own. Once, there came a hooting from the sky and my hand tightened quickly about my sword hilt. However, if one of the winged people passed he or she had no interest in me.

Always my thoughts were busy now with what had happened since the night before when Gathea ran into the wilderness. I was convinced that in some way I had missed whatever path she had followed, forcing myself to accept the fact that it would only be by fortunate chance that I might ever pick up her trail again.

In spite of my struggle to keep awake I dozed, awoke with a start, only to fall into a new snatch of sleep. Still I listened and held guard, eyes and ears alert.

What I would do in the morning I did not know. To return up that road to the pass was not to be tried. I had been highly fortunate in my first encounter with the winged people. I could not hope for more luck in a second. My best chance was perhaps to journey along the foot of the heights seeking traces of Gathea—or perhaps of any Sword Brothers who had earlier ridden westward. My spirits hit a desolate low as for the first time since Lord Garn had exiled me from the clan and House I realized what it meant to be utterly alone. There was no worse fate, I decided in those night-dark moments, for any man. My hope of reaching the Lady Iynne was, I made myself accept, a dream which bore little chance of realization since Gathea had vanished.

Still, I remained stubborn enough to vow that my search would not be over until I was dead—for I had nothing else left to me.

The night was long, my broken rest was short. However, nothing approached my lean-to, as if I were invisible to anything which prowled or hunted in the dark. With the coming of dawn I ate again, only a few rationed mouthfuls, mended the carrying straps of both wallets, and, slinging those upon my back, set out once more, my guide still the blocks of the road.

Those led me into the wood, where the branches of trees met overhead to form a ceiling, keeping out much of the sunlight. Once more the blocks were clear from encroachment of growth. In fact, so bright were they that they appeared to give off a dim radiance of their own. Nor were there any here which were marked with those disturbing symbols.

The road, however, did not run straight; rather swing right or left from time to time to allow full growth space to taller and thicker trees. Their bark was smooth, of a red-brown, while their crowns were lifted high, with few branches below.

I came a good way along before I noted that those trees also differed in other ways from their fellows. For, when I skirted about them, their leaves (which were a brighter green and seemed as fresh as the first tentative sprouting of spring) began to rustle—though no breeze blew. At the third such reaction to my passing I halted to look up. No, I had not been wrong. Those leaves immediately above my head were more and more in motion—almost as if they formed mouths by rubbing together, calling or else commenting on my presence.

Had the poison which had struck me yesterday disordered my wits? I tried to think that was so—far more believable than that trees talked, were sentient beings.

I felt no fear, only a dull wonder. Nor did I move on, though had one of those mighty limbs come crashing down it would have meant my death. Still more violently the leaves rustled. I began to truly believe the sound was indeed speech—though alien to my own.

The rustling now, I decided, sounded impatient, as if my attention had been sought and I had not made the proper response. So deep was I caught in that fancy that I spoke aloud:

“What do you want of me?”

The leaves above twirled on their stems, rustling as if a gale had closed about this tree, sending it into a frenzy. Even those weighty branches swayed as a desperate man might toss up his arms to attract the notice of some, heedless sluggard.

There was a shimmer in the leaves as they tossed, giving me a queer sense that they were not leaves any more but flames of greenish hue such as might spring from a thousand candles all set alight. Green they were, but they also now sparked blue, and yellow—and a deeper violet—until I stood beneath a web woven in an unknown pattern which hung above me as might a fine tapestry in some rich Keep,

That light flowed downward, or did it drop from leaf after leaf as they might fall with the coming of winter? I found that I could not look away as they—or the pattern of light which they emitted—swirled about me.

I was no longer in the wood. Where I stood then I could not have said, save it was a place in which my kind had not walked and was unknown. The bright swirl of color wove tighter about me. I felt no fear, rather awe that I could see this, which I understood was never meant for eyes like mine. Then that web parted, drew to either side like a curtain, and another faced me.

One hidden part of me knew a flash of uneasiness such as comes whenever a man faces the utterly strange. Yet the rest of me was waiting, wanting to know what was expected of me. There had been a summons of a sort, of that I was aware.

She was tall and slender, this woman whom the leaf colors had now revealed to me, clothed in a shimmering green which I could see was formed of many small leaves which never lay still but flowed about her, showing now her slender limbs, now a single small breast, now her shoulders, or thickened again until she was hidden from throat to ankle.

Her hair hung free but it did not lie still upon her shoulders, long as it was. No, it played outward in a nebulous cloud about her head, swaying and twining, loosening and tightening, even as the leaves of her clothing moved. It was also green, but of a pale shade touched with threads of red-brown here and there. Red-brown also was her skin where and when it showed in contrast to her garment, smooth—

Against that, her great eyes, which overshadowed the rest of her features, were a brilliant green like those gems cherished by our wealthiest lords. As brilliant, and of a harder luster, were the nails on the hands which she raised now to tame the weaving of her hair.

She had such beauty, strange though it was, as I had never believed could exist, as I had never dreamed of-—even in those dreams of the body which came to any youth when he passes into manhood. Yet I could not have reached for her with any desire fiery in me, for there was no bridge between us that I might cross. I could only look upon her as a wondrous thing like a flower of perfect blossom.

Those huge eyes reached into me and I had no defense against such sorcery, nor did I want any. I felt the touch of her mind, far more intimate than any touch of hand or body.

“Who are you who travels the old way of Alafian?”

Not speech, but thought. Nor did I shape any answer with lips in return. Rather it was as if her asking set my memory alert and I found myself recalling vividly, with detail which I thought forgotten, all that had chanced with me since I had come into Garn’s dale.

By no will of my own did I remember. Somethings I wished I had truly forgotten—but of that there was no chance. I remembered and she learned.

“So—”

My mind seemed sucked dry, though I did not even resent that she used me so. In a dull, dim way it seemed only right that I thus vindicated to her why I intruded in a land which was hers, where there had long been peace, where my very coming had broken a slumberous, happy rest.

“This is not your place, half-man. But your seeking will drive you still. And—”

Her thought withdrew for a moment, leaving me strangely empty, feeling even more that burden of loneliness which lay on me.

“What you would do—that will drive you. Your need is not of our choice, nor can such as me mar or mend. Seek and perhaps you will find more than you now expect. All things are possible when a seed is well planted. Go in peace, though that is not what you will find, for it does not lie within you.”

Again her thought withdrew. I wanted to cry out for her not to leave me. But already the shifting curtain of light closed between us to move in a dizzying pattern, breaking into sparks which flew apart with a burst of light which left me blinded for what seemed a long moment.

Once more I stood beneath the tree, my feet planted on the ancient road. No leaves rustled above me. The tree was quite as if the life which had filled it had withdrawn. Lying at my feet was a single leaf, perfect in its shape, a bright green, as gemlike as the lady’s eyes. About its edge ran a line of red-brown like the trunk of the tree, or like her body which had shown so fair.

Some vision borne out of bodily weakness? No, that I did not believe. I stooped to pick up that one perfect leaf. It was not a tree leaf, or at least not like any I had seen or fingered before. There was weight and thickness to it, a leaf which had been carved out of some precious stone my people did not know, a leaf which would not wither, powder at last into dust, as do those which fall in an ordinary woods.

I loosed the pouch fastening of my wallet and carefully set that leaf within. For what purpose it had been given to me (for I believed firmly that it was a gift) I might not yet know, but it was a treasure which I would ever carry with me.

For a while I could not go on. I stared into that tree, until my longing at last died in the realization that what I had seen would not come again. Horror I had met on the ledge of the winged creatures; here I had met beauty, a vision which tugged at me powerfully and might never now be satisfied. In this land one swung between fear and awe, with no safe middle path.

Still, I went on down that road which wound in and out among those trees, but now no leaf voices called to me. I wanted to be away from them, for even to sight one made me aware of a loss which was an ache, not of the body, but of some inner part of me.

I did not stop to eat, though I hungered, only kept doggedly on, until, at last, I emerged from the wood into open land again. There I left the road, for that still held northward and it was westward I believed I must go. Not too far away another line of heights reached skyward, while the land before me was overgrown with brush and scattered trees. Beyond the fringe of growth something caught my full attention.

A Keep—here?

Stone walls, a tower—the building was so much like those which even the Gate’s power had not erased from my past that I could believe I had returned to the land of my birth, save that no lord’s banner flapped in the wind above that tower, no signs of life were to be seen about its walls.

I wondered once more what had led the Bards to open the Gate for us into this world. Had indeed people of my own kind once before come this way? What had we fled? Why need the knowledge of that be erased from our memories when so much else was allowed to remain? This I looked upon now might well be the hold of any of the greater lords; it was more impressive certainly than Garn’s. If it had not been built by those of my own blood then it had been the abiding place of some so like us that we might find allies here, kin in part.

The very familiarity of that fortress-hall drew me. I set a faster pace to push through the brush. There had once been fields here. Stone walls, some of them tumbled into mere scattered rubble, cut through grass and shrubs so that in my headlong path I had to climb, seeing what could have been stunted patches of grain already sun-warmed to a yellow for harvesting.

I caught a handful of the bearded heads and rubbed them in my palm, then chewed them as I had done with the harvest of fields I had known since childhood. They had a familiar taste. How close were the worlds which the Gate had bound together. At least this untended harvest would testify that seed grains which our landsmen had brought with them would grow here, promising better for the future—if the alien life did not battle against us, for invaders and strangers have no homestead rights.

As I chewed on that mouthful of grain I walked on toward the building ahead. The closer I got the more it appeared to be one of our own homesteads. I believed as I studied it that those who had built here had also had need for defense, since there were stout walls, windows which were narrow and well above the ground.

Only, the massive gate was not only open, but had broken free of one hinge, half of it hanging askew, allowing free entrance, making it plain that this was a deserted place. The stone from which it had been built was not native to the heights behind me, for it was of a plain rose-red displaying none of the somber veining of those rocks. Also it glinted here and there in the last rays of the sun (fast being shut off by the stand of highland beyond) as if bits of burnished silver were entrapped to give it alien beauty, belying the plainness of the structure into which it had been wrought.

Over the gate where that door hung open was a panel which flashed with even greater brilliance. Just so might the insignia of a House be set in the grander Keeps of the clans, save that this was wrought into the form, sharp against its background, of a cat, a silver and white cat like Gruu himself. The creature did not snarl defiance against any assault as one might expect by its placement—rather it sat upright, its tail curled about so that the tip lay snug over the forepaws.

Green eyes (as brilliant as those of my lady of the leaves) had been set skillfully in the head so one could not escape the half belief they had life, that this beast surely saw all who passed under its niche. Why, I could not tell, I brought up my right hand in a warrior’s salute to that motionless sentry who had kept faith for so long.

I pushed under the cat’s perch to a large inner courtyard. Directly facing me stood the bulk of the structure, topped by the tower, which would certainly house, not only the great hall for the assemblance of all who sheltered here once, but also the private apartments of the lord, the armory, and the special storerooms, while around the inner side of the wall were clustered smaller buildings—stables, storehouses, and some which must have been for dwellings of landsmen and servitors, barracks for my lord’s meiny, and the like.

There was no sign (save that drooping door) that time had rested any heavy hand here. From the outward show, one of our clans might well have marched within to make a home in greater comfort than they would certainly know for a score of years in the sea-girt dales. Always supposing that they did not bring down upon them such enemies as the winged ones—or those Silver Singers of the night.

I went boldly. Perhaps because this was so like a dwelling of my own people, I did not have the uneasiness which had ridden me ever since I had followed Gathea’s guidance into this sorcery-shadowed land. The door to the tower structure was wide open and there was a banking of blown earth and winter-withered leaves against it to testify that it had been more than one season since any had sought to close it.

Over the arch was a broad band of smooth stone, a half circle, on which there stood out, with the same boldness of the gateway cat, a series of runes. Warning? . Welcome? dan name? I might guess but I would never know.

Again I passed on into the great hall. What remained of furnishing there was also stone. There was the dais with high-backed seats of honor—four of them—each of a sleek green stone, their backs carven with an intricate design, the details of which I could not distinguish from a distance. There was a table of the same stone, and then, running partway down the hall to make that upper table a bar across its top, a second board—this of rock matching the walls.

The place lay mainly in shadow, since the windows were high set and small. Still, near the tables I could see a massive hearth, smoke blackening up its chimney throat, nearly of a size to take a section of one of those giant forest trees. This was topped with an over-mantel supported on either side by sitting cats which out-topped me in height. That was again carved with runes which glinted brightly in spite of the lack of full light.

Curiosity, together with that odd feeling of familiarity, kept me exploring. I found chambers above, reached by a stairway set in the wall behind the chairs of honor. Those were bare, though two had fireplaces with carven mantels and rune signs. Perhaps once hangings had veiled the walls, but there were none left. Nothing lay on the floors but dust in which my trail boots left the first marking perhaps for years.

I found the kitchen, again furnished with stone tables set out for the convenience of long-vanished cooks—the wing holding this running out to join the wall on the other side of the towered inner keep. Here there was a cleverly set pipe spouting water into a long trough, something no building of my own people had ever had. I tasted the stream, found the water cold and sweet, and drank deeply. Then I returned to the hall, determined that here I would camp this night.

With the coming of dark another wonder was revealed. I had earlier noted that the runes above the fireplace had seemed over bright in the general gloom of the long hall. Now, as that grew darker, they in turn grew brighter. When I examined them as closely as I could (for the panel was set far above my head) I could see there were small scenes carved in and among those, coming to life with the runes.

I made out pictures of hunts. Still, there were no hunters who might be termed men. Rather cats crept, leaped, brought down the prey. And such prey! I had no difficulty in identifying the winged thing I had fought on the ledge. And that was the least strange of the enemies pictured there. To look upon them was warning enough against venturing on into this country. Unless passing years had brought some end to them.

There was a serpent (or at least one first thought “serpent” until I saw the thing better) with a horned and tusked head reared high enough to prove the head was not mounted on a reptile’s supple length, having instead a human torso, sliding into scales once again where a man’s lower limbs might join his body. Its outstretched hands held two blades with which it menaced the cat seeking to attack it, as if it were a swordsman well versed in battle craft.

Again another cat fighter reared its own head in victory, its mouth open to give vent to what I thought might be just such a roar as I had heard Gruu utter. Under his mighty forepaw, pinned flat, a smaller creature which looked to be a mass of bristly hair leaving one root like arm which still strove to bring knotted talons of fingers to bear on its captor—or slayer.

That these representations were accounts of real past battles I believed. I considered the recklessness with which I had set out into a land which still abounded perhaps in such monstrosities. Also I remembered both Gathea and my lady Iynne at that moment, though there was nothing that I might do to help either, until I could come upon some clue as to their path.

There was no wood here that I might light a fire in the vast cave of the hearth, but I sat upon its stone to allow myself that small portion of food I had put aside for the next meal, thinking that tomorrow I would doubtless find good hunting. For surely any animals that grazed would be drawn to the fields to cull that grain. At least I might drink my fill of water and that I did.

Having eaten, I once more went up the length of the hall which was now filled with shadows, so that I drew aside now and then from some darker clot, as I would for people gathering to talk and await the coming of the lord, his signal for the evening meal. In spite of the dusk it was to me a goodly place, one which I would have been full proud to make my own—were I a lord with a clan to house and an old proud name to hold in honor. But I was kinless, nameless—and my life was as like to be as empty of all such in the future as this hall was now, a shadow clan was all I might ever hope to head.

Yet when I had come to the high table I stepped boldly onto the dais and passed along the row of chairs seeking those four set in the middle. The openwork on the backs of those bristled with no horror scenes of cats and prey, but rather was formed by mingling of fruit-bearing stems and tall grain stocks, each bordered by flowers. Those made me think again of my leaf-clad lady and wonder of what manner of folk she was. Or had it been the spirit of the tree itself which had so confronted, weighed, and judged me?

Bold again I pushed to the fourth of those chairs and seated myself, discovering that indeed they had been fashioned for someone like me physically. Hard though that stone was to the touch, yet it did not seem uncomfortable to sit upon. When I placed both elbows on the table and supported my chin on my hands to look down the length of the hall, I saw that here, too, there had been symbols set into the surface of the table itself, gleaming enough so that I could make out their curves of design. I dropped my right hand, on which still showed the brand the blood of the winged thing had left upon me, as, with fingertip, I began to trace the line of the symbol which was before me, my flesh running smoothly and swiftly along the curves and sharp angles to another curve again. Idly so, and why I could not have told, I traced that three times—

Three times—

The lines grew brighter. Perhaps my action had cleared them of clogging dust. I could see other sets, each of which lay before one of the High seats, but none of those was as clear as this.

Somewhere—from out of the very air itself—came sound. It was like the deep note of a horn. Yet there was also in it the beat of a drum. Or was it a call of many voices joined together into a single lingering note? I only knew that I had not heard its like before. In spite of myself I shrank back from the table, braced both hands now on the carved arms of the chair, staring out into the hall (for that had grown very dark), hunting the source of that sound.

Three times it was repeated. The last time I imagined that an echo, or a reply, had followed from farther away. The dark (I could not even see the gleam of those pictures above the fireplace now though their radiance had fought the general gloom from the first) closed in deeper, thicker.

I had a giddy feeling that the whole building into which I had dared intrude was in a state of change, that, though I was now blinded, strange things were happening all about me. My grip on the arms of the chair was so tight that the edges of carving cut cruelly into my hands. The dark was thick—complete. I was falling, or flying, or being drawn, into another place—perhaps another time from which change there was no escape.

11.

If that blackness was some witchery, then what I awoke into was not a dream, though I wanted to believe it was. I was still in the chair of honor at that table but I looked down a hall which was alive with company—enough to fill it, vast as it was. Still, when I tried to focus clearly on any of that throng they appeared to veil themselves against my direct gaze. Thus I could only make out but a hazy outline of a form, perhaps the muted color of a robe or jerkin. Never did I see a face clearly. Also I was left with a strong impression that, while many of those forms were like my own, aliens moved easily and companionably among them—some beautiful, some grotesque.

It was plain they feasted and that this was an assembly for a reason of importance. This I sensed rather than heard. There was sound in the hall but so muted, so far removed from my own hearing, it was more of the murmur of sea waves breaking on distant shore.

I leaned forward, striving to center upon just one face, hold that in my sight until I could be sure of the features, but there was always that veiling. Then I turned my head to the right, to see who occupied the chair at my hand’s side. There was indeed one there, a woman whose robe was the amber of ripened grain. But her face, the rest of her, was only a blur. When I looked to my left I was sure that my other neighbor was a man, but more than that I could not have told you.

Still holding tightly to the arms of my chair, I waited for them to mark my coming, perhaps for the sorcery either to break into nothingness, or else change, to reveal them fully. Yet neither happened, save that those hazy forms moved, sat, ate, raised goblets to drink, spoke in murmurs, and remained within a world of their own which I could not enter, only watch.

One thing only gleamed in sharp brightness—the runes on the tabletop directly before me. They were fully in my world and my eyes kept returning to them as I became more and more confused by the vision into which I had been plunged. By a great effort I loosed my hold upon the arms of the chair, stretched forth both hands to touch those symbols. If they had ensorcelled me into this state of being, then perhaps they would free me from it again.

I had to summon up my will power to straighten my forefinger, hold it once more above that lettering. Just so had I traced the runes, mark by mark. Three times. What would happen if I wrought so again? I set my teeth and began. Under my touch that inscription was cold as if I had plunged my finger into the water of a mountain spring. So—and so—and so—

Once, twice, three times, I made the gesture, keeping my attention fully on what I did. Then my ears opened—I heard voices—no longer as a distant hum but loud and clear. Though what language they spoke—it was none of mine.

I dared to look up. The hall, all those within had been also given reality, emerged from shadows to full substance. There were men and women, feast-day clad with a richness which I had never seen in any lord’s hall among my own kind. They did not wear emblazoned tabards such as my people kept for occasions of state, rather robes and jerkins of soft, clinging stuff colored as brightly as meadow flowers. There were gemmed girdles, broad jeweled collars, the flash of rings on moving hands.

Their hair was dark, and that of the ladies dressed high and decked with jewel-headed pins, or coronets so begemmed it was as if they had drawn the stars out of the skies to bedeck themselves. Circle crownlets the men wore also, but those each bore a single large gem over the forehead and were of gold or silver, or a red metal I had not seen before.

Among them were others, even as I had thought. I saw near the high table a woman who was surely of the same race as she who I had met among the trees. There was a man—or so I thought him—who wore no jerkin. But there were two begemmed belts crossing on his breast, and covering each shoulder with a wider span. His skin was furred, his features were covered by a soft down, while from his forehead there curled up and back horns of a red shade which matched the glint of his eyes. I was sure that I saw the arch of furled wings standing above the head of another farther down that board. But as I tried to catch a closer look at what I feared might be one of the monsters, I was startled by a touch. A hand rested upon mine.

“Has the spring wine bemused you, my lord? You stare as one who has not feasted here before.”

Her voice was soft, yet it carried easily through the louder sound of all other voices. I turned my head slowly, to see clearly her who sat at my right, who had spoken words in my own tongue.

She was dark of both hair and skin. Even against my sun-browned flesh hers showed darker still, and I was sure that her coloring owed nothing to the touch of heat or wind. Tall she must have been, for I had to look up a fraction to meet her eyes. Those were brown also, the ruddy brown of that amber which is so highly prized by my kin. But her brows were black and straight above her eyes. She possessed the authority of one well used to command. The amber which I had noticed through the haze was a mantle which she had flung back now that she had put out her hand to mine. Under it was a robe of the yellow shade of ripe-to-cut grain, fitted to a body which was generous of breast, but narrow of waist. Between her full breasts rested a pendant which was also of amber, though the chain which supported it was of black and amber beads alternating. The pendant was formed like a shock of harvested grain, bound together by a vine from which had burst fruit in lusty ripeness.

