---

present

Consider the roots of a simple and mundane action, for instance, buying bread for your breakfast. A farmer has grown the grain in a field carved from wilderness by his ancestors; in the ancient city a miller has ground the flour and a baker prepared the loaf; the vendor has transported it to your house in a cart built by a cartwright and his apprentices. Even the donkey that draws the cart, what stories could she not tell if you could decipher her braying? And then you yourself hand over a coin of copper dug from the very heart of the earth, you who have risen from a bed of dreams and darkness to stand in the light of the vast and terrifying sun. Are there not a thousand strands woven together into this tapestry of a morning meal? How then can you expect that the omens of great events should be easy to unravel?

1.

The Knave of Flowers

Bardek, 1098

Down in the public square Luvilae’s market spread out, a lake of brightly colored sunshades and little stalls. Acrobats performed on improvised platforms; minstrels sat in the shade of trees and played for coppers. Wearing bronze helmets topped with red plumes, the archon’s men strolled through in pairs to keep order. A warm breeze carried the scents of incense and roast pork, flowered perfumes and spiced vegetables. Off to one side, behind a line of stalls that sold blue and purple pottery, a fortune-teller was doing a reading for a client. In the midst of striped and faded blue sunshades and curtains, the two women haggled over the price from either side of a low table. Draped in black as befitted her trade in omens, the elderly one sank onto her cushions with a moist sigh. Dressed like a boy in a linen tunic and sandals, the young woman knelt on a pounded bark mat and ran both hands through her mop of frizzy black hair before she settled back on her heels. Wheezing a little in the heat, Akantha took an ebony box from under the table and slid out the ninety-six tiles of polished bone. Most fell facedown, a good omen, but as Akantha turned the few wayward tiles over, one slid to the ground. With a frown she snatched it back.
“Help me mix them up, little one. Bring them over to the right side of the table—my right, that is.”
Marka laid both hands flat on the layer of tiles and mixed with a sound like thunder.
“Enough,” Akantha said at last. “Draw five to start with.”
The old woman turned the chosen tiles faceup to form a square. The two of spears and the four of golds appeared, followed by three different tiles from the suit of flowers: the knave, the six, and finally the princess, which Akantha laid in the center of the square.
“Is that me?” Marka asked.
“It might be, it might be—or else, you will someday serve the princess. Not sure which yet. But I don’t much like the look of this knave. Hum. A lover, maybe; he’s the same suit, but he’s no prince, is he? Watch out for him, girl. I do like the look of this six. Good fortune, girl, very good fortune indeed, though not without some trouble.” She laid a long and bony forefinger on the two of spears. “But nothing your wits won’t be able to get you out of, I’d say. Three flowers in the first draw is very lucky, very lucky. Now draw me four groups of three.”
Each group formed a triangle. For a long time Akantha sucked her teeth in silence while she studied the layout; once or twice she started to speak, then merely shook her head. Marka knew just enough about the tiles to understand that the expanded reading simply wasn’t coalescing into a whole. Omens of splendid good luck lay right next to signifiers of the grimmest bad fortune, while the minor, numbered tiles contradicted all the important trumps around them. The first was the three of flowers.
“Well, then, the reading should be a good one. Here’s a flower coming up from the Earth. Now, we’ve got the nine of swords for Air, so you’re in for a bit of rough sailing, sure enough. And now for Water we’ve got the queen of birds, which is not the kind of location I’d like to see for that tile. No, water and birds aren’t a happy marriage, girl, not at all. But well, look at this! For Fire here’s the ten of golds! Very good luck, the best there is. And finally, for the Ether, we have the . . . the prince of Swords? Oh, by the Star Goddesses themselves! This isn’t making sense again. Listen, young Marka, sometimes the gods just don’t want us to know the future. That’s all there is to it. Don’t you pay one bit of attention to anything I’ve said this morning, and as for your, money, come back after dark and I’ll try again for free. Sometimes letting the sun set on a reading changes things.”
“Thank you, but I can’t. We’ll be putting on our show once it’s dark.”
“Ah. You’re one of that bunch from Main Island, then?”
“Yes. I do the slack wire. I mean, I used to.” She stopped herself just in time from venting all her bitterness on this sympathetic if hired ear. “I juggle now.”
As she hurried away, Marka tried to leave the reading behind, but its bad aura hung round her like a wet cloak. Nothing, it seemed, was going right these days, not even a simple thing like getting her fortune told. Although Luvilae was the capital of Zama Mañae, the southernmost island in the Orystinnian archipelago, at a mere twenty thousand inhabitants it was not the sort of place where a wandering troupe of acrobats could make its fortune. Marka wondered why her father had brought them there, but then, these days her father did a lot of things that made no sense. She felt a constant dread, a line of ice down her back, a knowledge that she refused to face. He promised, she would think, it couldn’t be that again.
She forced her mind away from old memories with a wrench of will. She’d been sent into town, after all, for more important reasons than just hearing her fortune. She bought a chunk of roast pork on a stick and wandered round, nibbling her meal and looking over the other street performers at the fair. The only jugglers she saw were clumsy; there were no slackrope walkers at all. Although she found a band of tumblers, they couldn’t compete with the complex routines that the men in her troupe performed. Most of the solitaires were musicians. Overall, the best show she saw in that first look round featured trained monkeys and apes.
As she was buying herself a piece of sugared cake, she noticed a small crowd gathering off to one side in the shade of a big plane tree. The cake seller gestured with snow-white fingers, all sticky from her wares.
“If that’s the barbarian, you should take a look at him. Puts on a good show, though I swear the man’s demented!”
Marka went over, paying as much attention to the cake as anything, since it was impossible to eat without getting sugar all over her chin. She found a spot off to one side, but at first she could only see scarves flying into the air above the heads of the crowd and hear the fellow’s patter, a running mix of topical jokes and sheer nonsense, all delivered in a musical voice without any foreign accent whatsoever. She assumed that his barbarism was nothing more than a good costume until she wormed her way closer to the front.
For a moment she could only gawk openmouthed. Never in her life had she seen anyone so pale, as if he’d been bleached like a strip of linen soaked in lemon juice and left in the summer sun. His skin was a light pinky-beige, and his hair, as fine and straight as silk thread, was the silvery color of moonbeams with just the barest hint of yellow in it by contrast with his steel-gray eyes. He was wearing a strange sort of tunic, with long, full sleeves, and gathered into a yoke at the shoulders and belted over a peculiar garment that encased his legs in baggy tubes of blue cloth. So he was indeed one of those fabled barbarians from the savage kingdoms far to the north! It took Marka a few moments to recover from his appearance before she could appreciate his skill.
And skill he had. In his long, slender hands the silk scarves seemed to come alive, whisking through the air, floating up only to plummet down, circling round and round or weaving in and out while he kept up his stream of jokes and snatches of song. Watching him, she was bitterly aware of what a beginner she was at juggling and how clumsy she was going to look when her turn came to perform. When he paused, looking significantly at the crowd, a rain of coins flew his way. Laughing and bowing, he flicked the scarves into his sleeves, then hunkered down to pick up the coins, making them fly round his head in a little stream before they all disappeared into his clothes.
“The Great Krysello is pleased!” he announced. “Allow him to delight your noble selves with his humble tricks for a little while longer.”
When he bowed again, three eggs seemed to appear out of nowhere and settle into his hands. Before he began this new routine, he happened to glance Marka’s way. His eyes widened; he broke into a smile of pure delight; then he wiped the smile away and turned firm attention to his performance. Marka felt utterly flabbergasted. Although she knew that she was a pretty girl, she’d never had a man look at her that way before, as if the very sight of her had made him happy beyond dreaming. Her second thought was that there was powdered sugar all over her face. Blushing furiously, she elbowed her way through the crowd and fled the Great Krysello and his smiles.
She found the public fountain and washed the sugar off, then headed for the city-owned caravanserai at the edge of town. The troupe had four tents and two wagons of its own, set up in a circle under some palm trees at the edge of the campground. It was better to stay away from other travelers, always quick to accuse wandering showmen of being thieves. The five acrobats were practicing their tumbling turns behind the tents, while their leader, Vinto, watched and commented. Out in the middle of the tent circle a big cooking fire was burning. Marka’s stepmother, Orima, along with the two other women in the troupe, Delya and Keeta, were stewing spiced vegetables in a hanging pot and slapping rounds of thin bread onto an enormous iron griddle. They fell silent when Marka came up.
“What’s wrong, Rimi?”
“Nothing. What makes you say that?”
Marka hesitated on the edge of forcing a confrontation. Orima’s dark eyes turned narrow. In the silence Marka could hear the sea booming on the nearby shore and the men chanting out practice cadences.
“Where’s Father?”
“Sleeping.” She turned away, frowning into the pot. “He’s resting before the show tonight.”
Before Marka could say anything more, Keeta came up behind her, grabbed her elbow, and steered her away from the campfire. Arguing with enormously tall Keeta, who was as strong as two average men, was a waste of time.
“If you’re going to learn how to catch a flaming torch,” she said, and firmly, “you’ve got to start practicing.”
They walked to the edge of the sea cliff and stood for a while, looking down at the waves rising higher and higher on the graveled beach. Far off at the horizon the sea made a line like a stretched wire, perfectly flat and landless. Sail far enough to the south, or so Marka had always been told, and you’d come to an enormous waterfall, pouring down into the fiery underworld where the sea boiled off. The water rose again as clouds of steam to make the rain and start the cycle all over again.
“You don’t really want to give me a lesson now, do you?” Marka said at last.
“Well, yes, actually I do.” Keeta grinned, a flash of white teeth in her dark face. “But I also happen to be sick of hearing you fight with your mother.”
“That woman is not my mother, thank you very much.”
Keeta sighed sharply.
“Well, how much older than me is she, anyway? Four years, five? How do you expect me to—”
“I don’t expect you to do anything.” Keeta held one huge hand up for silence. “Except to try not to make things worse. Listen, I know she lords it over you. She lords it over everyone, doesn’t she? But we’re in a very bad position, stuck here at the edge of nowhere. Your father won’t even talk about money. I’m willing to bet that there’s not a lot left to talk about.”
All at once Marka felt sick to her stomach. She sat down in the scruffy grass and stared fixedly out to sea. After a few minutes Keeta hunkered down next to her with a dramatic sigh.
“You’re old enough to know these things now. If the audience gives you special tips, keep them hidden, will you? Dont turn them over to your father. I’m doing the same. We might all need a few extra coins if we’re ever going to see Main Island again.”
“All right.”
“I wonder what’s he doing with it?” Keeta got up and stretched. “Spending it all on her?”
“Probably.” Marka felt the ice-knowledge again, slicing down her spine. You should tell her, she thought, you should tell her the truth right now. Saying the words aloud would mean admitting the truth to herself, as well.
After a long moment Keeta sighed and shook her head.
“Well, let’s practice. Some sticks of driftwood are what we want, something unbalanced like the torches.”
As Marka followed her down to the beach, she was feeling like the worst coward in the world. But I’ve got to be sure. I can’t tell anyone till I’m sure. That, at least, was her excuse.
A good session’s practice with a friend turned Marka as sunny as the day, but when they got back to the campground, she found her father awake, or just barely awake. He came stumbling out of the tent, yawning hugely, rubbing his sticky eyes, and glancing round him with a stupid sort of smile that made him look like a stunned ox. Hamil was as tall as Keeta, and much stockier, a handsome man with his wide black eyes and full mouth, his close-cropped curly hair just touched at the temples with distinguished gray. But just lately he’d been looking old, his eyes often distant or glazed, his speech slow, and he’d been putting on a flabby kind of fat round the middle.
“Marka?” Hamil said. “Did you work over the market?”
“Yes, just about an hour ago. There were only two acts to worry about. One has apes and monkeys, and there’s nothing we can do about that. And then there’s this juggler, but he’s just a single player. I’ve never seen anybody throw scarves the way he does. He’s really fantastic.”
“Oh, really?” Orima said with a simper. “Maybe we should prentice you out to him.”
Marka opened her mouth for a smart reply, but she noticed Keeta, standing behind her father and stepmother and shaking her head grimly.
“He could teach us all something,” Marka said instead. “The best thing is, he’s a barbarian. A real northern barbarian.”
“A draw in itself.” With one last yawn Hamil ambled over to the fire circle and sat down on a low stool near his wife. “Huh. Wonder if he wants to join up with a bigger outfit. We could use a new draw.”
“If he’s that good, he doesn’t need to split his take with anyone.” Keeta came forward and joined the circle. “Maybe we should try monkeys.”
“Smelly things. And they bite,” Orima broke in. “And they leave messes all over. It’s all that fruit they eat. I wouldn’t want them in my troupe.”
“If you ever get your own troupe,” Marka snapped. “You can decide then.”
“Marka!” Hamil and Keeta snapped in unison. Hamil went on alone. “You apologize to your stepmother.”
“For what?”
Hamil got up, raising one broad hand.
“I’m sorry, Rimi.”
Orima simpered and sneered; everyone else in the circle looked awkwardly away; Hamil sat down again.
“I’m going to practice some more.”
As Marka turned on her heel and strode off, she was wondering if she could murder Orima and get away with it. The thought was so strong that it terrified her.

“It is her, O Puissant Princess of Powers Perilous,” Salamander said. “Would the Great Krysello be mistaken over a matter of such grave import? Of course not. I saw her, I tell you: my own beloved Alaena, reborn and come back to me.”
“I have my doubts,” Jill said. “There hasn’t really been enough time, you know, since her last life.”
Salamander turned sulky and devoted himself to pouring more wine. They were sitting in the best inn chamber that Luvilae had to offer—a palace by Jill’s standards though close to a hovel by his—a small room with a chipped tile door, scattered with cushions for want of furniture. Jill took one of the flat wine cups from him and considered the problem.
“I don’t mean to stir up painful memories.” She made her voice as gentle as she could. “But how long has Alaena been gone?”
“Thirty years. Well, almost. Well, maybe a score and eight.”
“How old is this lass, anyway?”
“Uh, well, sixteen or so.”
“That’s not much time as the Lords of Wyrd reckon time. It’s possible, of course—just not likely.”
“I know, I know, but I keep thinking, ye gods, our marriage lasted but such a little while! She would have wanted to come back as soon as she could.”
“For your sake I suppose?”
He winced.
“Not for me,” he said at last. “But because she loved life so much.”
Jill wondered if she could ever be objective in this situation. Since she herself seemed to be destined to lose every man that she allowed herself to love, she refused to let her own bitterness spoil his chance to be happy. He sat frowning into his goblet until the, for him, bizarre silence got on her nerves.
“Does her family live here in town?”
“Um?” He looked up, startled. “My apologies. What did you say?”
“Your heart is really troubled, isn’t it?”
“I’ll admit to that. I was just remembering when Alaena died.”
He got up and paced over to the one small window, leaned against the sill, and stared fixedly out at the courtyard below. Old grief turned his unnaturally handsome face slack. Jill waited for the tale and his usual flood of words. It never came.
“Does her family live here in town?” she repeated.
“It doesn’t. I did a bit of asking round in the market before I came back here. She is—of all things—an acrobat. One of a troupe of acrobats just come from Main Island.” As he turned back a glossy smile smoothed and masked his face. “Fancy that! I’ve heard of strange and solemn twists and turns of wild and wandering Wyrd before, but this—”
“Hold your tongue, will you? I suppose there’s no harm in getting to know her a bit. But for the sake of all the gods, will you try to remember this? That even if by some bizarre chance this is the soul you knew as Alaena, she isn’t the same person anymore. You have no idea what this child is like. None.”
“True enough, much as it aches my eager heart.”
There were times when Salamander could irritate Jill beyond belief, and this was one of them. For all that his half-elven blood kept him looking young, he was fifty-some years older than she, but although he’d started studying their mutual craft of the dweomer long before she’d been born, she’d so far overtaken him that she was, in a very real though unspoken way, the master now to his journeyman. Though he acknowledged her authority, which came ultimately from Nevyn himself, it didn’t take dweomer to see that he resented it as well.
“You’re truly angry with me, aren’t you?” Salamander wiped his smile away.
“Ye gods! You promised me you were going to devote yourself to your studies, but you’ve kept finding one cursed distraction after another. Now this! And there’s the lass to consider, too, you know. She’s but a chid.”
“Old enough to have been married for years in Deverry.”
“This isn’t Deverry.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that. Jill, is it me you’re angry with, or is it everything? The delay, I mean. We’ve been wandering round Bardek for months and months, finding but a trace here and there of the things you want to know.”
Jill took a deep breath and considered.
“There’s that, indeed. Patience has never been my right-hand weapon, has it?”
“And now glorious Luvilae has been but another dead trail, a road with no ending, a house with no doors, a—”
“One wretched image is enough, please. But there’s still that bookseller in Ihderat Noa. I have hopes of him.”
“I suppose you’ll want to head back there straightaway.”
“I was thinking of it, truly. Why not? Oh, of course. The lass. I suppose you want to spend a few days sniffing round her.”
“How crudely you put things!” He grinned, tucking, his thumbs into his belt and leaning back against the wall. “But I did think I might take a stroll in the marketplace tonight. No doubt her troupe performs in the evening, when it’s cooler.”

When it came time for the show, it seemed at first that the gods were going to grant them a decent take. In the cool of the evening a big crowd gathered in front of their improvised stage, set up between two trees to support the slack wire. As the men raised the huge standing torches and Marka ran round lighting them, she noticed a number of fairly well-dressed people in the crowd, the kind who looked like they weren’t above throwing some small change to a street performer. Best of all, her father was wide-awake and alert, laughing and joking with the troupe as they gathered backstage. The first turns went well, too, her own juggling, the apprentice tumblers, and Keeta’s routine with the flaming torches. When the troupe broke to sling the slack wire, coins came in a copper shower, but here and there Marka plucked a silver one.
With great ceremony the flute boy and the drummer sat down cross-legged at the edge of the stage, paused a moment, then began the music for the centerpiece of the show, the slack rope routine. Wiping her face on a scarf, Marka stood off to one side and watched the crowd more than the show. Until Orima came along, the slack rope had been her own turn, one she’d learned as a small child from her mother and at which she was particularly skilled. A cow prancing on a string—that’s our Rimi, she thought to herself. Then she saw, standing off toward the back, the barbarian juggler. Her heart thudded, her fingers tightened on the scarf, and she couldn’t understand why in the least, except, perhaps, that he was so handsome. All at once he noticed her watching and smiled right at her. Blushing furiously, hating herself for it, she turned away.
Dressed in a brief but flowing silk tunic over a loincloth, Orima was just approaching the wire-wound rope, which hung between the twin wooden towers of the mounting platforms, a good six feet above the stage itself. With a big smile for crowd she climbed up and did a back flip on the platform. She bowed—several times too many in Marka’s estimation—then took the balance pole and leapt to the rope for a graceful half run across, balancing in the middle. When the crowd cheered and clapped, she executed a good turn, and ran back to the platform so lightly and easily that the crowd yelled in delight. Marka could practically taste her own anger, a black bile in her mouth. As Orima mounted the rope again, she hesitated for the barest second, just the split of a moment too long. The rope swung, then snapped back; her lead foot groped and grabbed—too late. With a shriek she fell, landing spraddled on all fours, unhurt but furious as the crowd burst out laughing. Swearing under his breath Hamil rushed to help her up while the tumblers ran back on stage and hurled themselves into an improvised routine. It was no good. Laughing and chuckling, calling out a few insults, the crowd broke up and drifted away, and they didn’t bother to throw a single coin behind them, not even for good luck.
In a sullen silence, barely able to look at each other, the troupe doused the torches, stripped the stage, and loaded everything into the wagons while Orima cowered under a nearby palm. Marka was frankly terrified, blaming her ill will for the fall even as she told herself, over and over, that such things were impossible. Much to her relief, no one mentioned the fall until they got back to the campground, where Delya and young Rosso were keeping an eye on the tents. While the men tended the horses and wagons, Hamil and the women drifted miserably over to the fire. Delya took one good look at their faces and said nothing. The silence grew until Orima screwed her face in a pout and pointed one painted fingernail at Marka.
“She hexed me!” Orima screeched. “Your precious little daughter hexed me! She’s got the evil eye.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” Hamil snapped. “We all fall now and then.”
“She’s got the evil eye!” Orima stamped one slender foot.
“Will you shut up? If your head wasn’t so empty you might have better balance on the rope.”
“You pig! You filthy rooting hog!”
Orima and Hamil began sneering and screeching in turns. The rest of the troupe rolled eyes heavenward and trotted off, bursting into chatter as soon as they were well away from the slanging match by the fire. Marka raced off after Keeta. She knew how the fight would end; they would suddenly be all kisses and hugs and creep into their tent . . . she didn’t want to think about it. In the moonlight the two women walked along the edge of the cliff and watched the waves foaming below.
“Keeta?” Marka said at last. “You don’t think wishing someone ill can work them ill, do you?”
Keeta laughed, her dark rumble of a bellow as reassuring as a motherly hug.
“No, I most certainly don’t. Why? Feeling a bite of guilt, hum?”
“Well, it sounds silly now.”
“Understandable enough, little one. But don’t vex your soul over it. She fell because she hurried her step, that’s all.” Keeta sighed profoundly. “At least we earned enough to eat for a while.”
“But how are we going to get home? This is the only stinking town on this rotten little island, and they aren’t going to want to watch the cow capering again.”
“Oooh! Nasty little tongue!”
“But I’m right.”
Keeta made a sort of grunt.
“Well, aren’t I right?”
“About the audience, yes. I wouldn’t call Rimi a cow. Your father’s right. We all fall now and then.”
“I never did! And she hates me for it, too. You know what I’m afraid of? That she’ll work on Father, and he’ll sell me to a slave trader. That’d buy passage for all of you, wouldn’t it? I bet I’d fetch a lot.”
“Will you be quiet? That’s the most awful thing I’ve ever heard anyone say! Your father would never do such a thing.”
“Maybe not, but she would.”
Keeta’s silence spoke a scrollful of answers.
In the morning Marka slept late. She shared a tent with Keeta and Delya, but woke to find them long gone, their bedrolls neatly folded and stowed off to one side, the hot sun streaming through the canvas. From outside she could hear voices, laughter and amiable squabbling, snatches of singing and pretend-oaths, all the normal life of the camp. She dressed, found her bone comb, and wandered outside to stand blinking in the sunlight and work at smoothing her tangle of curls. Although everyone else was up and around, there was no sign of her father or Orima. Still in bed, probably. She made a face at the thought.
“There you are!” Keeta called out. “Fresh bread in that basket by the fire pit.”
Together they sat down by a pile of firewood while Marka nibbled at her breakfast.
“I was talking to Vinto,” Keeta said. “He’s worried about money, too. Your father’s been making hints about not having enough to give the acrobats their full wages.”
Marka felt suddenly sick to her stomach.
“But if he shorts them, they’ll leave. They’re good enough to travel on their own.”
“I know. I thought maybe you might have a word with your father. You’ve still got a lot of influence with him.”
“If I say something, the cow will say the opposite, just to be mooing.”
“Marka!” But Keeta hesitated, her mouth twisting in a bitter recognition of the truth. “Maybe I’ll talk to him, then. I was stranded once, with another troupe, years ago now, but I remember it awfully well. Too well. I don’t—” She hesitated again. “Wait a minute. Isn’t that the barbarian?”
His face shaded by a floppy leather hat, the juggler was riding up to the camp on a beautiful—and expensive-looking—gray gelding. He dismounted just outside the circle of tents, stood looking round for a moment, then led his horse over to the fire pit while everyone else in camp strolled over to meet him. Marka felt her heart start pounding when he made them all a lazy bow, just because he was so lithe and graceful.
“Good morning, all,” he announced with a grin. “My name’s Salamander, and I was wondering if I could have a word with the head of your troupe. I might have a business proposition to lay before him.”
“Um, well, he’s still in his tent,” Keeta said. “Should be up anytime now.”
Salamander glanced at the sky as if to check the position of the sun. Vinto and Keeta exchanged significant looks and went on surreptitiously judging the cost of his beautiful clothes and horse gear.
“Well, I’m his daughter,” Marka said. “Maybe you could tell me what you want.”
“Perhaps you can help me, indeed. I was wondering where you were all heading to next, since it would seem that this town no longer provides afresh and profitable field for your talents to cultivate.”
Again Keeta and Vinto glanced at each other, this time with a hint of agony.
“Er, we haven’t exactly decided. Going back to Main Island, maybe, but I’m not sure.”
“I see. Well, my companion and I are less than sure of our next destination, too, you see, and I thought that . . . ” He let his words trail away.
Hamil was crawling out of his tent, and when he stood up, he lurched and swayed so badly that Marka at first thought he was ill. She bolted and ran to steady him, shocked at the inert force of his weight upon her shoulder as he leaned sideways. Dimly she was aware of the camp breaking out into a buzz of talk.
“Papa, what’s wrong?”
For an answer he merely smiled, a slow, secretive smile, and his eyes turned her way slowly, too, all heavy lids and droop. Around him hung a smoky scent, like incense. Marka grunted as the ice-knowledge chilled her to the spine. For a moment she felt the earth turn beneath her.
“It’s the white smoke again. Well, isn’t it? Oh, Papa, you promised!” With a howl she thrust him away.
“Hey.” He staggered and sat down heavily. “Little beast.”
“Not again! Why . . . it was her, wasn’t it? She’s been getting it for you! Curse her guts!”
By then the rest of the troupe was hurrying over. Marka dodged away and ducked into her father’s tent. Naked, on her hands and knees, Rimi was desperately scraping earth over a hole in the dirt floor. The stem of a pipe stuck up through it. Marka grabbed her by the hair, pulled her up, and slapped her across the face. She squealed like a pig and slapped back, all feeble and limp-wristed.
“Filth! You piece of gutter filth!” Marka hit her again. “You’ve been giving my father opium. I should turn you over to the archon. I should kill you.”
Squealing and swearing, Rimi tried to writhe away. Marka went for her throat just as Keeta grabbed her from behind. There was no use struggling in those massive hands.
“Delya, get the little whore dressed and out here!” Keeta dragged Marka back. “You, young lady, are coming with me.”
Outside, the acrobats were mobbing round Hamil, clamoring questions. Keeta marched Marka over to the fire pit, where Salamander was standing and studying the dead coals as if they interested him very much indeed. One or two at a time, the acrobats gave Hamil up as a bad job and drifted over. Marka began to sob convulsively, whether in rage or grief she didn’t quite know. Keeta’s icy voice cut through her hysteria.
“He’s done this before, has he?”
“Not for years. He promised. Why do you think my mother left him?”
“She left you with him?” Vinto broke in.
“He wouldn’t let me go. And he promised to stop. He promised.”
She forced back tears and looked up. Keeta had turned away appalled, shaking her head over and over. Vinto ran both hands through his hair and stared at the ground for a long moment.
“Well,” he said at last. “I’m sorry, little Marka, but me and the boys are pulling out. We can earn enough on our own to get back to Main Island, anyway, and we’ll think of something to do then.” He glanced at Keeta. “You and Delya are welcome to come with us.”
Keeta sighed sharply, hesitated, then looked at Marka.
“Only if you come, too, little one. I can’t just leave you here.”
Marka felt as if her tongue had swelled to block her throat. She could only stare numbly at her friend’s face.
“You little bitch, you viper!” Rimi marched over, dressed now and wrapped in dignity as well. “You’d better go with them! Do you think I’m going to put up with you after this?”
Marka could find nothing to say to her.
“Shut up,” Keeta snapped. “Her father’s got something to say about this.”
“Father will listen to her.” Marka heard her own voice whispering like a stranger’s. “If they do the smoke together, he’ll listen to her. He lost my mother over it, didn’t he?”
She began to cry again, a helpless flutter that she hated for its weakness. Through her tears she saw Rimi leering and gloating, her face swimming like some dark moon. Marka raised her hands and stepped forward; then someone caught her firmly and pulled her back: the barbarian juggler.
“Satisfying though it would be, my turtledove, to rake your nails down her beauty, it would be both unprofitable and a waste of time. The opium itself will claw her for you.”
Rimi swore like a sailor, then turned on her heel and marched off. Marka wriggled free of his lax grasp and wiped her face on her sleeve. When she looked round, there was no sign of Hamil, but from the purposeful way that Rimi was marching toward the palm grove at the edge of the caravanserai, Marka could assume that he’d taken refuge there. Vinto, his acrobats, Keeta and Delya, Salamander as well—Marka was suddenly aware of the way they all were looking at her, as if she were an invalid who just might die.
“You can’t stay with them,” Keeta said at last. “You just can’t. I don’t know what would happen to you, but—”
“I can guess,” Vinto snarled. “She’s not a child anymore, Keeta! She can hear the truth. How long will it be before her pig-dog of a father has her and Rimi selling themselves to keep him in smoke?”
Marka felt the earth lurch again, but she knew what she had to do. Salamander laid a gentle hand on her shoulder to steady her. She shook it off.
“We’d better pack our stuff up,” Marka snapped. “Vinto, at least one horse and wagon should be yours, anyway, for the wages we owe you.” Her voice threatened to break, but she forced it steady. “Maybe if we all pool our coin, we can get a ship back to Main Island today.”
Keeta let out her breath in an explosive puff and muttered a thanks to the Star Goddesses.
“If you wouldn’t mind me joining you with my act,” Salamander said. “We could all travel together, indeed. Shall we repair to the inn where I’ve been staying and have some wine? There shall we foment plans.”
“Glad to,” Vinto said. “We can discuss shares later. First let’s get out of this stinking camp.”
During the slow walk to town, Marka suddenly remembered the fortune-teller. Good luck mixed with disaster, was it? Well, she could see the disaster, all right, but where was the good luck?
At Salamander’s inn the portly landlord moaned and wrung his hands over the very thought of having traveling acrobats in his common room, but the juggler talked him into serving wine and little cakes, such good wine that Marka was impressed. As they sat on cushions round a low table and made awkward conversation, she noticed that Vinto was already beginning to defer to him, only in little ways, but she had the feeling that sooner or later this stranger was going to end up managing the entire troupe. Since they were sitting off to one side, she could whisper to Delya.
“Do you mind everything changing like this?”
“Mind? Oh, if Keeta thinks it’s a good idea, I’ll go along with it. What do you think of this juggler?”
“I don’t know. He’s awfully good-looking.”
“I suppose so. He’s certainly used to taking charge. He said he had a companion, didn’t he? I wonder what she’s like?”
Marka felt so bitterly disappointed that she nearly wept. She’d forgotten that a man like this would have women following him round wherever he went, that he would most certainly never be interested in a gawky girl like her.