Her hair had been brought up in a coronet of braids, and, instead of the gem flashing crowns or pins the others wore, there was only over her forehead another amber piece, larger but of the same design as her pendant, supported by a circlet of ruddy gold.

I was so bemused in looking at her. Yes, and in feeling in myself a response such as was certainly not fitting for this time and place—that I had not answered. She was—I could not find words as my thoughts flitted in a crazy fashion to a vision of a field prepared for sowing (also other and less innocent things as my body responded to a growing excitement).

She smiled and her smile was an invitation that drew me so that only my will held me in my seat. Nor did she take her hand away from where it lay on mine. It was a teeth-setting determination to keep from seizing upon her fingers, drawing her to me.

Her eyes changed and there was surprise in them. Then more than surprise, recognition. In that moment I was sure she saw me as what I truly was—not one of their company at all, a stranger caught in some sorcery and so brought among them.

Now I could not have moved even had I allowed myself the wild drive for action which tormented me. Those amber eyes held me. She lifted her other hand to clasp the pendant at her breast. I waited to see her anger grow, to have her claim me imposter, enemy—thief of some heritage which could never be mine.

Instead she only studied me. There was now speculation in her eyes. Her fingers, touching me, moved, closed about my wrist in a grip which I do not believe that I could have thrown off without full exertion of strength. I would not have believed that any woman could hold me so.

She spoke, her words again reaching me clearly under the cover of the babble about us, with a snap of order which I could not have disobeyed.

“Drink!”

There was a goblet at my left hand. Since she did not release the hold on my right I perforce raised that to obey her. The goblet, oddly enough in that place of such wealth, was carved from a solid piece of dark wood. In high relief upon the side was the head of a man, or one close to a man—though the eyes were slanted and there was a wry kind of amusement cleverly suggested by both those eyes and quirk of the lips above a pointed chin. The head of curling locks was crowned by a circlet in the form of deer horns, while the cup was filled near to the brim with liquid which, as I raised the goblet, began to seethe and bubble. Still I could not escape doing as she bade, and I drank.

The liquid was not hot as I had feared from seeing the action within—rather cool. Still, as it went down my throat it spread warmth—warmth and something more. It fired my blood, strengthened my desire.

I had kept my eyes on my companion above the rim of that cup as I drank, and I saw her smile slowly and languorously. Then she laughed a little, her right hand continuing to stroke the pendant between those breasts which flaunted more and more their ripeness, their firmness—

“Well met, well be!” She spoke again. “There is some power already in you, man from years ahead, or you would not come among us.” She leaned closer. From her body, or garments, though I was sure that scent arose from her firm flesh itself, came a fragrance which made my head spin dizzily. For a moment I found I could not put down my cup, nor loose my other wrist; I was held fast prisoner while she played with me.

“It is a pity,” she continued, “that our times do not truly lay one upon the other so that you could realize that present desire of yours. But carry this with you, straying one, and give it to the proper one at the right time and the right place.”

She kissed me full on the mouth. The fire of that touch ran into me, even as the wine had filled my body with another kind of warmth, I knew at that moment that no other woman could be to me what this one might have been—

“Not so,” she whispered as she drew a little away from me. “Not so. In your own time there will be one—I, Gunnora, do promise this. She shall come and you will know her not—until the proper hour. You have drunk from the Hunter’s own cup. Thus shall you seek, until you find.”

Her hand on my wrist moved my fingers now. I was retracing those runes, whether or no, but backwards. Three times I did so. Once more she was but a haze, still I could not shake off her hold. Three times more. Then again the dark and my passage was ended. Had that been through time itself, or space?

I still sat at the table. But the hall was cold and still, and the dark of night was heavy. I held something in my left hand and I could see by the defused light of those shining runes that I held a goblet. The rune light awoke a gleam of silver on its side. Out of that other place I had brought back the Hunter’s cup. My body also knew well the need which had been awakened in me, and for which there was no answer in the here and now.

“Gunnora?”

I said her name aloud. The sound of it carried emptily down the hall. There was not even an echo in return. Then I pushed the cup aside impatiently, laid my head forward on my folded arms, my cheek pressed against the runes, knowing, without being so assured, that these would not work for me again.

Three days I stayed in the keep, sleeping before its hearth, sitting now and then in the high seat of honor trying to recall every small moment of that time when I had been allowed to look into the past. I had never had a woman, though I had heard in many tales of Garn’s meiny much concerning such experience. It was our birthright that this need did not come in early youth. For that reason perhaps our families were small and it was easier for clan lords to make marriages to their own advantages and that of their heirs.

Now I was ridden by new dreams, and, knowing that I must go unfulfilled, I fought to turn my mind to other matters. Hunt I did, and managed to snare creatures coming to feed upon the grain. That, too, I harvested in a rude fashon, ground awkwardly between stones, and sifted into gritty meal to store in the box Zabina had used for journey bread. The meat I took I smoked as best I could, preparing supplies for when I moved on. For I knew I must leave this place, even though part of me wanted to linger—to try again to master the runes.

I desired nothing so much in my whole life as to join the feasting again, this time for good. Save that I understood that even with the aid of sorcery I could not so bridge time. During those days I thought very little of my quest for Iynne, my hunt for Gathea. Both seemed far away, as if a curtain had fallen over that part of my past, severing me from life before, from the person I had once been.

On the fourth morning, however, I roused, knowing, as well as if my amber lady had ordered it, that it was time for me to go. I could moon no longer over what might have been. Though I held very little by her promise that I would be eased of my hunger by any now living. She was too vivid, too much within my thoughts.

Reluctantly I left the keep soon after dawn. West must be my way still. However, after I was well beyond that deserted keep, I suddenly changed. I might have been caught in a feverish sleep and was now healed of my distemper. Again that old urgency came to life—the need for finding some clue as to where Garn’s daughter had gone, and where Gathea had also vanished.

Once more land was wild and held no trace of any former dwelling, not even a road before me. I took as a guide a sighting on one peak of the continuing heights, one which resembled a sword blade pointing upward into the sky. Toward that I made my way with such caution as I could summon, for now that I was away from the deserted keep I was unsure of every standing stone, every cluster of brush which might conceal an ambush. Yet there were only birds high against the sky, and the ground under my feet bore no sign of track. This might be a world free of any life save that which grew rooted or winged.

On the second day I came to the first slope of the peak toward which I had marched. There was food of a sort to ration that I had roughly smoked or brought with me from the forgotten fields. I had come through a patch of bushes heavy with berries which I had found both food and drink. Gathea’s wallet I had not opened, still I bore it with me as if I were to meet her within each hour that passed. My own grew much leaner.

Haze gathered about the peak, not far from sundown. The mist descended like a slowly lowered curtain, wiping the heights from sight as it fell. With that in view I decided to camp for the night and not attempt to win beyond until I had the aid of the morning’s sun.

Thus I searched for shelter until I chanced upon a pocket among rocks where I could crowd in, my back well protected as I faced outward. Nights in this eerie land were periods of endurance which I faced unhappily. Though I had heard nothing during the past ones since I left the keep to suggest that any hunters prowled. Still I slept in snatches and it seemed that my body ached for a chance to rest the full night through with no care for any sentry duty.

Though there was dead wood tangled among the bushes and the trees which grew here and there, I set no fire to be a beacon. Rather I half sat, half lay, my back against the rock, staring out into the gathering shadows. As ever when I let down my guard there crept vividly into my mind the picture of that keep hall as I had seen it as a dream of that long ago feasting time. Why had they gone, those who had gathered there? What blight had fallen to leave their fine hall an empty ruin? I had seen no signs of war there. Had it been a plague, a threat from afar which was so potent as to send them into flight?

I started, gasped.

Had I heard that with my ears? No, that cry had been an invasion of my mind. I hunched forward on my knees, striving to draw from the fast coming night a clue as to who had so summoned help and where they, he, or it might be.

Again that plea shuddered through me. From behind—from the mist-veiled mountain! But who? I pulled around and up to my feet, staring up that wall of rock. There was a wink of light now visible in the night, though it was but a formless splotch through that mist. Fire? It did not have the color of true flames. A trap with that as bait? I could remember only too well those silver women and their wooing song among the rock circles.

For the third time came that frantic, wordless summons. Caution told me to remain where I was. But I could not shut out that plaint by covering my ears. It found its way to my very bones. Nor could I stand against it—for it seemed to me that strange though it came, it was a cry for help from one of my own kind—Gathea, Iynne—? It could be either or both, a power that had come to them out of this sorcerous country.

I left my frail suggestion of safety and began to climb. The wind came down slope, striking against me. On it was an odor—not a stench of evil nor yet the musky sweetness which I had associated with Gunnora, with the Moon Shrine, and its pallid flowering trees. This I could not put name to.

Though I knew that I was a fool to venture thus into the night, still I could do no less, but I could go with caution, and a wary eye and ear. So I did not hurry blindly, but set my feet as carefully as I could, waiting tensely between each step for another of those pleas to reach me.

The splotch of light held but there was nothing else now. Nothing unless one could give some name to that sensation of awaiting some significant action, some demand which grew stronger and stronger with every step I won up slope.

Luckily there were bushes here which I could grasp when the slope became steeper, using them to haul myself farther and higher. I reached the outer edges of the mist and that clung as a clammy cloak about my body, settling in drops of moisture on my face. Yet it had not put out that light in the center of its curtain.

I stopped short every few steps I won, to cast about. I was blind, but I was forcing my ears to serve me. There was a chill to this fog as if it were indeed sleet of late autumn instead of a normal mist. It seemed also to deaden sound for I heard nothing.

The light neither dwindled nor grew, but remained as a beacon—a beacon to summon—what? Me? I might well be only caught in the web meant for another. Yet I could not bring myself to turn aside, even now when that call no longer reached me.

Then—

Out of the very ground at my feet there arose a form near as light as that ghostly fog. It reared tall and I could not mistake that soft rumble of growl. A mountain cat—Gruu?

I paused again, hand reaching for sword hilt. This lurker was surely as large as Gruu, and, if it were a nocturnal hunter like many of its breed, then even steel and my best efforts might be very little to halt any attack.

Once more it growled, then it turned and was gone into the mist which swallowed it instantly. Gruu! Surely that had been Gruu or I would not have gone unchallenged. Which meant that Gathea was up there!

I made the rest of that climb in a scrambling run, wanting to call out her name, but fearing that if she were in trouble I would alert whatever held her captive or besieged. Again the white-silver cat awaited me as I plunged on into a circle of light.

That radiance arose and spread out from an object resting on bare rock—a ledge level enough to have been cut from the mountainside by purpose. I could not see what made its core. At that moment I was more intent upon the form which lay limply beside it, over which the cat crouched, using his rough tongue gently across a cheek.

Gathea it was. Something had dealt harshly with her. The stout trail clothing which she had worn was in tatters, so that her arms, showing the red marks of deep scratches, were bare near to the shoulder, and even her breeches were shredded into strips which were held together by knotting one rough length onto another.

Her hair was a wild tangle around her head, matted and twined with bits of stick and dead leaf. While her face was only skin laid thin across the bones, and her hands, bruised and scratched, were as skeletal as those claws of the winged thing I had fought.

I knelt beside her, my fingers seeking out the pulse of life, for so limply did she sprawl that I thought perhaps what I had caught had been her death cry, and that she was gone before I had reached her. Gruu drew back a little and let me to her, but his green eyes were steady on me, as if he would challenge my tending.

She was alive, yes, but I believed that her heart fluttered weakly and that she perhaps had come near to death. I needed my supplies. There was water, and that I dripped first upon her face and then, steadying her head against my body, I forced the edge of the small pannikin I carried between her lips and trickled what I could into her mouth. Looking about that eerie pillar of light I could see no sign of supplies, but remembering Zabina’s instructions I crumbled some dried leaves into the pannikin and swirled water about with them. The aroma which came from the mixture was fresh, pungent, with a clearing rush of sharp scent. Again I steadied her against my body and was able to get a mouthful of the herb liquid then another into her. Her eyes opened and she looked up at me.

There was no recognition in her gaze; she was one who saw into other worlds, beyond me, through me— Still I got her to drink all of the restorative, then I crumbled a handful of coarsely ground grain into more water—making a lumpy gruel which, using a small horn spoon, I got into her and which she did chew and swallow. Yet never did she seem to see me, or even appear to realize that someone tended her.

For the first time I raided the wallet which had been hers. In one box I discovered more salve which, working as gently as I could, having lain her down by the light, I anointed the worst of the blood-encrusted scratches so deeply lacing her arms and legs.

Gruu watched me intently as ever. Before I was quite done, he arose and faced outward into the night, his head up, as if he either listened or scented some peril. Restlessly he began to pace back and forth, keeping, I noted, between the two of us and the mist curtain which hedged in the small clear pocket about the flame.

Then he voiced one of those roars with which he had challenged the creatures of the night. Before I could move, he leaped out to vanish into the fog. I could hear the sounds of a mighty struggle, grunts, shrill cries, which certainly had never broken from Gruu’s furred throat, last of all a gurgling.

I stood over Gathea, my sword out and ready. Yet nothing came through the mist until Gruu himself paced back. There was a dark spattering down his chest, and more blood dripping from his large fangs. He sat now, unconcerned, by the light and started to clean his coat of those traces of battle, licking and then hissing with disgust. I at last took that folded bandage I had carried with me and wet it with my water.

Approaching the cat I ventured to wash the worst of the thick clotting from his ruff where a long trickle had matted deeply into his fur. He suffered me to do this, and I did not wonder at his disgust at his own attempt to clean himself, for what I sponged off did not seem like true blood, was instead a thicker, noisome stuff with so foul a smell that I nearly had to hold my nose as I ministered to him.

Gathea did not regain full consciousness—at least she still did not appear to note that I was with her. However, I was able to get more of the grain gruel into her, spoonful by spoonful, and I made certain that her many scratches, though deep and red and angry-looking, were not real wounds. How she had won this far without supplies and what was the nature of the light which glowed by us remained mysteries. I began to believe that she had collapsed from sheer lack of food and exhaustion. Yet that strange summons which had brought me to her had been of such a nature that must have been more than just weakness of body to make her cry for aid.

With Gruu as sentry I felt more at ease than I had since I had left the keep. The cat lay now by the fire, licking his paws, seemingly wrapped in his own concerns. Yet I was sure he could be trusted.

I made the girl as comfortable as I could, her own wallet for a pillow, spreading over her the travel cloak I had kept as a roll across my shoulder. Shaking the water bottle beside my ear I guessed I had used its contents freely and I must find a mountain spring by morning—perhaps Gruu could help.

Stretching out an arm’s distance away from Gathea I allowed fatigue to claim me. The light still burned as high as ever, but it did not dazzle the eyes. There was a softness in its gleam which did not shine too strongly.

I was in the light, the very core of it. There I awaited an unfamiliar intelligence. First it challenged me; there came an abrupt demand—unvoiced. From whence had I come and what would I do? At that there flashed into my mind in answer (though that was not of my calling) the symbol my amber lady had worn, the sheath entwined with fruitful vine.

My unseen challenger was startled, so much that mind picture alone might have struck a telling blow. Yet there was nothing in me which wanted battle between us. I felt no enmity toward that which had so peremptorily demanded my right to be where I was. This ability to build in such detail a mind picture was new to me, yet it seemed right. No longer was my vision only the pendant, that altered, to become a true sheaf of harvest, the fruit wound around the stock possessing real life, so that I could have reached forth a hand to pluck each globe from the burdened vine. Though I could not see her, I believed that behind me at that moment stood my lady of the keep. Though I longed mightily to look and see if that were so, still I could not turn my head.

That which the fire in the mist represented gave way. An impatient arrogance which had filled it when it would not only weigh me, but would judge me to my fate, faded. Instead there was a questioning—tinged with astonishment—not because of me but for the coming of her who was so standing to sponsor my actions.

I felt forces sweep around me, through me. Questions were raised and answered, and I understood nothing. Save that, in some manner, I had been made free of a road, though the power behind the fire was still resentful and grudging. Then I was given, at last, the boon of deep sleep which my aching body craved.

12.

I looked up into an unclouded sky, pulled out of a sleep so deep that my body felt stiff as if I had lain so for a toll of seasons upon seasons. That which had drawn me into wakefulness continued.

Speech clear and strong, then a period of silence, as if the speaker waited for an answer. Followed by speech once again. The strange words singsonged with that rhythm our clan bards used upon formal occasions when either House history or some fragment of the Laws were recited. However, I could not understand one of those fluting sounds which must be words.

I turned my head. Gathea no longer lay as I had left her, but sat cross-legged in sunlight. It was she who spoke, addressing those unknown words to the air, though even Gruu had vanished leaving only emptiness.

A fever may plunge anyone into a condition of seeing, speaking or acting so. That was my first thought, that she was held in a strong delusion. Nor did she turn her head when I sat up abruptly. Was she fevered indeed or trapped in some new witchery?

Before her, as she sat so, was that which must have provided the guide fire of last night. As I looked upon it I wanted to scramble up, away, drag her with me—if I could. For there, wedged between rocks holding it upright, was what could only be a portion of the wand she had fashioned under my own eyes from a tree limb.

A third of it was gone. Even as I looked another small section broke away—became a fluff of ash carried off by a puff of breeze. There was no other fuel—nothing save that fire-eaten rod.

Still Gathea sat and spoke, waited for an answer I could not hear, then spoke again. At times during those waiting intervals, she nodded as if what she alone heard made excellent sense. Once or twice she frowned, seemingly in concentration, as she strove better to understand an admonition or advice. So real were these actions that I could well begin to believe the fault lay within me, that I was deaf. Just as that speaker remained invisible to my eyes.

Though I wanted to reach out to her, my hand was stayed by a strong impression that this indeed was no illusion. Or if so, it was mine not hers. At last she gave a sigh and the angle of her head changed. She might now be gazing up to someone who had been seated on a level with her, but had now arisen. One of her hands lifted in a small gesture of farewell. Still her eyes followed the invisible one who left us.

Only then was I able to move. When I caught her lightly by the arm, she started in real surprise. However the eyes she turned to me were knowing—they saw me, knew me.

“Gathea—” I spoke her name.

Her frown became a battle flag of rising anger as she jerked back.

“You have no right spying—” she flared.

That impatient gesture she had made to free herself from my hold sent my wallet swinging. The clasp, never strong since my battle with the winged creature, burst open, and there fell out, to roll across the ground, that cup of Horn-Crowned man which I had brought out of the deserted keep; from its interior in turn the gem-leaf of the tree woman since I had put these two marvels in keeping together.

Gathea’s eyes dropped from me to that cup which came to rest against her own boot, the horned head uppermost, to the leaf bright in the sun. They widened into a stare of sheer astonishment, then centered upon that head as if it were alive.

She retreated farther, still staring at the cup as I reclaimed the leaf. I saw the tip of her tongue appear between her lips to moisten the lower one. There was no anger in her face now. What I read there was surely the beginning of fear. In a voice hardly above a whisper she asked:

“Where did you find these?”

“They were gifts,” I answered deliberately. “The cup given me by a great lady who read for me something of the future.”

Gathea did not raise her gaze from the cup. Beneath the sun-browning of her face a pallor spread.

“She had a name—this giver of cups?” That whispered question was even thinner. Her unease was plain by the way she turned swiftly to seize upon what was left of her wand, holding that as a man might hold a sword when fronted by an enemy.

“Her name was Gunnora,” I replied. Some trait in me was satisfied by seeing her so shaken. As if, in her present state, I could reach her—whereas before she had been far removed from me in spirit, even though she was only a hand’s distance away in body.

Once more her tongue crossed her lips. Now she glanced from the cup to me. There was a beginning of calculation in that look, or so I read it. She might earlier have dismissed me with little concern. Now I had taken on a new value.

“What is her sign?” That was no whisper. She rapped the question out as if she had a right to demand a quick answer.

“A sheath of grain bound by a fruited vine.” I never would forget anything which was of that lady who had sat beside me in another time, and perhaps even another and stranger world.

Gathea nodded. “That is so, but—” she shook her head like one who is at a loss. Then she raised her eyes full to mine. There was that in them which searched, yet was still rooted in unbelief. “Why—why did she give this to you? And where did you find her? There was no” shrine—” The hand holding the wand arose to her breast as if she hugged, like a shield, that reduced symbol of her own dealing with the unknown.

“I found her in no shrine,” I repeated, picking up cup and leaf, putting one within the other again. “There was a keep, old and deserted. Through some power I feasted there with those who once held this land. My amber lady was one of them, but she alone knew me for what I was, and gave me this.”

“But she did not tell you—” Gathea’s eyes narrowed. Her awe and wariness were fast fading. If I had been of importance to her moments earlier, I was now losing that standing. “No, it would seem she did not. Still you have the cup, even if you do not know how to use it—and that has meaning in itself.”

I was irked by her swift return to her usual assurance, to that domination she had held, or sought to hold, over me since we had come into this western land.

“She gave me one other thing,” I said. “Which I am to use in the proper time—”

Gathea’s gaze traveled on to the wallet into which I was fitting the cup once again. It was my turn to shake my head.

“No, it is not the leaf—though that I had also of a lady who had power of her own. You have your secrets, these I hold as mine.” Nor did I ever then intend to tell her of that kiss and what my amber lady had said concerning it. I was no wooer of this witch maid. Whatever dream might have sprung, or would spring, from out of my memory I would not share that! Instead I moved on to make my own demands:

“What have you learned concerning Iynne or your moon magic dealing? With whom did you speak just now?”