Jill first heard of Salamander’s newly acquired troupe of acrobats from the innkeep, who came rushing upstairs to tell her as soon as he had the wine served. All quivering jowls and flapping hands, he bowed repeatedly while he blurted.
“There must be ten of them! They’re probably all thieves! I don’t have room! I don’t know what your—uh—friend was thinking of!”
“Thinking? He probably wasn’t, knowing him. All right, I’ll go down.”
By then several pitchers of wine had gone round, and everyone was giggling and talking a little too loudly as they lounged on cushions round the low table. Jill stood in the doorway for a moment and watched Salamander, beaming at his own generosity, playing host like a Deverry lord. Opposite him sat a pretty young woman who studied him in such a fervent mix of desire and misery that she might well have loved him in her last life.
“Oh, Jill, there you are!” Salamander called out. “Come join us! My friends, this is Gilyan of Brin Toraedic, a wandering scholar, who has honored my humble self by traveling with me as she searches out rare manuscripts. She’s on a special commission from the scholar-priests of Wmmglaedd, a mysterious and magical isle in the far-off kingdom.”
The troupe greeted this cascade of blather with honest awe, the men rising to bow to her, the women bobbing their heads her way, except for Marka, who merely stared. The gray-haired fellow sitting next to Salamander started to get up and cede her his seat, but Jill waved him back.
“I just need a word with Salamander,” she said. “Not that it’s possible to have but a single word.”
At the jab he winced, but he scrambled up and followed her out to the courtyard where they could talk privately. Jill perched on the edge of a tiled fountain and glared at him.
“I wanted to travel quietly.”
“Um, well, yes. I do remember you mentioning something of the sort. But we’ll be safer with a large group.”
“I wasn’t aware we were in any danger.”
Salamander sighed and sat down next to her.
“Let’s have the truth.” Jill changed into Deverrian to doubly insure privacy. “You’re doing this to have a chance at the lass, aren’t you?”
“Bit more to it than that!”
She raised one eyebrow.
“Jill, they needed my aid! The leader of their band had spent all their coin on the white smoke, and there they were, stranded far from home in a town where they’d never earn another copper.”
“Your heart’s big enough to embrace the world and your tongue to cover it, too. I still say it’s the lass who inspired this outburst of compassion.”
“Imph, well.” He held up his hand and flicked drops from his fingertips. “Well. Imph.” Then he looked up with one of his sunny grins. “But since you want to talk with that bookseller in Inderat Noa again, we’ve got to go back to Main Island anyway, and travel across its less-than-glorious reaches, so they might as well travel with us.”
“Oh, I suppose so! And the lass will doubtless be better off with you to look after her than she would be on her own.”
Salamander grabbed her hand and kissed it.
“My humble thanks, O Princess of Powers Perilous!”
Jill snatched her hand away and stood up, shaking her head more at herself for indulging him than him for wanting to be indulged. Later, though, when she heard Marka’s story of traveling with her addicted father and his jealous young wife, she decided that she’d done the right thing. The child was better off with them. Certainly the members of the troupe agreed. Late that evening, after the muttering innkeep had found them all rooms and served a grudged dinner, Jill was walking out in the cooler air of the courtyard when Keeta joined her, carrying a pierced tin candle-lantern.
“I just wanted to thank you for allowing Salamander to take us on like this. If he weren’t advancing us the passage home, I don’t know what we’d do.”
“Well, it was his decision, but you’re all welcome enough.”
“Oh, please!” Keeta laughed, a pleasant if rather deep chuckle. “It’s obvious that you do the deciding around here, no matter how much he talks, and by the Star Goddesses themselves, he does a lot of talking, doesn’t he? But I’m glad that we’ll be taking Marka away from her father before she gets cold feet and runs back to him.”
“Kin ties are hard to break, and she’s very young.”
“Um.” Keeta sat down on the edge of the tiled fountain. Even sitting while Jill stood, she looked Jill straight in the face. “She’s a wise child, old beyond her years—well, in most things, that is. When it comes to others . . . ”
Jill waited, not quite sure of her drift. Keeta frowned at the dappled lantern light on the water.
“I’ve seen it happen before,” Keeta said at last. “A young girl same in the same troupe with some good-looking man. Sometimes there’s trouble over it—trouble for her, anyway. I intend to talk some sense into her head. You don’t need to worry about her making a fool of herself over vour man.”
“What?” Jill burst out laughing. “Let me assure you that Salamander’s nothing of the sort! He’s more like a brother to me than anything.”
“Oh! Well, that takes care of half the problem, then.”
“And the other half is?”
“I’d hate to see little Marka pregnant and deserted.”
“He wouldn’t do that. Oddly enough. He looks like the sort of man who’d leave with never a backward glance, but he’s not. I’ll give him a fair bit of credit—he’s got more honor around women than most men do.”
“Wouldn’t be hard, huh?” Keeta considered for a long moment before she smiled. “Well, that eases my mind, I must say. I didn’t want to see the child get free of one mess only to land in another.”
Although Keeta took the lantern and went back inside, Jill lingered in the cooler air. By then the moon, just past her full, had sailed tover her zenith and was beginning to sink off to the west. The silver light fell dappled through the sparse trees and danced on the mcoving surface of the fountain. As Jill watched, the light seemed to thicken and take shape like the drift of smoke over a dying campfire. At first she assumed that it was merely some of the Wildfolk in a semimaterialized form, playing in the water; then she realized that the waft of palpable light was swirling, growing, stretching upward as it spiraled round to make a silver pillar some ten feet high and four across. Inside the pillar, glowing all silver, stood a vaguely elven shape, not as solid as water, yet more so than a beam of light.
Jill raised her hands palm-out and chest-high, then spoke in greetings the magical names of the Lords of Water, for she thought that this being was one of the elemental kings. Yet as the form thickened within the pillar of light, she realized that it belonged to an elven woman, familiar-looking at that, with a long mane of silvery-blond hair and steel-colored eyes.
“Dallandra! How did—” Jill was too surprised to say more
Dressed in an elven tunic and a pair of leather trousers, Dallandra seemed almost solid as she stood hovering over the water in the basin. Jill had never seen her so clearly before. She could pick out the separate curls and masses of her hair, see the folds of cloth in her tunic, and just make out a pale shard of landscape behind her, a grassy meadow and a single tree. Round her neck Dallandra was wearing on a golden chain a single large amethyst carved into some ornamental shape—or so Jill thought of it. Yet when she spoke, Jill heard her voice only as a thought.
“Jill! What are you doing here?”
“Trying to find out the meaning of the word inside the rose ring. Do you remember it? The one Rhodry Maelwaedd has.”
“Of course I do. That’s why I’ve been looking for you.” She frowned, staring down at something near her feet that Jill couldn’t see. “But I meant, why are you in Bardek?”
“You know where I am? How?”
“I can see your surroundings, and they match what I’ve been told about the islands. But please, I don’t have much time.”
“Well, it seems that some of the People may have fled south after the Great Burning, and there might be some still living far to the south of here. I’ve found a map, you see, that shows islands out beyond Anmurdio, and some histories that indicate there were once elves in Bardek. I’ve come to look for them.”
Dallandra gasped, and the surprise broke her concentration. Her form began to fade as the pillar of light changed to a thick pillar of smoke, swirling silver in the moonlight.
“Dallandra!” Without thinking Jill was on her feet and shooting. “Dalla! Wait! How did you get here?”
With one last swirl the pillar seemed to blow away, smoke on the wind, a thickening of moonlight, then gone.
For a long time Jill sat on the bench, and did some hard thinking. Dallandra was a dweomermaster of great power who, some hundreds of years earlier, had linked her Wyrd to that of the strange race of beings known as the Guardians. Jill had last seen her back in the Westlands a thousand miles away and, more significantly, far across the ocean, Working dweomer across any body of water is impossible, because the exhalations of elemental and the astral vibrations break up an image as fast as even the best dweomermaster can build it. Other dweomermasters had told Jill many a time that Dallandra had long left ordinary physical existence behind, even though none of them knew exactly in what state she did exist. At best she was semicorporeal, a thing of etheric substance only, which would make her even more vulnerable to the water forces than an ordinary magically produced shape or image. Yet here she was, or at the least some clear projection of her, coming through onto the physical plane. It was more of a puzzle than Jill could solve.
When she went back inside, she paused for a moment at the door of the common room and watched Salamander lounging at a table with a half-empty wine cup in his slender hands and smiling as he listened to the talk and jests flying like juggling clubs among the troupe of acrobats. He’s probably been lonely, Jill thought. The gods all know that I’m poor enough company when I’ve got some working at hand. Yet her annoyance lingered, that he’d distract himself from his studies this way. She had, after all, promised Nevyn that she would oversee his dweomer training and do her best to get him to work up to his potential. In her mind, any promise she’d made to Nevyn was a sacred charge.

Dallandra had come to Bardek searching for Jill, or to be precise, she’d been searching for Jill on the inner planes and traced her to a place that had turned out to be Bardek. Judging from the way that Time ran in that world in which she was experiencing Time, it had only been a few weeks since she’d left her dweomermaster of a husband, Aderyn of the Silver Wings, back in the Westlands, although she knew, of course, that it was well over two hundred years as men and elves reckoned the span. Even though she was aware of the split between the two time flows, it was hard to keep track of small variations. It seemed to her that she’d last seen Jill the day before, when in truth it had been nearly three years. During that last meeting, Jill had asked her about the rose ring’s secret and she’d tried to find the answer for the human dweomerwoman.
“I’d forgotten about the lapse of time,” she remarked to Evandar. “She was so surprised that I’d remember.”
“Eventually you’ll grow used to the ebb and flow, and you’ll see why we don’t concern ourselves with the affairs of that world of yours. It all speeds by, like light on a running stream.”
“So it must. How many of their years is a day here?”
“What? How would I know?”
“Haven’t you ever thought to work it out?”
“Whatever for? Besides, it changes, how fast things flow.”
“It changes? Well, there’s a bother, then. On what principle?”
“On what?”
“Well, I mean, there must be some sort of rule or regular order to the way the changes come and go.”
Evandar merely looked at her, slack-mouthed and wondering. Dallandra considered and tried again.
“What about bard lore? Would there be any old sayings about Time among your people?”
“In summer the sun runs fast as a girl through the sky,” he said and promptly. “In winter like an old woman she goes halt and slow.”
“I’ve never noticed it being winter here.”
“Oh, but it has been. You can tell by the way Time limps. Now in the heat of the summer she moves like a bird on the wing.”
“’And what about spring and autumn? Are there any sayings about them?
“About spring, no, but there’s one day in the fall of the year when our time and their time coincides.”
“And that is?”
“In the land of men, it’s the day between years.”
“A day between years? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
He merely shrugged indifferently. They were sitting that evening—or seemed to be sitting—on a grassy hilltop, looking down into shifting mists that alternately covered, then revealed a plain crisscrossed by rivers and dotted with thickets. Far off on the horizon a moon was rising, bloated and golden.
“I don’t understand why you won’t tell me what that word inside the ring means.”
“I don’t understand why myself, but I’m still not going to tell you.” He caught her hand and kissed it. “Why do you want to help this human woman, anyway?”
“Because she’s going to help us. She promised me that she’d look after the child when it’s born, and in return, it’s only common courtesy to help her find out what she needs to know.”
“But it’s a riddle, and one of my best riddles, and I’ll not tell her the answer.”
For a moment she considered him, this strange creature who was in a stranger way her lover now. Although he looked like an elf in most ways, his hair was the yellow of daffodils, no natural blond, his lips were as red as sour cherries, and his eyes were a startling turquoise-blue, as artificial as one of the colors that elven craftsmen grind to decorate tents.
“This island to the south, now,” Evandar said in a moment. “That does interest me. Would you like to help her find it? That I will do for her, in return for her help when the child is birthed.”
“Bless you, my love. I would, indeed.”
“Splendid! You go tell her while I look for the island.”
“I will, but I think I’ll find Elessario first and take her along. She should be right nearby.”
And so, thanks to the vagaries of Time, it was some weeks in Jill’s world before Dallandra appeared to her again.

In the meanwhile, the troupe of traveling players, with Jill and Salamander tagging along, left Zama Mañae behind. The main island of the Orystinnian archipelago is shaped rather like an animal, with the head pointing due north and the long tail of a peninsula filing some fifty miles off to the south. Once the troupe reached Arbarat, the city at the tail’s tip, they had a long, slow journey north with their tumble-down wagons and elderly horses to the next large cjty, Inderat Noa on the western coast of the animal’s body. Marka was delighted when Salamander insisted that she leave the bumpy wagon and ride on his horse, which he then led, walking nearby in the sunny road. They stopped often, of course, to perform in the smaller towns and marketplaces along the way. In every marketplace Salamander bought something for the troupe, a length of silk for a costume here, or a brand-new set of painted leather clubs for the acrobats there, out of his own always substantial earnings.
“It takes coin to earn coin,” he would say. “And between us, Yinto and I are going to make this troupe the most splendid show in all of Orystinna.”
Marka would merely smile and think that Salamander could no doubt do anything in the whole world if he set his mind to it.
With Orima left behind and gone, Marka reclaimed the star turn on the slack rope. It was some compensation, she supposed, for losing her father, although, as the days went by, she was startled to find that she missed him very little. While Haniil had never treated her badly, he’d never treated her particularly well, either. What she did miss was the fact of having a father, a family, a place or connection in the world, From now on the troupe—or some troupe much like it—would be the only family she would have, just as their troupes were for so many of the wandering performers of the Bardekian islands. She comforted herself by thinking that at least she had Keeta and Delya, whom she’d known for six whole years, practically a lifetime in the fluid world of traveling shows.
And then, of course, there was Salamander, whom she found more than compensation enough. She would pick out a place at a safe distance to sit and watch him for hours on end, whether he was performing or practicing or merely standing by the campfire and eating his dinner. Most times she was afraid to approach him. Once though, when he was working with the silk scarves, he noticed her watching and called her over.
“Want to learn how to throw these?” he said.
“Yes, I would.” She was surprised at herself for speaking so easily. “If you wouldn’t mind taking the time to show me how.”
“Not in the least, not in the least.”
After that, she had a legitimate excuse to spend several hours a day in his company, though every now and then, she would notice Keeta or Jill giving them a less-than-approving look.
After one of their practice sessions, he told her that his real name was Ebañy, but he made her promise to keep it a secret from everyone else—which gave her a moment of cold doubt Even though she was thoroughly besotted with him, Marka was shrewd enough to realize that he was keeping some rather strange truths to himself. Whenever he spoke of the barbarian kingdom in the north, his stories grew guarded. He never mentioned his family or a home city; he never told anyone why or how he’d become a street performer.
“Do you think he’s maybe the outcast son of one of their nobles?” Marka remarked to Keeta one night. “Maybe he’s even a prince in disgrace.”
Keeta snorted.
“The disgrace I’d believe quick enough.”
“Oh, don’t be mean! But you know, sometimes I wonder if he’s married.”
“Marka my dear, you do have a good head on your shoulders, don’t you? But no, I asked Jill, and she said he wasn’t.”
“Oh, I’m so glad! We can trust what Jill says, can’t we?”
“There’s something about Jill, my dear, that makes me think we could trust her with our lives.” Keeta frowned, nipping her lower lip in thought. “I feel like a fool for saying it, but there you are.”
Marka barely paid attention to this last remark, but she found the news about Ebañy sweeter than the finest wine or purest honey. For days she savored it, bringing out the thought that no other woman had a claim on him. Yet, he remained distant, brotherly at the most, until she reached the bitter conclusion that he merely felt sorry for her.
The day before they reached Inderat Noa, the troupe came upon a public caravanserai beside the road. Although they could have made a few more miles before dark, and the city lay only about five miles ahead, they decided to camp early rather than risk being shut out of the gates by arriving late. Once the horses were tended and the tents raised, Marka went looking for Ebañy. Off to one side of the campground stood some scruffy holm oaks round a spring and a series of stone fountains, provided for travelers by the archons of Inderat Noa. As she walked up, Marka saw him sitting with Jill, and something about the tense set of their shoulders made her hesitate. When Ebañy saw her, he gave such a guilty start and smiled in such a nervous way that she realized they’d been talking about her. All at once she felt about eight years old; she was blushing—she was sure of it. Without a word she turned and ran for the camp, dodged into her tent, and threw herself down onto her blankets for a good cry.

“Whatever happened to the girl’s mother, anyway?” Jill said.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know,” Keeta said. “She was long gone when I joined Hamil’s troupe. It was quite a large show in those days.”
They were sitting on a stone bench under some trees in Inderat Noa’s marketplace, a big and elegant open square with fountains and little cobbled walkways between the groups of stalls and booths. Afternoon heat danced and shimmered over the paving like the water mist over the fountains. Not too far away Salamander and Vinto were haggling with a pair of archon’s men about a performance permit.
“I did hear that Marka’s mother went back to Mangortinna,” Keeta went on. “I think she was born there.”
“I see. I don’t understand why she didn’t take her daughter with her.”
“How could she? She and Hamil were legally married and all.”
“Well, what—”
“Oh, wait! You speak so well that I keep forgetting you’re a foreigner. Under our laws a child’s her father’s property. The mother has no say in anything, really, unless he gives her one.” Keeta frowned briefly. “One reason why I made my mind up never to marry.”
“I can understand that. Mangortinna, huh? Well, if she went back home, we’d probably never find her, even if we did try.”
“What do you want to find her for?”
“Oh, it’s probably just sentimentality on my part, but I feel like I should . . . well, consult her, I suppose. You see, Salamander wants to marry Marka.”
“Marry her? Actually legally marry her?”
“Yes, just that.”
“Well, that’s wonderful! He’s the kind of man who could take good care of her, and she certainly wants to marry him.”
Jill laughed.
“You were just telling me how awful marriage is.”
“For me, it would be, but I know that the way I’ve chosen to live my life isn’t right for every woman. I was really afraid that Marka was going to end up unmarried and pregnant, no matter what you said about his morals.”
“So far he hasn’t laid a hand on her.”
“So far. She’s a pretty little thing, after all.”
“True, and even more to the point with our Salamander, she worships him.”
“Imph. What’s wrong with them getting married?”
“Well, he’s a good bit older than her, more so than you’d ever think to look at him. And then, well . . . ” She hesitated, unsure of how to explain, of how much she could explain.
Someone called their names. Waving the permit, Salamander came strolling over to them, and Jill let the subject drop. Vinto looked extremely pleased about something, himself.
“We shall be setting up our fabulous cavalcade of wonders on the East Square,” Salamander said. “Not only is said square paved and thus quite level, but it’s in the more prosperous quarter of town. We had best return to camp and tell the others of our good fortune. And I want to see how Delya and Marka are getting on with finishing those new costumes.”
“I’m going to stay in town,” Jill broke in. “I want to go see the bookseller, and then I’m supposed to consult with the priests of Dalae-oh-contremo again.”
Although Inderat Noa sported several grand public squares, most of the streets twisted like tunnels under arcades of houses and shops, built right out over them for the shade. As Jill made her way through this dim warren she attracted a crowd of Wildfolk, the big purple-striped gnomes peculiar to Bardek, scurrying along after her on their fat little legs. Although her usual gray fellow did materialize, he took a smaller form than usual, so that he could ride upon her shoulder and look down upon the purple gnomes with a lordly disdain. None of the other people in the crowded street could see her companions, of course, although every now and then some passerby suddenly looked down and frowned at what seemed empty air as a gnome bumped into him or brushed rudely past.
The bookseller, however, could see them quite well, because he’d studied the dweomer lore for some thirty years. Daeno’s little shop was wedged in between a fruit seller’s and a basket weaver’s down on a dead-end alley perfumed with lemons and drying grass. When Jill and her crew crowded through the door into the blessedly cool shop, the old man came shuffling forward to greet them all, waggling a finger at the gnomes and warning them to keep their little clawed paws off the rare scrolls and codices stacked up high all round.
“I’ve found the map,” he announced. “My boy just got back with it. Its owner let it go cheap, by the way. It’s not much of a collector’s item.”
The piece of pounded bark paper was about two feet long by a foot and a half wide, all torn and filthy round the edges, and flecked with what looked like ancient wine drops overall. At the very top of the map lay the faded outline of Main Island’s tail and the tiny islands just to the south; off to the left lay the Anmurdian archipelago in somewhat darker ink.
“Now, Anmurdio is much farther off than this map makes it look,” Daeno remarked. “So who knows how far away these are.”
He laid one bony finger on the “these” in question, a group of four islands, drawn entirely too circular to be accurate, floating far to the south of Anmurdio. Out in the middle of the ocean in between, the scribe had drawn a sea serpent and a fat monster with big fangs. Daeno picked up the map and flipped it over to reveal several lines of tiny, spiky writing, faded to a pale brown, on the back.
“Vairo the merchant made this map by the grace of the Star Goddesses in the reign of Archon Trono. That was in 977 by Deverry reckoning, Jill, well, give or take a year, anyway.”
“You have my sincere thanks for going to all this trouble.”
“You’re most welcome. I’m afraid it’s not much of a map.”
“It’s better than no map at all, and it’ll be something to show round once we get to Anmurdio.”
“You know, there are supposed to be cannibals in the smaller islands.”
“Just like there’s supposed to be sea serpents out in the southern ocean?”
Daeno laughed, nodding his head in agreement while he rolled up the map.
“The thing is,” Jill went on. “I’m never going to get a merchant here on Main Island to risk his ship and his fortune on some daft scheme of sailing to the far south. Or well, there was one, but he has a wife and three children, and I couldn’t let him. I just couldn’t.”
“Of course not.” Daeno paused to swat at the gnomes, who were scurrying this way and that on the counter. “I’m surprised you found anyone at all. Who was it, by the bye? A local man?”
“No, a merchant up in Orysat, Kladyo by name.”
“Elaeno’s boy?”
“The very one! Do you know—oh, of course you’d know Elaeno!”
“Well, not intimately or anything, but we’ve met in the flesh and then, of course, out on the etheric we run into one another from time to time. Hum, am I right in this? I heard that his master in the dweomer was a Deverry man.”
“That’s true, and it was the same person who taught me. Nevyn, his name was.”
Daeno whistled under his breath. The gnomes all went dead-still to listen.
“Not the Nevyn?” the old man said. “Oh, listen to me! There could only be one!”
“You’ve heard of him, then?”
“What?” Daeno laughed aloud. “Every dweomerworker in these parts has heard of Nevyn! He spent years and years in the islands, you know, over the last two hundred years or so. He’d turn up for twenty, thirty years at a time, then disappear again for even longer. Probably sailed back home to your kingdom. You must know all about it.”
In fact, Jill didn’t, and she was rather surprised to find it out now. Daeno went blithely on.
“But to get back to the problem in hand, if you want to sail south, I suppose that Anmurdio’s the best place to look for a ship.”
When Jill arrived back at the caravanserai, she found the troupe hard at work, readying costumes and props for the evening show. Salamander himself was sitting on the bed of a wagon with his feet dangling over the edge like a farm boy and whittling like one as well. On a piece of driftwood shaped much like a bird, he was carving details.
“It’ll be a fine thing to juggle with.” In illustration he tossed it spinning and caught it again in the same hand. “And I know what you’re thinking, O Mistress of Magicks Marvelous, that if only I spent this much time and ingenuity, to say naught of cleverness, craft, wit, and willingness upon the dweomer, I should soon match you.”
“Surpass me, more like. You’ve got the fluid natural talent that I never had.”
“Oh, please, tease me not and mock me neither.”
“Naught of the sort. I’ve had to work blasted hard for everything I’ve accomplished, while it comes easy to you. I suppose—no, I know—that’s why I get so sour with you.”
“Oh.” He considered the wooden bird with a frown. “Well, that does put a different complexion on things, truly. Jill, you have my apologies. I try to control my frivolous nature, but it’s just somewhat I was born with, I fear me.”
“It’s somewhat that could be overcome.”
He shrugged and went back to refining a small burl that resembled a wing.
“Ebañy, I just don’t understand you.”
“I don’t understand myself.”
“Would you please not put me off?”
He looked up, abruptly solemn, yet she couldn’t tell if he were sincere or merely arranging the expression she wanted to see.
“Dweomer means everything to you, doesn’t it?” he said.
“It does. More than meat and drink, more than life.”
“More than love.”
“Unquestionably, considering.”
“Alas, my poor brother! I don’t suppose he’ll ever understand why you chose the dweomer over him. No more do I suppose that you particularly care if he does or not.”
“That’s not fair.”
He winced at the bite in her voice.
“Look.” Jill tried another tack. “I know the basic exercises and suchlike can be tedious. Why, when I was learning all the proper calls and salutes for the elemental kings and lords, I thought I’d go out of my mind from sheer boredom. But it’s been more than worth it. Now I can travel where I will in their worlds and see the marvels there. But you know about that. You’ve had a taste of it yourself. I simply can’t understand how you wouldn’t want more.”
“I don’t have your devotion to the art.”
“Oh, horseshit!”
“Ah, the silver dagger’s daughter still!” He looked up from his work with a grin, then let it fade. “But horseshit it’s not, my friend, my dear and treasured companion. Jill, when you want somewhat, you’re so single-minded that it takes my breath away. The rest of the world’s not like that.”
“I’m not talking about the rest of the world.”
“Oh, very well, then. I’m not like that.”
Jill hesitated, struggling to understand.
“Well,” he went on. “You had your own doubts about taking up the art, didn’t you?”
“True spoken. But that’s when I didn’t know what it offered. You do know. I honestly don’t see how you could get so far and then give it up.”
“Ah. It’s because you do the work out of love, while I have only duty and grim obligation as my whip and spur.”
“You honestly and truly don’t love the dweomer work?”
“I should have thought that such would be obvious after all these years.”
She knew him well enough to know that he was skirting the edge of a lie.
“Well here, consider this.” Salamander spoke quickly, before she could pin him down. “Wasn’t your father the greatest swordsman in all Deverry? Didn’t he gain great glory for himself wherever he rode—the silver dagger, the lowly outcast of a silver dagger, who put the best fighting men in the kingdom to shame? But did he relish that life? Did he revel in his glory and his position? Far from it!”
“Well, true spoken. What are you driving at?”
“Only that a man may have great skill and talent and not give a pig’s fart about the life they lead him to.”
“And do you feel that way about the dweomer?”
“Not exactly, literally, precisely, or even in substance. A mere example only.”
But at that exact moment his thumb slipped on the knife, and he sliced his hand. With a yelp he tossed both bird and blade onto the wagon bed and started cursing himself and his clumsiness. Blood welled and ran.
“You’d better let me bind that for you,” Jill said. “I hope that wretched knife was clean.”
“Doesn’t matter. The cut’s deep enough to wash itself out.”
It was, too, though mercifully not deep enough to cause permanent harm. Later Jill was to remember that accident and its unconscious confession only to curse herself for not seeing the meaning at the time.

Among the Host, Evandar’s people, Dallandra searched on a sunny day through a meadow, bright with flowers of red and gold. In their bright clothes and golden jewelry, the Host too bloomed like flowers amid the tall green grass, and as always, their exact numbers eluded her. Even in the sunlight of a summer noon, shadow wrapped them round, blurring the boundaries that define a person for us in our world. Out of the corner of her eye she would see a pair of young girls, sitting gossiping on the grass, turn to look and find a bevy giggling together, then rising to run away like a flock of birds taking flight. Or it would seem that under the shade of an enormous tree a band of minstrels played, their conjoint music so sweet that it pierced her heart, yet she would find but one man with a single lute. Like flames in a fire or ripples in a stream, they became distinct and separate only to fall back again and meld.
Some of the Host, though, remained discrete, with minds and personalities of their own. Evandar himself, of course, and his daughter, Elessario, were the two she knew best, but there were others, men and women both, who wore names and faces like a mark of honor. In the dancing sunlight they waved in greeting or called out some pleasant remark as she made her way across.
“Have you seen Elessario?” she would ask, but always the answer was no.
By the meadow’s edge a river flowed, and at that moment it flowed broad and smooth. At other times she had seen it narrow and churning with white water or come upon it to find a swamp and nothing more, but at the moment the broad water sparkled in the sun, and green rushes stood at the bank like sword blades stuck into a treaty ground. Out among them on one leg stood a white heron.
“Elessario!”
The heron turned its head to consider her with one yellow eye, then rippled like the water and became a young woman with impossibly yellow hair, wading naked to the bank. Dallandra offered a hand and helped her clamber out. Elessario picked up a tunic from the grassy bank and pulled it over her head. Although at first glance she seemed beautiful, with human ears but elven eyes, at second glance one noticed that the eyes were as yellow as her hair, cat-slit with emerald-green, and that her smile revealed sharp-pointed teeth.
“Did you need me for something, Dalla?”
“I did. Come see something with me.”
Hand in hand like mother and child they wandered downriver, looking for Bardek. Here in the world of the Guardians, as the elves named Evandar’s people, images could become real rather easily, that is, for those with minds trained to build them. First Dallandra created an image of Jill in her mind, as clear and as detailed as possible; then she moved this image out through her eyes onto the landscape—a mental trick, that, and not true dweomer, strange though it sounds to those who don’t know how to do it. These mental images were lifeless things, even in this world, and broke up fast like a picture imagined in a cloud or a fire. Every now and then, though, one image would linger for a while longer or seem brighter and more solid. With a fascinated Elessario trailing after, Dallandra would walk to that spot and cast another round of images. Every time, one of the new crop would become solid and endure long enough to point out the next step of their journey.
As they followed these clues, the landscape changed round them. The river narrowed, ran shallow; the lush grass withered till brown and dry. They passed big boulders, pushing up through thin earth, and eventually found a graveled road, leading forward into mist. All at once, twilight turned the world an opalescent gray, shot with lavender.
“Here we are,” Dallandra said. “Come look at a city of men.”
In the mist they seemed to float, like birds hovering on the wind, then spiraled down and down in ever-twisting arcs till at last the mist vanished in a starry sky. Below lay a white city, shimmering in the heat of a Bardek evening. Here and there in the dark streets a gold point of light bobbed along, a lantern carried in someone’s hand. Down in the center of town a vast sea of lamps flickered among the brightly colored banners and booths of the public market. Around this small geometry of streets and light stretched the dark and arid plain out to a horizon glowing faint green with the last of sunset. With a little gasp of delight Elessario began gliding down, following the drift of music that came to them, but Dallandra caught her arm.
“Not now, I’m afraid. It is lovely, isn’t it?”
“Shall I see marvels like this once I’ve been born, Dalla?”
“Well, yes,” Dallandra hesitated, caught between truth and sadness. “But you know, they probably won’t seem so marvelous, You’ll take them for granted, then, like we all do.”
One last image of Jill pointed their way to a caravanserai out on the edge of town. Among a scatter of palm trees horses and mules drowsed at tether, and human beings wandered back and forth. Fires bloomed here and there, but far off to one side a silver-blue pillar of water force, glowing like a beacon to guide them down, rose from a fountain. Beside it, sitting with her feet tucked under her on a little beach, was Jill. To Dallandra it seemed that they walked up to her in the usual manner, but judging from the way Jill yelped in surprise, she must have seen them appear all at once.
“Jill, I’ve brought Elessario. She’s the one who’ll lead her people into our world.”
“You’re very brave, then, Elessario.” Jill got up to greet them. “I salute you.”
The child stared back, all solemn eyes and sudden shyness.
“Does she truly understand what all this means, Dalla?” Jill went on.
“I hope so.”
“You’d best make sure of it. To put this burden on someone without them truly knowing what they’re doing is—”
“But, Jill, if they don’t come through, her people will die. Fade away. Vanish. And until one makes the journey, none will.”
“But still, she needs to know what—”
“I’ll do my best to tell her. To make her understand.”
“Good.”
For a moment they considered each other. Although Dallandra could only wonder what she might look like to Jill, to her the human dweomerwoman seemed made of colored glass, glowing and shimmering as they peered at each other across a gulf of worlds. Such niceties as facial expressions and nuances of voice simply refused to come clear, yet Dallandra could feel Jill’s urgency as a barb in an old wound of guilt. As she turned inward to her own thoughts, she began to lose the vision entirely: Jill’s image flattened, then dwindled as if it were rapidly flying away.
“Jill!” she called out. “The islands! Evandar will look for them!”
She had no way of knowing if Jill had heard her. All round them in a rushy vortex the worlds spun by, green and gold, white and red, faces and parts of faces, words and names flung into a purple wind, strange beings and glimpses of landscapes, round and round, faster and faster, yet flowing always upward. She clutched Elessario’s hand tight in both of hers and swept her along as they tumbled, spun, flew higher, ever higher through a rush of voices and images, until at last, with a crack like the strike of a sword on a wooden shield, they fell into the grass of the river meadow, where the Host was dancing in the summer sun. Elessario rolled over onto her back and began to laugh.
“Oh, that was exciting! It was truly a splendid sort of game! Will being born be like that, Dalla?”
“Yes, but backward. That is, you’ll go down and down instead of up.”
“And where will I come out, then?” Elessario sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees.
“To a place where it’s all warm and dark and safe, where you’ll sleep for a long time.” Dallandra had told her this story a hundred times before, but the girl loved hearing it. “Then you’ll find yourself in a bright place, and someone will hold you, and you’ll really, really know what love is. But it won’t all be easy, Elli my sweet. It truly won’t.”
“You told me about the hard bits. Pain and blood and slime.” She frowned, looking across the flowered fields. “I don’t want to hear about them again now, please.”
Dalla felt her heart wrench, wondering for the thousandth time if she were doing the right thing, if indeed she had enough knowledge to do the right thing for this strange race, trapped in a backwash, a killing eddy of the river of Time. Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when they were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, “stayed behind.” Without the discipline of the worlds of form, they were doomed, but after so long in the magical lands they’d found—or created, she couldn’t be sure which—the stinking, aching, grieving inertia called life seemed hateful to them. One by one, they would wink out and die, sparks flown too far from the fire, unless someone led them down into the world. I’m too ignorant, Dalla thought. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t have enough power, I’m doing this for the wrong reasons, I can’t, I’ll fail, I’ll never be able to save them.
Unfortunately, there was no one but her to so much as try.

The vendor had spread his wares out in the shade near a public fountain. An old man, with pale brown skin and lank white hair, he sat on his heels behind a small red rug and stared out at the crowd unblinking, unmoving, as if he cared not at all if anyone bought his wares. Neatly arrayed in front of him were three different kinds of fortune-telling sets, ranging from a stack of flimsy beaten bark packets filled with cheap wooden tiles to a single beautifully painted bone set in a carved wooden box with bronze hinges. Marka counted her coins out twice, but still, she didn’t have enough money for even the cheapest version. As she reluctantly hid her pouch again inside her tunic, the old man deigned to look her way.
“If you’re meant to have them, the coin will come,” he remarked. “They have the power to pick out their true owners.”
“Really, good sir?”
“Really.” He leaned forward and ran a gnarled hand over the lid of the bronze-fitted box. “I’ve sold these sets for years, traveling round Orystinna, and I’ve come to know all about them. Now, the cheap things, they have no power whatsoever. A man I know up in Orysat brings them in from Bardektinna by the crateful. They’re slave-made, I suppose. And those there in the cloth sacks, well, they’re good enough, especially for a beginner. But every now and then a really fine set comes my way, like these. You can just feel, somehow, that they’re different.”
He picked out a tile and held it faceup in his palm. It was the prince of birds, exquisitely carved with a flare of wing and a long beak; into the graved lines the craftsman had rubbed some sort of blue and green dye, staining the bone beyond the power of fingers to rub it away. As she looked at it, Marka felt a peculiar sensation, that somehow she recognized that tile, that in fact she recognized the whole set and particularly its box.
“There’s a wine stain on the bottom,” she said, and then was horrified to realize she’d spoken aloud.
“Well, so there is.” The vendor made the admission unwillingly. “But it’s just a little one, and it’s faded, too. It hasn’t hurt the tiles any.”
In the hot summer day Marka turned icy-cold. She managed to smile, then stood up. All she could think of was running away from the box of tiles. When someone touched her shoulder from behind, she screamed.
“Well, a thousand apologies!” It was Ebañy, half laughing, half concerned. “I thought you’d seen me come up. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Oh, well, I was just, uh, well, talking with this man. He, uh, has these interesting things for sale.”
Ebañy glanced down and went as wide-eyed as a child. When he knelt down for a better look, she wanted to scream at him and beg him to come away. Yet, when he gestured at her to join him, she knelt beside him, as close as she dared. He picked the knave of flowers out of the box and held it up to let the golden blossoms catch the light. With an eye for Ebañy’s expensively embroidered shirt of the finest linen, the vendor leaned forward, all smiles.
“The young lady found those most interesting, sir.”
“Oh, I’m sure she did.” Ebañy was smiling, but his gray eyes were oddly cold and distant, like a flash of steel. “Tell me, where did you buy these?”
“From a merchant up in Delinth, last year it was. He’d won them in a gambling game, he told me, over on Surtinna. He trades there regularly.”
“You don’t happen to remember what city he got them in, do you?” Ebañy put back the knave and picked up a careless handful of other tiles. Seeing them lying in his long, pale fingers made Marka feel like fainting, but why, she couldn’t say.
“Um, well.” The vendor thought for a moment. “Wylinth, maybe, but I wouldn’t swear to that. I’ve talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of tales since then.”
“Of course. How much do you want for them?”
“Ten zotars.”
“Huh, and the moon would cost me only twelve! Two zotars.”
“What! The box alone is worth that.”
“But it’s got that wine stain on the bottom. Three zotars.”
As they went on haggling, enjoying themselves thoroughly, Marka could barely listen. Ebañy knew about the stain, too, just as she somehow knew, when neither of them had picked the box up and looked at the bottom. She was sorry she’d ever stopped to chat with the vendor, sorry she’d wanted the set of tiles, even sorrier he was buying them—and then it occurred to her that he was buying them just for her, just because he knew she wanted them. When he happened to glance her way and smile, she felt as if she would die from happiness. At last five zotars changed hands, and Ebañy settled the lid on the box, picked it up, hefted it briefly, and gave it to her. Clutching it to her chest, she leaned over and on a sudden impulse kissed him on the cheek.
“Oh, thank you. They’re so lovely.”
He merely smiled, so warmly, so softly, that her heart started pounding. He rose, then helped her up, taking the box from her to carry it.
“Let’s get back to the camp. Oh, and by the way. This isn’t much of a place to ask, but will you marry me? I know that under your laws I should be asking your father, but going back to find that esteemed worthy would be a journey tedious beyond belief, and a reunion oppressive beyond sufferance.”
“Marry you? Really actually marry you?”
“Just that.”

When he laughed at her surprise, she realized just how ready she’d been to do anything that he might ask of her.
“Shall I take your silence as a yes or a no?”
“A yes, you idiot.”
With one convulsive sob, hating herself for doing it, Marka began to cry, and she sniveled inelegantly all the way back to the caravanserai.

“You stupid blithering dolt!” Jill was yelling, but she did remember to use Deverrian. “I could strangle you!”
“Do calm down, will you now?” Salamander stepped back, honestly frightened. “I don’t understand why your heart is so troubled, I truly don’t.”
Jill stopped, the anger ebbing, and considered the question as seriously as it did indeed deserve. She was worried about the girl, she supposed, who thought she was marrying a young traveling player much like herself while the truth was a fair bit stranger.
“Well, my apologies for getting so angry,” she said at last. “I suppose it’s because she’s so young, and you’re not, no matter how handsome your elven blood keeps you.”
“But that’s a reason in itself. Here, consider this. I’m well over a century old, my turtledove, old for a human being, young for a full-blooded man of the People, but I’m neither, am I?” His voice cracked with bitterness, quickly covered. “Who knows how long a half-breed lives? Marka’s little more than a child, truly. I keep hoping that this time, we’ll have the chance to grow old together. Before, even if she hadn’t caught that fever, I would have lived long past her.”
“Oh.” Jill couldn’t find it in her heart to reproach him. “Well. I mean, none of my affair, is it now? Whether the lass marries you or no.”
“Mayhap I was a bit sudden about it. It was seeing her with those tiles. Ye gods, how many hours have I watched her, sitting there at that little table, poring over those tiles, and joking with me about what she was seeing, or—”
“Even if they should be incarnations of the same soul, Marka and Alaena are not the same person. No one is, truly, from life to life.”
His eyes filled with tears, and he tossed his head, turning half away. Jill let out her breath in a long sigh. They were sitting in their tent, off at the edge of the campground. From outside Jill could hear Marka, babbling in a frenzy of joy, and Keeta’s low voice, celebrating with her. It was certainly impossible to make Salamander go back on his offer.
“Well, that’s torn it, then,” she said. “I’ll be going on to Anmurdio alone.”
“What? I can’t let you do that!”
“And I can’t let you drag that child along with us, either.”
“Why not? Is it any more dangerous than the life she’s used to, wandering the roads and never knowing where her next copper’s going to come from? We’ll be safe enough. That’s why I’ve been building up the troupe.”
“Are you trying to tell me, you stupid chattering elf, that you want to take all these wretched acrobats all the way to Anmurdio with us?”
“Of course I do.”
Jill could only stare at him. He smiled, all sunny charm.
“List but a moment, O Princess of Powers Perilous, and all will become as clear as a summer sky. Cast your mind backward to our youth, and our adventures in Slaith. Ah, glorious Slaith! Alas, thanks to my brother and his righteous wrath, no more do its beds of fish entrails scent the warm and tropic air, no more do pirates swagger down its rich and arrogant streets, no more do—”
“Are you going to hold your tongue or am I going to cut it out? Get to the point!”
“Well and good, then, but you do take the bloom off a man’s rhetoric, I must say. The point, my turtledove, is this: Slaith was a foul and evil den of pirates, but even there, in that den of the accursed, my humble gerthddyn’s calling made us both welcome and immune to infamy. Far more welcome, then, in isolate, nay, even desolate Anmurdio shall be an entire troupe of performers.”
“Imph. I hate to admit this, but you’re probably right.”
“Of course I’m right. I’ve spent many a long and guileful hour in thought, working this scheme through. We’ll probably even turn a profit.”
“Oh, very well, then! Since there’s naught I can do about it all, anyway, I might as well go along with your daft scheme. Poor little Marka—a fine way to start married life!”
“Aha! You’re the one who’s making the mistake this time. You’re remembering pampered Alaena, the rich widow who lacked for naught. Marka has lived as hard a life as ever you did as a child, following your father round the kingdom.”
Jill said something foul beyond repeating, simply because he was right, but he merely laughed at her.
Later that afternoon Jill went looking for Marka and found her sitting in front of the tent she shared with Delya and Keeta. She’d spread out a large mat and arranged the tiles, which might possibly have come back to her from another life, in tidy lines to study them.
“Marka?” Jill said. “I’ve just come to offer my congratulations.”
“Oh, thank you!” She looked up with a smile of such sheer, innocent joy that it wrung Jill’s heart. “You know, I never ever thought I’d be this lucky, not ever.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re so happy.” Jill sat down on the ground across from her. “Keeta tells me that the troupe’s going to join together to buy you a wedding dress.”
“Yes, and it’s so wonderful of them.” She hesitated briefly. “You look sad, too, just like Keeta and Delya do. Why?”
“Oh, there’s just something about a wedding that takes us old crones this way. Don’t let it trouble you.”
“But it does trouble me. You’re all acting like I’m going to get dragged off to the archon’s prison instead of married.”
Jill hesitated, but the girl deserved an honest answer.
“Well, I suppose it’s because this kind of happiness just can’t last, just because of the way life runs, I mean. It’s sad, in a way, like seeing a spring flower and knowing it’s going to fade when summer comes. I know that sounds awfully harsh, but do you think you’ll always be this gloriously happy?”
“Well, I wish I could be, but of course you’re right. All right, then, if that’s all it is.”
It was, of course, a great deal more than that, but this was no moment to turn vulture and dwell upon all those worries that used to trouble older women at a wedding: the slow death of a girl’s youth, the quick death of the little freedom allowed her in life between her father’s house and her husband’s, to say nothing, in those days—hundreds of years before the dweomer taught women to control their pregnancies—of her possible literal death in childbirth or from the simple exhaustion of birthing too many children.
“That’s a nice set of fortune tiles,” Jill said instead. “Did Salamander buy them for you?”
“Yes. Aren’t they lovely?” But she frowned, tilting her head a little to one side. “You know, it was the oddest thing. I saw these in the marketplace, just sitting in their box, and I didn’t pick them up or anything. I didn’t even touch them. But I somehow knew that there was this wine stain on the bottom. And you know what the oddest thing was? Ebañy knew it, too. And he never looked, either.”
Jill’s doubt that the girl might be Alaena reborn vanished.
“Well, odd things like that do happen.” She stood up quickly, before Marka could ask further and touch the edge of secrets. “I think it means you were meant to have them. And meant to have Ebañy, too, most like.”
Marka favored her with a smile as brilliant as the moon at her full.
Later that evening, after the show, when the troupe was eating its midnight meal round a leaping fire, there was a celebration. Vinto was a fine musician, playing the wela-wela, a zitherlike instrument; another of the acrobats played the drum; the flute boy outdid himself, especially since there was plenty of background noise to cover his occasional squeak. Everyone was laughing and singing, toasting Salamander and Marka with cups of red wine and taking turns in wishing them happiness, and even some of the merchants who were sharing the public field drifted over, getting into the spirit of things by bringing stuffed dates and nut cakes and the other traditional gifts for this sort of celebration. After about an hour the noise and the crowd began to get on Jill’s nerves, and when she drifted away for a quiet walk, Keeta and Delya joined her. They found a bench by the public fountain and sat down to watch the water splashing in the moonlight. Although Delya was smiling, a little flushed from the wine and humming a tune under her breath—in fact, she never did add a word to that entire conversation—Keeta looked downright melancholy.
“Ah, well,” she said at last. “At least Salamander looks like he’ll make her a better husband than most.”
“Oh, he certainly will,” Jill said. “I’ve known him a long time, and I can honestly say that.”
“Good. By the way, has he mentioned anything about going to Anmurdio to you?”
“Oh, yes. What do you think of the idea?”
“It’s a good one. The towns over there are so starved for a good show that we should do really well.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I didn’t want to drag the rest of you along only to have it turn out to be a disaster.”
“What I don’t understand, frankly, is how there could be any rare books and things over there for you to find.”
Jill fell back onto a version of the truth.
“There may not be any, indeed. But a long time ago there was a horrible war in the country adjoining our kingdom, and a large band of refugees fled south. Now, they didn’t settle in Bardek proper nor here in Orystinna. What I’d like to know is where they did end up, and what books they brought with them when they fled.”
“I must say that you people seem to have a ghastly lot of wars.”
“Well, yes, I’m afraid so.”
Keeta glanced at her companion and suddenly smiled. “Delly, you’re just about asleep. Want to go back?”
“Mph?” Delya woke with a start and yawned. “I’m fine.”
“I think we’d best get back.” Keeta got up and held out a hand. “Come along.”
With a nod and apologetic smile in Jill’s direction, Delya rose and allowed herself to be led off to camp. Jill considered going, too, then decided to sit in the cool and moon-shot dark for a while. Not only did all the noise and rire’s heat seem a burden, but she was hoping that Dallandra would come through into the physical plane again. Ever since Dalla had appeared to her with Elessario along, Jill had been trying to puzzle out her cryptic last words, which she’d heard only as “islands Evandar.” Whether “Evandar” was the name of the islands where the refugees had settled or of some person, she simply didn’t know. Yet, though she waited there for hours, the elven dweomerwoman never returned.
When Jill got back to the camp, she found it silent, with no one up but Keeta, sitting yawning by a dying fire.
“I moved your gear and blankets and things over to our tent. Better let Salamander and Marka have one to themselves. Thought I’d better wait up and tell you.”
“Ah, I see,” Jill said. “Thank you.”
On the morrow, when the troupe marched off into town to register the wedding officially at the archon’s palace, Jill stayed in camp, but she came to greet them when they paraded back again. At the head of the line, sitting sidesaddle on Salamander’s dapple-gray horse, rode Marka, flushed and smiling, with her new husband walking beside her. In full costume the acrobats followed, singing, laughing, doing a bit of juggling or a dance here and there. A crowd of children and citizens brought up the rear, treating the acrobats’ wedding as just another show, although, in all fairness, Salamander and Marka seemed delighted to provide them with it. When they reached camp, he swept her out of the saddle and kissed her soundly. To the cheering of the crowd they held hands and bowed, while the rest of the troupe scurried round collecting the small coins that rained down upon the pair. Jill could only think that indeed, Salamander had found himself a perfect wife.
Toward evening, however, Jill dragged him away from the dancing and music. In the lengthening shadows they walked together among the palms at the edge of the campground. A sunset wind was springing up, sending drifts of dusts across the dead-flat plains.
“Somewhat I wanted to ask you,” Jill said in Deverrian. “When you agreed to come to Bardek with me, was it mostly on the hope of finding Alaena again?”
“I cannot tell a lie. Indeed it was.”
Jill snorted profoundly, realizing even as she did it that she sounded just like Nevyn.
“But, Jill, it all worked out for the best, didn’t it now? Have I not been your guide, your escort, your loyal companion and faithful dog, even, while at the same time rescuing my beloved from a life of virtual slavery to her bestial father?”
“It was Keeta who did the rescuing. You were just the bait.”
“Imph, well, I suppose so, but how crudely you put things sometimes.”
“My heart bleeds. On the morrow we’re going to find a ship for Anmurdio and get on with our search and that’s that.”
“I’ve already found the ship.” He favored her with a brilliant grin. “We had to wait a fair bit down at the archon’s palace, and there was a ship’s captain waiting there as well to register his last cargo, and so lo and behold! A deal was struck.”
And that was the worst of Salamander, Jill reflected. Just when you were about to allow yourself the pleasure of berating him, he went and did something right.