Gathea gave a slight movement of the shoulders which was not quite a shrug.

“What I seek—” she began, but I interrupted her with new confidence:

“What we seek. I will find my lord’s daughter if it can be done in this land of many surprises and mixed magic. Have you any word from your invisible friend as to where our path must run?”

I was sure that she wanted to deny me, to turn and walk away. Yet I was as certain that she could no longer treat me so. I might not know what power issued from the goblet which I carried, but the fact that it was mine at all plainly made her reluctantly consider me as a trail companion she could not ruthlessly leave behind.

“Past the mountains beyond—”

I looked deliberately at the heights before us, my head moving so I could view those lying to the south on to the ones rising in the north.

“A wide land for searching,” I commented. “Surely you are able to narrow our wandering better than that!”

For a long moment I believed she was going to refuse. Her frown was back, and she held the wand almost as if she would like to lay it across my face. Such a rush of anger reached me that it was as if the blow had truly been dealt. A moment later wonder started in me that I had been able to sense so clearly her emotions. Though acts of anger such as Garn’s blow (which had made me as nothing among my own kind), were open, still I had never before felt within me anything like this understanding of another.

I unslung the second wallet—her own—which I had carried for so long, held it out to her.

“Yours. You will find all untouched within. The strap has been mended.”

My action appeared to distract her anger for a moment. Gathea took the wallet, holding it almost as if she had never seen it before. A deep score was cut across its surface where one of the talons of the winged creature had slashed.

“That was done by a flying thing.” I made my voice casual.

“Flying thing—the Varks! You have fought with a vark!”

“After a fashion. Though I wonder if they can be truly killed, at least they take a deal of killing if they are.” I recalled that severed hand which had crept toward me like some monster possessing separate life of its own. “It would seem you have learned more of this land since we parted. Enough at least that you can give name to that—and what else?”

Once more her face was unreadable. “Enough.”

Enough? Well, I would push her no more now. Instead I continued briskly:

“Where do we head across these mountains? Still due west?”

Gathea gave a low whistle and Gruu slipped into place between us as if she would go only so under his escort. She looked sullen, and, had I had my will I would have turned on my heel and left her then and there. Only she was my guide to Iynne. And, for my own inner honor, I must do what I could for one who carried the blood of my own House—since in part it was my carelessness which had led my lord’s daughter into danger in the beginning.

We climbed in silence, Gruu in the lead, as if the great cat knew exactly what path to take, though I could detect no sign that there had ever been a way here which had been followed by more than perhaps his own kind. The mist had cleared entirely. I could look back upon the land below, stretching out even to the edge where the deserted keep stood. I wondered if Gathea had passed through there; if so what had been her experiences, though I was in no mind to ask her. She had raised a firm barrier between us, and, for now, I was content to have that so.

Steep as the slope was it did not tax us as that first height on which I had found the lair of the Vark. Now and again I did glance up into the sky to see if we might be observed by such an enemy. However the day was bright and clear and nothing moved above.

We did not try to scale the sharp set peak, rather Gruu brought us in a way around it, through a crevice so narrow at times that we had to turn sideways to win beyond. Then once more—at nooning I judged by the sun’s height—we came out upon another ledge able to look down and out upon a new land.

What lay behind us was a mixture of desert and wilderness, a harsh and desolate country. What lay ahead was richly green. There was no mistaking the distant glimpses of what could only be towers, the slim white markings of roads. Gathea stood surveying this before glancing at me over her shoulder.

“This is guarded land—”

I grasped her meaning. She was declaring that she alone might have the power to continue. Well, that I would test when the time came, though the rich look of that territory ahead suggested that if Iynne had, in some way, found a refuge here she might well be in better case than I had feared.

Now my companion swung farther around. “Do you not understand?” Her tone held a hiss like the sound Gruu might make in warning to any who thought to take a liberty with him. “You are not prepared, there are barriers here you cannot hope to cross!”

“But ones which will fall easily before you? Perhaps manned by the invisible?”

She tapped the wand she had clung to during all our climb against the flattened palm of her other hand. Her gesture was one of impatience and irritation. Then, seeming to come to some decision, she added:

“You cannot begin to understand. It would take years—long seasons of time for you to unlock the doors between you and the proper knowledge. I have been schooled from childhood. Also I was born of stock which had held certain powers from generation to generation. I am a woman and these powers are entrusted alone to those who can stand under the moon and sing down the Great Lady! You are—you have nothing!”

I thought of Gunnora, of my amber lady, and of the cup which plumped the wallet hanging from my shoulder and my jeweled leaf. Thus I did not accept the belief that only a woman might be akin to what ruled here.

“You think of steel—of a sword—” Gathea continued so swiftly one word near broke on the next. “This place has weapons you cannot begin even to dream of. I tell you there is no place for you! Nor can I aid you. All my strength I shall need for myself—to carry through what I must do. Your kin-lady took from me what was mine, what I have birthright to! I shall get it back!”

Her eyes were as fierce as those of an untamed hawk. I saw that she gripped that wand so tightly her knuckles stood out in pallid knobs.

“There is a time for swords, also for other weapons. I have not said that I do not believe in your powers—or in the strangeness of this land. I have had my own contact with that.” My hand went then not to sword hilt but to the bulge in my wallet.

She laughed. There was scorn in the sound. “Yes, the cup of the Horn-Crowned One, but you do not even know the true meaning of that. By ancient tradition he who wears the Horn Crown holds power only for a season or so, then his blood, his flesh, go to enrich the fields, to be a fair offering to the lady—”

“To Gunnora?” I asked and did not believe her.

Gathea stared. “You—you—” It was as if so many words boiled in her throat that they choked her into silence. Then she turned, began to descend with such reckless speed that I hurried to catch up as well as I could, lest she slip to end on rocks below. While Gruu flashed past me, crowding in ahead of her at last, to stand rock still keeping her where she was until I joined them.

“Shall we go,” I asked her, “together?”

I knew that she longed to deny me, to continue that headlong dash as she had done when she had lost me before the crossing of the other range, save that the cat would not move and she had no room to push past his bulk.

“On your own head be it!” she snapped. Once more there lay silence between us until I broke it, since I had decided that this warring of words was of no service to either of us.

“It may be true that you shall find welcome here. Was it with one of the guardians of this way that you held speech with air only before you? Only I am pledged to find Iynne, since that is a kin debt. That I shall endeavor to do with every bit of strength I can summon. Perhaps a sword is no answer, I do not know. But I am only a warrior—”

Why had I said that? For nothing else had I ever chosen to be. Yet now I felt another need beginning to move in me. What had been said to me concerning a seed planted—which would grow? I was no Bard, that I knew. So, what did move in me to reach forward eagerly, longing to test the secrets of this green land ahead? More than just the search for Iynne spurred me, I realized. I had a desire, a thirst for learning what lay here—what I might of such people as I had seen during my vision in the lost keep.

“You are a man!” She made of that statement an accusation.

It was true that Wise Women had no dealings with marriage. They were known to hold to virginity lest some of their power be lost in coupling. Perhaps deep in them they harbored a contempt for all males, such as I read into her voice now.

I laughed. “That I am!” Again I remembered the rousing warmth of my amber lady’s kiss. But if this lean-flanked, sun-browned girl thought that I lusted after her, having seen Gunnora, she was very wrong. “In your learning you would deny everything to me because of that? You speak of the Horn-Crowned One and his sacrifice—how is it that I have heard nothing of that in all my years? If it was once the way of life, it certainly has not been for seasons uncounted now. Among the kin—”

“The kin!” she flashed. “We are not among them. Yes, much has been forgot. I did not begin to dream how much, until I passed the Gate. Then I was like one being let out of a tight prison into an open world. I have begun to learn, but I am only on the first part of the path—a path you cannot think of walking. Go back, kinless one—you cannot hope to stand—”

“We shall see what I can or cannot stand,” I returned, as sharply. She had flung that last insult at me knowingly, meaning to wound, reminding me once again of the need for restoring my own pride. More than ever I knew that I must continue or be damned in my own eyes.

I wanted to know what invisible presence she had met with on the mountain land. However, if she would not tell me I could not force it out of her. As I faced her squarely I saw the fierceness fade a little from her eyes, then she looked down at her wand, twirling what was left of that about in her hands.

“Why will you not let matters be—?” she asked in a low voice. “You push, you pry, your very presence here may lead to defeat. I could turn this on you—” The end of the wand flipped a fraction in my direction. “Only if I use my gift so, then the force would strike back at me. I cannot send you away, I only ask that you go. I have spoken ill of your Lady Iynne, but accept this: when I find her I shall do all in my power to free her from a tangle, which she invited in her foolishness, and return her to her own life. I can do this, being who and what I am. You cannot—”

“Because I am who and what I am?” I asked. “I may surprise you still. Shall we go?”

She shrugged and started the descent again, this time at a more sober pace to suit the roughness of the way. For on this side the peak was far more precipitous than had been the other. Here were places where it was necessary that we aid one another in finding hand-holds, or steadying over drops.

There was no more speech between us, but our hands met readily enough when it was needful. Finally we reached better and easier ways which brought us into that green land. Here there were a number of those same trees that had been in that wood which had seemed to harbor the spirit woman I had met. There was no brush growing beneath them, only patches of moss. In pockets of sun, flowers bloomed—mostly white, faintly touched on petal tip with either rose or a green-yellow, so perfect one might have thought them fashioned from gems.

Perfume hung in those sunlit glades which Gathea did not cross directly. Rather she passed about the edges, being careful not to touch or disturb any of the flowers. While I was content to copy her example.

However, I noticed that she made such detours hurriedly and never looked at the flowers directly. Once when I fell a little behind she turned and beckoned me on. Pointing to the flowers, she said:

“They are dangerous—to us. There is a sleep lying ready in their scent to drug the traveler, give him strange dreams.”

How she knew this I did not understand, for their like I had never seen. But a Wise Woman has much knowledge of growing things and perhaps Gathea could sense from her training what carried danger within, even though she had not seen them before.

Gruu had vanished, speeding well ahead of us after we had found our way down the last slope. We had not stopped for nooning meal and I knew that what lay left in my wallet was not enough to carry us far. I was hungry and I began to cast glances about us as we went for either game, or some growing thing which would fulfill our needs. Save that there were neither to be seen in that wood.

At length we came from among the tall trees and their attendant glades of flowers, into a forest more natural to me, for these trees seemed closely akin to those I had known on the other side of the Gate. We had not ventured far within that section before we chanced upon a game trail on which were the fresh hoof prints of deer.

Still Gathea made no move to halt, but I was heartened to think that when we did camp we might have fresh meat to roast over a fire. As she continued a pace as swift as the obstructions of the wood would allow, I became restive, and, at last, broke that silence which seemed to be of her choice.

“I have food of a sort,” I said abruptly. “It would be best to eat.”

I believed that she had been so busied with her own thoughts that my words came as a startling surprise. Now she did pause and her hand went to the latching on the wallet I had brought her. She looked around. Nearby lay a mossy trunk of a tree that she chose as a seat. I dropped beside her and brought out my bag of grain now three-fourths empty, and a small portion of smoked meat.

She had unlatched her own supply bag and had a handful of dried fruit, two very stale, dried journey cakes. How had she fared during those days we had been apart? Had Gruu hunted for her or had the trail she followed been better served with fruit?

“None of that,” she shook her head at the meat I offered. “I do not eat much flesh within this land. And if you are wise you will not either. In fact, it would be better by far for you to bury that,” she looked upon the meat with aversion. “Things—hunters—can be drawn by the very scent, old and dry as it is.”

I considered what she had said. It was true she must know far more of this country—perhaps through some report from her invisible friend—than I did. Thus it would be wise to be governed—up to a point—by her advice.

With a sigh, I grubbed a hole in the soft earth beside that log, dumped in my meat, and covered it over. I made do with part of a cake and some pieces of the fruit she had offered me, setting aside my coarse ground meal for the future. It was peaceful here and, now that we had settled and there was no longer the sound of our passing to act as a warning, I began to hear the small noises of the life which must inhabit this place.

Down one of those trees flashed a creature with a plumed tail to act as a balance. It had a long narrow head, and very keen eyes which kept upon us as it came. The thing squeaked in a high note and appeared to have no great fear of us.

Gathea made a small twittering noise. The animal retreated up the trunk for a short space, then halted, peering down at her with an intent stare. From the wealth of teeth it showed, I believed that it certainly had no fear of hunting and it must do well for itself as its body was plump, its fur shiny and soft.

Again it squeaked. I could not put aside a belief that it had answered, in its own way, my companion. Again it flitted down the tree trunk, leaped a last portion, to land on nearby, then ran fearlessly to the girl who held out a piece of dried fruit. The forepaw with which it reached was more like a hand than a paw, and it used that appendage with as much dexterity as a man might use his five fingers.

It chewed at the morsel, swallowed. Then it squatted, its tail flaring back and forth, snapping from side to side, and loosed a volume of squeaking. Plainly it was talking after its own fashion, and I rapidly changed my estimate of its intelligence.

Gathea twittered and then shook her head regretfully. Whatever news or message the creature had brought was plainly not to her understanding. At least she did not know everything about this land. Its squeaking ended in a squeal which held a note of alarm. Then it was gone, a red streak back up into the branches of its chosen tree.

The wood became still—too still. Gathea swept the remaining food back into her wallet, latched that. Then she leaned forward a little, plainly listening. I could catch nothing but the silence, but that in itself was a warning. I could have liked just then to see the silver head of Gruu rise above the bushes, being very willing to trust the cat’s sense concerning enemies. That some inimical force was now moving within the wood I had no doubt all.

I got to my feet as quietly as I could, then tensed. There came a loud call—and that I had heard before. It was the croaking of those evil-looking birds which had plagued us in Garn’s dale. They could not penetrate the cover of the trees which roofed us over; still I was very certain that they knew we were here. Also they did not come in to attack, but rather waited as might those hounds a hunter loosed on a trail. We had been discovered, we were about to be the prey of some force, and an evil one if those birds obeyed his, her, its commands!

13.

Gathea stood beside me, her head held high. I saw her nostrils expand as if, like Gruu, she depended upon sense of smell. If she picked up such a warning it was denied me. Rather I listened to the calling of those birds and then I gazed along the aisles between the trees. Of the great cat there was no sign, though I wished that he had remained with us.

Because I needed some hint for our possible defense I rounded on my companion, determined to get a straight answer from her.

“What do those call? Them I know and have seen before and they are surely evil.”

She met my demanding gaze and I could see she was shaken.

“The Wings of Ord.” Her voice reached me nearly overridden by the clamor from the skies.

“And this Ord?” I pressed her.

Gathea shook her head. “He is, I think, one of the great Old Ones—I—” Her eyes dropped to the wand which she still held, and then once more she looked at me. “There is that I can do—for my own safety—but whether it will also hold for you … Bring forth that cup!”

So sharp was her order that I obeyed without stopping to think. The face of the Horned man looked up at me. Some trick of the light shifted in here by the leaves gave it a change of countenance, made it appear for a moment or two as if those silver eyes had come to life, regarded me measuringly.

“We should have wine—” She looked about her as if a cask might suddenly appear from the air itself in answer to her need. Then she scrabbled within her wallet, brought out several small pieces of fruit which I recognized for long dried grapes, hard and black.

“These—into the cup!” She held out her hand and I scooped up those dried balls (there were seven of them I noted) to drop into the hollow of the goblet. “Now water—no, it must come from your flask!”

Upon the dark balls I sloshed what might have measured three mouthfuls of water, wanting to save our supply since I did not know when I could replenish the bottle.

Some new sense arose abruptly within me. I was grasping the cup with both hands, near level with my chin. So holding it I also turned it, that the liquid it held washed back and forth across the long dried fruit. A poor substitute for wine, perhaps—only, maybe a firm desire in such straits would equal the lack.

“Look at him!” Gathea’s voice was taut. “Think of him! Think of wine, a toast to the Hunter. His pledge cup has passed to you. Perhaps that means that you have favor. But this is a sort which no magic raised by a woman can summon. Think of wine—the taste of it—pledge your service to him. Do it—and speedily!”

I did look at that face under the stag horn crown. There was that in it which was not human, yet here was enough of mankind to make me hope that perhaps whatever magic she believed might be woven by this would come to our aid. Though I had never tried to make my mind command my sight, I had learned enough to believe this might be done—whether or no I was taught in the mysteries of Power.

The silver face stared back at me, that alienness, which had at first appeared so marked, was growing less. There was power here. This represented a high lord, one who dealt justice to his people with one hand, and defended them against all ill with the other. To ride among the household of such a one would be enough for any man.

I raised the goblet yet higher, closed my eyes, and set in my mind that what washed within was not water and bits of dried fruit. No, rather I prepared to taste such a drink as had filled it on that night when I had sat at the feast board at Gunnora’s left hand. Setting the rim to my lips I drank.

And—I shall always swear by all I hold in my heart as right and strong—what I sipped was indeed wine, spiced, mellow, such a vintage as had not stood in the casks of any keep I knew. I pledged with those mouthfuls my service—I who was kinless, and had no honor among my own any more.

We of the clans swear our strongest oaths by blood and steel, and by the Flame. Though the latter is a faroff thing which only the Bards and a handful of believers ever mention. I swore rather by a wine which I drank, by that within me which drew me to this lost lord whose face I looked upon as I turned the goblet upside down as is our custom for honor pledge. There dripped from it (yes, this too I swore to) not water, not knotted ball of sun-dried grape, rather wine light as the sun, yellow and clear. Those drops fell into forest mould and were gone. I threw back my head and shouted aloud words which I did not know but which had come easily into my mind:

“Ha, Kurnous, Ha, Hie Wentur!”

My cry swelled, echoed among the trees, repeated over and over again. About us leaves shook as a wind rushed upon us, wrapping us around. We stood without hurt as branches snapped free and hurtled by us, pieces of the leaf mould underfoot were scuffed up and sent hurtling off.

An inflow of new strength swelled within me. I felt in that moment that I was greater than any man, filled with something I could not name but which made me more alive than I had ever felt before in my life. I could have drawn steel and stood against the open attack of a whole clan, laughing as I fought to victory. Or I might front such a cat as Gruu with none but my own two hands, and it would be the cat that would first give ground!

Above the rushing of the wind we could hear the hoarse cries of the birds. They were screaming, calling to whatever had sent them for aid. No help came to them. I saw the air toss branches of the trees which had sheltered us, and between those whipping limbs, that beat wildly here and there, began to fall bundles of ragged feathers, limp bodies of battered birds. Some still struggled feebly as they struck the ground. Their red eyes were glazed, but one or two still gazed toward us and their furious hatred was plain.

The wind swirled, appeared to gather itself together as if it had just formed a wide-flung net and was now being once more compacted into a bundle. Then it was gone. Only a scatter of torn leaves and the dead birds remained.

My exultation had swept with that wind. I drew a deep, ragged breath, looked once more at the Horned Hunter. The face on the goblet held no hint of any life now. In fact a dulling crept across the silver so that it looked both old and worn, as if a virtue had departed out of it. I held it gingerly. What I had wrought by its aid had left me shaken. Now I wanted to stow it away—to think out what I had done and why I had been able to do it.

However, as I placed it back in the wallet, I glanced at Gathea. She was farther apart from me, her back set against a tree, her eyes wide. Between us she held up the wand, as if to ward off blows she half expected I might aim at her.

“He came—” Her words were low, shaken. “He truly came—to your calling. But you are a man, a man of the clans, of the House of Garn, how could you do this thing?”

“I do not know—nor even what I did. But you expected it—you told me—”

She shook her head. “I only had some hope—because you possessed the cup. Now you have done what even a Bard would not dare to try—you summoned Him Who Hunts and have been answered! This is—I must think on this! Now, let us go before that which sent the Black Ones can seek us again!”

She began to run along one of the more open aisles of the wood, leaping over fallen branches here and there. I followed, catching up just as we came out into the open.

I expected that some of that vile flock might have survived the killing wind to spy on us. There was nothing to be seen there except one winged thing (too far to say whether it was bird or something far worse) flying at speed away from the wood. So, relieved of any need for immediate action, I turned to Gathea, caught her arm and held her by main strength. The time had come for answers to my questions.

“Who is He Who Hunts? The Black Ones? Ord? You will tell me now what you know!”

She twisted in my hold, and she was strong, stronger than I thought a woman might be. Still I held her and when she half raised the wand I promptly struck out at her wrist as I was only too wary of what she might do. I had never so roughly handled a woman before, nor did I like this trial of strengths between us. However I was through moving blindly when I believed that she had knowledge which might save us both from new and unknown perils.

Gathea glared at me, though she stopped her struggle. I saw her lips move, though they shaped no speech I could understand. So I swept her closer to me, clapped one hand over her mouth for I believed she might be summoning up some new aid—against me.

“You will talk!” I said into her ear as I held her prisoner against my body. “I have gone your way too long—you have drawn me into sorcery—and I will have answers!” She was like a bar of sword steel in my hold, though she no longer fought for freedom. What further steps I might take to make her answer I could not imagine.

“You are no fool,” I continued. “To go farther into this land without knowing how we may arm ourselves—that is folly past believing. I do not want your secrets—but I am a warrior as you know. I will not go blind if you can tell what will aid me. Do you understand?”

I thought that her stubbornness was going to continue. If so I did not know what I could do, for I could not hold her prisoner forever. When she would not speak, another idea came to me, even as had that invocation which had entered my mind. I spoke again and did so in a voice which demanded an answer:

“By Gunnora I ask it!” For I felt that to invoke whatever power had answered the cup ritual would not make her yield. She spoke so much of women’s knowledge and of things which were not of a man’s world at all—proud in the fact that this set her apart. Gunnora had been all woman and I was sure a person of no little power—in her own time and place.