Evandar lounged upon a hilltop that overlooked the remains of a formal garden, roses gone wild and tangled, hedges sending long green fingers into the air, muddy walks cracking. The plan of squares and half circles stretched out skewed, as well, as if the right half had shrunk and the left grown along the diagonal.
“It looks squashed,” he remarked to Dallandra. “As if a giant had fallen against it.”
“I see what you mean. Is this the garden you showed me when first I came here?”
“It is, yes, but now it’s spoilt. And the house, the splendid rooms I made for you—they’ve all gone away, too, turned into air and blown far, far away. It always happens. I try to build as once your people built, but never does a stone or stick last me out.”
“This world was meant for flux, not forms. If only you’d come be born into my world . . . ”
“Shan’t!” He tossed his head in irritation. “Don’t speak of it.”
She knew his moods and let the subject drop.
“I found a marvel, Dalla. The islands of which your friend spoke? They’ve rebuilt Rinbaladelan there, but it’s a poor thing, all small and flimsy, wood where once stood stone.”
“You found them? You didn’t tell me that!”
He shrugged, then rose, standing for a moment to frown at the ruined garden. Twilight gathered purple in the sky and dropped shadows round him like rain. Wind ruffled his yellow hair with a flash of palpable light. At moments like these Dalla found herself wondering who or what he might be, and where they might be, as well, if perhaps even she’d died and all this bright country was only an illusion of life built of memory and longing. It seemed that her very wondering threatened to destroy the world round her. The hill upon which they stood dissolved and began to float away in tendrils of mist, while the garden below became only a pile of weeds and sticks. Evandar grew as thin as a shadow himself, a colored shadow cast upon empty air. Her heart thudded in her throat.
“Don’t go!” The words seemed torn out of her. “I love you.”
All at once he stood solidly in front of her, and the hands that caught her shoulders, the mouth that caught her own, were warm and substantial. He kissed her again, his mouth all hunger, his hands pulling her tight against him. Together they sank to their knees, then lay down, clasped in each other’s arms. She lost all awareness of her body, if indeed it were anything more than a mere image or form of a body, yet she could feel him, twined round, feel the energy pulsing from him as tangible as flesh, feel the power flowing from her own essence as well to mingle with his, while they shared an ecstasy more intense than any sexual pleasure she’d ever known. On waves of sensation that made them both cry aloud they seemed to soar, a twined, twinned consciousness.
And yet, afterward, as always, she couldn’t quite remember what had happened to make her feel that way. They lay on the hillside, clasped in each other’s arms like an ordinary pair of lovers, and yet, without her conscious thought, whatever illusions of clothing that they wore had returned. She felt cool, alert, almost preternaturally calm, and he merely smiled at her as if he were surprised at what they’d shared. Yet when he released her, she saw the garden blooming down below, renewed and glorious.
“I love you as well,” he said, as if nothing had interrupted their earlier talk. “Dalla, Dalla, I thought I was so clever when I lured you here, but you’re the hunter and the snare both. And in the end you’ll abandon me, no doubt, like some animal left dead so long in a trap that its fur’s all rotted and spoilt.”
She pulled away from him and sat up, running her hands through her long tangle of hair. Already her hands and the hair itself felt perfectly normal to her, no different from the flesh she remembered. He lay back on one elbow and watched, his face as stricken as a man who’s been told he’ll hang on the morrow.
“In the end you’ll force me to go,” she said at last. “I love you too much to stay and watch you die into nothingness.”
“That’s a cruel speaking,”
“Is it? What would you have me do instead?”
“I don’t know.” He paused, then shook his head. “By those gods you speak of, I’m weary tonight. I went a long way, seeking out those islands. You should see them for yourself.”
“I want to, yes. I wish I could talk with Jill about them.”
“Why can’t you? Go with my blessing, my love.”
“It’s not that. I just never have enough time to say much once I find her, before the vision breaks, I mean.”
“Well, if you insist on going only in visions.”
“And how else am I supposed to go?”
“Are you not here in the world between all worlds? Wait! Forgive me. I forget you don’t know. Come with me, my love, and you shall learn to walk the roads.” He hesitated, cocking his head to one side like a dog. “Where’s Elessario?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s just go take a look at her. I have the strangest feeling round my heart.”
A feeling that, it turned out, was well justified. Hand in hand they drifted down from the hilltop to find the Host feasting in the meadowlands. It seemed a huge pavilion of cloth-of-gold, hung with blue banners, sheltered rows of long tablets, set with candles in silver candelabra, but once inside Dallandra realized that she could look through the roof and see stars, spread in the long drift of the Snowy Road. Music floated over the talk and laughter as they made their way through the tables and asked for his child. None had seen her. All at once the pavilion changed, grew stone inside the cloth, the meadow crisping into straw, the banners transmuting to faded tapestries. Out of the comer of her eye Dallandra thought she saw fire leaping in a huge stone hearth, yet when she looked straight at it, she saw only the moon, rising through a mullioned window.
“Come with me.” Evandar tugged her hand so hard that he nearly dragged her away. “I don’t like this.”
At the back door they found Elessario, dres sed in a long tunic of blue, kirtled at the waist with a silver, white, and green plaid. In her hands she carried a loaf of bread, which she offered to an old beggar woman, all gnarled hands and brown rags, leaning on a bit of stick.
“Mother, Mother,” the child was saying. “Why won’t you come in and feast?”
“No more am I welcome in your father’s hall. Child, can’t you see that they plot your death? Come away, come with me to safety. Better the life of a beggar on the roads than this murderous luxury.”
“Miother, no, they mean to give us life, true life, the like of which we’ve never had before.”
The old woman spat onto the ground.
“Touching, Alshandra, very touching,” Evandar said suddenly. “Truly, you should go be born into Deverry and grow into a bard.’
With a howl of rage the beggar woman rose up, shedding her rags like water dripping, dressed now in a deerskin tunic and boots; her stick became a hunting bow, and her hair flowed gold over her shoulders. Dimly, at the margins of her sight, Dallandra realized that the stone broch behind them had disappeared, and that the cloth-of-gold pavilion glimmered in the moonlight in its stead.
“My curse upon you, Evandar!” Alshandra snarled. “A mother’s curse upon you and your elven whore both!”
“With a gust of wind and a swirl of dry leaves from some distant forest’s floor, she disappeared. Evandar rubbed his chin and sighed.
“She always could be a bit tiresome,” he remarked. “Elli, come with us. I’ve a lesson to give Dallandra, and I’m not leaving you here alone.”

As Bardekian merchantmen go, the ship was a good one, soundly built and deep, with room enough in the hold for the troupe’s gear and room enough on deck twixt single mast and stern for them to camp under improvised tents. The troupe’s horses had a comfortable place up on the deck tethered by the bow rather than in the stinking hold. During the crossing Jill spent most of her time in their equine company. Even in normal circumstances the troupe lived in a welter of spats and jests, gossip and sentiment, outright nghts and professions of undying loyalty, and now that they were sailing off to unknown country, they were as tightly strung as the wela-wela. Tucked in between the horses and the bow rail, Jill could have privacy for her meditations. Every now and then Keeta joined her, for a bit of a rest as the juggler put it.
“I don’t know how you stand this lot sometimes,” Jill remarked to her one morning.
“Neither do I.” Keeta flashed a grin. “Oh, they’re all good people, really, and the only family I’ve ever had or am likely to have. But they do carry on so. It’s Marka’s marriage, you see. She started out as nothing, the apprentice, the waif we all pitied, and now here she is, the leader’s wife. Everyone’s all stirred up and jockeying for position.”
“And Salamander’s really become the leader, hasn’t he?”
“Oh, yes. No doubt about that, my dear, none at all.”
At that moment Jill realized why she’d objected to Salamander’s marriage. He’d so loaded himself up with responsibility for other people’s lives that she couldn’t possibly reproach him for letting his dweomer studies lapse. She said nothing, merely watched him over the next few days as he busied himself with the troupe or sat grinning beside his new wife. Perhaps he knows best, she would think. Perhaps he simply doesn’t have the strength of will, perhaps he’s too weak, somewhere deep in his heart, to take up his destiny. Yet, despite this sensible reasoning, she felt that she was mourning a death. For Nevyn’s sake, she would do her best to keep him from squandering his talent, but a crowded ship was no place to confront him.
From the moment the troupe landed, Jill hated Anmurdio. While Orystinna was every bit as hot, it was a dry heat there, thanks to the way the mountains channeled and deflected the prevailing winds. Anmurdio, the collective name for a group of volcanic islands, caught the tropic-wet winds full in the face. It seemed that if it wasn’t actually raining, then the wind was howling round, or if the air was still for a brief while, then it became so humid that everyone wished it would rain. The towns—random clusters of wooden houses—sagged in the ever-present mud between stretches of primal jungle. The water wasn’t safe to drink without a good dollop of wine in it; beef was unknown, and bread rare. Yet all of these aggravations might have been bearable if it weren’t for the mosquitoes, drifting in twilight clouds as thick as smoke.
Traveling in heavy wagons would be impossible, but fortunately all the hamlets in the archipelago lay right on the ocean. Swearing and sweating over the expense, Salamander made a bargain with the owner of a little coaster that would just barely hold the troupe. The wagon horses, which Marka loved like pets, had to be stabled at a further cost in the main town—city being far too dignified a word for Myleton Noa—rather than merely sold and abandoned.
Just when all these expensive arrangements were concluded, it began to rain, a dark sodden pour that went on and on and on for three days and washed away the troupe’s remaining coin along with their tempers. In a flood of jokes and compliments Salamander moved from person to person, keeping up morale and stopping fights. As she told him late one night, when they got a moment alone together, Jill had to admire him for it.
“But still,” she remarked. “If you’d only put this much hard work into your studies—”
He busied himself with slapping mosquitoes.
“I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you,” she went on, relentless. “No doubt you’ve lost some ground lately, but now that you’re married and settled, there’s no reason that you couldn’t gain it back.”
“No doubt you’re correct, O Princess of Powers Perilous, as well as accurate, precise, and just plain right, but the times are a bit troubled, not to say noisy, with all of us packed into this stinking inn together, for concentration. At the moment, the only dweomer I feel like working would be a bit of weather magic, to drive away this wretched storm, but I know that such would offend your fine-tuned sense of ethics.”
“Things aren’t quite desperate enough for that, yet.”
“True. It doubtless will clear soon enough on its own. The innkeep assures me that this much rain is most unseasonable.”
Apparently the innkeep knew his weather, because they woke on the morrow to clearing skies. In a much improved mood the troupe set about cleaning and readying their equipment for the coming show.
“I hope to every god that I was right about the profit to be made here,” Salamander remarked to Jill. “If I’m not, we are well and truly in the thick of battle without a sword, as the old saying would have it.”
She said nothing, by a great effort of will.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he went on with theatrical gloom. “You might as well berate me and be done with it.”
“I was merely wondering why anyone bothered to settle here in the first place, and then, in the second, why they bother to stay.”
“Pearls.” All at once he grinned. “Pearls both black and white, mother of pearl and fine shells of all sorts, the best and the rarest for the jewelers of Bardek. And they quarry the black obsidian, too, to send home, and catch the parrots and other rare birds to delight the fine ladies of Surtinna. Merchant ships sail back and forth all the time, trading for their wares.”
“Nothing but a lot of trinkets, if you ask me.”
“Trinkets have made men rich before. Of course, a lot of men have died out here, too. The sea’s bounty demands its price.”
“If it’s that dangerous, maybe you should just take the troupe home now.”
“Not until I’ve put my scheme to the test, O Monarch of Might Mysterious. And tonight, here in the very market square of Myleton Noa, will the test come!”
The market square in question was a big sprawl of mud in the center of town. All round the edge stood such civic buildings as the town could muster: a customs house, an archon’s residence, a barracks for the town guard, and a money changer, who supported a small guard of his own, according to the wine seller.
“He’s a shrewd one, old Din-var-tano,” he remarked to Jill. “And as honest as the sea is deep, too. But a miser? Ye gods! He lives like a slave, and he won’t have a wife because of the expense of keeping one, you see. I’ll wager we won’t see him tonight at this here show. He’d feel obliged to part with one of his precious coppers! But it looks like everyone else in town is here, that’s for certain.”
Jill and the wine seller were standing on the wooden steps of the archon’s palace, a little above the crowd swarming round the muddy square. The old man had set up his little booth on the top step, and as they talked, he was busily chaining wine cups to the rail. In the velvet twilight, the troupe was raising crossed pairs of standing torches round the stage while Salamander himself stood underneath the slack rope and pulled on it to make sure it was secure.
“We’ve never had a show through here before,” the wine seller went on. “I wager I’ll do good business after it’s over.”
“No doubt. I take it things are lonely in Anmurdio.”
“As lonely as the sea is deep, that’s for certain. Sometimes I’m sorry I came, I tell you, but then, a man can live his life as he likes out here without a lot of city clerks laying down the law and grabbing his coin for taxes.”
“Ah. I see. Tell me something. Do you ever hear of ships sailing south?”
“South? What for? Nothing out there but sea and wind.”
“You’re sure?” She paused to kill a particularly big mosquito that had landed on her wrist. “You’ve never heard of any islands lying far to the south?”
He sucked his stumps of teeth while he considered.
“Never,” he said at last. “But I can tell you who you want to ask about that. See over there, that great big fellow standing in the torchlight? The one with the red tunic—that’s right, him. Dekki’s his name, and he’s quite a sailing man, goes to all sorts of places, and not all of them are on maps, if you take my meaning.”
Jill sighed, because she did see. A pirate, most likely, and not her favorite sort of person in the world. Before she could ask the wine seller more, on the stage drums boomed out and flutes sang. In a pleasurable shudder of applause, the crowd surged closer. The show had begun.
From the very first moment, when the youngest and clumsiest acrobat cartwheeled across the stage, Jill could see that Salamander’s commercial instincts had delivered triumph. No matter whether a performer pulled off a difficult trick or fell in the middle of an easy one, the crowd clapped and cheered. At the end of each turn coins clinked and slithered on the stage. After all, these colonists were rich by the standards of the cities they’d left behind, but lacked luxuries to spend their wealth upon. When the heart of the show appeared, Keeta and her flaming torches, Marka dancing upon the slack rope, the crowd screamed and stamped their feet. Silver flashed like rain in the torchlight. When Jill turned to speak to the wine seller, she found him utterly entranced, smiling as he stared. Salamander himself performed the greatest trick of all, making the crowd fall silent again to catch his every word. It seemed to Jill that he luxuriated in their attention like a man drowsing in a hot and perfumed bath. She felt as if she should slap him awake before he drowned.
Finally, when the performers were exhausted beyond the power of cheers and coins to revive them, the show wound down. By then the moon was low on the horizon, and the wheel of stars turning toward dawn. In a cooler wind from the sea the crowd lingered, watching the troupe strike its stage or drifting over the various booths and peddlers selling food and drink. When Dekki came strolling up, the crowd round the wine booth parted like the sea beneath a prow to let him through, and the wine seller handed him a cup without waiting to be asked. The pirate paid twice its worth for it, though; Jill supposed that his high standing in the town depended on his generosity just as a Deverry lord’s respect among his folk depended on his. The wine seller made him a bob of a bow.
“This lady here would like to speak with you, Dekki.” He jerked a thumb in Jill’s direction. “She’s a scholar and a map-maker.”
“Indeed?” His voice was a rumble like distant thunder. “My honor, then. What do you want to know?”
They moved away from the press of thirsty customers and stood by a pair of torches. Jill pulled her map out of her shirt and held it unrolled in the flaring light.
“I got this over in Inderat Noa,” she said. “Do you see those islands far to the south? You wouldn’t happen to know if they really exist, would you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me they did. Let’s put it this way. There’s something out there.” He took the map and frowned at the dim markings. “Once me and my men, we were blown off course by a storm, and a bad one it was, too. We rode south before it for many a day, and we just barely pulled through, and we found wrack from a ship that wasn’t so lucky. We spotted what looked like a figurehead and hauled it on board. We were thinking, see, that it was an Anmurdio ship, and so we’d take it home for the owners’ reward. Huh. Never seen anything like it in my life.” He handed back the map. “It was a woman, and she was smiling and had all this long hair, a nice job of carving it was, you would have sworn you could have run your fingers through it. But she had wings, or, I should say, what we found had stumps of wings. They must have folded back along the bow, like. But anyway, there were these letters carved round the belt she was wearing. Never seen anything like them. I call them letters, but they were magic marks for all I know.”
“And what happened to this thing?”
“Oh, we tossed it back. Wasn’t one of our ships.”
“I see. So, then, it must have come from somewhere to the south?”
“Most likely. And then there’s the bubbles, too. Down on the southern beaches, sometimes you find these glass bubbles after a storm.” He cupped his massive hands. “About so big. Bad luck to break one. The priests say there must be evil spirits trapped inside. But someone must have blown the glass and trapped the spirits.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in sailing south someday, just to find out what lies that way.”
“Not on your life!”
“Not even if someone paid you well?”
“Not even then. You can’t spend coin down Hades way, can you? That storm took us about as far as a man can sail and still get himself home again, and we all came cursed near to starving to death before we made port.”
The way he shook his head, and the edge of fear wedging into his voice, made it plain that not all the persuasion in the world was going to change his mind. Jill stood him to another cup of wine in thanks for the information, then bid him farewell and strolled over to join the troupe. They were laughing, tossing jests back and forth and all round the circle, dancing through their work, so happy—so relieved, really—that she couldn’t bear to spoil their celebration. She would wait to talk with Salamander on the morrow, she decided
“Ebañy?” she called out. “I’m going back to the inn. This trip’s wrung me out.”
He tossed a length of rope into a wagon and hurried over, peering at her in the flickering torchlight. He himself looked exhausted, streaming with sweat, his eyes pools of dark shadow.
“Jill, are you well? Lately you’ve looked so pale.”
“It’s the heat.” As she spoke, she realized the grim truth of it. “I’m not used to it, and I’m not as young as I used to be, you know. And it seems to be taking its toll on you, as well.”
He nodded his agreement and ran both hands through his sweaty hair to slick it back from his face.
“Don’t stay up too late yourself, my friend,” Jill said. “As for me, I think I’ll go have some of that watered wine or winy water or whatever it is, and then just go to bed.”
She was so exhausted that once she lay down in her inn chamber, she fell straight asleep and never even heard the entire troupe clattering in, an hour or so later.
In the middle of the night, though, Jill woke in a puddle of sweat. Since the window was a patch of black only slightly grayer than the room itself, she could assume that the moon had already set but the dawn was still hours away. Swearing under her breath she got up, rubbed herself dry with her dirty shirt, and put on her cleaner one to go outside for a breath of air. The compound was utterly silent, utterly dark except for the faint murmur of water in the fountain and a glimmer of stars far above. She made her careful way across the cracked tiles to the fountain, groped around, and found a safe seat on its edge. Here outside, with a trace of breeze brushing her face and the sound of water splashing nearby, she felt cool enough to think.
Getting an Anmurdio ship for the trip south was out of the question. She decided that straightaway. Even if the crew proved trustworthy, they and their passengers both would still likely die from the bad water and worse food on such a long journey. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she could never subject the troupe to the journey, not even if they had the best boat in the world to carry them. Not even Marka? She indulged herself with a few choice curses on Salamander’s head. They could neither take the lass along nor leave her behind, not now, unless of course Salamander stayed with her. But go alone? She was willing to admit that the idea of traveling alone across the southern sea frightened her, in spite of all her dweomer, but she also knew that if she had to, she would. When she looked up, the stars hung bright and cold, a vast indifferent sweep dwarfing even a dweomermaster and her concerns in a tide of light and darkness. In the spirit of an invalid demanding a lantern in her nighttime chamber, Jill snapped her fingers and called upon the Wildfolk of Aethyr. They came, clustering round the decayed stone nymph in the center of the fountain and shedding a faint but comforting glow.
The silver light made her think of Dallandra, just idly at first, until an idea struck home like an arrow. Jill pointed at one of the spirits hovering nearby.
“You know the lands of the Guardians. Fetch Dallandra for me.”
The spirit winked out of manifestation, but whether it had truly understood the command, Jill couldn’t say. She waited for a long time, was, in fact, about to give it up and go back inside when she saw a wisp of silver light gathering above the fountain.
“Dalla?” She breathed out the name.
But it was only an undine, raising itself up as sleek as a water snake, to stare at her with enormous eyes before vanishing in a swirl of water. Dressed in her elven clothes, though the amethyst jewel no longer hung round her neck, Dallandra herself strolled across the courtyard, as solid as the cobblestones.
“I can’t believe I managed it,” she remarked, grinning, and she spoke in Elvish. “But it worked, and here I am. Jill, I’ve got so much to tell you. Evandar’s found the islands, first off, and we can take you there.”
“Take me there?” Jill felt as muddled as if someone had just struck her on the head. “You’ve got a ship?”
“No, but we don’t need one. It’s Evandar’s dweomer. But I don’t know how many of you we can—”
“I’ll be the only person making the trip. I’ve been dreading taking other people along with me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am! For all I knew, we could all drown out there.”
“Most likely you would.” She paused, glancing over her shoulder at something that only she could see. “I’ve still got to be quick, even though it’s ever so much easier to talk like this. But Evandar said to tell you something else, that these people respect and honor the dweomer more than any other thing under the sun and moon, and so you’ll have a welcome there.”
“And I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that, too! I’d been rather wondering about it.”
“No doubt.” She flashed a grin. “When do you want to go? I imagine that you’ve got farewells to make.”
“And some gear to get together. And, well, there’s somewhat I’ve got to do before I leave, not that Salamander’s going to thank me for it, I suppose. I don’t suppose we can set a time, anyway. If I say a fortnight, how will you know when that comes round?”
“It’s difficult, yes. I do have a plan. There’s a place that I can wait, one that’s next to your world, you see, and so its Time runs a little closer to yours. Get yourself ready, and I’ll come to you as soon as I can. Send me one of the Wildfolk for a messenger.”
“Splendid. And you have my thanks and a thousand times my thanks.”
“Most welcome.” She paused again, staring down at the ground and frowning. “The child. She’s going to have to be born soon, because there’s trouble brewing in our lands. I can’t explain. I only half understand it myself. But it’s going to have to be soon.”
All at once a thought struck Jill. It might well be that Salamander and his new wife would serve the dweomer whether he wanted to or no.
“Tell me something. Could the child be born here? In the islands, I mean?”
“No, not at all. All the omens, and what little logic there is in this thing, for that matter, say she has to be born into the Wesdands.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just that I know a new husband who might make a splendid father for such a child,”
“Good, because, you see, there’ll be other children born later, lots and lots—at least, if I can carry this thing off. Jill, at times I’m frightened.”
“Well, for what my help is worth, you have it.”
“It’s worth a very great deal.”
They clasped hands and shared a smile. Jill was surprised at how warm and solid Dallandra’s hand felt; she’d been expecting some cool etheric touch.
“If great things are on the move,” Jill said, “I’d best wrap up my affairs here and get on my way back to Deverry.”
“When the time draws near, I’ll take you back to Deverry, have no fear about that. I’ve so many marvels to tell you about, to show you, once we’ve time to talk together for a while, but now—”
“Yes, I understand. You’d best go. It’s almost dawn, and if other people find you here, they’ll ask questions.”
Dallandra walked toward the inn-yard gates, turned once to wave, then vanished in a glimmer of gray dawn light. Marvels, indeed! Jill thought. All at once she laughed aloud, thinking what a wonderful jest it would be on Salamander, if indeed he ended up fathering the body for some dweomer-touched child. Even Nevyn, she supposed, would have been able to see the humor in this for all that the old man could be downright grim more often than not.

When Dallandra mentioned trouble brewing, she meant nothing more than the ill will that Alshandra bore her, but as things turned out she’d spoken more truly than she knew. After she left Jill at the inn yard, she traveled back through the twisting roads and the mists to Evandar’s country. He was waiting for her on the hilltop, standing alone and looking down through the night to the meadow where his people danced by torchlight. The music drifted up to them on the wind, harp and drum and flute.
“You’ve come back,” he said. “My heart ached the whole time you were gone.”
“Did you think I’d desert you so soon?”
“I no longer know what to think. I thought I was so clever at jests and riddles, and now you’ve posed me a riddle that I can’t answer.” He shook his head and made his yellow hair toss tike a horse’s mane. “I take it you found Jill?”
“I did, and she’ll follow our road with heartfelt thanks. But what do you mean, a riddle you can’t answer?”
All at once the life flashed in his turquoise eyes, and he grinned.
“Now that I shan’t tell you, because it’s a riddle of mine to top the one you posed me. Or perhaps we can say that—” He hesitated, listening.
Dallandra heard it, too, a thin shriek on the rising wind. Together without need for words they turned and hurled themselves into the air, he a hawk, suddenly, a red hawk from Deverry, while she changed to her usual shape of some gray and indeterminate songbird, both of them with wingspreads of fully fifteen feet across. They banked into the rising wind and rode it down, swooping over the grassy hillside to the flowered meadow where now the court screamed and ran about in confusion. In the darkening night torches guttered and sparked.
“Elessario!” The cry drifted up to them. “She’s been taken!”
The hawk screamed, a harsh cry, and changed course for the river. Dallandra followed, praying for moonlight, and as if in answer a moon began to appear on the horizon, vast and bloated, casting a sickly yellow tight. Far below on the oily river she saw a shape, like a splinter of wood from their height, pushing itself upstream. Evandar stooped and plunged. More slowly in prudent circles Dallandra followed him down and saw a black barge, rowed by slaves, churning against the current. In the prow stood Alshandra, and she seemed that night some ten feet high, a warrior woman dressed in glittering armor, nocking an arrow in her bow. Screaming, the hawk plunged down and upon her before she could aim and loose. His massive claws raked her face and his beak tore at her arms as she fell to the deck, howling in rage, clubbing him with the bow.
Bound round with black chains Elessario crouched, sobbing, some feet away. Dallandra understood enough about this country by then to keep her wits. She landed on the deck and shed her bird-form like a cloak.
“Break the chains!” she snapped. “Just flex your arms, and they’ll fall right off.”
Elessario followed orders and laughed aloud when the chains turned to water and puddled at her feet. With a howl of rage Alshandra threw the hawk to one side and hauled herself to her knees. Boat, slaves, armor, night—they all vanished as suddenly as the chains. In the golden sun of a late afternoon they stood in elven form on the grassy riverbank while the chattering Host swarmed round.
“Oh, go away, all of you!” Alshandra snarled.
Laughing and calling out to one another they fled. Dallandra put an arm round Elessario’s shoulders and drew her close while Alshandra and Evandar faced each other, both dressed in court clothes, now, cloth-of-gold tunics, diadems of gold and jewels, and their cloaks, tipped in fur, seemed made of silver satin. And yet, across her cheek ran the bleeding rake of a hawk’s talon, and on his face swelled a purple bruise.
“She’s my daughter, and I shall take her wherever I want,” Alshandra said.
“Not unless she goes willingly, and the chains show she was less than willing. Where were you going to take her? Farther in?”
“That’s no affair of yours.” Alshandra turned on Dalla. “You may have my man, because I tired of him long before you came to us, but you shall not have my daughter.”
“I don’t want her for my sake. I only want her to have the life that should be hers, that should be yours, truly, as well.”
With a shimmer of tight Alshandra changed her form, becoming old, wrinkled, pathetic in black rags.
“You’ll take her far away, far, far away, and never shall I see her again.”
“Come with her, then. Follow her, the way all of your people are going to do. Join us all in life.” Dallandra glanced Elessario’s way. “Do you want to go with your mother?”
“No, I want to stay with you.”
Alshandra howled, swelling up tall and strong, dressed like a hunter in her doeskin tunic and boots, the bow clasped in red-veined hands.
“Have it your way, witch! You’ll lose this battle in the end. I swear it. I’ve found some as will help me, back in that ugly little world of yours. I’ve made friends there, powerful friends. They’ll get me my daughter back the moment she tries to leave us. I’ll make them promise, and I know they will, because they grovel at my feet, they do.”
She was gone, winking out like a blown flame, but all round them the wind seemed cold and the sunlight, shadowed. Shaking and pale, Elessario leaned into Dallandra’s clasp.
“Friends? Groveling?” Evandar said. “I wonder what she means by that. I very much do. I’d say it bodes ill, an ill-omened thing all round.”
“I’d never argue with you.” Dalla felt her voice as very small and weak. “We’d best try to find out what she means by friends.”
“Will the finding be a safe thing? I don’t know, mind. I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know, either. Can’t we get away from all this music and the noise and ail?”
“Of course. Ell, I fear to leave you alone. Come with us.”
“I’m so tired, Father. I don’t want to.”
“Well, I’m not going to leave you sleeping beside the river like a falcon’s lure. I—” All at once he smiled. “Very well, my love, my daughter, my darling. Rest you shall have. Dalla, if you’ll step here to my side?”
Puzzled, Dallandra did just that. Evandar raised one hand and waved out a circle that seemed to float from his fingers and ring his daughter round. He chanted, too, in some language that Dallandra had never heard before, just softly, briefly while Elessario yawned, reaching up to rub her eyes. It seemed that the wind caught her hair and tossed it, spread it out around her as she reached up higher, grabbed at it, her fingers turning long and slender, growing out, her arms reaching, stretching, stiffening, suddenly, as gray-brown bark wrapped her body round, and her hair, all green and gold, sprouted into leaves. A young oak tree, some seven feet tall and slender, nodded in the evening wind.
“Alshandra the Inelegant will never think to look for her there,” Evandar remarked. “She truly can be a bit thick at times.”
Dallandra merely stared, gape-mouthed, until he took her hand and led her away.

While Evandar was confronting his wife in his strange homeland, in the world of men Jill was trying to discharge what she saw as her obligation to Salamander before she moved on. After the triumph at Myleton Noa, the troupe set sail, falling into the routine of sailing down the coast some miles, then disembarking at yet another sodden hamlet, where they would be received like kings. Jill had the distinct feeling that Salamander was avoiding her. When everyone was crammed on board the small and smelly coaster, it was of course impossible to get a word alone with him. On land, whenever she went looking for him for their talk about his studies, he always seemed to be negotiating with an innkeep, or teaching a member of the troupe a juggling trick, or solving some problem among the acrobats, or arranging their next show. Finally, though, one evening in a good-sized town called Injaro, he made the mistake of leaving the dinner table early while Marka stayed behind to gossip with her friends. Jill followed him upstairs and cornered him in his inn chamber.
“Uh, I was just going back down,” he squeaked. “I have to talk to Vinto and make sure the troupe’s ready to take ship. We’re leaving on the dawn tide, you know.”
“Indeed? Then why have you lit all these lamps?”
“Er, just looking for somewhat. Are you all packed and ready for the journey? Best make sure you are.”
“Stop driveling.”
With a heavy sigh Salamander sank down onto an enormous purple cushion and gestured at her to find a seat opposite him. Sitting so close, she could smell the scent of sweet wine clinging to him and see the dark circles smudged under his puffy eyes.
“I was only wondering how your studies were going.” She made her voice as mild as possible.
“I haven’t done one rotten thing, and you know that as well as I do. Jill, I’m so cursed weary!”
“Well, then, when do you plan to take them up again?”
“Never.”
The last thing she’d expected was candor. He went so wide-eyed and tense that she knew he’d shocked himself, too, but though she waited, he refused to back down, merely watched the insects swarming round the oil lamps and let the silence grow.
“Do you truly think you can just turn your back and walk away from the dweomer?” she said at last.
“I intend to try.” His hands were shaking so hard that he clamped them down on his thighs. “I am sick to my heart of being badgered and prodded.”
“What’s brought all this on?”
“I should think it would be clear, plain, obvious, and evident. I’ve found a thing that I want more than dweomer power.” He paused for one of his sunny smiles, and never had the gesture seemed less appropriate. “A normal life, Jill, a normal life. Does that have one shred of meaning for the likes of you?”
“What are you talking about? What’s so splendid about traveling the roads with a troupe of mangy acrobats and this poor child you’ve married?”
“Of course it’s not splendid. That’s the point.”
“You’re a dolt, Ebañy.”
“Oh, I suppose I must look that way to you, truly. I no longer care. I’ve found the woman I love, and I’ve found a way to have a family of my own while we travel the roads, just like I’ve always loved to do, and cursed, plagued, excoriated, blighted, and scourged will I be before I give one whit of it up.”
“I’m not asking you to give up one thing, just to develop the talent you were born with.”
“Talent? Oh, ye gods!” All at once he exploded, talking much too fast, his voice hissing as he tried to keep from shouting. “I am so sick of that ugly little word. Do you think I ever asked for it? Talent. Oh, certainly, I know I have talent for magic. That’s all I’ve ever heard in my long and cursed life, from the time that my wretched father dragged me to meet Aderyn when I was but a little child. Talent. You have splendid talent for the dweomer. You must study it. It would be a waste to not study it. Your people need you to study it. No one, not one blasted soul, whether elven or human, not one person in the entire world has ever asked me if I wanted to study the blasted dweomer. All they did was push and press and mock and nag until by every god in the sky I’m sick of the very name of dweomer.”
“My heart aches for you, but—”
“Don’t you be sarcastic with me.”
“I wasn’t. I’m trying to point out that—”
“I don’t want to hear it! By the black hairy ass of the Lord of Hell, Jill, can’t you see? I’ve finally found what I want in life, and I’ll have it no matter how many platitudes and how much invective you heap upon my head.”
“Whoever said you couldn’t have it?”
“The dweomer itself. How can you sit there and tell me that I could have both, you of all people on this blasted earth?”
Jill came perilously close to slapping him. Her rage at having that ancient wound reopened took her so much by surprise that for a long moment she couldn’t speak. When he shrank back, suddenly pale, suddenly weak—cringing, or so she thought of it—the rage turned as cold as a steel blade on a winter morning. She got up slowly and stood for a moment, her hands on her hips, looking down as he crouched on the cushion, one hand raised as if to ward off a blow.
“Oho, I think I do see.” She could hear her voice crack like a boot breaking ice. “You’re a coward.”
He was on his feet in a moment, red-faced and shaking with a rage to match hers.
“After all I’ve risked for you, after all I’ve done for you—”
“You haven’t done one thing for me. You’ve done it for the dweomer and the Light.”
“I don’t give a—” He caught himself on the edge of blasphemy. “So I did. Wasn’t that enough, then, everything I suffered for the Light?”
“You can’t measure out service like so many sacks of meal and say ‘enough, no more.’ But that doesn’t matter anyway. My road isn’t your road. I couldn’t have Rhodry and the dweomer both, but there’s no reason on earth you can’t raise your family and study as well. If I’d married, my life would have been my husband’s. That’s a woman’s Wyrd, not yours. You can have Marka’s life and yours as well. You’re just too cursed lazy to study, aren’t you? That’s the ugly truth of it. Lazy and a coward.”
“Mock and goad me all you want. I’ve made my decision.”
“Well and good, then. Far be it from me to stop you. Not one thing on this earth or over it or under it can force you to take up the birthright you’re throwing away. But cursed and twice cursed if I linger to watch you.”
She turned on her heel and spun out of the chamber, slamming the door behind her, and strode down the narrow hall that stank of dust and damp in the cloying heat. She meant to go for a walk in the night air and let them both come to their senses, but he was furious enough to follow her.
“I am sick half to death of you lording it over me,” he snarled. “Don’t you think I know you despise me?”
“Naught of the sort! I’m merely sick at heart to see you pissing your life away into a puddle.”
“Oh, am I now? Is that all you think Marka is? A waste of my most exalted and ever so talented self?”
“Of course not! It’s got naught to do with the lass.”
“It’s got everything to do with her. That’s what you don’t understand. You’re just like Nevyn, Jill. As cold and nasty hearted as ever the old man was.”
“Don’t you say one word against Nevyn.”
The snarl in her voice frightened even her. He stopped in midreply and stepped back against the wall as if she were a thief come to murder him.
“You spoiled stinking mincing little fop,” she went on. “Have it your way, then. My curse upon you!”
She slammed out of the inn, strode across the courtyard, slammed out of the gates, and stomped off for a long walk round the town. Wildfolk clustered round her like an army, and whether it was her rage or their unseen but bristling presence, she didn’t know, but no one, not one single thief or drunkard, so much as came near her all during that long aimless trek. Through the muddy streets of Injaro, out into the surrounding cleared land along a rutted road—only the light from the Wildfolk of Aethyr kept her from breaking her neck and ending that particular incarnation then and there. All at once she realized that she’d gone dangerously far from the town, no matter how much dweomer she had, and turned back. For all that she’d walked herself exhausted, she still was too angry to judge Salamander fairly.
Toward dawn her wandering brought her back to a small rise overlooking the harbor, where she paused among a tangle of huge ferns, as big as trees, to catch her breath. Down below, out at the end of a long jetty, a boat lay at anchor in a pool of torchlight. Like ants the troupe moved back and forth, hauling their personal goods for the sailors to stow below. At the landward end of the jetty, Salamander was supervising while a pair of stevedores unloaded the troupe’s props and stage from a wagon. Jill swore aloud. She’d forgotten how early the tide would turn for their journey out. Fortunately there was still plenty of time left. She could trot right down, tell Salamander that she was going back to the inn for her pack and suchlike, then return to the coaster before they sailed.
For a long time she stood there, leaning against one of the tree ferns, and wondered why she wasn’t hurrying. Already out to the east the sky was beginning to lighten to the furry gray that meant dawn coming. Her gnome appeared to grab the hem of her shirt and pull on it as if he wanted to lead her to the ship. She picked him up in her arms and made sure she had his attention.
“Go tell Dallandra it’s time. Find her among the Guardians. She’ll know who sent you.”
In a puff of moldy air the gnome vanished. Jill watched the bustle at the pier. It seemed that everyone was on board, but Salamander lingered on land, looking up the road into the town, pacing back and forth, pausing to stare again. When the captain left the ship and walked over to argue with him, Salamander waved his arms in the air and shook his head in a stubborn no. The sky was all silver now, and already the heat of day was building in the humid air. Jill had one last stab of doubt. Was she simply being stubborn? Was she deserting a friend, and him one she’d known for years and years? Yet with the cold intuition of the dweomer she knew that she was doing the right thing, that she could no more force him to take up his Wyrd before he wished than Nevyn had been able to force her, all those years ago.
At last, Salamander flung both hands into the air, shook his head, and followed the captain on board. Just as the ship was pulling away from the jetty, the gray gnome appeared, all grins and bows. Jill picked him up again and held him like a child clutching a doll as she watched the ship sail away, heading south on a rising wind, until it disappeared into the opalescent dawn. In the day’s fresh heat, sweat trickled down her back.
“Well, we can hope, at least, that the Elder Brothers found themselves a better island to settle than this one, but somehow or other, I have my doubts.”
The gnome mugged a mournful face, then disappeared.

The ship had sailed some miles down the coast before Marka realized that something was wrong with Salamander. She was standing in the stern of the boat, watching the wake and chatting with the helmsman, when a grim Keeta made her way back through the piles of trunks and boxes.
“Marka, you’d best tend to that husband of yours. He’s up in front.”
When she hurried forward, Keeta followed, but she hovered a respectful distance away, back by the mast. At the prow, Salamander was leaning onto the wale as if he were a lookout, but she could tell that he was staring off toward nothing and seeing nothing as well.
“Ebañy?”
He neither moved nor seemed to hear. For a moment she felt paralyzed by a sudden mad fear, that no words of hers would ever reach him, that if she tried to touch him her hand would pass right through his arm, that never again would he hear when she tried to speak. As if a waking nightmare had dropped over her like a net the light turned strange, all blue and cold for the briefest of moments. She could not speak, knowing that he would never hear. She caught her breath in a sob, and he spun round, masking his face in a smile.
“Well, we’re under way nice and early, aren’t we?”
The illusion shattered. Ordinary sunlight danced on the sea and fell warm on her skin and hair. Yet, when he went on smiling, she felt as if he’d slapped her, that he would hide his hurt this way.
“I thought something was wrong.”
“Oh, no, no. Just thinking.”
In her sudden misery she could only study his face and wonder if he still loved her.
“Salamander?” Keeta strode forward. “Where’s Jill?”
“Oh, she’s not coming with us. There’s really nothing she in these stinking islands, so she’ll be catching a ship back to Orystinna.”
“Really?” Keeta raised one eyebrow.
“Just that.” Ebañy smiled again, easily and smoothly. “She’s got her work to do, you know, and she could see that she’s not going to find any rare books in these rotting little towns.”
“Well, that’s certainly true enough.” Keeta hesitated, on the edge of asking more. “I always wondered why she came out with us in the first place. But do you think she’ll be all right?”
“My dear woman!” Ebañy laughed aloud. “I’ve never known anyone better able to take care of herself than Jill.”
Keeta nodded, considering, then smiled herself.
“Well, that’s most likely true, too. Just wondering. I’m surprised she didn’t say good-bye, but then, she’s not the kind of woman who likes a long drawn-out parting. You can see that.”
Ebañy kept smiling until she wandered off, picking her way through the deck cargo in search of Delya; then he flung himself round and leaned onto the wale again, staring out as if he were struggling not to cry. Marka could think of nothing to do but lean next to him and wait. Ahead the sea stretched out like a road, green-blue and flecked with brown kelp. Gulls darted and shrieked in the rising sun.
“Ah, well,” Ebañy said at last. “Even old friends must part, sooner or later, I suppose.”
“Are you going to miss Jill?”
He nodded a yes, staring off to sea.
“Well, darling,” Marka felt like sobbing in relief, just from having something to say. “If the show keeps doing so well, maybe can go to Deverry someday and see her again. If she’s at this Wmmglaedd place, we’ll know where to find her.”
He turned to look at her, and this time his smile was genuine.
“Maybe so. Somehow I managed to forget that.”
“Silly.” She laid her hand on his arm. “My beloved idiot.”
“You do love me, don’t you? Truly, truly love me?”
“What? More than my life.”
“Don’t say that.” He grabbed her by the shoulders so tightly that it hurt. “It’s ill-omened.”
“I didn’t know.”
“But do you love me? Oh, by the gods! If you don’t love me, I’ve—” His voice caught in a sob.
“Of course I love you. I love you so much I can’t even say.”
“I’m sorry.” He let her go, caught her again, but gently this time. “Forgive me, my love. I’ll admit to having had days when I’ve been in better humor.” He kissed her mouth. “Why don’t you leave me to my fit, sulk, temperament, or whatever this may be?”
All morning he stood there alone, brooding over the sea and sky. Marka had a sudden premonition that had nothing to do with dweomer, that even if their marriage lasted for fifty years or more, she would never truly know her husband, realized it then, when by every law in Bardek and Deverry both it was far too late to change her mind. She also remembered the old fortune-teller in Luvilae. The knave of flowers, she thought. That’s who it was: Ebañy. I’ve married the knave of flowers, and I’ll never be the princess now.