I was certain that I had done rightly when Gathea made a last plunge for freedom without warning. However I was ready for such a ploy and gave her no chance. Only I repeated:

“By the power of Gunnora, I ask this!”

She as suddenly went limp in my hold, her head bobbing against the hand which gagged her. I released her then and stepped away, but I kept a wary eye on the wand. She was grasping it tightly, the burned part down, and she did not face me even now, only her voice, cold and hard, came:

“You meddle still. Once you shall go too far, and then you shall learn what comes to those who invoke what they do not understand. You are the fool!”

“I would rather be a live fool, than a dead one. And I think you know enough to let both of us walk this land with some weapons besides steel to hand. You know where we go—”

“Where I go!” Gathea corrected me. Even now she kept her face turned away as if she had been shamed by my handling and was thus lessened even in her own eyes. But I kept rein on any sympathy—I had treated with her fairly from the first, she could not say the same and be honest.

“Where we both go,” I corrected her calmly. “Also, you have a guide—one unseen—I saw you speak with such a one. Is she—or it—here?”

“These are Mysteries, not to be spoken of by those who stand outside,” she retorted.

“I have been involved in them. I have spoken to Gunnora. I have called upon the Hunter—and did he not answer me?”

She still would not look at me, rather her eyes went from side to side as a cornered animal might search for some hole of escape. “I have given oaths. You do not know what you ask—”

Again I was visited by inspiration. “Call upon that which cannot be seen—ask then of it whether I should be left blind among the sighted. I demand this in Gunnora’s name!”

The wand quivered. “She—why do you speak of her? She is no voice for a man’s hearing!”

“She is for this man. I sat at a feasting board at her left hand and she spoke to me with far better grace than you have ever known. The cup was her gift—”

“I cannot tell—”

“Then summon what can,” I pressed her. “Your invisible one.”

Now she did look at me and there was a flame which could be either rage or hatred in her eyes.

“On you then be the consequences!” She drove the wand butt down with a vicious push into the ground at her feet, stepped back a pace or two to settle herself beside the charred branch cross-legged, her gaze now concentrated on the half-burned wood.

My own hand fell to the wallet in which I had put the goblet and I pictured in my mind my amber lady as she had been, full of life, as ripe and bountiful as the symbol she wore.

There was a gathering chill, though the sun had been warm on my helmless head only moments earlier. I felt as if the breath of the Ice Dragon was spreading outward from the half-consumed rod which meant so much to my companion. Every passing moment I expected to see that light fan out to hide it. Only that did not happen. Just that cold grew greater, as if to banish me. I stood my ground and thought of Gunnora, and the cup I carried. Also I fumbled in my wallet and brought out that gem-leaf. Perhaps, as once it had been a growing thing, it would prove now a talisman.

Gathea spoke, in that other tongue which held a singsong cadence. She could be reciting some bardic invocation. The chill increased. I might have been encased in ice from head to foot, only under that hand which lay upon the wallet and within the hand which closed upon the leaf there was warmth which spread outward, fighting that chill which perhaps could be deadly. Whether Gathea deliberately summoned harm I had no way of telling. Perhaps what answered her had its defenses against the interference of an outsider.

I heard no voice out of the air. However Gathea stopped her chant, to speak directly to the source of that cold. Again I summoned to my own mind my most vivid memory of Gunnora. That began to fade in spite of my efforts. Another face took on substance in place of her amber and golden beauty. This was of a younger woman, one I had never looked upon. Her hair was held straight back by a band with the new moon in silver mounted over a brow which was austere, remote, where Gunnora had been well aware—and forgiving—of human frailties. The eyes beneath this other’s wide brow were gray as winter ice, holding no more warmth than that. Night black as any winter sky was her hair, and the robe which was girdled about the straight figure of a very young girl was white as the light of the burning wand.

There was no humanity in her. She had been frozen away from every warmth known to my kind. Still there was in the lift of her proud head, about her face a trace haunting of memory. I did not question that this vision in my inner eyes was that of the entity Gathea had summoned, and that there was nothing in her which would move her followers to seek out aught but sterile knowledge which would serve to wall them yet further from their own kind.

There was no escape for me from her inspection. I sensed a kind of impatient contempt—not for me as a person—but because to her no male was of consequence.

“Gunnora!” Had I thought that, or had I cried the name aloud?

The saying of it broke the calm. She did not frown, she did not draw back, yet I sensed that, in some way beyond my comprehension, she was disturbed, shaken. There might well be a feud upon another plane of existence which touched this land, in which power strove with power. I had chanced upon one such power, Gathea had found another, and they were far from allied.

That I had thought before the change began. The white garment took a tinge of color, the girl’s body beneath it ripened into curves, the crescent moon of her diadem grew into a circle, the same sign at its full zenith. That halting resemblance I had half seen—this was also Gunnora! But in another guise. Maid, woman—both the same, but possessing different gifts.

The cold which had tried to freeze me warmed. I could smell scents of full summer, that of ripened fruit, the dusty aroma of grain falling to the harvest. Two natures! That which abode in Gathea had summoned one, that which lay dormant in me had drawn the other.

Only for an instant did I see my amber lady. Then she winked out of my mind’s vision. However as she left I felt that I was indeed accepted by her and that there were more gates open to me, giving on stranger lands even than the one I now walked. I need only reach for what I wished with the full strength of my mind, and my desire would come to me bit by bit in answer to the force which I exerted.

“Gunnora!” I called as she vanished, my whole being longing once more to hear the richness of her voice. My lips burned again, as they had when I had received her kiss.

“Dians!” My own cry was echoed by another name. Gathea reached up into the air, as if she would catch and hold the intangible. For I knew that we were now alone. The Power she had called up had answered me as well as her.

Her voice had a desolate ring as if she had called upon near kin who were leaving her forever. Then her hands fell down upon her knees, her head drooped forward.

I did not move to her, for I knew at that moment she would resent bitterly any touch of mine. But I spoke:

“She was Gunnora, maid—wife—”

“She was Dians who knows no man! She was—” Gathea lifted her head. The tears in her eyes astounded me as much as if one of the tree trunks about us wept. “She is—the Moon Lady. Then—then—” Again that hawk fierceness shone in her eyes as she raised her head to look at me. “Gunnora is for woman also, but only for women who put off their maidenhood to follow the path of submission to some man.”

“Submission?” I countered. These was nothing in my Amber Lady to suggest submission. “I think not so—unless the woman so desires. She is of the harvest, the coming together of those who would produce new life. She is warmth—your Dians all cold—”

Gathea shook her head slowly. “It is true that Gunnora answered your thought-call. I do not know why or how she lends favor to a man. Her Mysteries are not for you. But it seems, past all belief, that she has indeed chosen you for some reason. Only—it is to Dians’s shrine that we go and that is another matter.”

I noted that her “I” had become “we.” However, I was wise enough to make no comment. She arose slowly, as if that invocation had worn her hard. Now she plucked the wand from the ground to lay it across her palm which she held out well before her.

Though I could detect no movement of the flesh on which it rested, the wand did turn, pointing to her left, out into that green land. Gathea nodded.

“We have our guide, let us go.”

That this land was inhabited I was sure and I had no mind to meet with any in possession until I learned more of what we might expect. The coming of the birds was warning enough to tread with caution and keep well away from what we did not understand until we could judge it good or evil.

These who had withdrawn from the dales were, I suspected more and more, of many different species. I remembered the glimpses I had had in that feasting hall of those who were far from human in their seeming. Though all had been in harmony there, much time must have passed. Having been raised among a people who were often torn by clan feuds, I could understand that some such disputes might well have rent apart the dwellers here.

“You spoke of the birds as Ord’s.” Now that I had broken through Gathea’s barrier against explanation I determined to make the most of it. “Who then is Ord?”

“I do not know—save he is a Dark Master—and those are loathsome things which are hunting prey their master wishes.”

“That winged thing which I strove with in the mountains?” Swiftly I told her more of that battle and of the strange statue which had guarded the entrance to the foul hole from which it had crawled.

“Evil, yes—but twisted from another way long ago. There was some great warring here once. Those who chose the Dark were changed. Then there are the ones who made no choice, who withdrew. They changed in another way—drawing farther apart from either good or ill into a state where they acknowledge the power of neither and cannot be summoned to a quarrel.”

“You have learned a lot,” I commented.

“Do you not understand even yet?” she asked. “I was born knowing that I had in me powers, talents, which I could not use because I lacked the key which would unlock them. I came here and there were keys! Zabina wanted me to walk slowly, to creep as a babe who has not yet found the way to rise upon its feet. I am young, but my years do not stretch so far ahead that I can wait, and wait, and accept humbly scraps of knowledge when I know there is a full feast provided for those who dare seek it! The Moon Shrine—that gave me the key. Through it I would have been able to fly where now I stumble foot over foot, although the magic which lay there came only now and then. Before I could draw upon it your keep girl blundered in. I hope she will or has learned what it means to steal another’s hopes!”

She spoke with a twist of lip which made me think that she would rather have framed a curse to hurl at Iynne.

“I know Gunnora—she is another phase of your Moon Lady—though she goes in guise of sun warmth. Who is the Hunter who came to my calling?”

“What his name tells you. In a woman lies the right to hold the seed, to nourish it, to watch it grow, to harvest when it is ripe. In a man lies hasty action, the seeking for prey, the hand on sword, the readiness to cut down growth. The Horn-Crowned One hunts—and slays—”

“So he is evil?”

I could read in her face a desire, or so I thought, to agree. But, at length, she answered reluctantly:

“All things must balance in any world. There is light and dark—moon and sun—life and death. For the most part one is neither better nor greater than the other. The mother sows, the man reaps, she gives life, he grants death when the proper hour turns on the everlasting wheel. To her all the harvest rooted in earth, to him dominion over that which runs four-footed, flies two-winged, unless the balance is disturbed and there arise those strong enough to challenge the proper order of things and bring about pure evil. For that is the true nature of evil—it is power which is used to pull apart the smooth weaving of life and the world.”

“So the Hunter is the opposite of your Dians, of Gunnora, yet he has his place.”

I thought of the fact that she assigned death as the task of the Horn-Crowned Man and that I did not like. Even though it was part of the scheme of life. For my blood mostly look upon Death with dread—unless life has beaten them so cruelly that they do indeed welcome him as a friend. That I had summoned Death incarnate to our help made me now uneasy and I longed to throw from me that unlucky cup—perhaps the leaf also—and have nothing more to do with them. But Gunnora had given me the cup, and if she stood for the abundance of life why would she present me with the visible image of death? Unless (the woman of the forest had also life coursing in her, strange though that might be—I could not believe her leaf a promise of ending) unless there had been a dire message in both gifts.

Only never would I admit to Gathea my doubts of the Amber Lady and what she stood for. Since I was bred a fighting man I should not shrink from the idea that I had indeed called upon Death as an aid. In that moment I decided to live for one day only. What came I would face without flinching. If Gunnora had meant that cup as a warning—no, that I would not believe. She had spoken of a future for me, and I would hold fast to her prophecy.

Gathea could not read my thoughts. Now she frowned. Not as if she held me to fault, but rather as she faced a puzzling task.

“The Horn-Crowned One is not the opposite of Dians.” Her words came slowly, her frown grew more forbidding. She plainly spoke against her will. “He is honored with the Maiden, and the Mother—he is in turn, brother, and mate—even son to the Old One—”

“And this Old One?”

“The Wise One, she who finishes life as the Maid begins it, the Dark Moon we cannot see. Yes, the Horn-Crowned One is their equal. Save that he does not answer to the Shrine—he has his own place. And—”

What more she might have said she never added for there came a silver flash through the air. With one leap Gruu was again with us. Behind the cat coursed something else. To me it looked like a streak of black lightning—if one can conceive of lightning as being that, instead of the brightness which we know. It cracked in the air as might the lash of a whip—

The lash of a whip! That was what it was! Out of the countryside rode at a gallop three robed figures and one of them was reeling back, as he came, a black lash, both hands busy with that while his mount, unguided, came forward, its huge fanged jaws agape, its scaled legs in such motion as I thought no living creature might achieve. For these were no steeds of the common world which the three riders bestrode, rather they raced upright on ponderous hind legs, their shorter and thinner forelegs dangling as they came, while their riders balanced on saddles strapped upon those mighty shoulders.

I saw that black lash coiled, ready to come flying out at us. Gruu had turned at bay once he reached Gathea’s side, his fangs showing white and sharp as he roared. I drew steel and thrust myself before the girl, knowing that there was no time for us to flee back into the forest. Death-bringer indeed. I had summoned the Hunter and now I was faced with his price for playing a game I could not understand.

14.

Our attackers made no attempt to close with us, rather they set their monstrous steeds to circle, penning us in. I pivoted to watch, while Gruu crowded back against us both, his head up, snarling, his tail lashing in rage. The lizard things these dark strangers rode hissed, shot out forked tongues as if to impale us. Why the trio did not ride us down straightway I did not understand.

There was no time now for any invocation such as I had used back in the wood. Nor could I even be certain at this moment that the threat faced had not been drawn upon us because I had called on a power I had no ability to order.

At length the three of them came to a halt again. Their faces I could not see for they wore hoods after the manner of my own people in winter, and those were drawn so far forward as to conceal their features, though I caught glimpses of pallid skin on sharply pointed chins. One stopped his slavering mount on the right, matching his fellow to the left. While he who had first used the lightning flash was directly before us.

They have said that the best defense is sometimes attack. I knew in that moment without being told that such an act would avail me nothing. Why they did not simply cut us down with those lines of flame I did not understand.

In spite of my attempt to shield her, Gathea had moved out, her shoulder near touching mine, even though she held no sword, just the shortened wand. We waited, the only sound now being the rumble of Gruu’s growl, the hissing now and then of one of the mounts.

I remembered what my companion had earlier said—that iron in itself was a menace to some forms of Dark life. Could it be my sword that they feared, not because of any skill of mine in using it, but because it was wrought of that metal? If so—then perhaps attack might still be possible—

From the very air over us there came a voice, deep as thunder in its way, so startling that it shook my attention away from our captors, making me look up to hunt its source.

Save that there was nothing there.

No! That was not so! There was a troubling of the air, like unto a ripple which a pebble might cause in a pond. If sounds could have visible substance … And those did! There were trails now of something like the thinnest smoke. These did not vanish, rather curled and circled over our heads as the riders had encircled us. While we moved to the ordering of that near invisible ring in the air.

I struggled hard to counteract the compulsion which sent me walking forward, even to use the sword I had in hand. My body was no longer under my control, I was a prisoner within my own flesh and bone. Both Gruu and Gathea must have been the same, for they, too, moved in a stiff, jerky fashion, as if they were being pulled along by invisible ropes.

He who directly faced us turned his scaled mount, heading outward into the open land, with us drawn behind him, paced on either hand by the other riders. Though there was sun above us and the land still looked fair and green beyond, still it was as if we walked prisoner within a shell which was subtly foul.

We crossed a road, but he who led did not turn, kept rather in a straight line over open fields, while always that faint circle over our heads continued to hold.

“What do you know of these?” How deep Gathea’s knowledge of this land might run I had no idea, but any hint which she could give me might be of service—had to be of service! I might be helpless now against some witchery, but there could also come a moment, a chance—

“They are of the Dark,” she answered me shortly. “Their master is a strong one. It is his voice which holds us in spell. Save that they are the enemy, I can tell you no more.”

She had pressed both hands against her breast, the wand resting between her palms and her body as if she would somehow shelter that thing of power. I did not sheathe my sword as I was urged onward. It was better that I go prepared.

Thus we were taken captive, and thus we passed over green and pleasant lands to come into another strip of country. The growth was as luxuriant here, perhaps even more free and full. Still it seemed unpleasant, darksome. There were flowers which looked like avid scarlet mouths ready to fasten greedily upon anyone who passed too close, others stood pale, possessing ugly-looking stamens of green-yellow which caught and held struggling insects, and from which spread a charnel reek. The trees were twisted, with lumps upon their trunks which were like masks of dread, or rather the heads of men and women who had died in agony and despair. While their leaves were few, the green of them was overlaid with ashy gray as if disease had so marked them.

The ground was also gray-dark and with each step we took there arose a stench of mouldy decay. Fungi grew in patches, looking like the sloughing flesh of things long dead but not decently buried.

Things lived here. We could hear rustling in that mass of growth. Now and then eyes peered at us and we caught short, very fleeting glimpses of stunted misshapen creatures which could be animals twisted by some strange magic from their proper forms—animals—or worse!

On this blighted ground stood a wood of trees, so interwoven and matted that I did not see how any living thing could force a way through. Still from the midst of those dark trees arose a tower.

The stone of its fashioning was a dull black, making a smear against the clear sky to outrage nature. It was toward that tower that our captor rode, we being forced along in his wake.

I saw no opening of path but, as the rider approached, that wood, so much of a barrier, thinned, drew back. It, too, could have been of smoke or an illusion. Yet I somehow knew that it would prove very real to any who had no dominion over the power which had set it there.

Thus the rider moved within its boundaries without any halt and so did the three of us march after him, compelled still by what had taken command of our limbs, if not our minds. I glanced from side to side as we went on into that dark and more noisome place. There were great thorns as long as my belt knife on branches. In other places gray flowers with red veining across their petals, like the veins which brought life through a true body, dripped from their hearts sluggish yellow drops I was sure were poisonous. Strange it was, but also there was about it a daunting aura of evil and of vile life. I made myself face my own fear and ride above it. Sight and smell and sound—these had been used, yes—and witchery worked in them. Only inside I still was myself and that I must hold to in this place. I might be helpless of body, but my mind—

Why it was necessary to remember that at this moment, I did not understand. Save that thought was the only way remaining that I could fight, holding out against my captors in so little.

We came into that opening in the wood where the tower itself stood. There was no outer wall, no other building of any true keep—only that upward pointing black pillar. In the side facing us opened a doorway which gaped darkly, no barrier seeming set in it to deny any entrance.

Our mounted guide came to a halt before that doorway, raised the staff from which his lightning lash had shot in a salute. He did not speak. Now even the hissing of his mount and of those other two ceased. It was very quiet in that tower-centered clearing—hot, oppressively so, and the air so filled with a variety of stenches that no lungful one drew seemed to satisfy the body’s craving for air.

No voice spoke at this time, but the rider, as if he had received an order we could not hear, drew his mount to one side. He did not dismount though I saw his cowled head turn as that which controlled us now pushed us on, straight into the waiting, open door.

The dark appeared to reach out for us. I had been in unlit rooms, in the dark of storm-clouded nights. Yet nothing could equal this complete and utter absence of light. Even as we were marched through the arch we were encompassed by it and lost in a thick black.

Lost—I strove to command my hand by even this much—that I could reach out and touch either Gathea’s flesh or the fur of the cat. Only no command I used to signal that action reached my muscles. I might well have had both arms tightly bound to my sides. The dark itself was smothering so that I heard my own gasps for breath, knew within me a stir of panic.

We no longer—or at least I—no longer moved. Nothing of the day’s light penetrated here. Nor could I even guess where we now were, for I had a strange sensation that in passing within that doorway I had entered no hall but a vast space of another existence, that there were no walls about me—only long, unseeable distances.

How long did I stand so? I will never know, for in this other place there was no measurement of time. That had been suspended. There was only the here and now, the crushing dark which was forcing, with a slow, sadistic pleasure, the spark of my life into nothingness which would leave me forever caught like an insect in the sticky gum of a fruit tree, trapped and encircled.

My species fear the dark. That is born in us. Still is it also born in most of us that we must fight fear lest we vanish into nothingness. No man of the clans might have faced such an ordeal as this before, still I found, a little to my astonishment, much to my heartening, that I could hold the fear at a distance—for this moment, and the next—counting time by the breaths I drew as shallow gasps. If I could do it for this instant, then I could do it again, and once more, and—

The dark—there was a change in the air ahead—the stenches of the humid hotbed behind us no longer tormented our nostrils. Instead there was a puff of scent, heavy, musky—not entrancing—rather with a sweet hint of the beginning of decay.

That was accompanied by a faint, very faint lighting of the complete dark. A spot of the same smoky gray as had formed to take us prisoner grew slowly there, hanging in the air equal with our heads. Pale it was, in this utter gloom glowing wanly.

It enlarged from a disc into an oval, spreading down-ward and its gray became a sickly white—tinged with yellow—as the flowers we had seen without. Now it resembled the surface of a mirror, though it reflected no part of the three of us. Complete in its growth it remained forming a second doorway, though the force which had compelled us here did not now move us toward it. No, rather that which had its being on the other side approached.

Just as the doorway had grown so did this come slowly—first a shadow on the oval, then deepening in substance into a blurred figure which was like us in form. Only about it there was a hint of ill-shaping—of distortion. The rest of it came with a rush. In the blink of an eye it was there sharp and clear.

I saw a woman, her skin pale, her hair long and dark, loose and flowing nearly to her knees. Her body was as ripe as Gunnora’s and she stood flaunting it in a way which a part of me understood and responded to, just as I had responded earlier to Gunnora’s womanhood.

Only—

Was my mind playing tricks? When I thought of Gunnora in connection with this female there was a blurring for an instant of that perfect body, the eyes which had been green-yellow, like Gruu’s, had held a red spark. I had sensed a small flash of rage.