After she watched the ship sail out of sight, Jill returned to the inn, paid off the bills that the troupe had left behind them, then gathered a pack’s worth of possessions: her clothes, the various maps and bits of manuscripts that she’d found in the archipelago, a judicious selection of herbs and oddments, then in a fit of thrift stored the rest with the innkeep, just as if she might come back again someday. Laden like a peddler she strolled out of town by the west gate and followed the road, keeping more on the solid shoulder than the mucky middle, for about a mile. As soon as she turned off into the tangled forest, she saw Dallandra, waiting for her between two trees. In the sunlight the elven woman seemed as insubstantial as a wisp of fog caught in branches.
“You’re ready?” Dalla said, “Now remember, Time runs differently, even on our borders. We won’t seem to be in the Gatelands very long, but we might come out again years later or suchlike. We have to travel fast.”
Together they walked through the dappled shade and between the enormous trees. At first Jill thought that nothing had happened, but then she realized that the thick jungle foliage was so intense a green that it seemed fashioned from emerald. When she took a few steps, she saw ahead of her windblown billows of grass. She spun round and found the jungle gone, swallowed by a mist hanging in the air, opalescent in a delicate flood of grays and lavenders shot through with pinks and blues. As she watched, the mist swelled, surged, and wrapped them round in welcome cold.
“There,” Dallandra said. “You’re not truly in your body anymore, you see.”
Jill felt a weight round her neck and found, hanging from a golden chain, a tiny statuette of herself carved from obsidian. Dallandra laughed.
“Mine’s of amethyst. That’s rather rude of Evandar, to use blackstone for you. It’s so grim.”
“Oh, it suits me well enough.”
Ahead three roads stretched out pale across the grasslands. One road led to the left and a stand of dark hills, so bleak and glowering that she knew they had no part in any country that Dallandra would call home. One road led to the right and a sudden rise of mountains, pale and gleaming in pure air beyond the mist, their tops shrouded in snow so bright that it seemed as if they were lighted from within. Straight ahead on the misty flat stretched the third. Dressed in elven clothes, a man was walking to meet them down that middle way, whistling as he came, his hair an impossible yellow, bright as daffodils. When he drew close Jill noticed that his eyes were an unnatural sky-blue and his lips red as cherries. She felt magical power streaming from him as palpably as she felt the mist.
“Good morrow, fair lady.” He spoke in Deverrian. “My true love tells me that you wish to hurry on your way and not linger here in my beloved land. What a pity, for I’ve many a marvel to show you.”
“No doubt, and truly, I’m honored by your invitation, but I’ve another kind of marvel to find. If I remember the tales about you rightly, it’s one that I think you’d find interesting yourself, the island refuge of the sea elves.”
He grinned, revealing teeth that were more than a little sharp.
“And someday, perhaps, I’ll come visit you there.” He turned to Dallandra. “I’ve found the road we want. Shall we travel it?”
For an answer she merely smiled and caught his hand. Jill walked alongside as they sauntered off down the middle road, as casually as a lady and her lover taking a stroll through the park lands of his estate. All round the mist hovered, parting directly ahead in swirls of watery sunlight to reveal dark mounds of trees. Off to her right she could hear a distant ocean crashing big waves onto some unseen shore.
“Those three roads you saw at first? They’re the mothers of all roads,” Evandar remarked. “Men and elves, every thinking creature under all the suns everywhere—they like to think they’re following a road of their own building, don’t they? But all those earthly roads are just the daughters of one of these three.”
“Indeed?” Jill said. “I won’t argue with you when you could well be right, for all I know.”
“And since the three are the mothers of all earthly roads, all those earthly roads start and end here. You can move from one to another and come out where you choose, providing, of course, that you know how to get here in the first place.”
“I see.” Jill allowed herself a smile. “That’s the trick, is it?”
“Just so.” He smiled in return. “And not so easy a trick to learn.”
“I well believe that.”
“Now, of course, I could show you that trick, if you’d care to stay and learn it.”
Jill felt a pang of temptation as strong as a stab of pain, but she merely laughed and shook her head no.
“I’m grateful for the offer, mind. But I’ve got a bit of work on my hands just now.”
“Your choice, of course.” Evandar bowed, a half-mocking sweep of his arm. “Now, it does take a bit of learning to untangle the roads from their mothers. It’s rather like a tapestry weaver’s remnants, a big basket of yarn of all colors, all tangled up together, and pulling just one strand free without knotting it round the rest isn’t such an easy thing to do. Which is why we’d best stop for a moment and let me think.”
They had reached a low rise, dropping gently down in front of them to another wide and grassy plain, crisscrossed with tiny streams and dotted with thickets of trees. Off on a far horizon in a gathering mist Jill could just make out a rise of towers, all white stone flecked with the occasional glint of gold, as if some mighty city stood there. Although Evandar had talked of many roads, she could only see one, meandering through the plain like a stream. He seemed to hear her thought.
“It’s all in the walking, which road you end up traveling. They all do look alike at first. Come along, we’ll just head down past those gray stones, there.”
Now that he pointed them out, Jill could indeed see the boulders, shoving themselves clear of the earth about halfway down the rise. As they strolled past, she noticed that the stones seemed worked, shaped into flat slabs with some crude tool, and arranged into a roughly circular ring.
“We turn here, I think,” Evandar said.
The sun turned brighter by a sudden streamside, all dappled with coins of gold light and bordered with a spill of yellow wildflowers. Even though it seemed they had traveled a long way, Jill could still hear the mutter of the invisible ocean.
“And what of the sea roads? Do all ships sail on that sea I hear over there somewhere?” She waved vaguely in the direction of the sound. “Is there a harbor where all sailors come to port?”
“There is, truly. Again, if they can find their way to it. If. Your ancestors sailed that sea when Cadwallon the Druid brought them free of slavery and defeat in the land they called Gallia. But, of course, you know that.”
“What?” Jill stopped walking and turned to him. “I don’t know in the least. What are you saying?”
Evandar tossed his head back and laughed.
“Cadwallon was a splendid man, if a bit dour at times. I knew him well, my lady. Now, if only you’d come take the hospitality of my hall, there’s many a tale I could tell you.”
When Jill wavered, Dallandra intervened, shooting a scowl in his direction.
“Don’t listen to him, Jill. You’ve not got years and years of idle time to waste over a goblet of mead.”
“You are a harsh one, my love.” But Evandar was laughing. “Unfortunately, you speak true, and it would be too unscrupulous even for me to tempt our guest further. Look, see where the sun’s breaking through? I think me that it shines on the island you’re looking for.”
The mist ahead opened like a door and let through sunlight in a solid shaft. As they came close Jill felt the steamy heat of a tropical day streaming out to meet them.
“A thousand thanks, Evandar. Dalla, will I see you again?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I was thinking of coming with you, just for a little while.” She glanced at her glowering lover. “To you it’ll be but moments.”
“So it will, and go with my blessing, as long as you come back.”
“Oh, that I will.” Dallandra flashed a wicked smile. “This time.”
Before he could protest farther she dropped his hand and strode forward into the shaft of sun. When Jill hurried after, the light was so strong that it burned her eyes and made them blink and water. Blind and stumbling, she stepped forward and fell to her knees in soft sand.
“”Ych, this is awful,” Dalandra remarked, from nearby. “I feel like I’m made of lead, and I’ve tripped over some driftwood or somewhat.”
Finally, after a lot of swearing and muttering, Jill got her sight back and realized that they were kneeling on a beach under a blazing; sun that lay halfway between the zenith and the horizon—whether it was setting or rising, Jill couldn’t know. Off to her left the ocean stretched glittering; to her right, cliffs of pale sandstone rose up high; ahead the white sand ran, on, and on. Wildfolk swarmed round, climbing into their laps, patting their arms with nervous paws. Dallandra rose to her knees and shaded her eyes with one hand to frown up at the clifftops. Her figurine was gone, and when Jill automatically laid a hand at her own throat, she found that hers had vanished as well. She also realized that she could feel her pack on her back again; it had seemed to weigh nothing at all in the misty lands of the Guardians. For a moment Dallandra stood, looking this way and that, chewing on her lower lip in hard thought.
“Wait! I can just see . . . a long ways down the coast there. Look at those black dots wheeling round in the sky.”
“I can’t make them out at all.”
“My apologies; I forget you’re not elven. But I can just see what looks like birds, wheeling round and diving and suchlike. I’ll wager there’s a river mouth, and where there’s a river mouth there might be a harbor.”
“True spoken. There’ll be fresh water at least, and fish and suchlike.”
“You’ll need food, truly. Are you sure you should do this?”
“I don’t have much choice, do I? Don’t worry, Dalla. I’ve spent many a long year alone in wild places, and I have the elementals, too, to help me if need be.”
“Well and good, then. And I’ll be listening for you. If you call me, I’ll come. It may take me a while, but I will.”
“You have my thanks, and so does Evandar.”
Dallandra smiled, then turned and began walking toward the sea, heading for a place where it seemed the sun laid a road of gold across the water. She waded out into the gentle waves, seemed to step onto the golden road, and disappeared like mist vanishing in the glare of sun. She apparently knew the trick, as Evandar had called it, of traveling to the home of the three mothers of all roads.
Jill allowed herself the luxury of a brief moment of envying her, then made herself concentrate on the job at hand. The wildfolk were still clustering round, undines thronging all silver in the breaking waves, sylphs and sprites hovering overhead, crystal glimpses in the strong sun. At the head of a pack of warty green and purple gnomes, her faithful gray fellow was wandering around, poking at the sand with a piece of stick. When Jill called him, he trotted over, the others straggling slowly after.
“Now look, I need your help. You know who the Elder Brothers are.”
The gray gnome nodded and grinned, revealing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. The purple fellows were suddenly all attention.
“Well, somewhere around here they have a city, somewhere away from the shore, most like. I need to know where it is.”
With a scatter of sand they all disappeared, leaving her to hope they’d understood her.
Sticking to the hard-packed sand at the water’s edge, Jill headed down the beach, keeping the cliffs to her left—going south, she finally decided, once the sun had moved enough for her to judge that it was setting, not rising. It was a long time before she could see the specks wheeling and diving that Dallandra had noticed, and longer still before those specks did indeed resolve themselves into white birds. At that point she realized as well that the land was sloping ever so gently down, and that the cliffs rose lower and lower, finally petering out ahead in a last curve of broken hill. She could also see a brownish surge of water heading out from land and flowing across the ocean. So Dallandra had found her a river, indeed, and Jill was glad of it. In the blazing heat she wanted a swim in fresh water as badly as she was beginning to need the shade of the trees that bordered it.
Unfortunately, when she reached the shallows of the estuary, she found crocodiles, piled on a tumble of gray rocks or flopped onto each other as they lazed on the mud among stands of water reeds. Although Jill started to count them, she gave up after fifty. While the creatures blinked and drowsed in the afternoon sun, little brown birds walked among and over them without the crocodiles even noticing, but Jill had no desire to try the trick herself. She got one of her water bottles out of her pack and had a long swallow—warm, tasting of leather, but at least it was wet. If, as seemed likely, the river got deeper and ran faster upstream, she’d be able to find a safer spot to drink later.
By then the sun was sinking off in the west, and with the
cooler air of evening came swarms of insects, rising like a mist from the riverbanks. Deep in the jungle ahead birds began to call back and forth. With a yawn and a grunt, a few of the crocodiles scrambled out of the pack and flopped into the river. Birds screeched a warning and flew. Jill decided that she’d be better off with a good stretch of dry land between her and them. Rather than face the night jungle she hurried back to the beach and went back the way she’d come for some hundreds of yards. Well above the current waterline she found the bleached-gray trunk of an entire tree, its roots all twisted with dead kelp, and a long scatter of smaller pieces of driftwood, plenty of bone-dry fuel for a fire. Crocodiles, she assumed, would dislike fire as much as other wild animals did. She swung her pack free of her aching shoulders, set it down in the shade of the trunk, and set about making camp.
As she was gathering small chunks and sticks, she discovered her first concrete bit of evidence that Evandar had indeed found her the right island. Lying half-buried in the sand was a broken plank, cut and curved in such a way that it could only have come from a ship. It might, of course, have been nothing more than wrack from some Bardek merchanter, carried hundreds and hundreds of miles by the currents, but she preferred to doubt it. In the last of the day’s light she scurried round, searching for more driftwood, scrabbling like a mole in the sand, until at last, just as the twilight was growing thick and gray, she unearthed a flat panel of wood that must have once formed the side of a chest or back of a bench. It seemed to be the splintered half of a big oblong, and it was carved with designs that no Bardekian would have drawn.
Once she got a fire going with less interesting driftwood, Jill studied her discovery by firelight streaked blue from the sea salt impregnating the wood. Although the panel was bleached and blistering, she discovered on one edge two indentations that could only have been made by hinges—so it was part of a chest, indeed. With her fingertip she could trace a long pattern of vines and flowers, looping casually, almost randomly across the entire surface rather than being contained in strict bands, such as a Bardekian craftsman would have chosen, and among the foliage were the little faces of Wildfolk. On the reverse side of the panel she found deep-graved letters, recognizably elven though somewhat different from the profuse syllabary she’d learned.
Enough of the symbols were familiar for her to make a stab at deciphering the words, most of which seemed to have vanished with the missing piece of panel. There was the graceful hook that spelled “ba,” and here the slashed cross of “de.”
“Iran rinbaladelan linalandal—” she said aloud, and her blood ran cold at the sound of the city name. “Rinbaladelan son of the something? Or wait! The son of Rinbaladelan, not the other way round.”
A new city, then, founded by exiles? Quite possibly, if its name had been inscribed on this long-sunk ship to show her home port. She tossed the panel over near her gear, then got up and laid more wood on the fire. In the blue and gold flame the salamanders leapt and sported, rubbing their backs like cats on the burning sea wrack. Jill wandered away from the pool of light so that she could look up at the stars, hanging bright and clear above her, so close, seemingly, that she felt she could stretch up a hand and touch them. She wished she had a navigator’s lore, to read the stars and learn how far south she might be, but of course, for all the strange lore she did know, the book of the stars was closed to her. Far down the beach at low tide, the ocean lapped soft waves,
What, then, was the noise? All at once she realized that for some time now she’d been hearing a distant sound that she’d been assuming, only half consciously, was surf, but here in this sheltered bend of coast, and with the tide so far out at that, no waves pounded on the shore. She went cold again, freezing motionless, straining to hear, to place, the soft but rhythmical boom, boom, boom floating through the night.
Alter some long minutes she realized that the sound was growing louder, coming closer, pounding like the footsteps of an enormous animal walking at a stately pace. She hurried back to the fire, wondered if she should keep it or smother it, cursed herself for not traveling armed, decided that one sword wouldn’t have been much good, anyway, against a beast as big as this one must be, then laughed aloud at herself. She did, after all, have dweomer to fall back upon. No doubt a blaze of etheric fire would frighten away any animal, gigantic or not, if indeed a beast was what she was hearing. The sound was definitely closer now and definitely coming from the distant river. She walked away from the fire, peered into the dark until her eyes adjusted, then saw pinpoints of light flickering far off in the estuary. The booms grew louder still.
Drums. Drums and torches coming along the riverbank, and she was willing to wager that whoever came marching was pounding those drums to scare the crocodiles off. All at once Wildfolk swarmed into manifestation around her, a whole army of green and purple gnomes, a flock of sprites, jumping or fluttering round in sheer excitement. Her own gray gnome appeared, jigging up and down on top of her pack.
“The Elder Brothers, is it?”
He nodded a yes and grinned, gape-mouthed. In a few minutes she could see the dark shapes of ten men break free of the shadows around the river and turn, torches held high, onto the beach. She could even pick out the drummer, marching at the rear of the line and banging a large, flat drum with some kind of stick. She went back to her fire, threw on more wood to make it blaze in greeting, and waited, arms crossed over her chest, as they drew nearer, stumbling a little on the soft beach sand. With the crocodiles far behind, the drummer fell silent. About ten feet away they stopped, just out of the pool of light, but she could see them clearly enough: elves, all right, with their long, delicate ears and moonbeam-pale hair. They were dressed in full tunics, belted at the waist with a glitter of gold, which came just above their knees, and each man carried a quiver of arrows at his hip and a bow slung over his back. Jill hoped that they spoke the same elven language that she knew.
“I give you my heartfelt greetings,” she said, “and hope I might be welcome here.”
She could just make out a rustle of surprised whispers. One man stepped from the crowd and walked a few paces in her direction. A dragon’s head, worked in gold and as big as the palm of his hand, clasped his belt. When he spoke, she could indeed understand him, but with some difficulty. His dialect was far more different from that of the Westfolk than, say, Eldidd speech is from that of Deverry proper.
“Strangers are always less than welcome. Are you a victim of the sea’s rage?”
It took her a moment to realize that he meant a castaway. “No, good sir. I came here quite deliberately, looking for you and your people, in fact.”
Automatically he turned to glance at the cove, turned back to her with a slight frown.
“I see no boat.”
“Well, no.” There was nothing she could say but the truth. “I traveled by dweomer, and I come to greet you and ask your aid in the name of the Light that shines behind all the gods.”
Jill had never seen anyone look so surprised. He turned on one heel, staring at the beach, turned back to her with a shake of his head, his mouth half-open as he fought for words. The men behind him went dead-silent for a moment, then all began talking in a gabble of surprise until their leader shouted at them to be quiet.
“It seems discourteous in the extreme to ask you for some proof, but given the circumstances . . . ”
Jill smiled, flung up one hand, and called upon the Spirits of Aethyr. In a blaze and stream of bluish light they flocked to her and made her hand and arm blaze with etheric fire far brighter than a torch. All round them Wildfolk swarmed into manifestation and spread out on the beach like an army.
“Forgive me for doubting you.” The elven leader bowed deep. “My name is Elamanderiel, and in the name of the Light, I bid you welcome.”

When Dallandra left Jill, she followed the sun road until the gold faded and the dappled tiles gave way to daffodils blooming by a stream. Following the stream uphill led her back past the circle of stones, through the mists, and down the long road by the sea whose waves broke on every shore and none of them. At length she made her way back to the river and found the Host scattered across the meadow and dancing, as if nothing troubling had ever happened in these lands. Under the young oak tree that hid his daughter, Evandar was sitting in the grass and playing sour notes on a bone whistle, about six inches long and bleached dead-white.
“Odd little trinket,” he remarked. “I found it lying over there, in among the bushes, as if someone had dropped it by mistake. What do you think it is, my love?”
“Oh, ych! It looks like it was made from an elven finger.”
“Doesn’t it? What is it? Two joints somehow glued together? No, but it’s much too long for a single joint.” He held his own hand against it in illustration. “I wondered what it would call up, you see, but so far, naught’s appeared in answer to my playing.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well. It gives me the strangest feeling, seeing it, and a worse one to hear it call. I wish you’d just smash it.”
“I would, except it’s a riddle, and I think me a good one at that,” He tossed it into the air, seemed to catch it, but when he opened his hand it was gone. “Now I know where it lies, but no one else does, and so I’ve covered a riddle with a riddle.”
“I can’t imagine any of your people making such a thing.”
“Indeed, no, and so I wonder: who dropped it here, and why were they prowling beside my river? I think me we’d best tend to our borders.”
All at once they were no longer alone. Like flames leaping out of the ground, soldiers of the Host were gathering round him—how many, she couldn’t tell—in a glitter of coppery-colored mail and helmets, each man armed with a long bronze-tipped spear. The music drifted away and stopped as the Host swelled, spreading across the meadow. At some far distance she heard horses neighing.
“While you were gone, Alshandra was seen again,” Evandar said to Dallandra. “With some of those from farther in.”
“Farther in? I wish you’d explain—”
“There are two hosts, my love, the bright court that I keep, and then the dark who live farther in. And that’s all I’ll say about it now, for look! our horses!”
A young boy hurried forward, leading two golden horses with silvery manes and tails. As Dallandra mounted, she saw that the foot soldiers had turned into cavalry as suddenly as changes always came about in this country. In the clatter and jingle of metal-studded tack they followed Evandar as he led the way out with a whoop and a wave of his arm. Dallandra rode up next to him as the road beneath flattened out and broke free into sunlight. Yet always the mist remained, a gray and shifting wall, seeming solid at times, thin and teased to silver at others to reveal glimpses of shining cities or forested mountains. Dallandra noticed that it always hung just at their left hand, as if they were traveling deosil in a vast circle round a grassy plain.
“The riding of the border,” Evandar called out.
Behind him the Host roared their approval, and silver horns blew.
On horses that never seemed to tire they rode for hours, till the day faded into a greenish twilight, and a moon hung pink and bloated just above the horizon, never rising, never setting. In that ghastly light they traveled past ruins of cities fallen to some great catastrophe and the black and twisted stumps of dead forests, blanketed with ancient ash stretching as far as Dallandra could see. The horses never stumbled, never paused, ambled on and on and on through death and night, till just as she was ready to scream from the terror of it day broke, blue and clear, to drench them all in golden light. The mist writhed one last time, then blew away on a fresh and rising wind. Just ahead in the flowered meadow stood the pavilion of cloth-of-gold. Dallandra caught her breath in a sob of relief.
“Tne border lies secure!” Evandar cried out. “Go then to your music and the feast, but come again when I call.”
Behind him the host of soldiers blew away, like dead leaves swirling in an autumn wind. He swung down from his horse, helped Dallandra dismount, then turned the reins of their horses over to the same boy, who appeared as silently as before. Dallandra watched him lead them away round the pavilion and wondered aloud if there they would disappear.
“No” they’ll return to their pastures, from whence we stole them.” He was grinning. “Are you weary, my love? Shall we join the feast?”
“I’d rather you explained a few things to me.”
“If a riddle has an answer, it’s a riddle no more.”
Simply because she was indeed very tired, she dropped the subject and let him lead her into the pavilion. Their seats, couches on which they could semirecline, stood at the head of the hall. She sank gratefully onto the soft cushions and accepted a golden goblet of mead from a page. As always, the mead and the bread seemed real to her fingers and her taste, solid and so delicious that she realized how hungry she was after the long ride. While they ate, various members of the Host would come to Evandar and talk in low voices, reporting things they’d seen, apparently. Harpers played nearby in long, sad harmonies, while young voices sang, until at last, she slept.

---

---

present

Consider the roots of a simple and mundane action, for instance, buying bread for your breakfast. A farmer has grown the grain in a field carved from wilderness by his ancestors; in the ancient city a miller has ground the flour and a baker prepared the loaf; the vendor has transported it to your house in a cart built by a cartwright and his apprentices. Even the donkey that draws the cart, what stories could she not tell if you could decipher her braying? And then you yourself hand over a coin of copper dug from the very heart of the earth, you who have risen from a bed of dreams and darkness to stand in the light of the vast and terrifying sun. Are there not a thousand strands woven together into this tapestry of a morning meal? How then can you expect that the omens of great events should be easy to unravel?

1.

The Knave of Flowers

Bardek, 1098

Down in the public square Luvilae’s market spread out, a lake of brightly colored sunshades and little stalls. Acrobats performed on improvised platforms; minstrels sat in the shade of trees and played for coppers. Wearing bronze helmets topped with red plumes, the archon’s men strolled through in pairs to keep order. A warm breeze carried the scents of incense and roast pork, flowered perfumes and spiced vegetables. Off to one side, behind a line of stalls that sold blue and purple pottery, a fortune-teller was doing a reading for a client. In the midst of striped and faded blue sunshades and curtains, the two women haggled over the price from either side of a low table. Draped in black as befitted her trade in omens, the elderly one sank onto her cushions with a moist sigh. Dressed like a boy in a linen tunic and sandals, the young woman knelt on a pounded bark mat and ran both hands through her mop of frizzy black hair before she settled back on her heels. Wheezing a little in the heat, Akantha took an ebony box from under the table and slid out the ninety-six tiles of polished bone. Most fell facedown, a good omen, but as Akantha turned the few wayward tiles over, one slid to the ground. With a frown she snatched it back.
“Help me mix them up, little one. Bring them over to the right side of the table—my right, that is.”
Marka laid both hands flat on the layer of tiles and mixed with a sound like thunder.
“Enough,” Akantha said at last. “Draw five to start with.”
The old woman turned the chosen tiles faceup to form a square. The two of spears and the four of golds appeared, followed by three different tiles from the suit of flowers: the knave, the six, and finally the princess, which Akantha laid in the center of the square.
“Is that me?” Marka asked.
“It might be, it might be—or else, you will someday serve the princess. Not sure which yet. But I don’t much like the look of this knave. Hum. A lover, maybe; he’s the same suit, but he’s no prince, is he? Watch out for him, girl. I do like the look of this six. Good fortune, girl, very good fortune indeed, though not without some trouble.” She laid a long and bony forefinger on the two of spears. “But nothing your wits won’t be able to get you out of, I’d say. Three flowers in the first draw is very lucky, very lucky. Now draw me four groups of three.”
Each group formed a triangle. For a long time Akantha sucked her teeth in silence while she studied the layout; once or twice she started to speak, then merely shook her head. Marka knew just enough about the tiles to understand that the expanded reading simply wasn’t coalescing into a whole. Omens of splendid good luck lay right next to signifiers of the grimmest bad fortune, while the minor, numbered tiles contradicted all the important trumps around them. The first was the three of flowers.
“Well, then, the reading should be a good one. Here’s a flower coming up from the Earth. Now, we’ve got the nine of swords for Air, so you’re in for a bit of rough sailing, sure enough. And now for Water we’ve got the queen of birds, which is not the kind of location I’d like to see for that tile. No, water and birds aren’t a happy marriage, girl, not at all. But well, look at this! For Fire here’s the ten of golds! Very good luck, the best there is. And finally, for the Ether, we have the . . . the prince of Swords? Oh, by the Star Goddesses themselves! This isn’t making sense again. Listen, young Marka, sometimes the gods just don’t want us to know the future. That’s all there is to it. Don’t you pay one bit of attention to anything I’ve said this morning, and as for your, money, come back after dark and I’ll try again for free. Sometimes letting the sun set on a reading changes things.”
“Thank you, but I can’t. We’ll be putting on our show once it’s dark.”
“Ah. You’re one of that bunch from Main Island, then?”
“Yes. I do the slack wire. I mean, I used to.” She stopped herself just in time from venting all her bitterness on this sympathetic if hired ear. “I juggle now.”
As she hurried away, Marka tried to leave the reading behind, but its bad aura hung round her like a wet cloak. Nothing, it seemed, was going right these days, not even a simple thing like getting her fortune told. Although Luvilae was the capital of Zama Mañae, the southernmost island in the Orystinnian archipelago, at a mere twenty thousand inhabitants it was not the sort of place where a wandering troupe of acrobats could make its fortune. Marka wondered why her father had brought them there, but then, these days her father did a lot of things that made no sense. She felt a constant dread, a line of ice down her back, a knowledge that she refused to face. He promised, she would think, it couldn’t be that again.
She forced her mind away from old memories with a wrench of will. She’d been sent into town, after all, for more important reasons than just hearing her fortune. She bought a chunk of roast pork on a stick and wandered round, nibbling her meal and looking over the other street performers at the fair. The only jugglers she saw were clumsy; there were no slackrope walkers at all. Although she found a band of tumblers, they couldn’t compete with the complex routines that the men in her troupe performed. Most of the solitaires were musicians. Overall, the best show she saw in that first look round featured trained monkeys and apes.
As she was buying herself a piece of sugared cake, she noticed a small crowd gathering off to one side in the shade of a big plane tree. The cake seller gestured with snow-white fingers, all sticky from her wares.
“If that’s the barbarian, you should take a look at him. Puts on a good show, though I swear the man’s demented!”
Marka went over, paying as much attention to the cake as anything, since it was impossible to eat without getting sugar all over her chin. She found a spot off to one side, but at first she could only see scarves flying into the air above the heads of the crowd and hear the fellow’s patter, a running mix of topical jokes and sheer nonsense, all delivered in a musical voice without any foreign accent whatsoever. She assumed that his barbarism was nothing more than a good costume until she wormed her way closer to the front.
For a moment she could only gawk openmouthed. Never in her life had she seen anyone so pale, as if he’d been bleached like a strip of linen soaked in lemon juice and left in the summer sun. His skin was a light pinky-beige, and his hair, as fine and straight as silk thread, was the silvery color of moonbeams with just the barest hint of yellow in it by contrast with his steel-gray eyes. He was wearing a strange sort of tunic, with long, full sleeves, and gathered into a yoke at the shoulders and belted over a peculiar garment that encased his legs in baggy tubes of blue cloth. So he was indeed one of those fabled barbarians from the savage kingdoms far to the north! It took Marka a few moments to recover from his appearance before she could appreciate his skill.
And skill he had. In his long, slender hands the silk scarves seemed to come alive, whisking through the air, floating up only to plummet down, circling round and round or weaving in and out while he kept up his stream of jokes and snatches of song. Watching him, she was bitterly aware of what a beginner she was at juggling and how clumsy she was going to look when her turn came to perform. When he paused, looking significantly at the crowd, a rain of coins flew his way. Laughing and bowing, he flicked the scarves into his sleeves, then hunkered down to pick up the coins, making them fly round his head in a little stream before they all disappeared into his clothes.
“The Great Krysello is pleased!” he announced. “Allow him to delight your noble selves with his humble tricks for a little while longer.”
When he bowed again, three eggs seemed to appear out of nowhere and settle into his hands. Before he began this new routine, he happened to glance Marka’s way. His eyes widened; he broke into a smile of pure delight; then he wiped the smile away and turned firm attention to his performance. Marka felt utterly flabbergasted. Although she knew that she was a pretty girl, she’d never had a man look at her that way before, as if the very sight of her had made him happy beyond dreaming. Her second thought was that there was powdered sugar all over her face. Blushing furiously, she elbowed her way through the crowd and fled the Great Krysello and his smiles.
She found the public fountain and washed the sugar off, then headed for the city-owned caravanserai at the edge of town. The troupe had four tents and two wagons of its own, set up in a circle under some palm trees at the edge of the campground. It was better to stay away from other travelers, always quick to accuse wandering showmen of being thieves. The five acrobats were practicing their tumbling turns behind the tents, while their leader, Vinto, watched and commented. Out in the middle of the tent circle a big cooking fire was burning. Marka’s stepmother, Orima, along with the two other women in the troupe, Delya and Keeta, were stewing spiced vegetables in a hanging pot and slapping rounds of thin bread onto an enormous iron griddle. They fell silent when Marka came up.
“What’s wrong, Rimi?”
“Nothing. What makes you say that?”
Marka hesitated on the edge of forcing a confrontation. Orima’s dark eyes turned narrow. In the silence Marka could hear the sea booming on the nearby shore and the men chanting out practice cadences.
“Where’s Father?”
“Sleeping.” She turned away, frowning into the pot. “He’s resting before the show tonight.”
Before Marka could say anything more, Keeta came up behind her, grabbed her elbow, and steered her away from the campfire. Arguing with enormously tall Keeta, who was as strong as two average men, was a waste of time.
“If you’re going to learn how to catch a flaming torch,” she said, and firmly, “you’ve got to start practicing.”
They walked to the edge of the sea cliff and stood for a while, looking down at the waves rising higher and higher on the graveled beach. Far off at the horizon the sea made a line like a stretched wire, perfectly flat and landless. Sail far enough to the south, or so Marka had always been told, and you’d come to an enormous waterfall, pouring down into the fiery underworld where the sea boiled off. The water rose again as clouds of steam to make the rain and start the cycle all over again.
“You don’t really want to give me a lesson now, do you?” Marka said at last.
“Well, yes, actually I do.” Keeta grinned, a flash of white teeth in her dark face. “But I also happen to be sick of hearing you fight with your mother.”
“That woman is not my mother, thank you very much.”
Keeta sighed sharply.
“Well, how much older than me is she, anyway? Four years, five? How do you expect me to—”
“I don’t expect you to do anything.” Keeta held one huge hand up for silence. “Except to try not to make things worse. Listen, I know she lords it over you. She lords it over everyone, doesn’t she? But we’re in a very bad position, stuck here at the edge of nowhere. Your father won’t even talk about money. I’m willing to bet that there’s not a lot left to talk about.”
All at once Marka felt sick to her stomach. She sat down in the scruffy grass and stared fixedly out to sea. After a few minutes Keeta hunkered down next to her with a dramatic sigh.
“You’re old enough to know these things now. If the audience gives you special tips, keep them hidden, will you? Dont turn them over to your father. I’m doing the same. We might all need a few extra coins if we’re ever going to see Main Island again.”
“All right.”
“I wonder what’s he doing with it?” Keeta got up and stretched. “Spending it all on her?”
“Probably.” Marka felt the ice-knowledge again, slicing down her spine. You should tell her, she thought, you should tell her the truth right now. Saying the words aloud would mean admitting the truth to herself, as well.
After a long moment Keeta sighed and shook her head.
“Well, let’s practice. Some sticks of driftwood are what we want, something unbalanced like the torches.”
As Marka followed her down to the beach, she was feeling like the worst coward in the world. But I’ve got to be sure. I can’t tell anyone till I’m sure. That, at least, was her excuse.
A good session’s practice with a friend turned Marka as sunny as the day, but when they got back to the campground, she found her father awake, or just barely awake. He came stumbling out of the tent, yawning hugely, rubbing his sticky eyes, and glancing round him with a stupid sort of smile that made him look like a stunned ox. Hamil was as tall as Keeta, and much stockier, a handsome man with his wide black eyes and full mouth, his close-cropped curly hair just touched at the temples with distinguished gray. But just lately he’d been looking old, his eyes often distant or glazed, his speech slow, and he’d been putting on a flabby kind of fat round the middle.
“Marka?” Hamil said. “Did you work over the market?”
“Yes, just about an hour ago. There were only two acts to worry about. One has apes and monkeys, and there’s nothing we can do about that. And then there’s this juggler, but he’s just a single player. I’ve never seen anybody throw scarves the way he does. He’s really fantastic.”
“Oh, really?” Orima said with a simper. “Maybe we should prentice you out to him.”
Marka opened her mouth for a smart reply, but she noticed Keeta, standing behind her father and stepmother and shaking her head grimly.
“He could teach us all something,” Marka said instead. “The best thing is, he’s a barbarian. A real northern barbarian.”
“A draw in itself.” With one last yawn Hamil ambled over to the fire circle and sat down on a low stool near his wife. “Huh. Wonder if he wants to join up with a bigger outfit. We could use a new draw.”
“If he’s that good, he doesn’t need to split his take with anyone.” Keeta came forward and joined the circle. “Maybe we should try monkeys.”
“Smelly things. And they bite,” Orima broke in. “And they leave messes all over. It’s all that fruit they eat. I wouldn’t want them in my troupe.”
“If you ever get your own troupe,” Marka snapped. “You can decide then.”
“Marka!” Hamil and Keeta snapped in unison. Hamil went on alone. “You apologize to your stepmother.”
“For what?”
Hamil got up, raising one broad hand.
“I’m sorry, Rimi.”
Orima simpered and sneered; everyone else in the circle looked awkwardly away; Hamil sat down again.
“I’m going to practice some more.”
As Marka turned on her heel and strode off, she was wondering if she could murder Orima and get away with it. The thought was so strong that it terrified her.