Still I took a step forward in spite of myself. I was aroused now, as I had been by Gunnora. I was not aware that I could move freely until I found myself sliding my sword back into the sheath; I wanted my hands, my arms free, I wanted—

My swinging hand scraped across my bulging wallet. Again the figure awaiting me—promising me—blurred. The cup—

She might well have read my confusion. Now she held both arms to me, and lustful hunger almost overwhelmed me until I was on the verge of taking those steps between us, reaching out my hands to stroke that satin smooth skin, to caress, to possess … She was all a man could want in a woman and it was me she wooed! She was—

Something moved before me. Gruu flashed into the air in one great leap. I cried out, hurled myself after the cat. The figure in that oval of light blurred again. Somehow, as I swung my weapon—I must save her from the beast if I could—I brushed against the wallet. Brushed, no, my hand clung to the leather above the bulge of the cup, fastened there, in spite of my violent efforts to free it. At the same moment I did not see the dark lady savaged by the beast as I had thought. Rather Gruu rolled with another cat, one which matched him. I heard him cry out and saw him bowl over the newcomer. There was no woman, only the two cats.

Then Gruu and the other were gone, the woman stood there again, her enchantment reaching once more for me. Only there was a wrongness in her image. It strove to fit itself into the pattern it had made earlier, yet it continually flowed beyond the bounds here and there. So at length I knew—this was an illusion. What awaited me there was no woman but something which used witchery to bring its prey peacefully into its hold.

I pressed my hand harder against the wallet. If there was any power radiating out of that I needed it now! The Horn-Crowned One! Gunnora! I grasped at fragments of memory, sought to weave those into a shield.

There was a woman—there was swirling substance—there was a woman—back and forth the struggle of the Dark One who ruled this nest of evil went. Perhaps she—or it—was not aware at first of what small defense I had. The lure was still strong, my body pulled me forward, the lustful heat in me arose high and higher. I fought both myself and that illusion, tearing myself apart with a fear that I would never be able to find words for.

Once I was on my knees, crawling like the animal which more than half of me had become, toward that light and her who had managed to wholly materialize there for a longer period. Only there was no woman there—that I held to, as a dying man holds to the last spark of life. For I truly believe that had I been conquered by my body then, I would have been dead after a fashion which is too evil to think upon!

The Horn-Crowned! Kurnous—Kurnous—! I had no wine to summon him; I had nothing but a part of me and memory. To summon Gunnora in my thoughts—no! Hastily I walled that away. Gunnora, herself, had a small part of this kind of magic. To think of her would open the door again. The Hunter—the Killer—the slayer—

That figure in the light changed. No woman postured and beckoned there now. Instead there was a man, tall, well favored, and wearing on his head a crown of interlaced antlers. He had the calm, proud face of a great and well beloved lord, and he held out his hand to welcome me. Me, the kinless, the clanless. Never alone again. I need only take that hand and I would not be just liegeman, but sword brother, close kin! This was not Garn, but one infinitely above him, a lord one would follow eagerly on great quests, joining to rid the land of the shadow which lay upon it, to serve in glory! This was he I had called upon in ignorance, now come to me in all his—

Still, with my eyes fastened on him, I fumbled with the lashings of my wallet, to take that cup forth—prove that I was one pledged to him! This was how he had saved me again from the prowlers in the dark. This was—

I had the wallet open. My fingers reached in and touched the cup, my forefinger slipping into the bowl.

The man wavered. No! Not to go! I could prove—I could—

Once more he wavered. Then I saw her—that girl—she was pushing ahead of me. Her hands were up, out, she was reaching …

There was no man, no Horn-Crowned warrior. There was a woman, not she who had nearly drawn me into her net, no, this was a girl, slender, lithe, her body partly covered by a moon-silver tunic which fastened on one shoulder and came to mid thigh. On her head she wore the crescent of the new moon. She was gone. The man began once more to form.

I had pulled loose the cup, held it beneath my chin, awkwardly. What ancient wisdom had come out of the past to make me aware that this was what I must do? There was nothing in that cup, still there came to my nostrils from its interior a sharp, clean scent—the leaves of certain trees, under the morning sun, the sharpness of herbs crushed beneath foot.

It was as if a veil had been swept away and I really saw!

Cloud bubbled and frothed within the oval, veiling and then revealing the form of Gruu, who lay on his side unmoving. There were streaks of red in that murk, darker shadows, as if small things wavered back and forth through it. Still Gathea moved toward it, her hands outheld. She had already passed me. However, that hold upon us which had kept us from any movement was broken now. Still cradling the cup close to me with one hand, I threw myself forward and flung out my other hand across her path when she came close to that coiling matter.

Her face was rapt, her eyes all for the frothing within the oval. At first she simply pushed against my hold as if she did not expect or know what it might be. I knew that thus, one-armed, I could not hold her back. I dropped my arm, laced fingers of my left hand instead in her belt, jerked backward myself, so brought her with me, even as a tendril of the mist reached for her.

She tripped and fell and I went with her, my body rolling over her as she began a frenzied struggle for freedom. I do not think she even knew me for who I was, but rather only as a barrier between her and what she must have. With fist, tooth and nail, she fought me, and I could but use my strength to pin her to the ground, attempt to dodge those raking nails. For I knew that the cup was my salvation and only while I held it to me, and breathed in that strange scent which still arose from it, would my head remain clear and that weaver of illusions could not take me to its self.

Somehow I held, and then hoping that it would serve her as it had me, and because I felt a little safer with my back to that oval of light, I forced the cup itself closer to her face where her head turned from side to side and she snapped her teeth as if seeking to tear my arm, as Gruu himself might do in a frenzy.

We were still caught in that struggle when—

My grip on Gathea became desperate, my hold on the cup even more. We no longer lay on the pavement of that place of darkness. There was cold so sharp that I believe no living thing could have stood it for more than the instant. Then we were in light again, a red light which leaped and flamed. As the cold had struck at us, so now did heat lick out to sear our bodies.

Gathea lay still, her eyes closed. But I could feel the quick rise and fall of her breast under gasping breaths. I raised myself to my knees and looked around. The heat was so intense it seemed that every breath I drew must black and char my lungs. There was rock under us—that, too, blistering hot, so I hastened to pull Gathea up from it, hold her against me lest she burn. I smelled singeing of hair and as I turned my head I saw Gruu, still stretched motionless nearby.

We were surrounded by a wall of flame which burned red and yellow. Now and then, as if blown by a breeze we could not ourselves feel, it sent long tongues reaching for us. The fire was bright, its wall held no breaks, so I could not see what lay beyond it. All I could think now was that our defiance had angered the tower presence so that it had abruptly banished us through some mastery of power into this prison which was like to complete the matter by reducing us swiftly to fire-blackened bones.

“Dains!” Gathea opened her eyes. They still did not focus upon me, but searched beyond. I was sure she sought whatever vision the tower presence had formed for her beguiling. She frowned as apparently true sight returned. Then she looked at me with an anger that would send me hurtling into that blazing wall if she could aim it rightly. “Dains—she was there! She called me—at last!”

She raised both hands and fended me off so sharply that I was indeed pushed too near the fire, had to jump away and to my feet. The cup I kept held of with a fierce grip.

“It was all an illusion,” I retorted. She had claimed to know so much of sorcery, why had she not seen that for herself when Gruu had been drawn, when twice I had faced what was intended to bind me also to the dark?

“What did you see?” I continued, fronting her and speaking with the heat which was not of any flame wall, but arose out of my own spirit. “Gruu went to another cat. I saw first a woman—” I was not going to go into detail there—“and then the Horn-Crowned One. You—did you see your goddess—your Moon Daughter?”

I think that Gathea had no mind to listen to me at first, that she was still so bemused over the illusion that she had only anger for me and used it to drown out my voice. She raised her hand, balled into a fist, as if she would beat me, and then as she took a step, she snagged her boot on Gruu’s limp body and fell forward, sprawling over the cat.

“Gruu!” Her cry was loud. As she lifted herself, she gathered the cat’s head into her hands, stared into his half-closed eyes. I wondered if he had died, his life sucked out by whatever lure that thing had set for him. “Gruu!” She was smoothing the fur about his throat. Then her eyes wide, and with all the bemusement gone from them, she looked up at me.

“He is—no!” She added, her fingers dug deep into the fur at his throat. “He is not dead! You—” Still cradling the cat’s head against her breast she gazed at me again.

“You saw Gruu—what happened to him?”

That she had not seen the cat leap into that enticement should not have surprised me. I had already reckoned that the presence had set for each of us the most suitable temptation. Gruu had gone to another cat, doubtless a female of his own species. I had fronted that which had beckoned to me first for the body, as if my senses were like Gruu’s—and then touched on a more subtle line.

“He was drawn to that thing by sight of another cat, a female!”

“Dains—Dains was there!” The girl shook her head as if still she could not rid herself of that dream. “I had found the shrine—I was—” Then she stopped, though her hands still caressed the head of the cat. “You did not see her. You saw others—” Gathea looked at the flames now which sent waves of heat against my back, not at me.

“One who deals in false illusions.” She shivered as if her own fear chilled her enough to banish those flames. “And one of the Dark! But why—? And Gruu—” She looked down at the quiet head pressed against her.

“How did we get here?” she asked after a long moment, her voice steady now as if she had accepted what had happened as fact and then put it behind her, ready to face what might come.

I told her—of the cup and how the scent from it had banished all illusions for me, that I had prevented her going into the light and then we had been transported to this place. She listened. I believed she not only understood what I said, but was able to build upon it a little from her own strange knowledge.

“Three of us,” she said slowly. “It had to control three of us at the same time. That spell which its liegemen brought to us—yes, that could be held. For it was set to control our bodies together, and the wills of the three riders would help feed it. But when we fronted it alone, that control no longer worked. Poor Gruu, wise as he is he would have no understanding of a spell of illusion, therefore he was first trapped. And you—you were guarded in a way it did not suspect.”

“You did not see what it fashioned for me?” I asked as casually as I could. Why had she stood so silent and aloof while all that had been pictured for me? Or had her vision of Dains been produced at the same time as mine?

“I saw a shrine—a Moon Shrine—with the light full on the altar. I waited, for I knew that she would come—that that was the place I have searched for. No, I did not see what was made for you. Only, that spinner of vision could not hold two illusions steady, one for each of us. When you defeated its aims with your cup, then it wrought Dains—as I waited for her. It could not hold for the three of us at one time. Your cup power shook it, and you were freed, enough to free me—

“But,” she gave a sweeping glance which took in the flame wall, “where did it banish us when we would not yield?”

“Into some strong evil of its own,” I returned. “I do not know where anymore than I know how. If there is any way to win out of here we had better seek it before we are dried and cooked and so barred from all hunting entirely.”

Gathea laid her cheek against the cat’s head. “I no longer have the wand,” she said. “My learning is nothing here. Nor can we hope to reach the Light if we are deep in the realm of the Great Dark, for there is no passage between the worlds of the two. They meet at boundaries and there they struggle one with the other. Only I think that here we are well past that debatable land and no moon magic will come to my calling.”

I could not believe that she was resigned to whatever fate awaited her. I had learned, I was sure, that she would not give up, no matter how high the odds against us. That we had defeated in part something which seemed to have power far beyond my imagining at least heartened me.

Gathea was busy now, loosening the latching of her wallet. She brought out a packet of dried leaves. Sorting out seven of them she put them into her mouth and began chewing quickly and thoroughly.

“What—?” I began a question.

She shook her head and pointed to her mouth, signalling that she could not speak. Then her hand went once more to Gruu’s head and I realized that what she strove to do was for the sake of the cat.

15.

Gathea took a pat of paste from her mouth, and pressing the cat’s eyelids down gently, she spread the mixture across the closed eyes. When she had finished she touched fingertips of both hands to Gruu’s skull between the ears. The girl appeared to take no note of the flame wall about us. The breath of that was, I believed, growing stronger. I strove to win some measure of sight through the play of the red tongues, but they seemed to stretch solidly.

Flame has been man’s tool for years uncounted, but it is also his bane. Now I felt that that space about us might at any moment narrow to consume us all. While Gathea sat supporting the head of the cat, her eyes also closed, using some inner power of her own to summon back whatever life essence our enemy of the tower had forced from its victim.

Gruu moved a paw, unsheathed claws. A mewing such as might issue from a bewildered kitten came from his mouth, which hung open to display his formidable fangs. Gathea caressed the fur behind his ears, rubbed along the line of his jaw.

“It is well. He is waking.”

“To what?” I retorted. “If he escaped this,” I waved toward the flame, “through illusion, why summon him back?”

My mouth was dry; I longed for a long pull at the water bottle hooked to my belt, except that I had no mind to waste the small store of liquid it contained. Sweat plastered my hair to my skull, ran in trickles within my clothing, making both linen and quilted jerkin cling tightly to my skin.

“Illusion,” Gathea repeated. She still soothed the cat. “It would seem that the weapon of this Power lies therein. And—”

She looked beyond me to the play of the flame wall. There was no need to put into words what thought had come into her mind.

“Perhaps that is an illusion,” I conceded. “Yet it is tight woven and I think we cannot break it—”

“As above, so below—” she said then, and the meaning of her words I did not understand.

“Illusion,” she continued, “means the drawing of thought from an enemy’s, or victim’s mind, building upon it. Then one summons from another plane the substance of that which is most feared—or desired—and the subject transposes it into life himself.”

“You mean, we feed this flame?”

“As long as we believe we see it, then our belief feeds it.” She nodded.

“And if you are not right, if we have indeed been dropped into a real place of fire?”

“Even reality can answer to Power. What can be summoned can also be dismissed. Have you not already proven that?”

I saw the trickle of sweat down her own cheek. Then Gruu’s head raised from her knee; the smears of dried herb paste cracked and fell away as his eyes opened; his gaze centered on her face. He made a sound between purr and growl.

Yes, I could accept the changes I had witnessed for myself as well-woven illusion—but this was something else again. For I was sure if I put out a hand those flames would sear my flesh to the bone.

My companion closed her eyes again and the great cat seemed content to stay where he was, as if he drowsed. In the red light I saw movement of her lips, though now no words were spoken aloud.

This playing with minds! No wonder my clansmen had fought shy of the ways of the Wise Women, much as they had depended upon the fruits of such delving into the unknown. I wanted no more at that moment than an opponent I could see, one with a sword in his fist, ready to do battle in a way which was open and of my own world.

I was not even sure that where we were now pent was in the world I knew at all. Certainly we had been snatched here in a way that suggested travel through a space not meant for those of my species. Even if we conquered the flames by whatever sorcery Gathea could summon—what then? If we were not in our own place—or time?

She opened her eyes to stare straight at me. “You hinder!” she accused. “You withhold unbelief! Oh!” She made a fist with one hand and pounded it against the hot rock of the floor on which she had hunkered as if that were spring cooled. “If I but had one who was fitted to this task! You—you fight me with your belief in the wrong things!”

Her emotion passed into the cat. He lifted his heavy head well up for the first time to snarl at me.

I was stung by her words. She owed me a little. I had kept her from answering to the false Dians, had I not? Once more I felt for the cup and raised it, hoping that I could again sniff that cool rich air which had served and saved me. There was nothing there now. Gathea looked at what I held and her eyes narrowed. There came a faint change in her expression; she might have been looking at some object she could put to better usage.

“If you only knew more—”

“Tell me, then!” To my sight those flames which sprouted from the fire wall were moving closer.

Gathea raised her hand to push back the hair plastered against her forehead.

“What you ask is impossible. You cannot compress years of learning into a few words here and now!”

Then she gave a jerk as a flame tongue nearly licked her hand and I saw the shadow of fear arise in her eyes.

“We may not even have time for a few words,” I pointed out grimly.

“Those who have the Power,” she answered hastily, “are said to be able to transfer objects from one plane of existence to the next. They look into the thing and see its innermost self. For each thing, born or made, was once only a thought, therefore it remains partly a thought. That thought being the substance we on the plane can see, does exit elsewhere in another form. A mistress of the Mysteries can seek out such a thought, reduce the object once more to its beginnings. This is what we are taught—”

“You have seen it done?”

Slowly Gathea shook her head. “It would take one who knew much to see the innermost heart of a thing and so use it.”

“But you have said that if I knew more,” I persisted, “you could help us. What should I know?”

She shook her head again slowly. “We do not know the innermost being of the force that sought to entrap us. And—”

“This—” I pointed to the flames again flaring inward at us. I was sure that the circling walls were coming closer—”is fire. Fire is born of fuel—wood—some liquids which burn fast if a striker spark ignites them. What is then the innermost part of fire—that which it feeds upon?”

In this fire I could see no sign of either wood or a trough for the oil we used for long-lamps.

“That which it feeds upon—” Gathea repeated thoughtfully after me. Then an expression of excitement began to grow on her thin face. “Yes, it could be that the food for the fire exists elsewhere.”

A statement which did not seem helpful to me, but which appeared to awaken new life and purpose in her.

“Come.” She reached upward, holding out her hand to me. “The cup—have you a measure of water to pour into that?”

“A very little.”

“It must do. I cannot do this thing, for the cup is yours. Only you can evoke the power it exerts. Pour water into it—hold it steady. Then link hand with me. Perhaps Gruu also can give us of his strength, since his own bespelling is broken. Do this—it may be our only chance! For my power cannot rise alone.”

I allowed a trickle of water to moisten the bottom of the cup, hardly enough to be seen. Holding it in a grip tight enough to cramp my fingers, I sat on my heels, my left hand firm clasped in hers.

“Now, close your eyes. There is a fire, it is burning—from wood—just as it would on a keep hearth. There is water, a spring of water and it is rising, rising. See this! You must see it!”

There was urgency, force in her words. Yet when I closed my eyes, my mind rebelled, I could not build such a picture. When I tried it was a pale thing which winked out of mind as the lack in me allowed it to vanish.

Somewhere a voice was to be heard—but far off, sounding in such need that I strained to hear better. No, it was the fire picture not the voice—not anything but a fire burning in the pocket of a forest clearing. A fire, laid on wood as might be in any hunter’s camp—a fire!

Something built within me, a strength of will which I had never known I possessed. It was as if the force of the water and the fire had themselves transformed their substance, and all the energy which both held now filled me. My weak and fluttering picture of the fire firmed, I could hold it longer. There were the rocks of a basin into which the water of a spring flowed. Fire and water—ancient enemies!

That fire, that basin of water, became the world. Nothing lay beyond them, no action mattered save that I hold them in mind’s eye as steady and clear as I could. Fire—and water!

Into me continued to flow that strength which made clear my sight, which now allowed me not only to visualize the fire, the stream from the basin, but enabled me to use that stream, to draw the water higher and higher in the basin. No, it was a full well of water, very deep. The water which filled it to the brim overflowed—toward the fire!

The fire flared, was gone. I held firmly to my thought-picture. It was there! And once more it was. The water had fallen away as I had concentrated on the fire. No, up water, up—over—down—I saw the rise of it like a wide sea wave, issuing forth from the mouth of the well, splashing, flowing heavier. Again, when my picture wavered, there was a renewal of the other strength so that I could catch and hold.

Down poured the water, it lapped at the wood, then engulfed it. The flames sputtered, fled to far ends of the brands which were its food; the water advanced upon those also. There was a last flicker of my picture as if the fire I watched knew its force was failing. Only I held, and the water flowed on in full flood. There were no flames left. I released the flood. It was gone. But had it, for a moment, mirrored a head crowned with horns? I could not be sure. I opened my eyes. The head was there, shining on the side of my cup. For the rest it was dark, we were no longer surrounded by the blistering heat of that wall.

I blinked and blinked again. The only source of light came from the dim glow of the head on the goblet, and that was slowly fading. If there had not been the firm stone under me I would have thought we had been whirled out of life itself. As the interior of the tower had been so was this blackness thick enough to swallow one, pressing against the body with a stifling hold. I heard a sigh from the dark and knew it came from Gathea.

“It—it worked!” I found my tongue. “The fire is gone. But we are not yet back—or is this still the tower?”

Somehow I did not believe that. There was an otherness which was like the Dark, pressing in. Now that we had lost the fire which had held my mind, I realized that one step could not mean a journey. Out of the thick black came Gathea’s voice to awaken my unease yet further.

“We are still trapped,” she said. “This is not of our time or place … And—”

What she might have added I will never know for at that moment the darkness changed. There was no oval of light piercing it—rather we were being sucked, pulled through it at such a speed as to nearly tear my breath from me, so I gasped and fought to fill my lungs. My hold on Gathea’s hand was vise tight. At that instant I feared more than anything that we be separated, each whirled to a different fate.

My body seemed weightless, as fragile as a leaf caught up by the wind’s blast. I even closed my eyes, for the pressure of the dark through which we were drawn seemed painful against them, as if it would strike me permanently blind. We were drawn and that which drew us gathered strength, lapping us as lightly about as if we were encased in a net of ropes which drew tighter and tighter across and around our bodies.

Then—that feeling of rushing through the air vanished. We hung, still prisoners in the dark, for I ventured to open my eyes to see nothing. There was a purpose; I could sense it. Within me something marveled at how quickly I was able to sense the unknown. I had no teaching, as Gathea had pointed out. Then what had awakened me to this knowledge of things-which-were-not and the patterns wrought by Power?

We hung, as I say, helpless, waiting the need—or the pleasure—of a pressure so beyond my comprehension that I could not begin to guess at its nature. All that linked me to the real was my hand interlocked with Gathea’s. I wanted to ask questions, my words were smothered before they reached my lips by the heavy pressure of the black upon my chest and throat.

I think that I was not far then from retreating out of myself, seeking even death as a shelter, if one’s will can carry so far as that. The faint light which had outlined the face on the cup had vanished, perhaps blown from us during that wild journey. I could still feel it, know that, like Gathea’s hand, it was locked to me for good or ill.

There was another wrenching, we were on the move again. Once more I experienced that icy cold, that sensation of blasting through some unbelievable barrier. Now there was light—dim—gray—yet still enough to cut through the curtain, make me blink. It was below, as if we were aloft in the sky, but it grew larger, brighter, and we were falling toward it being wafted downward, upheld by will—whose will and why?

There was a shock, wrenching my body with such force that I was torn loose from Gathea. That power which imprisoned me carried me away at another angle. Now I might have looked through the eyes of a bird or some winged thing which held itself aloft by swiftly beating wings.

Below stood a circle of stone, silver bright, for there were moon’s rays across it. In the center was a block of shining white, so vividly aglow in this light that I would have hidden my eyes from its glare had I had the ability to raise my hands. Again no part of my body would obey my will. On the stone lay someone, a woman. Her hair was outspread behind her head, flowing back over the edge of the stone. She wore no clothing and at first I thought that she might be dead, for I could determine no sign of life in that quiet shape.

Now I saw that there were four pillars set at the four corners of the pavement, each bearing a moon sign—even as there had been in the shrine among the dale hills. Under each of these wavered a thin form which seemed unstable, wraithlike, weaving in and out of human outline. They thickened, became more stable the closer I was borne to their stations.

As bare of body as the woman they were plainly masculine. Each held a staff within his hands, and they did not stand steadily, but changed from one foot to another constantly, as if they marched or danced, still keeping their places. There was a shadow of excitement building here, it reached out to me, sought to enter my mind, my body.

Out of the shadows beyond that place of gleaming silver came a fifth shadow, dark, a body like a black blot which soiled the silver, tarnished the fresh cleanness of the moonlight. In my hands the cup came alive, it was warm, growing hotter. It might have been filling with anger, with outrage.

I was to be a tool, a weapon in the hands of the Dark to forge a needed spell, to turn Light awry. And I could not fight against the pressure.

That black shadow wavered and weaved in a dance which led from one of the pillar men to the next, halting for a moment before each one to throw skeletal arms high in some invocation, while each this shadow so visited became more and more real as if fresh and powerful life were drawn into it. Still all this time the woman lay on the altar bespelled or in deep slumber, knowing, I believed, nothing of what chanced.

Downward the compulsion which had pulled me here forced me now. I was close enough to see their faces—all save that of the moving shadow who made the circling about, raising the power. That I could feel, streaming about me like a swift current.

If the dancing men saw me they gave no sign of it. I had reached the ground now, my feet were on the pavement, those moon silver blocks by the altar. I looked down and saw—Iynne!

Gone was the girl who had ridden in Garn’s train. She was changed in a manner which I did not understand. Her lips, dark against the pallor of her face, showing not red, but black in the light, curved in a slight smile. I could believe that she was dreaming, finding in sleep some great happiness never experienced by the timid maid I had always known and who shrank from others, perhaps so cowed by her father’s strong possessiveness that she dared not lift her eyes unless he might order it so.

Iynne! A—sacrifice. I needed no one to tell me that. Whatever was being wrought here was no act of the Light, rather of evil—of a Dark as black as that place from which I had been drawn.

I stood, the cup between my hands, feeling its growing heat. Its metal heart might have been filled with leaping flames, so did it burn my flesh. This was its defense against what would happen here. That silver face on the side blazed, from its eyes shot brilliant spears of light—white as the moon above us—yet in their way different.

That dancing shadow, still formless in its many swaddlings of night black, save for the skeletal arms, turned from the last man and came jigging and prancing toward me. The head was hooded; I could catch no sign of a face within that shadow. Still I knew that this one was aware of my coming, that it was in league with the presence which had sent me here.

Once more those arms were flung up and out, the wide sleeves fell away from arms which were skin over bone—ancient skin, ancient bone—to uncover them near to the shoulder. The crooked fingers which might be of extreme age, long of nail, knobbed and twisted, swooped down, reaching at the cup across the sleeping girl. I held to that fiercely, knowing that in my hold alone was this talisman safe.

I set my will, not against that which brought me here, for I believed that opposed to that I would have no chance at all. Rather I strove to center what strength I had upon continued possession of the Horned Man’s goblet. To that I bent every effort.

Fingers drove nails into my flesh and I jerked free. Perhaps I had taken by surprise whatever power had sent me here as a captive, perhaps the goblet I held, and determined to go on holding, roused in me strengths I did not know that I had.

The thing which would grasp the goblet made a second attack. Now its efforts loosed the full cowl over its head. The material fell away. Another woman—a travesty of her sex. She was very old and her aging had not been by good and well sought ways. Thus her deeply wrinkled face was a mask of ancient hatreds, imprinted by vices beyond reckoning. Across a nearly bald skull straggled a few wisps of greasy white hair, and, as she opened her mouth to spit and curse at me, I saw but one or two yellow teeth, more like Gruu’s fangs than those grown in any human mouth.

She was malevolent and she was powerful. What she desired to do moved her to greater strength than I would have thought possible, judging by her bony body. Having failed in her first grab at the cup, she rounded the altar on which Iynne slept, coming straight for me, her eyes pits of rage, born of both cunning and madness, her crooked hands out to rip my face to tatters.

To move against the power which had sent me was like struggling through thick sand. I could not avoid her leap at me, nor would I loose my hold on the cup. I strove to lessen her attack, take the force of it against my shoulder, my raised arms.

There was spittle at the corners of her mouth as she shouted forth strange words. To my amazement I could see those words. They were both red and smoky in the air, swirling up and about my head, pressing down as if they would scorch me like true fire.

It was then that I flung up my head and once more cried aloud.

“Ha! Kurnous—By the Name of the Horns!”

She might have run full against a wall, for she staggered back one step and then two, striving to keep her footing. Her mouth worked, spit dribbled down her chin. Now her hands moved, sketching out signs. Those, too, carried the red-black of the Dark weaving in the air.

The cup within my hands was almost too hot to hold; still I brought it level with my own mouth as if I were about to drink down what it held—though it was empty. From those eyes on the side the beams of brilliance were like the heads of spears set to bring down the charge of enemies.

They struck at that black-robed crone, met resistance, sprayed sideways, lapped across the altar stone and the sleeping girl. I might have loosed a fountain of light, for this radiance did not fade. Instead, the beams mingled with the moonlight, grew sharper, brighter.

The crone, with an agility which I would have thought beyond her years, hurled herself backwards once again, withdrawing from the outer wash of that light. She screamed, and the sound of her voice within my head made me cringe in turn, for it was pain such as I did not think I could bear.

Yet I stood my ground. The pressure which had brought me here was gone. I could if I wished have thrown aside the cup with its torment of fire, run from that confrontation. But in my heart I knew that I would not do. What strange battle was mine I could only guess. But I held as the light washed on and farther out.

The crone stumbled back and back. She stood now on the very edge of the pavement. There she halted as if determined to make a last stand. I well knew that she was summoning up the full force of her power. Though I had been long the prisoner of something beyond my comprehension, I was still warrior trained. I caught that small motion of her head, saw that, for a moment, her eyes did not hold on me, but had flashed to the girl.

It was my turn to attack. I so discovered that I had not lost all the ways and skills of a swordsman. An instant and I was between the crone and the girl. Also I shot a glance at the nearest of the men—would those four now move in upon me at the service of this sorceress? They were bare of body and had no weapons I could see, save those staffs they held. However, who might tell what other arms they might have which were not of my knowing at all?

The two I could see had not moved. Still they stood by the pillars, dancing from foot to foot, their eyes not for me, nor for the crone, but facing inward, though I could not be sure whether they watched Iynne or not—

A bolt of light flashed at me. I again swung up the goblet. Not only from the eyes of the Horned Lord did the answering radiance stream now, it welled from within the cup itself, fountaining into the air, sparking outwards, forming a veil between me and the crone. While on the pavement the flood of light also swirled outwards. It reached the bare feet of the nearest man. For the first time he awakened to what was happening. He twisted, his gaze breaking as he looked down at the stream now about his ankles.

Handsome he had been beyond the common; now his features writhed and moved in a sickening manner. His fine body might have been caught in a furnace of heat, shriveling, becoming stunted. He cried out like a wordless beast in agony as his staff turned into a silver flame ignited by the flood. He hurled it from him.

No man stood tall there now. Rather there crouched at the foot of the pillar a hairy, crooked thing with a great toad-wide mouth, a mixture of beast and reptile. He strove to hop or throw himself away from the flood of light that held him full captive.

I looked to the other man. He also had been wrought upon. What struggled in the morass overflowing from the cup I held was part bird, such a bird lived in no land I knew, tall as the man had been, rapacious of beak—bearing resemblance in part to those black fowl which we had seen in Garn’s dale, save that this was a giant of their species.

The crone—she retreated another step, off the moon-drenched pavement. The creeping flow of light halted at the edge of the stone, did not reach her. She was in a half crouch as if trying to overleap that rippling spread of light, still coming at me. For, though I might have baffled her for the moment, I knew that she was far from defeated. Nor was she done with whatever game she had attempted to play here.

Her mouth worked as it had when she had thrown at me those fiery curses. Only this time there were no words to be seen. Instead she brought her two hands together, and the sound which followed that gesture of flesh meeting flesh was as loud as a clap of thunder.

She was gone!

I backed against the altar. The two things at the bases of the pillars could not move in spite of their struggles. I swung around to view the other two. The radiance was creeping in their direction also. But it was not to reach and entrap them. Though they showed no sign that they could see the danger seeping toward their feet, they both suddenly snuffed out as had the crone.

Leaning back against the altar stone, I tried to view what lay outside that silver square. That I had been borne out of the other place where the Presence in the tower had sent us, I was sure. This was my own world—though what portion of it I could not begin to guess. This was certainly not that shrine in the hill above Garn’s dale. While Gathea and Gruu—where were they? Had they been left behind in that nothing place? If so—how might they be brought forth?

There was a sigh from behind me. I swung around. Iynne’s eyes were open, she was waking up, that shadow smile still on her lips, her eyes languorous, as if she had come from such a dream as no true maiden might hold in her mind.

16.

“Iynne!”

That we must get from this place filled with a play of unknown forces was the first thought in my mind. The cup I clutched had cooled, no longer giving forth its own glare of light. Even the face on it was fading back into the dulled markings which concealed the power it wielded, in spite of my inept handling.

The girl pulled herself up on the altar stone, her motions still the slow ones of a person aroused from so deep a sleep—so far a venture into dreaming—that she did not wholly focus on what lay about her.

Her hands stroked down over her body to lie below her waist, clasped there as if they pressed against her some treasure past all believing. She began to croon softly, her eyes never lifting to mine, a soft murmur which spun me across years and distance. Just so had I heard long ago in my first childhood remembrances Iynne’s nurse soothe her charge—a sleep-song for a babe.

“Done—” Still she did not appear to see me, her gaze was either turned inward or flew out beyond this place, to fasten on a promised future richer than the moonlight, which was all that clothed her slender body. “It is done! The god has come to me and I shall bear his will. A child who shall be greater than any lord—greater—greater—” Her voice trilled away once more into that croon of a cradle song.

Were her wits utterly cleaved from her? I placed the cup carefully on the ground, shuffled from my shoulder the roll of travel cloak which had been buckled about the wallet cord. Shaking this loose I dropped it around her shoulders as she sat still on the altar stone, smiling so gently, her hands protecting the new life which she believed must lie within her body.

“A son—a son who will ride forth in time to summon Great Forces, who will draw power into his two hands and make of it what weapon is needful for the hour. Greatly have I been honored—”

“Iynne!”

I made her name as sharp a call as I could, wanting to shake her into awareness of where she was and that I was with her. Now her head jerked, turned in my direction. I saw her eyes widen and knew that the illusion which sleep had left her was breaking.

“Elron!” Recognition at last. Her hands went to the cloak, wrapping it about her swiftly. “But—” She stared around her, as if looking to see who had accompanied me here. Then she must have seen those monsters who still writhed, if now feebly, in the hold of the cup’s overpour. I saw her shock. She screamed, her voice shrill and high in the night.

“Elron! What are those?” Contentment was wiped away by a look of fear and loathing mingled. “There is—” I saw her nostrils expand, her head lift a little—”evil here! I must not be touched by that. I bear a god—a son of power within me!”

She scrambled down from the altar to draw back, away from the creatures who snuffled and uttered cries, not of an entreaty, rather of bafflement and weak rage. I eyed the dark beyond the borders of the Moon Shrine. Though the crone had vanished from sight, I could not altogether believe that she had been so easily bested. Anything might lurk out there.

“Elron!” Iynne held the cloak close about her with one hand, now seized upon my arm with her other. “Get me away!”

“Presently. When I am sure there is nothing out there waiting for us.” I could not shake off the grip of her fingers. Holding the cup before me as I would a sword—for in this place perhaps it was a greater weapon than any blade, I edged still farther away from the altar, striving not only to keep in sight the two struggling beast things, but also to make sure that those who had stood by the other two pillars did not return to deny us passage.

There was an odd feeling of lightness, of emptiness, here now. Was it that I had won freedom—if only for a space—from the sorcery that had sent me to make a part in these labors? I could only hope that this was true.

Though Iynne kept still her hold on me, she moved without urging to match her pace to mine. We reached the edge of the shining pavement without any interference. I took one backward step, drew her safely with me, and then half faced around to stare into the darker ways of the night.

It took a moment or two to blink the glare of the Moon Shrine from my eyes, to see what lay in the softer light where those silver rays did not focus so brilliantly. Unlike the smaller shrine I had seen in the dale hills, this was not surrounded by trees or growing things but pavement, though not of the silver-white. Raying outward like the spokes of a wheel were low buildings also of stone.

I half expected to find life there, gathered to watch the ceremony my own coming had so abruptly ended. Nothing stirred. This was a dead place—a long-deserted place—in which only the shrine had life or purpose left.

For the first time Iynne dragged back, twisted away. It was my turn to take her in hold.

“Raidhan!” she called. “Raidhan? Where is she? Why is she gone?”

“Keep quiet!” I did not like the way her call was echoed hollowly back from those silent buildings about us. That we were really free of any company I could not quite believe, and my wariness was warning enough.

“Let me go! Raidhan!” Again she called, and, short of stuffing one end of the cloak in her mouth, I did not see how I could silence her. The cup I must still keep in my hand; I was beginning to trust it all the more than any ordinary weapon. Also I feared if I freed Iynne now she would run from me. I had no desire to hunt her among those dark and empty buildings this night.

“She is gone,” I made what answer I could. If that was the name of the hag I had driven out of the shrine with the Horn cup’s aid, then that was the truth. “Listen.” I shook her a little, to gain her full attention. “You saw those monsters by the pillars, did you not? Well, their like may prowl here. We cannot draw them to us.”

Her answer came fretfully: “I do not understand you. What are you doing here? Raidhan said that the god would take me, that his power was meant to be born again from my body. The Moon Shrine drew me here for no other purpose. That is true! The god came—he took me—”

I had to choose and quickly. “You dreamed. They must have drugged you and you dreamed! There was no god—the Moon Shrine is not his—” I could only hope that what I said was the truth. What had happened before I had been thrust into the midst of that ceremony I had no way of telling, but I believed that it had not been carried to its intended ending. Had those monsters in the temporary shape of men been summoned by the Dark to father on this girl some greater and more evil thing? That appeared to me to be the reason for the rites.

“Let me go!” She was twisting like a serpent in my hold. “You cannot know the truth! Raidhan told me—”

Luckily she was less strong than Gathea. Even with one hand I could hold her.

“If Raidhan was that black-cloaked bag of bones back there,” I retorted, “then she is gone. I would like to hope to some distance! It is best that we do also—”

She fought me hard; I was forced to thrust the cup beneath my belt and use both my hands. Then I managed to turn her, spitting and crying out against me as she was, and march her down the nearest open way, hoping with all my heart that her continued cries would not bring upon us some attack.

The road we followed was paved, while the buildings set along it were low, one story only, and small, with gaping, dark doorways, but no windows. Also the way under us slanted upward, past the length of thirteen buildings before we came to open ground.

Iynne had fallen silent at last; she was crying, sobs which shook her whole body. I could not think but that she was frailer than I had known her. Her body in my hold seemed to be slighter, and I thought that her dragging steps now were not from her desire to remain but rather because she was weak and tired. Then she stumbled and fell against me, so that her head came against my shoulder as it drooped, and I felt her go limp.

This might be a ruse. But I needed a chance to get away from this place of ill omen. So I swept her up in my arms, and went on, climbing up the road at the best pace I could hold to. We reached the rim of the valley and there I was forced to rest, letting Iynne from my arms but keeping her supported against me as I looked back down into that strange place.

The gleam of the Moon Shrine was still bright. But I could no longer make out the two caught against the pillars. Nor were there any other lights, or stirring, in all of that town. The buildings squatted dark and heavy and the roads running between them were open and free. Nothing moved.

Iynne’s heavy sobs had become sighs; she hung in my grasp as if all will and strength had gone out of her. I moved slowly, bringing her with me, to see now what lay beyond.

The road we had followed ran out and on, a dim white line, into the distance. There was moonlight enough, now that my eyes had adjusted from the greater glare in the shrine, to see that the country round about was well covered with vegetation. Trees formed copses, even a small grove or two. There was brush which cast pools of shadow I eyed with growing dislike. Too quickly my imagination could conjure images it was better not to see at all. Though the road might be watched by evil forces, yet at this time it was safer, I believed, than striking off into the open land.

“Can you walk?” I demanded of my charge. To go on carrying her, unable to use my hands for any sudden defense, was folly. Nor had I the least desire to remain where we now were, so close to the shrine.

“You had no right!” She struck out at me and the cloak half slipped from her body. She gave a gasp and caught at it clumsily, huddling it around her. “Raidhan will come—she will not permit you to take me.”

“Can you walk?” I dismissed her warning, for that concern was already on my own mind.

“Yes,” her assent was sullen. But if she thought that I would release her so that she might elude me to flee back to the shrine, she was mistaken. I kept one hand heavy and tight upon her shoulder, pushing her a little before me down that road.

For a time we went in silence. Since Iynne now gave me no trouble, I paid more attention to the fields stretching on either side, alert as I could be to any movement there. So far there was none, save that brought about by the wind which brushed the trees and swept across the ground growth in a steady whisper.

“Why did you come?” The question from my unwilling companion surprised me a little. I had come to think of her as a burden which must be borne, and not a living person.

Why had I? I had never aimed for this place. I had swung off into the unknown because I still owed Lord Garn a debt, repayment for my own folly. That I had found Iynne had been none of my own doing. Nor did I understand why the forces which I perhaps could never truly understand had summoned me here.

“I am kinless, clanless,” I answered. “Rightfully my lord has judged me. Had I not kept silent when you sought the hill shrine you would not be here.”

For a long moment she was silent. Then, when she spoke again, her voice was very low.

“Thus you have come to clean your honor—as a liegeman would say.”

Her speech was not that of the Iynne I knew. It was sharp, quick, with a sly sneer in it.

“I am no longer liegeman, and, as you know, for the kinless there is no honor. I failed at my guard—there is no erasing that.”

“You think to take me back—back to those who do not look beyond the labor of their own hands, who have no power and do not know what witlings they truly are!”

Her voice was becoming louder, more shrill. “I am not a bond maid to be pushed here and there as if I had neither wit nor desire of my own. I am—” She fell silent and I was caught enough by her sharp protest to ask:

“You are what then, Lady Iynne?”

She surprised me with a laugh, again there was slyness, a sneering note in her voice: “Wait and see, kinless, clanless one. You have meddled with matters you cannot touch no matter how far and how high you would reach. I bear within me now—yes, I a virgin—carry a child! A child of power, and such power as will make him ruler of this world. I was chosen—I am fulfilled! You cannot win me out of this land—try and see! I am a part of its greater force now—”

I thought of that crone and her evil mouthings, of the two things the cup flood had revealed at the shrine pillars. That these were allied, if not in a common bond, then in general spirit, to the Presence of the Black Tower I did not doubt. That Iynne would rejoice in such evil possessing her was a thought I could not hold. She must be truly englamoured; she had not openly chosen the Dark.

Now I slowed pace and taking from my belt the cup, never far from my hand, I held it out before her, turning it so she could look upon the Horned Man’s face. In the moonlight that was bright enough, an if the cold metal of its fashioning somehow sensed what I would do and would aid me in the doing.

“Do you know this, Iynne?”

“Yes, it is Kurnous—the Hunter. But what have you to do with him, Elron?” I caught sheer surprise breaking through the former harshness of her speech. “He is the warden, the protector of the Moon Lady. It was she who summoned me, whose bidding made me thus—”

No, that memory, foul as any stench upon the night air, which I had only partly understood, had certainly not been of Gathea’s Dians, nor of Gunnora, nor of the Horned Lord. Someone had perverted a rite to ensnare my companion. How deeply she was caught within that net I must discover, perhaps for the safety of us both.

“Dians summoned you?”

“Dians?” She repeated that name as if she had not heard it before. “Who is Dians? It was Raidhan—she who is the Elder, the ruler of the moon’s shadow. She is the Wise One, the one who would bring the Great Lord to life, calling me to form a body which he can use.”

“And Gunnora,” I tested yet further, “has she also spoken?”

“Dians, Gunnora!” The petulant tone was back in her voice. “Names which mean nothing—where did you learn them, kinless one? But more important, why do you carry the Horned Hunter’s cup?”

“It was a gift to me. Listen, Iynne, you have been used by Dark Ones. Dians—Gunnora—they are the rightful ladies of the moon. It is their power which this Raidhan of yours has usurped. Could you not tell when you looked upon those monsters back there that you were dealing with the Dark?”