“It is her, O Puissant Princess of Powers Perilous,” Salamander said. “Would the Great Krysello be mistaken over a matter of such grave import? Of course not. I saw her, I tell you: my own beloved Alaena, reborn and come back to me.”
“I have my doubts,” Jill said. “There hasn’t really been enough time, you know, since her last life.”
Salamander turned sulky and devoted himself to pouring more wine. They were sitting in the best inn chamber that Luvilae had to offer—a palace by Jill’s standards though close to a hovel by his—a small room with a chipped tile door, scattered with cushions for want of furniture. Jill took one of the flat wine cups from him and considered the problem.
“I don’t mean to stir up painful memories.” She made her voice as gentle as she could. “But how long has Alaena been gone?”
“Thirty years. Well, almost. Well, maybe a score and eight.”
“How old is this lass, anyway?”
“Uh, well, sixteen or so.”
“That’s not much time as the Lords of Wyrd reckon time. It’s possible, of course—just not likely.”
“I know, I know, but I keep thinking, ye gods, our marriage lasted but such a little while! She would have wanted to come back as soon as she could.”
“For your sake I suppose?”
He winced.
“Not for me,” he said at last. “But because she loved life so much.”
Jill wondered if she could ever be objective in this situation. Since she herself seemed to be destined to lose every man that she allowed herself to love, she refused to let her own bitterness spoil his chance to be happy. He sat frowning into his goblet until the, for him, bizarre silence got on her nerves.
“Does her family live here in town?”
“Um?” He looked up, startled. “My apologies. What did you say?”
“Your heart is really troubled, isn’t it?”
“I’ll admit to that. I was just remembering when Alaena died.”
He got up and paced over to the one small window, leaned against the sill, and stared fixedly out at the courtyard below. Old grief turned his unnaturally handsome face slack. Jill waited for the tale and his usual flood of words. It never came.
“Does her family live here in town?” she repeated.
“It doesn’t. I did a bit of asking round in the market before I came back here. She is—of all things—an acrobat. One of a troupe of acrobats just come from Main Island.” As he turned back a glossy smile smoothed and masked his face. “Fancy that! I’ve heard of strange and solemn twists and turns of wild and wandering Wyrd before, but this—”
“Hold your tongue, will you? I suppose there’s no harm in getting to know her a bit. But for the sake of all the gods, will you try to remember this? That even if by some bizarre chance this is the soul you knew as Alaena, she isn’t the same person anymore. You have no idea what this child is like. None.”
“True enough, much as it aches my eager heart.”
There were times when Salamander could irritate Jill beyond belief, and this was one of them. For all that his half-elven blood kept him looking young, he was fifty-some years older than she, but although he’d started studying their mutual craft of the dweomer long before she’d been born, she’d so far overtaken him that she was, in a very real though unspoken way, the master now to his journeyman. Though he acknowledged her authority, which came ultimately from Nevyn himself, it didn’t take dweomer to see that he resented it as well.
“You’re truly angry with me, aren’t you?” Salamander wiped his smile away.
“Ye gods! You promised me you were going to devote yourself to your studies, but you’ve kept finding one cursed distraction after another. Now this! And there’s the lass to consider, too, you know. She’s but a chid.”
“Old enough to have been married for years in Deverry.”
“This isn’t Deverry.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that. Jill, is it me you’re angry with, or is it everything? The delay, I mean. We’ve been wandering round Bardek for months and months, finding but a trace here and there of the things you want to know.”
Jill took a deep breath and considered.
“There’s that, indeed. Patience has never been my right-hand weapon, has it?”
“And now glorious Luvilae has been but another dead trail, a road with no ending, a house with no doors, a—”
“One wretched image is enough, please. But there’s still that bookseller in Ihderat Noa. I have hopes of him.”
“I suppose you’ll want to head back there straightaway.”
“I was thinking of it, truly. Why not? Oh, of course. The lass. I suppose you want to spend a few days sniffing round her.”
“How crudely you put things!” He grinned, tucking, his thumbs into his belt and leaning back against the wall. “But I did think I might take a stroll in the marketplace tonight. No doubt her troupe performs in the evening, when it’s cooler.”

When it came time for the show, it seemed at first that the gods were going to grant them a decent take. In the cool of the evening a big crowd gathered in front of their improvised stage, set up between two trees to support the slack wire. As the men raised the huge standing torches and Marka ran round lighting them, she noticed a number of fairly well-dressed people in the crowd, the kind who looked like they weren’t above throwing some small change to a street performer. Best of all, her father was wide-awake and alert, laughing and joking with the troupe as they gathered backstage. The first turns went well, too, her own juggling, the apprentice tumblers, and Keeta’s routine with the flaming torches. When the troupe broke to sling the slack wire, coins came in a copper shower, but here and there Marka plucked a silver one.
With great ceremony the flute boy and the drummer sat down cross-legged at the edge of the stage, paused a moment, then began the music for the centerpiece of the show, the slack rope routine. Wiping her face on a scarf, Marka stood off to one side and watched the crowd more than the show. Until Orima came along, the slack rope had been her own turn, one she’d learned as a small child from her mother and at which she was particularly skilled. A cow prancing on a string—that’s our Rimi, she thought to herself. Then she saw, standing off toward the back, the barbarian juggler. Her heart thudded, her fingers tightened on the scarf, and she couldn’t understand why in the least, except, perhaps, that he was so handsome. All at once he noticed her watching and smiled right at her. Blushing furiously, hating herself for it, she turned away.
Dressed in a brief but flowing silk tunic over a loincloth, Orima was just approaching the wire-wound rope, which hung between the twin wooden towers of the mounting platforms, a good six feet above the stage itself. With a big smile for crowd she climbed up and did a back flip on the platform. She bowed—several times too many in Marka’s estimation—then took the balance pole and leapt to the rope for a graceful half run across, balancing in the middle. When the crowd cheered and clapped, she executed a good turn, and ran back to the platform so lightly and easily that the crowd yelled in delight. Marka could practically taste her own anger, a black bile in her mouth. As Orima mounted the rope again, she hesitated for the barest second, just the split of a moment too long. The rope swung, then snapped back; her lead foot groped and grabbed—too late. With a shriek she fell, landing spraddled on all fours, unhurt but furious as the crowd burst out laughing. Swearing under his breath Hamil rushed to help her up while the tumblers ran back on stage and hurled themselves into an improvised routine. It was no good. Laughing and chuckling, calling out a few insults, the crowd broke up and drifted away, and they didn’t bother to throw a single coin behind them, not even for good luck.
In a sullen silence, barely able to look at each other, the troupe doused the torches, stripped the stage, and loaded everything into the wagons while Orima cowered under a nearby palm. Marka was frankly terrified, blaming her ill will for the fall even as she told herself, over and over, that such things were impossible. Much to her relief, no one mentioned the fall until they got back to the campground, where Delya and young Rosso were keeping an eye on the tents. While the men tended the horses and wagons, Hamil and the women drifted miserably over to the fire. Delya took one good look at their faces and said nothing. The silence grew until Orima screwed her face in a pout and pointed one painted fingernail at Marka.
“She hexed me!” Orima screeched. “Your precious little daughter hexed me! She’s got the evil eye.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” Hamil snapped. “We all fall now and then.”
“She’s got the evil eye!” Orima stamped one slender foot.
“Will you shut up? If your head wasn’t so empty you might have better balance on the rope.”
“You pig! You filthy rooting hog!”
Orima and Hamil began sneering and screeching in turns. The rest of the troupe rolled eyes heavenward and trotted off, bursting into chatter as soon as they were well away from the slanging match by the fire. Marka raced off after Keeta. She knew how the fight would end; they would suddenly be all kisses and hugs and creep into their tent . . . she didn’t want to think about it. In the moonlight the two women walked along the edge of the cliff and watched the waves foaming below.
“Keeta?” Marka said at last. “You don’t think wishing someone ill can work them ill, do you?”
Keeta laughed, her dark rumble of a bellow as reassuring as a motherly hug.
“No, I most certainly don’t. Why? Feeling a bite of guilt, hum?”
“Well, it sounds silly now.”
“Understandable enough, little one. But don’t vex your soul over it. She fell because she hurried her step, that’s all.” Keeta sighed profoundly. “At least we earned enough to eat for a while.”
“But how are we going to get home? This is the only stinking town on this rotten little island, and they aren’t going to want to watch the cow capering again.”
“Oooh! Nasty little tongue!”
“But I’m right.”
Keeta made a sort of grunt.
“Well, aren’t I right?”
“About the audience, yes. I wouldn’t call Rimi a cow. Your father’s right. We all fall now and then.”
“I never did! And she hates me for it, too. You know what I’m afraid of? That she’ll work on Father, and he’ll sell me to a slave trader. That’d buy passage for all of you, wouldn’t it? I bet I’d fetch a lot.”
“Will you be quiet? That’s the most awful thing I’ve ever heard anyone say! Your father would never do such a thing.”
“Maybe not, but she would.”
Keeta’s silence spoke a scrollful of answers.
In the morning Marka slept late. She shared a tent with Keeta and Delya, but woke to find them long gone, their bedrolls neatly folded and stowed off to one side, the hot sun streaming through the canvas. From outside she could hear voices, laughter and amiable squabbling, snatches of singing and pretend-oaths, all the normal life of the camp. She dressed, found her bone comb, and wandered outside to stand blinking in the sunlight and work at smoothing her tangle of curls. Although everyone else was up and around, there was no sign of her father or Orima. Still in bed, probably. She made a face at the thought.
“There you are!” Keeta called out. “Fresh bread in that basket by the fire pit.”
Together they sat down by a pile of firewood while Marka nibbled at her breakfast.
“I was talking to Vinto,” Keeta said. “He’s worried about money, too. Your father’s been making hints about not having enough to give the acrobats their full wages.”
Marka felt suddenly sick to her stomach.
“But if he shorts them, they’ll leave. They’re good enough to travel on their own.”
“I know. I thought maybe you might have a word with your father. You’ve still got a lot of influence with him.”
“If I say something, the cow will say the opposite, just to be mooing.”
“Marka!” But Keeta hesitated, her mouth twisting in a bitter recognition of the truth. “Maybe I’ll talk to him, then. I was stranded once, with another troupe, years ago now, but I remember it awfully well. Too well. I don’t—” She hesitated again. “Wait a minute. Isn’t that the barbarian?”
His face shaded by a floppy leather hat, the juggler was riding up to the camp on a beautiful—and expensive-looking—gray gelding. He dismounted just outside the circle of tents, stood looking round for a moment, then led his horse over to the fire pit while everyone else in camp strolled over to meet him. Marka felt her heart start pounding when he made them all a lazy bow, just because he was so lithe and graceful.
“Good morning, all,” he announced with a grin. “My name’s Salamander, and I was wondering if I could have a word with the head of your troupe. I might have a business proposition to lay before him.”
“Um, well, he’s still in his tent,” Keeta said. “Should be up anytime now.”
Salamander glanced at the sky as if to check the position of the sun. Vinto and Keeta exchanged significant looks and went on surreptitiously judging the cost of his beautiful clothes and horse gear.
“Well, I’m his daughter,” Marka said. “Maybe you could tell me what you want.”
“Perhaps you can help me, indeed. I was wondering where you were all heading to next, since it would seem that this town no longer provides afresh and profitable field for your talents to cultivate.”
Again Keeta and Vinto glanced at each other, this time with a hint of agony.
“Er, we haven’t exactly decided. Going back to Main Island, maybe, but I’m not sure.”
“I see. Well, my companion and I are less than sure of our next destination, too, you see, and I thought that . . . ” He let his words trail away.
Hamil was crawling out of his tent, and when he stood up, he lurched and swayed so badly that Marka at first thought he was ill. She bolted and ran to steady him, shocked at the inert force of his weight upon her shoulder as he leaned sideways. Dimly she was aware of the camp breaking out into a buzz of talk.
“Papa, what’s wrong?”
For an answer he merely smiled, a slow, secretive smile, and his eyes turned her way slowly, too, all heavy lids and droop. Around him hung a smoky scent, like incense. Marka grunted as the ice-knowledge chilled her to the spine. For a moment she felt the earth turn beneath her.
“It’s the white smoke again. Well, isn’t it? Oh, Papa, you promised!” With a howl she thrust him away.
“Hey.” He staggered and sat down heavily. “Little beast.”
“Not again! Why . . . it was her, wasn’t it? She’s been getting it for you! Curse her guts!”
By then the rest of the troupe was hurrying over. Marka dodged away and ducked into her father’s tent. Naked, on her hands and knees, Rimi was desperately scraping earth over a hole in the dirt floor. The stem of a pipe stuck up through it. Marka grabbed her by the hair, pulled her up, and slapped her across the face. She squealed like a pig and slapped back, all feeble and limp-wristed.
“Filth! You piece of gutter filth!” Marka hit her again. “You’ve been giving my father opium. I should turn you over to the archon. I should kill you.”
Squealing and swearing, Rimi tried to writhe away. Marka went for her throat just as Keeta grabbed her from behind. There was no use struggling in those massive hands.
“Delya, get the little whore dressed and out here!” Keeta dragged Marka back. “You, young lady, are coming with me.”
Outside, the acrobats were mobbing round Hamil, clamoring questions. Keeta marched Marka over to the fire pit, where Salamander was standing and studying the dead coals as if they interested him very much indeed. One or two at a time, the acrobats gave Hamil up as a bad job and drifted over. Marka began to sob convulsively, whether in rage or grief she didn’t quite know. Keeta’s icy voice cut through her hysteria.
“He’s done this before, has he?”
“Not for years. He promised. Why do you think my mother left him?”
“She left you with him?” Vinto broke in.
“He wouldn’t let me go. And he promised to stop. He promised.”
She forced back tears and looked up. Keeta had turned away appalled, shaking her head over and over. Vinto ran both hands through his hair and stared at the ground for a long moment.
“Well,” he said at last. “I’m sorry, little Marka, but me and the boys are pulling out. We can earn enough on our own to get back to Main Island, anyway, and we’ll think of something to do then.” He glanced at Keeta. “You and Delya are welcome to come with us.”
Keeta sighed sharply, hesitated, then looked at Marka.
“Only if you come, too, little one. I can’t just leave you here.”
Marka felt as if her tongue had swelled to block her throat. She could only stare numbly at her friend’s face.
“You little bitch, you viper!” Rimi marched over, dressed now and wrapped in dignity as well. “You’d better go with them! Do you think I’m going to put up with you after this?”
Marka could find nothing to say to her.
“Shut up,” Keeta snapped. “Her father’s got something to say about this.”
“Father will listen to her.” Marka heard her own voice whispering like a stranger’s. “If they do the smoke together, he’ll listen to her. He lost my mother over it, didn’t he?”
She began to cry again, a helpless flutter that she hated for its weakness. Through her tears she saw Rimi leering and gloating, her face swimming like some dark moon. Marka raised her hands and stepped forward; then someone caught her firmly and pulled her back: the barbarian juggler.
“Satisfying though it would be, my turtledove, to rake your nails down her beauty, it would be both unprofitable and a waste of time. The opium itself will claw her for you.”
Rimi swore like a sailor, then turned on her heel and marched off. Marka wriggled free of his lax grasp and wiped her face on her sleeve. When she looked round, there was no sign of Hamil, but from the purposeful way that Rimi was marching toward the palm grove at the edge of the caravanserai, Marka could assume that he’d taken refuge there. Vinto, his acrobats, Keeta and Delya, Salamander as well—Marka was suddenly aware of the way they all were looking at her, as if she were an invalid who just might die.
“You can’t stay with them,” Keeta said at last. “You just can’t. I don’t know what would happen to you, but—”
“I can guess,” Vinto snarled. “She’s not a child anymore, Keeta! She can hear the truth. How long will it be before her pig-dog of a father has her and Rimi selling themselves to keep him in smoke?”
Marka felt the earth lurch again, but she knew what she had to do. Salamander laid a gentle hand on her shoulder to steady her. She shook it off.
“We’d better pack our stuff up,” Marka snapped. “Vinto, at least one horse and wagon should be yours, anyway, for the wages we owe you.” Her voice threatened to break, but she forced it steady. “Maybe if we all pool our coin, we can get a ship back to Main Island today.”
Keeta let out her breath in an explosive puff and muttered a thanks to the Star Goddesses.
“If you wouldn’t mind me joining you with my act,” Salamander said. “We could all travel together, indeed. Shall we repair to the inn where I’ve been staying and have some wine? There shall we foment plans.”
“Glad to,” Vinto said. “We can discuss shares later. First let’s get out of this stinking camp.”
During the slow walk to town, Marka suddenly remembered the fortune-teller. Good luck mixed with disaster, was it? Well, she could see the disaster, all right, but where was the good luck?
At Salamander’s inn the portly landlord moaned and wrung his hands over the very thought of having traveling acrobats in his common room, but the juggler talked him into serving wine and little cakes, such good wine that Marka was impressed. As they sat on cushions round a low table and made awkward conversation, she noticed that Vinto was already beginning to defer to him, only in little ways, but she had the feeling that sooner or later this stranger was going to end up managing the entire troupe. Since they were sitting off to one side, she could whisper to Delya.
“Do you mind everything changing like this?”
“Mind? Oh, if Keeta thinks it’s a good idea, I’ll go along with it. What do you think of this juggler?”
“I don’t know. He’s awfully good-looking.”
“I suppose so. He’s certainly used to taking charge. He said he had a companion, didn’t he? I wonder what she’s like?”
Marka felt so bitterly disappointed that she nearly wept. She’d forgotten that a man like this would have women following him round wherever he went, that he would most certainly never be interested in a gawky girl like her.

Jill first heard of Salamander’s newly acquired troupe of acrobats from the innkeep, who came rushing upstairs to tell her as soon as he had the wine served. All quivering jowls and flapping hands, he bowed repeatedly while he blurted.
“There must be ten of them! They’re probably all thieves! I don’t have room! I don’t know what your—uh—friend was thinking of!”
“Thinking? He probably wasn’t, knowing him. All right, I’ll go down.”
By then several pitchers of wine had gone round, and everyone was giggling and talking a little too loudly as they lounged on cushions round the low table. Jill stood in the doorway for a moment and watched Salamander, beaming at his own generosity, playing host like a Deverry lord. Opposite him sat a pretty young woman who studied him in such a fervent mix of desire and misery that she might well have loved him in her last life.
“Oh, Jill, there you are!” Salamander called out. “Come join us! My friends, this is Gilyan of Brin Toraedic, a wandering scholar, who has honored my humble self by traveling with me as she searches out rare manuscripts. She’s on a special commission from the scholar-priests of Wmmglaedd, a mysterious and magical isle in the far-off kingdom.”
The troupe greeted this cascade of blather with honest awe, the men rising to bow to her, the women bobbing their heads her way, except for Marka, who merely stared. The gray-haired fellow sitting next to Salamander started to get up and cede her his seat, but Jill waved him back.
“I just need a word with Salamander,” she said. “Not that it’s possible to have but a single word.”
At the jab he winced, but he scrambled up and followed her out to the courtyard where they could talk privately. Jill perched on the edge of a tiled fountain and glared at him.
“I wanted to travel quietly.”
“Um, well, yes. I do remember you mentioning something of the sort. But we’ll be safer with a large group.”
“I wasn’t aware we were in any danger.”
Salamander sighed and sat down next to her.
“Let’s have the truth.” Jill changed into Deverrian to doubly insure privacy. “You’re doing this to have a chance at the lass, aren’t you?”
“Bit more to it than that!”
She raised one eyebrow.
“Jill, they needed my aid! The leader of their band had spent all their coin on the white smoke, and there they were, stranded far from home in a town where they’d never earn another copper.”
“Your heart’s big enough to embrace the world and your tongue to cover it, too. I still say it’s the lass who inspired this outburst of compassion.”
“Imph, well.” He held up his hand and flicked drops from his fingertips. “Well. Imph.” Then he looked up with one of his sunny grins. “But since you want to talk with that bookseller in Inderat Noa again, we’ve got to go back to Main Island anyway, and travel across its less-than-glorious reaches, so they might as well travel with us.”
“Oh, I suppose so! And the lass will doubtless be better off with you to look after her than she would be on her own.”
Salamander grabbed her hand and kissed it.
“My humble thanks, O Princess of Powers Perilous!”
Jill snatched her hand away and stood up, shaking her head more at herself for indulging him than him for wanting to be indulged. Later, though, when she heard Marka’s story of traveling with her addicted father and his jealous young wife, she decided that she’d done the right thing. The child was better off with them. Certainly the members of the troupe agreed. Late that evening, after the muttering innkeep had found them all rooms and served a grudged dinner, Jill was walking out in the cooler air of the courtyard when Keeta joined her, carrying a pierced tin candle-lantern.
“I just wanted to thank you for allowing Salamander to take us on like this. If he weren’t advancing us the passage home, I don’t know what we’d do.”
“Well, it was his decision, but you’re all welcome enough.”
“Oh, please!” Keeta laughed, a pleasant if rather deep chuckle. “It’s obvious that you do the deciding around here, no matter how much he talks, and by the Star Goddesses themselves, he does a lot of talking, doesn’t he? But I’m glad that we’ll be taking Marka away from her father before she gets cold feet and runs back to him.”
“Kin ties are hard to break, and she’s very young.”
“Um.” Keeta sat down on the edge of the tiled fountain. Even sitting while Jill stood, she looked Jill straight in the face. “She’s a wise child, old beyond her years—well, in most things, that is. When it comes to others . . . ”
Jill waited, not quite sure of her drift. Keeta frowned at the dappled lantern light on the water.
“I’ve seen it happen before,” Keeta said at last. “A young girl same in the same troupe with some good-looking man. Sometimes there’s trouble over it—trouble for her, anyway. I intend to talk some sense into her head. You don’t need to worry about her making a fool of herself over vour man.”
“What?” Jill burst out laughing. “Let me assure you that Salamander’s nothing of the sort! He’s more like a brother to me than anything.”
“Oh! Well, that takes care of half the problem, then.”
“And the other half is?”
“I’d hate to see little Marka pregnant and deserted.”
“He wouldn’t do that. Oddly enough. He looks like the sort of man who’d leave with never a backward glance, but he’s not. I’ll give him a fair bit of credit—he’s got more honor around women than most men do.”
“Wouldn’t be hard, huh?” Keeta considered for a long moment before she smiled. “Well, that eases my mind, I must say. I didn’t want to see the child get free of one mess only to land in another.”
Although Keeta took the lantern and went back inside, Jill lingered in the cooler air. By then the moon, just past her full, had sailed tover her zenith and was beginning to sink off to the west. The silver light fell dappled through the sparse trees and danced on the mcoving surface of the fountain. As Jill watched, the light seemed to thicken and take shape like the drift of smoke over a dying campfire. At first she assumed that it was merely some of the Wildfolk in a semimaterialized form, playing in the water; then she realized that the waft of palpable light was swirling, growing, stretching upward as it spiraled round to make a silver pillar some ten feet high and four across. Inside the pillar, glowing all silver, stood a vaguely elven shape, not as solid as water, yet more so than a beam of light.
Jill raised her hands palm-out and chest-high, then spoke in greetings the magical names of the Lords of Water, for she thought that this being was one of the elemental kings. Yet as the form thickened within the pillar of light, she realized that it belonged to an elven woman, familiar-looking at that, with a long mane of silvery-blond hair and steel-colored eyes.
“Dallandra! How did—” Jill was too surprised to say more
Dressed in an elven tunic and a pair of leather trousers, Dallandra seemed almost solid as she stood hovering over the water in the basin. Jill had never seen her so clearly before. She could pick out the separate curls and masses of her hair, see the folds of cloth in her tunic, and just make out a pale shard of landscape behind her, a grassy meadow and a single tree. Round her neck Dallandra was wearing on a golden chain a single large amethyst carved into some ornamental shape—or so Jill thought of it. Yet when she spoke, Jill heard her voice only as a thought.
“Jill! What are you doing here?”
“Trying to find out the meaning of the word inside the rose ring. Do you remember it? The one Rhodry Maelwaedd has.”
“Of course I do. That’s why I’ve been looking for you.” She frowned, staring down at something near her feet that Jill couldn’t see. “But I meant, why are you in Bardek?”
“You know where I am? How?”
“I can see your surroundings, and they match what I’ve been told about the islands. But please, I don’t have much time.”
“Well, it seems that some of the People may have fled south after the Great Burning, and there might be some still living far to the south of here. I’ve found a map, you see, that shows islands out beyond Anmurdio, and some histories that indicate there were once elves in Bardek. I’ve come to look for them.”
Dallandra gasped, and the surprise broke her concentration. Her form began to fade as the pillar of light changed to a thick pillar of smoke, swirling silver in the moonlight.
“Dallandra!” Without thinking Jill was on her feet and shooting. “Dalla! Wait! How did you get here?”
With one last swirl the pillar seemed to blow away, smoke on the wind, a thickening of moonlight, then gone.
For a long time Jill sat on the bench, and did some hard thinking. Dallandra was a dweomermaster of great power who, some hundreds of years earlier, had linked her Wyrd to that of the strange race of beings known as the Guardians. Jill had last seen her back in the Westlands a thousand miles away and, more significantly, far across the ocean, Working dweomer across any body of water is impossible, because the exhalations of elemental and the astral vibrations break up an image as fast as even the best dweomermaster can build it. Other dweomermasters had told Jill many a time that Dallandra had long left ordinary physical existence behind, even though none of them knew exactly in what state she did exist. At best she was semicorporeal, a thing of etheric substance only, which would make her even more vulnerable to the water forces than an ordinary magically produced shape or image. Yet here she was, or at the least some clear projection of her, coming through onto the physical plane. It was more of a puzzle than Jill could solve.
When she went back inside, she paused for a moment at the door of the common room and watched Salamander lounging at a table with a half-empty wine cup in his slender hands and smiling as he listened to the talk and jests flying like juggling clubs among the troupe of acrobats. He’s probably been lonely, Jill thought. The gods all know that I’m poor enough company when I’ve got some working at hand. Yet her annoyance lingered, that he’d distract himself from his studies this way. She had, after all, promised Nevyn that she would oversee his dweomer training and do her best to get him to work up to his potential. In her mind, any promise she’d made to Nevyn was a sacred charge.