“Your wits are awry!” Once more her tone was shrill. “You are of the Dark—not I! I tell you, I was summoned—I was chosen. I have slept this night in the arms of the Great One. I am his beloved—his chosen vessel—”

Almost she won free of me then, for she swept about and clawed at my face so suddenly I was not prepared. I was left holding only folds of the cloak. Then I lunged forward, pinning her arms, holding her so closely to me that I could see the expression of fear and loathing which distorted her face.

“I will not argue with you.” I knew that at this moment she could not be touched by any reason which I might offer. Gathea—Gruu—at that moment I would have given the sword at my side to have them with me. That they could still be caught in that place of complete dark gnawed at me now that my struggle at the shrine was over. “What remains is that we are alone in a land which is full of ensorcellments and we must stand together or we shall be pulled down.”

Her hands, which had been attempting to fight me off, fell to her sides. She looked from right to left and the moon was bright enough to show me that the shadow of a hunted creature had fallen upon her.

“I was safe—I am safe—Raidhan shall find me!” Only that did not ring as confident as she might have wished it to.

Still she seemed to be through fighting me, and I had no desire to stand in suspect openness on a road which ran directly into a place which, Moon Shrine or not, was befouled by evil. Thus once more, hand on her shoulder, I urged her on and she went without a struggle.

I needed some sanctuary. Everything behind me, dreamlike though some of that seemed to be now, had drained my strength. If I could find a temporary campsite, could I be sure that I might keep Iynne with me if I slept? Perhaps I must go to the limit of binding her hands and feet, thus making sure of her. Nor did I see any wrong in that considering what I had witnessed at the shrine in that forgotten town.

The road took a curve ahead and, out of the land, casting some very dark shadows, stood a series of hillocks which, to my mind, bore an unpleasant resemblance to grave barrows such as the clansmen will raise to a lord whose rule has proven safety in the midst of great disaster. If these were such memorials, the lords of renown here had been many indeed.

The wind, which had caused that constant whispering in the grass and among the leaves of the trees, changed its pathway. Now it came once more from my right hand which I star-judged to be the west. It brought with it a scent which was like that I had once found refreshing in the cup—keen, clear, and clean. Instinctively I faced in that direction, seeking what might promise some link (for so bemused by all that had happened was I that I would accept even scent as a guide now) with the Horned Lord.

A dim track broke away from the road, winding out among the barrows—westward. With no more promise than that scent on the wind should we take that way? It was dappled with shadows as I brought us both to a halt and looked down its length, for the barrows threw their half dark across it.

Again Iynne showed resistance.

“Where do you go?” she demanded. To me it seemed that she was two persons—sometimes the girl of Garn’s House, biddable, meek, but more often the other who was no friend to me and who lusted for strangeness and freedom of another kind.

I was right, the scent I sought was heavier down the vale between the looming mounds. Daring to loose my two-handed hold on Iynne, I brought out the cup and on impulse turned the face of the Horned Man to face in the direction of the path.

I had my answer, and, so accustomed had I now become to things outside my knowledge appearing to help or hinder, I was not too surprised when there was again an awakening of light in the eyes of the face. A twin set of faint beams picked out the direction which lay on into the heart of what might be a vast memorial to long-vanished lords—perhaps even armies who had battled here and buried the slain within the land for which they had struggled.

I heard a swift intake of breath from Iynne, but she made no more objection when I brought her with me from the smooth pavement of the road unto the beaten earth of the side way which was far more like the trails I was used to.

A shadow swept above us. I pulled her up short and against me, looking to the sky. There was a winged thing there, large—that vork which I had fought and which would not die came into my mind. It passed above us, seeming not to pay attention to anything below it. I could not make out its shape clearly; still there was an ominous suggestion that it was no true bird. Though it had been flying straight, it swerved suddenly directly above a barrow ahead, made a quick flapping turn northward. It might have run into some obstruction invisible to us. But the fact that the thing had been so deflected gave me heart, even though I could not be sure that was what had happened. When it had winged some distance away in a burst of added speed, I brought Iynne along as fast as she would follow, though she complained that there were stones which hurt her feet, and that we had no need to hurry.

In and out among the barrows wove that way which had plainly been made since the earth mounds were raised. Now as we passed I could see that great stones crowned some of these. From those there streamed skyward a thin bluish haze, though not enough light to aid us on our way.

I knew that we must find a refuge soon. My thirst was great, and also my hunger. I did not know whether Iynne was in a like state, but I felt her fuller, and it was past my powers to carry her.

At length we came to a burrow which topped the others, stonecrowned, with the bluish radiance rising from the four corners of that stone as if candles stood there, as was done among the kin, set at the four corners of the burial bed for our lords. Looking up I could find no other place where safety might be.

From that crown we could well view the land about, and there was a kind of Tightness in it. He who lay there might be long dead—but he still had his protections, and those who were of a like heart with him could well call upon such in their time also.

Iynne objected to my suggestion that we seek a camp place on the barrow, saying that it was well known that the restless spirits of the dead resented encroachment on their final resting places. Yet when the cup swung in my hand as she strove to pull free, and those twin beams of radiance not only turned toward the mound but grew stronger, she cowered and pulled the cloak tighter around her body, as if it were armor set against some stroke she feared. She said no more but, at my urging, began to climb the slope.

We found the top of the mound had been squared away, with the stone set in the middle of sodded earth like a low altar. As I came those candles of light bent like flames in the wind, pointing toward the cup.

Iynne cried out, falling to her knees and hiding her face in her hands, her tangled hair about her like a second cloak. But I stood tall to listen. For there came sound out of the night. I heard the ring of sword upon sword, the clash of blade meeting shield, shoutings, very distant and faint, some of triumph, some of despair. Then, above it all, rang the notes of a horn—a Hunter’s horn, not such as a keep lord carried as a battle signal. Excitement fired in me; my weariness of body, my hunger, my thirst, were forgotten. With one hand I held high the cup and with the other I drew my sword, not knowing why I did. I was not prepared to face an enemy. No—the enemies here were long gone, and only the triumph remained, clear and steady as the lights which lit the barrow tops. Rather my blade came up in a salute such as I would give an overlord to whom I was a liegeman, the hilt touching my lips as I held it so.

To what—or whom—I pledged myself then I did not know. Only that this was right and fitting. Around me the blue light swirled and spun, and the cup blazed sharply bright, though no liquid flowed from it.

Then it was gone. Swept away perhaps by a wind which was not chill, which carried with it the scent of the Horned Lord’s wine. I felt a loss, a pulling at me—a desire as strong as pain to pass on, to find those who had shouted, him who blew the Horn. Though my time was not yet, so I was left behind.

Slowly I let my sword slide once more into its scabbard. The blue of the candle flames had thinned, only the faintest trace of them remained. Iynne raised her head and stared at me. Her eyes were wide, there was both awe and fear on her face.

“What are you?” she asked.

I answered her with the truth, “I am Elron, the kinless, though—” My voice trailed away. The bitterness of being an exile—it had somehow been leached out of me by all I had met since my feet had been set on the path to the west. I looked back at that Elron and he seemed very young and very empty of mind. Though I knew but little more than he now, still I was aware of my ignorance and that was a step forward.

Iynne pushed her hair from her face as I hunkered down beside her and brought forward my water bottle, the little food which still remained in my wallet. She ate hungrily, making no comment that the food was stale, the water tasted more of the jar than fresh from any spring. We ate together there in the night, the moon and the grave candles giving us wan light. Each of us had our own thoughts, mine turning once again to Gathea and Gruu.

So when I had done I took the cup once more into my hands, brought it breast high and stared down into its hollow as if that were a window—or a mirror. I fastened my thoughts on the girl who had been with me in the Black Tower. This time I strove with all my powers of concentration to bring her to life in a mind picture, as I had the water and the fire of our ordeal in that other world.

It was so hard to hold the picture of her face. She was here and then it faded and was gone. I had finished the quest I had set myself in the beginning. Iynne was with me. Gathea had chosen her own way of her free will. I had no ties upon her nor had she any upon me. Not so! cried another part of me. There will be no rest for you until you are sure that she is again in this world—that she is free to reach for her desire. No rest—yes, that was true.

17.

“Elron!”

At first that cry arose out of my own memories—I never had heard that note in Iynne’s voice. My companion was on her knees, staring out over that land of barrows lighted with their thin and scarcely discernible grave candles.

The moon was well down the sky, its clear light muted. Iynne pointed to the west. In a moment I caught sight of them, too. Shapes were flitting among the barrows, only to be sighted as they sped from one patch of shadow to the next. I grew tense for it seemed to me that perhaps as many as a lord’s meiny might be purposefully encircling us.

They remained remarkably difficult to see, even allowing for their love of the shadows. Thus I could not get any clear idea whether they were some hunting pack of large animals—men—or another unpleasant and dangerous life form loosened in this wilderness, perhaps by that Presence which had already played a part in my life.

“I see,” I returned in a whisper. Though as far as I might determine the closest of those moving forms was still well away from the barrow where we sheltered, yet. I had no desire to make any sound which ears perhaps keener than my own might hear.

The girl moved closer to me, her shoulder brushed against my thigh as she knelt beside the great stone. In this subdued light she looked older, drawn and pale. Girlhood and that human aspect which was her birthright might have been rift from her during these past hours. Now she stared at me.

“You see—” there was a malicious glitter in her eyes. “They come for me! I—” Her hands came together on her belly, protecting, covering, what she declared she carried. “I hold the future lord—and they know it! Run, kinless one, save yourself while still you can! Not even my words can stand between you and their vengeance!”

Plainly, she believed this to be the moment of triumph for the forces with which she had so mistakenly allied herself. I had no intention of running. Nor was I as certain as she that what slunk through the night were the Dark minions in their might.

The cup moved in my hands. I would have sworn that my fingerhold on it had been tight, that it could not have shifted so by chance. It bent backwards; its hollow no longer displayed. Rather I looked down to see the face again uppermost. While the eyes in it—they saw! They caught and held me though I felt it was dangerous to turn my attention from the drawing in of those who came among the barrows.

I had believed that I had changed in a manner, was no longer the raw untutored youth who had failed his lord and been sent into exile. Now—now indeed I was becoming—

No! I strove to cry that denial aloud, to break the compelling gaze of eyes which must be—must be—only metal. Cunningly wrought so that they looked alive, yes, but still metal—not real, not reaching into my mind, fashioning a place—a place to hold what?

Strength was pouring into me. Not strength alone, but something more—an intelligence which strove to fit its identity into mine. Save that I was not the vessel it expected, it needed. There remained a barrier. To that small wall of safety my own person, whatever remained of Elron, clung, a last defender, determined to die rather than yield his post to a stranger unknown.

Whatever will sought so to encompass me and found that it could not enter in as it would, made the best of what I was forced to abandon. I was well aware that I now housed a power which I could not understand but which was determined that I serve its purpose. Or was it another that was prepared to serve mine? I distrusted that last thought. Such might be only an insidious second attack launched by this invader. I was no sorcerer, no Bard, who could open his mind, surrender his will to the unseen.

Iynne was on her feet in a quick sideways movement which took her farther from me. Before I could move, she flung aloft her arms and, facing where those hiding shadows appeared the thickest, she cried aloud:

“Holla, moon-born, light-bearer, I am here!”

I thrust that bewildering, dangerous cup again into my belt, reached for her. This time I did not try to spare her, rather threw one arm about her just below her throat and dragged her back against me, while once more she became one with Gruu’s clan, clawing, spitting her hate, striving to reach me with her fingernails. Thus we fought a wild battle until my greater strength triumphed. The cloak had slipped from her during that struggle, catching at our feet, so I tumbled backwards over the slab of blue litten stone, still holding to her flesh, now slippery with the sweat raised by our battling. I did not let go, nor was she able to break my hard held embrace enough to turn full upon me. This was like holding a maddened thing, for my prisoner was no longer the Iynne I had thought I knew.

A wind bore down upon us even as clouds closed overhead so that the only light was the ghostly beams of the “candles.” Twice I realized she strove to call again, and only a quick shift of hold to her throat choked off that summons.

I must have rendered her near unconscious, for finally she went limp. Then I released my hold a fraction to see if she was playing tricks. She did not move so I scrambled up, drawing her with me. Her heated body gave off a strange, heady fragrance as if her skin had been annointed with oil. She was panting, drawing deep, heavy breaths, as if she could not get enough air into her lungs.

Above that heavy breathing I heard something else. Far away the sound of a horn I had heard once before when I had been pent with Gathea and death sniffed about us—the first time I had sought the aid of the cup. High and clear that rang out.

The clouds above began to loose a burden of chill rain. I jerked Iynne to her feet, stooped and caught up with one hand the cloak to thrust it upon her.

“Cover yourself!” I commanded harshly. That soft and fragrant flesh in my hold, it brought back that temptation which the thing in the tower had striven to use as a weapon against me. Were I to loose a man’s hunger here and now—that would indeed open a doorway for my opposition.

The horn sounded closer. I tried to measure the position of the shadow force below us. All one could sight were the blue lights of the barrows—and not all of those were lit either. That which had flowed into me when I looked upon the cup, which had, for the moment, left off its struggle to become me, supplied a bit of knowledge. Those gathered below would not dare to climb the Har-Rests. For good or ill I had made a choice when the cup came into my hands. The force I had so allied myself with—mainly unwittingly—had protections as well as dangers. We stood on ground which had its own defenses and those were not of this world.

Iynne was sobbing again, more in anger, I believed, than for any other reason. She snatched the cloak, dragging it around her, turned from me, crouching down by the stone again, peering into the dark, her body tense with expectation. For the third time the horn sounded—still afar. The wind-driven rain pelted us furiously.

Garn’s daughter lapsed into sullen silence. I could not see into the dark valleys between the barrows but I had sensed that the menace there had withdrawn in part. It could be that she also knew. In spite of the clouds and the rain the sky was growing lighter, morning was coming. The candles became fainter, were gone. Now I could see that there were deep graven markings on the stone by our camp—runes beyond my reading, far different from those of our clan records. On the upper end of the stone toward the east—where it might even be above the heart of him who was buried here, there was the outline of a cup. In shape it was like my gift from Gunnora, save that there was no head upon it. However, above the picture of the cup there was also set in the stone the antler “horns”—these plainly formed the crown of some ancient lord.

“Dartif Double Sword—”

I raised my hand, palm bare and out, as I would to one whom I followed into battle, even though we knew little of each other.

“You name a name.” Iynne, huddled deep into her cloak, looked at me, still sly and sullen.

“I name a name, I greet a great lord,” I replied, knowing that that greeting, that naming, came from that other within me. “This was Farthfell.” I looked out over the crowding of the barrows. “When the Dark Ones following Archon came down from the north and the war horn called in all of the Light, there was here a battle of the last days. They slew—they died—their world was finished. From that warring came no victory—only memories of a better time—”

Those words arose out of me, yet I did not understand them until I spoke. Now I bowed under a deep sadness such as I had not fell before—a faraway sadness like that which can be summoned by a skillful Bard when he plays upon the thoughts of men and sings of great deeds and great defeats which lie hidden in the past, building so the belief that men of other times were stronger and better than any who now walk, giving us heroes by which to measure ourselves—goals toward which to strive.

For men must have such heroes, even though they look about them and see only lesser men, mean and petty things. Yet if they can be led to believe that once there was greatness then many of them will seek it again. That is why we can listen to the Bards and some of us weep inside, and others feel dour anger that life is not what it once was. Still there is left the core of aroused memory to strengthen our sword arms, make us ready to fight when danger arises even in our own day. It is the gift of the Bard to tie the past to us, to give us hope. I was no Bard, I listened to no hand harp here. Still I looked down upon the semblance of that Horn Crown, knowing that I was far less than he who lay below, yet I was not altogether overshadowed by him for I was another man and I must have within me the seeds of some small gift of service which was mine alone.

The gloom of the morning lay heavy, but we could see out over Farthfell and nothing moved among the barrows. What had crept upon us under the cover of the dark was gone. I reached a hand down to Iynne to help her to her feet.

Where we would go I was not sure. The horn had cried from the west and something pointed me in that direction, though it was eastward I should have turned to return Iynne to the dales.

“Where do you go?” she demanded, refusing to move until I set hand on her arm and drew her with me, half expecting that I might once more have to struggle with her and not liking that idea.

“West—”

She looked beyond me, seeming to consider the land around Farthfell, which was open enough, though there were groves of trees here and there. “Have you thrown the luck stones for the trail?” she asked.

“I have not yet heard my name called in the battle morn.” I returned one folk belief for the other. “Thus I do not think that this day, at least, I shall die. And while a man lives, then anything is possible.”

“You do yourself no good by holding me. I have those waiting for me and for the child now within me. Let me go. I am no longer Garn’s daughter—I am she who will mother greater than any man now living.”

I shrugged. That she nursed some delusion the hag had set upon her I could well believe. That indeed she was no longer any maid—might also be the truth. I only knew that, for good or ill, our fate lines were woven together for a space. And that I would surrender her back to the forces I had fought in the Moon Shrine I would not do.

When we descended from Dartif’s resting place I found deep tracks all about the winding path which had brought us there. Some were of cloven hoofs, some of great paws, more were misshapen—humanlike but with the imprint of long claws extending beyond, or even booted, yet all so deeply pressed it would seem that these had been left behind as a warning—or a threat, insolent in its very openness.

We followed on the path until we came to a stream and there we stopped and filled the water bottle, ate a little more from my fast-shrinking supplies. I would have to turn to hunting this day if we were to have any relief from gnawing hunger.

Farthfell was a widely open stretch between two ranges of heights. I thought that those to the east might be the ones I had crossed before the adventure of the Black Tower. Viewing the western rises, I did not relish the thought of another such passage ahead with no more purpose or guide than an inner feeling that this was the road we must take.

The rain lightened into a damp drizzle which plastered clothing to the body but did not beat on our uncovered heads. Though shelter was offered by any of the copses of trees I had sighted from the barrow, still I wanted to remain in the open. I had met too much peril within just such stands.

When I shouldered the water bottle and got to my feet Iynne appeared in no haste to push on. Her hair lay in wet strings across her head and shoulders and she looked like a fetch out of an old tale. I wished I had better to offer her in the way of clothing, but one could not conjure a robe, or a shorter riding dress, out of grass and brush.

“Folly!” Her hands, tight curled into fists, beat together. “Let me go! You achieve nothing, only raise their hate against you—”

“I do not hold you now,” I answered in weariness, for this struggle had become such that I would have gladly turned and walked away from her, save that I could not.

“You hold me—with that in you now, you hold me!” Her voice soared. “May the Death of Kryphon of the Dart be upon you—and it!”

As one who is tired to the point of limbs heavy and body worn, she arose slowly, faced westward, and began to walk, her white face set in the grimace of one being herded against her will.

We had not gone more than a short distance from the stream which we had splashed through before her stooped shoulders straightened, her head came up, turned a little to the north. There flowed back into her, so strongly that I witnessed its coming, new energy. Dropping the cloak as if the covering of her body meant nothing, Iynne broke into a run, her slender legs flashing at a sprint like a horse’s gallop.

I paused only to catch up the cloak and then pounded after her. It seemed that whatever purpose moved her gave her energy past my own, with the weight of mail and heavy sword belt upon me. Still I kept her in sight and, now and then, even gained on her a little. She kept to the open, luckily, for I feared that she might dodge in among one of the stands of trees to hide until I had passed her. Rather she appeared now to have forgotten me altogether and I could only believe that she was again in a net of whatever had entrapped her from the first.

The ground was rising again. Iynne took the slope easily, even leaping now and then across a pocket of earth to the top of a rock and then ahead. Over the crown of that hill she went as I ploughed doggedly after. When the other side of the ridge came into sight I nearly stopped short as I witnessed what awaited us a little below.

There was that dark-robed crone who had been working her spells in the Moon Shrine. She was partnered, not by any human kind. Rather one of the flying monsters such as I had fought by its lair stood on her left—this being a female and much taller than the crone, its wings fanning the air lazily, but its clawed feet firm planted on the ground. To her right was another figure—and at the sight of that I slowed pace.

It was both man and beast in an evil mixture of the worst of both. The body from the waist down was covered by a bristly pelt, the feet were hoofed like those of a bull. Huge and bulllike also was its masculine organ, so fully visible that it would seem it flaunted its sex, or was prepared to use it as a weapon of sorts.

Above the waist that bristle hair thinned, though it still grew thicker on chest and along the shoulders and upper arms. The arms themselves were overlong, its huge hands dangling low. But it was the head and face which had startled me into slowing pace.

There was a resemblance, a horrible and fearful resemblance to the face on my cup. That representation was noble; this was vile. A single being might have been split in two, all good in its nature to one side, the evil pulled to the other. This man-beast was the reverse of the Horn Lord—and he was not crowned. No entwined antlers rode on his thick tangle of curly hair.

His head was thrown back, and now he mouthed a roar which was part a beast’s cry, part laughter of cruel triumph. While the crone by his side flung high her arms, her fingers moving like a weaver’s shuttle. The winged woman thing smiled, her lips parting to show fang teeth.

Iynne, seeming to see no threat in those before her, was still running eagerly toward them, though she slowed when she nearly tripped over a stone set in the grass. I was too far away to reach her. Taking no chance I flung the cape after her, aiming as well as I could with that roll of the dank cloth.

It uncoiled in the air, and I saw that I had done better than I had hoped I might, for it whipped over her head, then dropped about her. She took only one more stride; then, blinded and startled, she fell sprawling, still well away from the waiting three. I spurted to her side as she still fought with the cloak.

The laughter of the beast-man died away. What rent the air—each word she uttered was like tearing open the very sky over us—was the chanting of the crone. She called on Powers, that much I knew.

The beast-man stood, grinning now, his wide fists resting on his hairy hips, about him all the confidence of a bully, a victor in many battles. His confidence was very sure and his eyes held a glint of red fire as if there were no natural orbs within those hollows, rather some other means of seeing the world and bending what he saw to his own purposes.

Back and forth the winged woman teetered, rising now so that only her toes were fast upon the ground, her wings beating with longer and stronger strokes. I felt she was about to launch herself straight at me and I drew steel.

Seeing the blade bare in my hand moved the beast-man to more open laughter. I had thrown my left arm about Iynne, held her as tightly as I could. If she went to them, if that hag laid hand upon her, I knew that she would be utterly lost, that this time no power I could summon would bring her free again. All that was still good, clean, and human in her would die and what was left was far better dead. Death itself might be the greatest gift I could give her now—when I sensed that they could take her at their pleasure. Better far to draw the edge of my blade across her throat—

“Do it, young fool!”

I saw the beast-man’s flare of flame within his eye pits. “Give her to us in blood—we shall take her more gladly so.”

So their power could reach beyond clean and sudden death. That was a new and chilling thought. I kept glancing at him, though I willed myself not to. He was so like in part to the Horn-Crowned One, yet so dark and lost. It is human nature to be a mixture of good and bad—perhaps what was better in me had been drawn one way by that image in the cup. Now the lowest inclined to this being.

“True—you think straight and true, fool. You are mine, do I desire it so.” He gestured.

Fire burned in my loins. I was caught up in just such a wave of lust as I had been when the Presence of the Black Tower had faced me. To toss aside the cloak—to take this girl, I held to—! I clamped my hand so hard about the hilt of my sword that the guard brought sharp pain. It was that small pain which aroused me. I was able to tear my gaze loose from the hold of his stare.

There was a pulling about me, what the crone wove, that net of her sorceries, was closing about us both. I would go to death—if I was lucky. Iynne to much worse.

Then that strength which had come to me among the barrows moved. I could accept or deny it. There would be only this one time of choice at last. If I accepted what it was I must do so fully. But I was a man. As a human I went my own way. To allow myself to become a tool of any power—good or evil—was I not then surrendering all that made me what I was?

Time—I wanted time! But there was no time left. I flung up my head, looked up into the dull cloudiness of the sky which closed us in as if we stood in a dungeon of a keep. Even all the land about us had taken a grim overcoating of gray which denied even the fresh green of the growth, all that I knew as life.

I moistened my lips with my tongue. For a moment more—just one moment—I held on to the Elron I knew—the Elron I had always been. Then I called: “Hi, Holla, Kurnous!”

It was like being caught up and twisted in a mighty hand, my blood sent to run in another fashion, my bones altered in a tortuous grip. I was filled with an overpowering sweep which shook me from side to side, as if buffeted by the greatest wind of any storm. Still I did not fall. There was a sharp, agonizing pain in my head. I could only think of a place with many doors long closed, all being battered inwards—or outwards—at once. So that which had been hidden behind them was freed and came flashing out.

What was I? I could not have said. I saw and heard things for which no man of my race had words, could have given name to. The tearing, the rending grew less. How long had it lasted? It had seemed to my tortured smaller self to have gone on for days out of time.

Then I was standing and Iynne crouched beside me, looking up at me with dazed eyes, a thread of spittle running from her slack, open mouth, while those other three still fronted me. Only, the winged one had lost her smile, the beast-man no longer laughed. Rather, he too, showed snags of teeth, and there was such fire blazing not only from his eyes, but the whole of him, as to set the grass about him blazing, save that it did not.

While she who Iynne called Raidhan stood with her hands upraised, yet her fingers had stopped their weaving, hung limply downward, as if all strength had been drawn out of them. What the three saw in me I could not tell. Only my heart warmed and leaped. I had thought that in this surrender I would lose all. Rather all had been drawn to me. I must make haste now, forget my wonderment at the richness I had been shown which had been locked within a child (for all men no matter what the tale of their years were children if they knew not their strength). There would be time now to savor all I had gained—later.

Once more I looked into the curtained sky and called:

“Holla, Kurnous!” Those talents which had been body bound linked within me, so more than my voice rolled across the land.

My answer came—the fluting of the horn—not in search, but in a peal of triumph, as if a quarry was not only sighted, but had been brought to bay. Though I was no questing hound, rather the sword of the hunter.

Then—

He came out of nowhere. No, not out of nowhere, but from the other place which marched beside this world, and which in time might become mine also. He was as tall as Garn, but his mail was a coat of shifting light which glowed about his body in green, and brown, and blue. I had been right—though the head on the cup was but a very dim imagining of what the Horn-Crowned Lord was—still his features were not too far from those of the beast-man. There were the Light and Dark. And I remembered in a flash then something Gathea had once said:

As above, so below. Each Power must have its light side and the dark—they were balanced. Save when that balance was disturbed and one grew the greater, then the fates—the need for all things being equal—took a hand. The righting of the balance might be bloody and dire, still it must come within all existing worlds.

The three before us gave no ground. Instead they began to swell, to take on stature, more and greater substance—striving to balance even now against the Horn-Crowned Hunter.

There was another disturbance of air.

Longing caught at me even to look upon her. Rich gold and amber light made her garment as she fronted the crone, her head high as a lady of power giving judgment. Yet—there was that in Raidhan which was a withered, far-off remnant of the same bountiful richness my amber lady wore as the body she had chosen now to assume.

A third coming—there was another winged one. But the brightness of this hurt the eyes. I could not look at her directly. The air raised by her wings blew against me, bringing the clear scent of small spring flowers, among last year’s dead leaves.

“As above, so below,” I said softly. There was movement beside me. Iynne pulled upward, her hand groping out as if she sought some support. I took her fingers into mine. They were cold and she was shivering as one who stood beset by high drifts of winter’s snow.

18.

Thus they fronted each other—Light and Dark. Though Iynne and I were not part of this meeting, I understood, through that path to the past which had opened within my mind, that this was no new struggle. In this haunted land there had long been a swing of the balance, favoring now the Light, again the Dark; and I knew that the coming of my own people might well set it once more atilt and so bring forth such warfare as man of the kin could not conceive.

Gunnora—her spell held for me; I would ever, I realized, cleave to that which she ruled—for she had brought part of me alive. Part of me—the rest—that was liege to Kurnous, the Horn-Crowned Lord. I was sworn to him by my own desire, and did not regret that choice. In him there appeared that quality which I had seen in the Bard Ouse, opener of gates, and in the Sword Brothers. At that moment I began to wonder if all our journey had honestly been a matter of choice, or had we, in some manner, been summoned into this world, that we might supply the opportunity to rebalance again the immortal scales.

How did the gifts and talents of these who confronted each other appear? Did they indeed need others, outside their own kin and kind, outside their knowledge, to bring about the proper time and place, the action for rebalancing? This was largely a forsaken land; had the numbers of the Old Ones become so few that now they would struggle against each other for possession of those of our own blood?

As I thought this there was speech between them. I put my arm about Iynne, for she had half fallen against me as if her legs could no longer support her; her strength might have been sucked away to feed the greedy need for power that abided here. Raidhan’s bony arms dropped to her sides, hidden in the black sleeves of her robe. The winged woman’s grimace became more pronounced. She spat and the spittle landed close to the feet of the shining figure who was her opposite—whose brilliance was too much for mortal eyes to pierce.

“It is again the hour—”

Did that ring in my ears or, rather, did the words marshal within my head? Kurnous spoke as he moved a pace toward the beast-man. “You have challenged, Cuntif—so I answer. Your gate is not about to open again!”

His opponent snarled. “But you have opened gates in plenty, wearer of horns. Now you bring others into the game—was that not forbidden of old?” He pointed directly at me. “Because the blood has grown thin, the heroes have all died, you summon these lesser ones and strive to fashion new liegemen. That is against the Oath—”

“Against the oath? When you would have made use of him—or your companion would have. Who summoned him with the cup—to put that to a foul purpose? We shall have no devil child born in Arvon!” It was Gunnora who spoke before her tall companion. “And you, Raidhan—your trap is sprung, your victim has been brought forth out of that bondage of deceit you wove. She is still a maid, in spite of your enchantments, and no vessel for evil.”

From the shining one came lilting notes, like the clear song of a bird—a wondrous trilling which made the heart glad to her. She, who was the gross parody of that presence, hunched her shoulders, allowed the tips of her wings to trail among the tall growing grass.

“Yes, the gates have opened,” the Horn-Crowned Lord said calmly. “When there comes a time for the shifting of forces, then we must summon those who can be aroused. From these so called there may be a new beginning. We have been long alone in a deserted land. Not all can we deal with—but there is always fertile ground waiting for the right seed. They shall be given their choice, and that shall be freely made, as is the right of all living things.”

“That girl has chosen!” Raidhan pointed a bone-thin finger at Iynne.

I tightened my grip more on Garn’s daughter. She was not going to that infamous three.

“Not freely, not with true understanding,” countered Gunnora. “Do you think I do not know how you entrapped her? She has not within her that spark which should have flared of itself for a real choice. Look you, is that not so?” She turned a little toward the two of us and held out her hand.

I felt such a hot desire that I thought I might sway as I stood. But Iynne cried out as one stricken by a sharp blow, slipped about in my hold, to press her face against my shoulder. She might be turning from a sight she could not bear to look upon.

“You would have used her—not by her true choice!” There was pity in Gunnora’s eyes. “You would have brought about the Great Secret coupling between your evil forces and an empty one—debased that which is of the Light!”

Once more she looked to the crone. “Three we are, nothing in the Lore binding can make it otherwise. But also we are pledged, you, I, Dians, to keep the faith—or there will be a reckoning.”

“Once before,” Kurnous took up that attack of words, “there was the strife of Light and Dark—there followed death, in spite of deeds for good. Harm and destruction rent wide this land and we were near spent—near banished because of it. Freedom of choice must remain.”

“I have my place, my power, you cannot deny me!” flared the beast-man.

“Have I denied that? Freedom of choice. Those you can openly win—they shall be your liegemen, for there shall be that within them which can only answer to your call. These two have chosen—”

“She has not! You yourself have said it!” Raidhan snarled at Gunnora.

“In her way she has. She is not of those who can be touched because their minds closed to us. Ensorcellment is forbidden; those who come wish it more than their other lives. Call her now without those spells!” ordered Gunnora.

The crone’s expression was as thunderous as the heaviest of storms. I saw her sleeves flutter as if her arms moved, but she made no ritual gesture. Perhaps she was forced to accept the truth of what my amber lady said.

“You see?” There was an odd note in Gunnora’s voice—could it have been a tinge of pity? Did she feel a little warmth for this twisted, wasted, ugly female creature? “What was done, must now be undone— Now!”

There was a force about her, a deepening of the warm gold light which I saw outline her figure. A point of this swept out like a well-aimed dart. I saw the crone stumble back a step. Her face was truly venomous. Her mouth twisted as if she wished to spit poison in return.

Then her shoulders drooped. If she could have taken on a heavier burden of years, she would have done so at that moment. Her hands arose, jerkily. I could sense her own will fighting a stronger force she could not withstand. This was not Gunnora’s doing—the division lay within herself, bringing her back into balance against all her Rival for more power of her own.

She spoke, four words—those rumbled, thundered. I fell as if both earth and sky answered with a shifting, as if two worlds overlapped for the space of a breath. Then we were once more in a single time and place.

I held—nothing! Iynne was gone, leaving empty space between my arm and my body. Then I cried out and Gunnora looked to me quickly.

“Have no fear for her, she has been returned to her own people. Nor will she remember. That she does not carry within her a dread child which would have been a bane for all of us—that is because you stood firm. Be glad!”

“You have not won!” The beast-man roared, his voice promising blood and savage death. “This is not the end—”

Kurnous shook his crowned head. “Neither of us can ever win. You will continue to try through the years to gain your will, but there will, in turn, always be one to stand against you—the balance will remain.”

“Not forever!” The beast-man swung his arm across his body in a furious gesture of repudiation.

He was gone!

The crone showed a straggle of yellow teeth in a sneer. “Not forever,” she repeated in turn. Her black sleeves whipped about her body as if there were a wind blowing, though I did not feel it, and it did not even ruffle the grass where she stood. Enwrapped in the blackness which covered her spare body, she dwindled until she was like a sere leaf which that wind carried away with it into nothingness.

Now the winged woman gave a harsh cry, unfurled her pinions, and leaped high into the air. Then she too sped away across the sky, the shining one flying after her.

The other two turned to face me fully. Enough remained in me of the earlier, more youthful, unfinished Elron so that I asked:

“The Dark is then loosed to work its way here? What then, will be the fate of the clansmen?”

“No land is all light without dark. For if there is no dark how could the light be judged and desired?” Kurnous asked in turn. “As it has been said—this is a near-empty land. There will be born among those who came with you some who are open to us—light and dark. Choices will be fully theirs. Others shall remain unknowing, for they will be of another kind and not seekers—”

I thought now of the presence in the Black Tower and it seemed to me that good might well be termed evil if such was allowed to have its way with its foul lures—without hindrance of those who might help.

“Not without hindrance—”

I began to believe that there was no need of speech between us. This was the lord I had chosen indeed and by that choice I would live from this hour on. Still there might come times when I would be troubled, when it would seem that good could do much and yet did not.

“Power—it rests upon the balance of power,” Kurnous continued. “Do you not understand that whoever gathers too much power, be it of the Light or the Dark, tips the scales and only chaos will fill the land? We learned that lesson long ago—and found it hard learning. This land was once great and strong until the balance was upset. Rebuilding will take very long—and many times that will seem beyond the strength of those who attempt it. They will try—for in your people lie the seeds. You will grow beyond your own belief that such can be achieved.”

Some part of me knew the truth of his speech. Yet human impatience remained.

“My lady Iynne is truly safe?”

“She will awake in the same place from which she was taken. Raidhan laid there a snare at the coming of your people. But her purpose was defeated because when she summoned the cup, you, who had set your mark already upon it, came also. For this lifetime it is yours,” Gunnora said. There was a difference about her. That overwhelming impact which she had on me appeared to have ebbed. I could look upon her and feel content, happy in a way I had not known before, but that fiery longing no longer moved me. I saw her smile.

“Not now—that is a hunger you shall know, yes, but in the proper time and with the proper one who will share it.”

“Gathea—and Gruu?”

There was no smile on Kurnous’s face. Rather he looked at me as if surveying a liegeman about to go into battle, to make sure that his man was properly armed, well prepared.

“The cup is yours, the rest must lie with you. Again free choices—for you both. Do you choose to face a trial knowing that may be denied? Or do you accept what will come—good or ill.”

I did not understand what he would tell me. But I had an answer for what I wanted most myself.

“Gathea—Gruu—they may need me. I would go to them.”

“Very well, so you have chosen. Go then and do what your heart tells you to do!”

It was no whirlwind which bore me away, nor any wings set on my shoulders. Rather there came a moment of dark when I believed I was back with the Presence—in that place where no light ever reached. Then came light—moonlight once more, as if the day were left behind.

Before me was a Moon Shrine. Not that of the dales, nor that sinister place in which Raidhan had tried to muster her helpers for foul witchery. This had a brightness of pure light—perhaps another part of the balance—standing to equal that other shrine where Iynne had waited defoulment and death of spirit.

She whom I sought was before the altar stone, and her body was silver white, for she had thrown aside all clothing, bathing in the radiance, drawing to her the power alive in this place. In the air above the altar stone hung a column of brilliance, veiling a figure I could hardly see.

Arms upheld, Gathea worshipped, her eyes closed, yearning open and avid in her face. My fingers went to buckles, to latchings. I put from me, first the trappings of war and death, and then all else so that I, too, had only the light, the light and the cup, and with it, as memory stirred and impulse ordered, that leaf of the forest woman.

As I moved to the shrine the light gathered thick before me. I felt it resist me, that resistance also attacking my mind—offering a sharp protest, a denial of what I carried, of what I would do. There arose out of the light, where he had been lying across the space between the two pillars before me, the silver body of Gruu. His lips wrinkled back in a soundless snarl of warning.

Then his eyes, as brilliant as any gems in that strong light, rested on the cup, before again meeting mine. Out of what had awakened in me I spoke to him mind to mind, reassuring that cat, who was more than cat, his place in my life which would be ours for the future.

“This is my right—and her choice.”

So Gruu moved aside and I entered into the Moon Shrine.

So much power! It beat against me, I could feel the cool pressure of it against my skin. My flesh prickled as if tormented by thorns. I felt an urge to hurl myself forth, but I took one step and then the next. The cup I held at the height of my heart, the leaf warm in my other hand.

Gathea turned suddenly, as if some warning or uneasiness had struck through the serene sorcery which filled this place. I saw her eyes widen. She raised a hand to ward me off.

But I knew what was to be done, I had made my choice—hers lay yet before her. I dropped the leaf into the hollow of the cup. It lay solid for only a second or two, then it melted, swirling down and then up, to near fill the cup—the bounty of nature herself summoned to bless this hour.

As a liegeman might do in high ceremony before his lady I went down on one knee. Was there a slight feeling of pressure on my head? Light indeed—yet I was ready for the crown—though that would not be of my summoning.

Gathea pointed a finger at me.

“Go!” There was force, was it also colored by a faint fear. That command heightened the pressure on me. If she held firm I could well be swept from this place, and neither of us would ever be whole. Always we would know a lack to keep us hungered until we passed through the last Gate of all.

“Dians!” When I had not obeyed, Gathea turned again to the altar, to that pillar of light above it.

I could see, but not clearly (I do not think any man would ever see that presence as she was). But there was the shadow of a slender maiden there. The face she wore, misty as it was, had a kinship to Gathea’s—closed, proud, keeping to vows which held against the fullness of life.

“Dians!” the girl cried again.

The face grew colder, showing a ghost of enmity. I remembered out of my newfound knowledge that Dians could kill a man who tempted or forced one of her maidens against that maiden’s will.

I called upon nothing, no one. This struggle I must win for myself.

“Dians!” Was there a questioning rather than a foreboding in Gathea’s voice now?

There formed above the cup, spiraling upward from the leaf’s bounty, a golden mist—the color of Gunnora’s harvest robe. Then that became amber and there was a heady fragrance to fill the space between us.

“Dians—” Gathea did not call; she murmured. Now she half turned from that silver figure to look at me. I spoke and my words came from a ritual older than a time any of my race could reckon:

“The field awaits the seed, the Power of the Lady opens the field to the seed. There comes the other to whom is given the duty of awakening—that the harvest may follow—that it may be for the nourishment of body, mind and spirit.”

Gathea came to me, one reluctant step and then another. The struggle was plain to read in her face. I held the cup, waiting. Choice, the choice was hers—I would not bring it to her, she must come to me—willingly.

For a long moment she stood so close that I might have stretched out my hand to touch her soft flesh. Only that was not the way. Yes, the power passed from man to maid—from new-made woman back to man. Only when the pattern was done so would the whole be greater than the parts. Still, the choice was Gathea’s.

“Dians—” a fleeting whisper. Around us the silver light pulsed, now hot, now cold, as if the struggle which was within Gathea was measured thus.

She was looking deeply into my eyes. Nothing passed between us. I do not know what she sought to see, or if she could indeed find it. Slowly her hands arose from where they hung by her sides, and—Would she dash the cup from me? Or was her choice otherwise?

Above mine her fingers curled around the bowl of the goblet, curled and held. Then she lifted it out of my grasp. As she took it, I stooped a little more and touched her white feet, the old words ready on my tongue:

“Those who seek shall also find, and rich shall be the treasure found. In the Maiden lies the Queen, and in the Lady’s name do I salute her, even as I salute thee.”

I raised my hands and laid them to where her slender thighs joined her body:

“In the Maiden awaits the fulfillment of the harvest. In the Lady’s name so I salute thee.”

Rising to my feet, I touched her small, firm breasts.

“In the Maiden stands another who cometh forth when the time is ripe. In the Lady’s name do I salute thee.”

Gathea held the cup level now between my lips and hers. In her eyes there was an awakening wonder—a change.

I drank from the cup she proffered, and then she drank also. Between us the cup was empty and she tossed it from her. It did not fall to the pavement, rather was carried through the air to stand upon the altar. That pillar of silver light there was deepening, changing, into rich gold. I took Gathea into my arms and the kiss I gave her, even as Gunnora had promised, was to seal my fate and open the last barrier.

The golden light—the warmth—we forgot all else. What remained was priestess and Lady, man and HornCrowned Lord. From their union would come power with which much could be wrought. As I took one who no longer would follow the sterile path of Dians, I felt that weight settle upon my head—the crown. Liegeman I had been, in this hour was I Lord.

Kinless—clanless—and crowned!

About the Author

For well over a half century, Andre Norton was one of the most popular science fiction and fantasy authors in the world. With series such as Time Traders, Solar Queen, Forerunner, Beast Master, Crosstime, and Janus, as well as many standalone novels, her tales of adventure have drawn countless readers to science fiction. Her fantasy novels, including the bestselling Witch World series, her Magic series, and many other unrelated novels, have been popular with readers for decades. Lauded as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, she is the recipient of a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. An Ohio native, Norton lived for many years in Winter Park, Florida, and died in March 2005 at her home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Jargoon Pard Copyright © 1974 by Andre Norton

Zarsthor’s Bane Copyright © 1978 by Andre Norton

The Crystal Gryphon Copyright © 1972 by Andre Norton

Gryphon in Glory Copyright © 1981 by Andre Norton

Horn Crown Copyright © 1981 by Andre Norton

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5572-7

This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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