Dallandra had come to Bardek searching for Jill, or to be precise, she’d been searching for Jill on the inner planes and traced her to a place that had turned out to be Bardek. Judging from the way that Time ran in that world in which she was experiencing Time, it had only been a few weeks since she’d left her dweomermaster of a husband, Aderyn of the Silver Wings, back in the Westlands, although she knew, of course, that it was well over two hundred years as men and elves reckoned the span. Even though she was aware of the split between the two time flows, it was hard to keep track of small variations. It seemed to her that she’d last seen Jill the day before, when in truth it had been nearly three years. During that last meeting, Jill had asked her about the rose ring’s secret and she’d tried to find the answer for the human dweomerwoman.
“I’d forgotten about the lapse of time,” she remarked to Evandar. “She was so surprised that I’d remember.”
“Eventually you’ll grow used to the ebb and flow, and you’ll see why we don’t concern ourselves with the affairs of that world of yours. It all speeds by, like light on a running stream.”
“So it must. How many of their years is a day here?”
“What? How would I know?”
“Haven’t you ever thought to work it out?”
“Whatever for? Besides, it changes, how fast things flow.”
“It changes? Well, there’s a bother, then. On what principle?”
“On what?”
“Well, I mean, there must be some sort of rule or regular order to the way the changes come and go.”
Evandar merely looked at her, slack-mouthed and wondering. Dallandra considered and tried again.
“What about bard lore? Would there be any old sayings about Time among your people?”
“In summer the sun runs fast as a girl through the sky,” he said and promptly. “In winter like an old woman she goes halt and slow.”
“I’ve never noticed it being winter here.”
“Oh, but it has been. You can tell by the way Time limps. Now in the heat of the summer she moves like a bird on the wing.”
“’And what about spring and autumn? Are there any sayings about them?
“About spring, no, but there’s one day in the fall of the year when our time and their time coincides.”
“And that is?”
“In the land of men, it’s the day between years.”
“A day between years? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
He merely shrugged indifferently. They were sitting that evening—or seemed to be sitting—on a grassy hilltop, looking down into shifting mists that alternately covered, then revealed a plain crisscrossed by rivers and dotted with thickets. Far off on the horizon a moon was rising, bloated and golden.
“I don’t understand why you won’t tell me what that word inside the ring means.”
“I don’t understand why myself, but I’m still not going to tell you.” He caught her hand and kissed it. “Why do you want to help this human woman, anyway?”
“Because she’s going to help us. She promised me that she’d look after the child when it’s born, and in return, it’s only common courtesy to help her find out what she needs to know.”
“But it’s a riddle, and one of my best riddles, and I’ll not tell her the answer.”
For a moment she considered him, this strange creature who was in a stranger way her lover now. Although he looked like an elf in most ways, his hair was the yellow of daffodils, no natural blond, his lips were as red as sour cherries, and his eyes were a startling turquoise-blue, as artificial as one of the colors that elven craftsmen grind to decorate tents.
“This island to the south, now,” Evandar said in a moment. “That does interest me. Would you like to help her find it? That I will do for her, in return for her help when the child is birthed.”
“Bless you, my love. I would, indeed.”
“Splendid! You go tell her while I look for the island.”
“I will, but I think I’ll find Elessario first and take her along. She should be right nearby.”
And so, thanks to the vagaries of Time, it was some weeks in Jill’s world before Dallandra appeared to her again.

In the meanwhile, the troupe of traveling players, with Jill and Salamander tagging along, left Zama Mañae behind. The main island of the Orystinnian archipelago is shaped rather like an animal, with the head pointing due north and the long tail of a peninsula filing some fifty miles off to the south. Once the troupe reached Arbarat, the city at the tail’s tip, they had a long, slow journey north with their tumble-down wagons and elderly horses to the next large cjty, Inderat Noa on the western coast of the animal’s body. Marka was delighted when Salamander insisted that she leave the bumpy wagon and ride on his horse, which he then led, walking nearby in the sunny road. They stopped often, of course, to perform in the smaller towns and marketplaces along the way. In every marketplace Salamander bought something for the troupe, a length of silk for a costume here, or a brand-new set of painted leather clubs for the acrobats there, out of his own always substantial earnings.
“It takes coin to earn coin,” he would say. “And between us, Yinto and I are going to make this troupe the most splendid show in all of Orystinna.”
Marka would merely smile and think that Salamander could no doubt do anything in the whole world if he set his mind to it.
With Orima left behind and gone, Marka reclaimed the star turn on the slack rope. It was some compensation, she supposed, for losing her father, although, as the days went by, she was startled to find that she missed him very little. While Haniil had never treated her badly, he’d never treated her particularly well, either. What she did miss was the fact of having a father, a family, a place or connection in the world, From now on the troupe—or some troupe much like it—would be the only family she would have, just as their troupes were for so many of the wandering performers of the Bardekian islands. She comforted herself by thinking that at least she had Keeta and Delya, whom she’d known for six whole years, practically a lifetime in the fluid world of traveling shows.
And then, of course, there was Salamander, whom she found more than compensation enough. She would pick out a place at a safe distance to sit and watch him for hours on end, whether he was performing or practicing or merely standing by the campfire and eating his dinner. Most times she was afraid to approach him. Once though, when he was working with the silk scarves, he noticed her watching and called her over.
“Want to learn how to throw these?” he said.
“Yes, I would.” She was surprised at herself for speaking so easily. “If you wouldn’t mind taking the time to show me how.”
“Not in the least, not in the least.”
After that, she had a legitimate excuse to spend several hours a day in his company, though every now and then, she would notice Keeta or Jill giving them a less-than-approving look.
After one of their practice sessions, he told her that his real name was Ebañy, but he made her promise to keep it a secret from everyone else—which gave her a moment of cold doubt Even though she was thoroughly besotted with him, Marka was shrewd enough to realize that he was keeping some rather strange truths to himself. Whenever he spoke of the barbarian kingdom in the north, his stories grew guarded. He never mentioned his family or a home city; he never told anyone why or how he’d become a street performer.
“Do you think he’s maybe the outcast son of one of their nobles?” Marka remarked to Keeta one night. “Maybe he’s even a prince in disgrace.”
Keeta snorted.
“The disgrace I’d believe quick enough.”
“Oh, don’t be mean! But you know, sometimes I wonder if he’s married.”
“Marka my dear, you do have a good head on your shoulders, don’t you? But no, I asked Jill, and she said he wasn’t.”
“Oh, I’m so glad! We can trust what Jill says, can’t we?”
“There’s something about Jill, my dear, that makes me think we could trust her with our lives.” Keeta frowned, nipping her lower lip in thought. “I feel like a fool for saying it, but there you are.”
Marka barely paid attention to this last remark, but she found the news about Ebañy sweeter than the finest wine or purest honey. For days she savored it, bringing out the thought that no other woman had a claim on him. Yet, he remained distant, brotherly at the most, until she reached the bitter conclusion that he merely felt sorry for her.
The day before they reached Inderat Noa, the troupe came upon a public caravanserai beside the road. Although they could have made a few more miles before dark, and the city lay only about five miles ahead, they decided to camp early rather than risk being shut out of the gates by arriving late. Once the horses were tended and the tents raised, Marka went looking for Ebañy. Off to one side of the campground stood some scruffy holm oaks round a spring and a series of stone fountains, provided for travelers by the archons of Inderat Noa. As she walked up, Marka saw him sitting with Jill, and something about the tense set of their shoulders made her hesitate. When Ebañy saw her, he gave such a guilty start and smiled in such a nervous way that she realized they’d been talking about her. All at once she felt about eight years old; she was blushing—she was sure of it. Without a word she turned and ran for the camp, dodged into her tent, and threw herself down onto her blankets for a good cry.

“Whatever happened to the girl’s mother, anyway?” Jill said.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know,” Keeta said. “She was long gone when I joined Hamil’s troupe. It was quite a large show in those days.”
They were sitting on a stone bench under some trees in Inderat Noa’s marketplace, a big and elegant open square with fountains and little cobbled walkways between the groups of stalls and booths. Afternoon heat danced and shimmered over the paving like the water mist over the fountains. Not too far away Salamander and Vinto were haggling with a pair of archon’s men about a performance permit.
“I did hear that Marka’s mother went back to Mangortinna,” Keeta went on. “I think she was born there.”
“I see. I don’t understand why she didn’t take her daughter with her.”
“How could she? She and Hamil were legally married and all.”
“Well, what—”
“Oh, wait! You speak so well that I keep forgetting you’re a foreigner. Under our laws a child’s her father’s property. The mother has no say in anything, really, unless he gives her one.” Keeta frowned briefly. “One reason why I made my mind up never to marry.”
“I can understand that. Mangortinna, huh? Well, if she went back home, we’d probably never find her, even if we did try.”
“What do you want to find her for?”
“Oh, it’s probably just sentimentality on my part, but I feel like I should . . . well, consult her, I suppose. You see, Salamander wants to marry Marka.”
“Marry her? Actually legally marry her?”
“Yes, just that.”
“Well, that’s wonderful! He’s the kind of man who could take good care of her, and she certainly wants to marry him.”
Jill laughed.
“You were just telling me how awful marriage is.”
“For me, it would be, but I know that the way I’ve chosen to live my life isn’t right for every woman. I was really afraid that Marka was going to end up unmarried and pregnant, no matter what you said about his morals.”
“So far he hasn’t laid a hand on her.”
“So far. She’s a pretty little thing, after all.”
“True, and even more to the point with our Salamander, she worships him.”
“Imph. What’s wrong with them getting married?”
“Well, he’s a good bit older than her, more so than you’d ever think to look at him. And then, well . . . ” She hesitated, unsure of how to explain, of how much she could explain.
Someone called their names. Waving the permit, Salamander came strolling over to them, and Jill let the subject drop. Vinto looked extremely pleased about something, himself.
“We shall be setting up our fabulous cavalcade of wonders on the East Square,” Salamander said. “Not only is said square paved and thus quite level, but it’s in the more prosperous quarter of town. We had best return to camp and tell the others of our good fortune. And I want to see how Delya and Marka are getting on with finishing those new costumes.”
“I’m going to stay in town,” Jill broke in. “I want to go see the bookseller, and then I’m supposed to consult with the priests of Dalae-oh-contremo again.”
Although Inderat Noa sported several grand public squares, most of the streets twisted like tunnels under arcades of houses and shops, built right out over them for the shade. As Jill made her way through this dim warren she attracted a crowd of Wildfolk, the big purple-striped gnomes peculiar to Bardek, scurrying along after her on their fat little legs. Although her usual gray fellow did materialize, he took a smaller form than usual, so that he could ride upon her shoulder and look down upon the purple gnomes with a lordly disdain. None of the other people in the crowded street could see her companions, of course, although every now and then some passerby suddenly looked down and frowned at what seemed empty air as a gnome bumped into him or brushed rudely past.
The bookseller, however, could see them quite well, because he’d studied the dweomer lore for some thirty years. Daeno’s little shop was wedged in between a fruit seller’s and a basket weaver’s down on a dead-end alley perfumed with lemons and drying grass. When Jill and her crew crowded through the door into the blessedly cool shop, the old man came shuffling forward to greet them all, waggling a finger at the gnomes and warning them to keep their little clawed paws off the rare scrolls and codices stacked up high all round.
“I’ve found the map,” he announced. “My boy just got back with it. Its owner let it go cheap, by the way. It’s not much of a collector’s item.”
The piece of pounded bark paper was about two feet long by a foot and a half wide, all torn and filthy round the edges, and flecked with what looked like ancient wine drops overall. At the very top of the map lay the faded outline of Main Island’s tail and the tiny islands just to the south; off to the left lay the Anmurdian archipelago in somewhat darker ink.
“Now, Anmurdio is much farther off than this map makes it look,” Daeno remarked. “So who knows how far away these are.”
He laid one bony finger on the “these” in question, a group of four islands, drawn entirely too circular to be accurate, floating far to the south of Anmurdio. Out in the middle of the ocean in between, the scribe had drawn a sea serpent and a fat monster with big fangs. Daeno picked up the map and flipped it over to reveal several lines of tiny, spiky writing, faded to a pale brown, on the back.
“Vairo the merchant made this map by the grace of the Star Goddesses in the reign of Archon Trono. That was in 977 by Deverry reckoning, Jill, well, give or take a year, anyway.”
“You have my sincere thanks for going to all this trouble.”
“You’re most welcome. I’m afraid it’s not much of a map.”
“It’s better than no map at all, and it’ll be something to show round once we get to Anmurdio.”
“You know, there are supposed to be cannibals in the smaller islands.”
“Just like there’s supposed to be sea serpents out in the southern ocean?”
Daeno laughed, nodding his head in agreement while he rolled up the map.
“The thing is,” Jill went on. “I’m never going to get a merchant here on Main Island to risk his ship and his fortune on some daft scheme of sailing to the far south. Or well, there was one, but he has a wife and three children, and I couldn’t let him. I just couldn’t.”
“Of course not.” Daeno paused to swat at the gnomes, who were scurrying this way and that on the counter. “I’m surprised you found anyone at all. Who was it, by the bye? A local man?”
“No, a merchant up in Orysat, Kladyo by name.”
“Elaeno’s boy?”
“The very one! Do you know—oh, of course you’d know Elaeno!”
“Well, not intimately or anything, but we’ve met in the flesh and then, of course, out on the etheric we run into one another from time to time. Hum, am I right in this? I heard that his master in the dweomer was a Deverry man.”
“That’s true, and it was the same person who taught me. Nevyn, his name was.”
Daeno whistled under his breath. The gnomes all went dead-still to listen.
“Not the Nevyn?” the old man said. “Oh, listen to me! There could only be one!”
“You’ve heard of him, then?”
“What?” Daeno laughed aloud. “Every dweomerworker in these parts has heard of Nevyn! He spent years and years in the islands, you know, over the last two hundred years or so. He’d turn up for twenty, thirty years at a time, then disappear again for even longer. Probably sailed back home to your kingdom. You must know all about it.”
In fact, Jill didn’t, and she was rather surprised to find it out now. Daeno went blithely on.
“But to get back to the problem in hand, if you want to sail south, I suppose that Anmurdio’s the best place to look for a ship.”
When Jill arrived back at the caravanserai, she found the troupe hard at work, readying costumes and props for the evening show. Salamander himself was sitting on the bed of a wagon with his feet dangling over the edge like a farm boy and whittling like one as well. On a piece of driftwood shaped much like a bird, he was carving details.
“It’ll be a fine thing to juggle with.” In illustration he tossed it spinning and caught it again in the same hand. “And I know what you’re thinking, O Mistress of Magicks Marvelous, that if only I spent this much time and ingenuity, to say naught of cleverness, craft, wit, and willingness upon the dweomer, I should soon match you.”
“Surpass me, more like. You’ve got the fluid natural talent that I never had.”
“Oh, please, tease me not and mock me neither.”
“Naught of the sort. I’ve had to work blasted hard for everything I’ve accomplished, while it comes easy to you. I suppose—no, I know—that’s why I get so sour with you.”
“Oh.” He considered the wooden bird with a frown. “Well, that does put a different complexion on things, truly. Jill, you have my apologies. I try to control my frivolous nature, but it’s just somewhat I was born with, I fear me.”
“It’s somewhat that could be overcome.”
He shrugged and went back to refining a small burl that resembled a wing.
“Ebañy, I just don’t understand you.”
“I don’t understand myself.”
“Would you please not put me off?”
He looked up, abruptly solemn, yet she couldn’t tell if he were sincere or merely arranging the expression she wanted to see.
“Dweomer means everything to you, doesn’t it?” he said.
“It does. More than meat and drink, more than life.”
“More than love.”
“Unquestionably, considering.”
“Alas, my poor brother! I don’t suppose he’ll ever understand why you chose the dweomer over him. No more do I suppose that you particularly care if he does or not.”
“That’s not fair.”
He winced at the bite in her voice.
“Look.” Jill tried another tack. “I know the basic exercises and suchlike can be tedious. Why, when I was learning all the proper calls and salutes for the elemental kings and lords, I thought I’d go out of my mind from sheer boredom. But it’s been more than worth it. Now I can travel where I will in their worlds and see the marvels there. But you know about that. You’ve had a taste of it yourself. I simply can’t understand how you wouldn’t want more.”
“I don’t have your devotion to the art.”
“Oh, horseshit!”
“Ah, the silver dagger’s daughter still!” He looked up from his work with a grin, then let it fade. “But horseshit it’s not, my friend, my dear and treasured companion. Jill, when you want somewhat, you’re so single-minded that it takes my breath away. The rest of the world’s not like that.”
“I’m not talking about the rest of the world.”
“Oh, very well, then. I’m not like that.”
Jill hesitated, struggling to understand.
“Well,” he went on. “You had your own doubts about taking up the art, didn’t you?”
“True spoken. But that’s when I didn’t know what it offered. You do know. I honestly don’t see how you could get so far and then give it up.”
“Ah. It’s because you do the work out of love, while I have only duty and grim obligation as my whip and spur.”
“You honestly and truly don’t love the dweomer work?”
“I should have thought that such would be obvious after all these years.”
She knew him well enough to know that he was skirting the edge of a lie.
“Well here, consider this.” Salamander spoke quickly, before she could pin him down. “Wasn’t your father the greatest swordsman in all Deverry? Didn’t he gain great glory for himself wherever he rode—the silver dagger, the lowly outcast of a silver dagger, who put the best fighting men in the kingdom to shame? But did he relish that life? Did he revel in his glory and his position? Far from it!”
“Well, true spoken. What are you driving at?”
“Only that a man may have great skill and talent and not give a pig’s fart about the life they lead him to.”
“And do you feel that way about the dweomer?”
“Not exactly, literally, precisely, or even in substance. A mere example only.”
But at that exact moment his thumb slipped on the knife, and he sliced his hand. With a yelp he tossed both bird and blade onto the wagon bed and started cursing himself and his clumsiness. Blood welled and ran.
“You’d better let me bind that for you,” Jill said. “I hope that wretched knife was clean.”
“Doesn’t matter. The cut’s deep enough to wash itself out.”
It was, too, though mercifully not deep enough to cause permanent harm. Later Jill was to remember that accident and its unconscious confession only to curse herself for not seeing the meaning at the time.

Among the Host, Evandar’s people, Dallandra searched on a sunny day through a meadow, bright with flowers of red and gold. In their bright clothes and golden jewelry, the Host too bloomed like flowers amid the tall green grass, and as always, their exact numbers eluded her. Even in the sunlight of a summer noon, shadow wrapped them round, blurring the boundaries that define a person for us in our world. Out of the corner of her eye she would see a pair of young girls, sitting gossiping on the grass, turn to look and find a bevy giggling together, then rising to run away like a flock of birds taking flight. Or it would seem that under the shade of an enormous tree a band of minstrels played, their conjoint music so sweet that it pierced her heart, yet she would find but one man with a single lute. Like flames in a fire or ripples in a stream, they became distinct and separate only to fall back again and meld.
Some of the Host, though, remained discrete, with minds and personalities of their own. Evandar himself, of course, and his daughter, Elessario, were the two she knew best, but there were others, men and women both, who wore names and faces like a mark of honor. In the dancing sunlight they waved in greeting or called out some pleasant remark as she made her way across.
“Have you seen Elessario?” she would ask, but always the answer was no.
By the meadow’s edge a river flowed, and at that moment it flowed broad and smooth. At other times she had seen it narrow and churning with white water or come upon it to find a swamp and nothing more, but at the moment the broad water sparkled in the sun, and green rushes stood at the bank like sword blades stuck into a treaty ground. Out among them on one leg stood a white heron.
“Elessario!”
The heron turned its head to consider her with one yellow eye, then rippled like the water and became a young woman with impossibly yellow hair, wading naked to the bank. Dallandra offered a hand and helped her clamber out. Elessario picked up a tunic from the grassy bank and pulled it over her head. Although at first glance she seemed beautiful, with human ears but elven eyes, at second glance one noticed that the eyes were as yellow as her hair, cat-slit with emerald-green, and that her smile revealed sharp-pointed teeth.
“Did you need me for something, Dalla?”
“I did. Come see something with me.”
Hand in hand like mother and child they wandered downriver, looking for Bardek. Here in the world of the Guardians, as the elves named Evandar’s people, images could become real rather easily, that is, for those with minds trained to build them. First Dallandra created an image of Jill in her mind, as clear and as detailed as possible; then she moved this image out through her eyes onto the landscape—a mental trick, that, and not true dweomer, strange though it sounds to those who don’t know how to do it. These mental images were lifeless things, even in this world, and broke up fast like a picture imagined in a cloud or a fire. Every now and then, though, one image would linger for a while longer or seem brighter and more solid. With a fascinated Elessario trailing after, Dallandra would walk to that spot and cast another round of images. Every time, one of the new crop would become solid and endure long enough to point out the next step of their journey.
As they followed these clues, the landscape changed round them. The river narrowed, ran shallow; the lush grass withered till brown and dry. They passed big boulders, pushing up through thin earth, and eventually found a graveled road, leading forward into mist. All at once, twilight turned the world an opalescent gray, shot with lavender.
“Here we are,” Dallandra said. “Come look at a city of men.”
In the mist they seemed to float, like birds hovering on the wind, then spiraled down and down in ever-twisting arcs till at last the mist vanished in a starry sky. Below lay a white city, shimmering in the heat of a Bardek evening. Here and there in the dark streets a gold point of light bobbed along, a lantern carried in someone’s hand. Down in the center of town a vast sea of lamps flickered among the brightly colored banners and booths of the public market. Around this small geometry of streets and light stretched the dark and arid plain out to a horizon glowing faint green with the last of sunset. With a little gasp of delight Elessario began gliding down, following the drift of music that came to them, but Dallandra caught her arm.
“Not now, I’m afraid. It is lovely, isn’t it?”
“Shall I see marvels like this once I’ve been born, Dalla?”
“Well, yes,” Dallandra hesitated, caught between truth and sadness. “But you know, they probably won’t seem so marvelous, You’ll take them for granted, then, like we all do.”
One last image of Jill pointed their way to a caravanserai out on the edge of town. Among a scatter of palm trees horses and mules drowsed at tether, and human beings wandered back and forth. Fires bloomed here and there, but far off to one side a silver-blue pillar of water force, glowing like a beacon to guide them down, rose from a fountain. Beside it, sitting with her feet tucked under her on a little beach, was Jill. To Dallandra it seemed that they walked up to her in the usual manner, but judging from the way Jill yelped in surprise, she must have seen them appear all at once.
“Jill, I’ve brought Elessario. She’s the one who’ll lead her people into our world.”
“You’re very brave, then, Elessario.” Jill got up to greet them. “I salute you.”
The child stared back, all solemn eyes and sudden shyness.
“Does she truly understand what all this means, Dalla?” Jill went on.
“I hope so.”
“You’d best make sure of it. To put this burden on someone without them truly knowing what they’re doing is—”
“But, Jill, if they don’t come through, her people will die. Fade away. Vanish. And until one makes the journey, none will.”
“But still, she needs to know what—”
“I’ll do my best to tell her. To make her understand.”
“Good.”
For a moment they considered each other. Although Dallandra could only wonder what she might look like to Jill, to her the human dweomerwoman seemed made of colored glass, glowing and shimmering as they peered at each other across a gulf of worlds. Such niceties as facial expressions and nuances of voice simply refused to come clear, yet Dallandra could feel Jill’s urgency as a barb in an old wound of guilt. As she turned inward to her own thoughts, she began to lose the vision entirely: Jill’s image flattened, then dwindled as if it were rapidly flying away.
“Jill!” she called out. “The islands! Evandar will look for them!”
She had no way of knowing if Jill had heard her. All round them in a rushy vortex the worlds spun by, green and gold, white and red, faces and parts of faces, words and names flung into a purple wind, strange beings and glimpses of landscapes, round and round, faster and faster, yet flowing always upward. She clutched Elessario’s hand tight in both of hers and swept her along as they tumbled, spun, flew higher, ever higher through a rush of voices and images, until at last, with a crack like the strike of a sword on a wooden shield, they fell into the grass of the river meadow, where the Host was dancing in the summer sun. Elessario rolled over onto her back and began to laugh.
“Oh, that was exciting! It was truly a splendid sort of game! Will being born be like that, Dalla?”
“Yes, but backward. That is, you’ll go down and down instead of up.”
“And where will I come out, then?” Elessario sat up, wrapping her arms around her knees.
“To a place where it’s all warm and dark and safe, where you’ll sleep for a long time.” Dallandra had told her this story a hundred times before, but the girl loved hearing it. “Then you’ll find yourself in a bright place, and someone will hold you, and you’ll really, really know what love is. But it won’t all be easy, Elli my sweet. It truly won’t.”
“You told me about the hard bits. Pain and blood and slime.” She frowned, looking across the flowered fields. “I don’t want to hear about them again now, please.”
Dalla felt her heart wrench, wondering for the thousandth time if she were doing the right thing, if indeed she had enough knowledge to do the right thing for this strange race, trapped in a backwash, a killing eddy of the river of Time. Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when they were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, “stayed behind.” Without the discipline of the worlds of form, they were doomed, but after so long in the magical lands they’d found—or created, she couldn’t be sure which—the stinking, aching, grieving inertia called life seemed hateful to them. One by one, they would wink out and die, sparks flown too far from the fire, unless someone led them down into the world. I’m too ignorant, Dalla thought. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t have enough power, I’m doing this for the wrong reasons, I can’t, I’ll fail, I’ll never be able to save them.
Unfortunately, there was no one but her to so much as try.

The vendor had spread his wares out in the shade near a public fountain. An old man, with pale brown skin and lank white hair, he sat on his heels behind a small red rug and stared out at the crowd unblinking, unmoving, as if he cared not at all if anyone bought his wares. Neatly arrayed in front of him were three different kinds of fortune-telling sets, ranging from a stack of flimsy beaten bark packets filled with cheap wooden tiles to a single beautifully painted bone set in a carved wooden box with bronze hinges. Marka counted her coins out twice, but still, she didn’t have enough money for even the cheapest version. As she reluctantly hid her pouch again inside her tunic, the old man deigned to look her way.
“If you’re meant to have them, the coin will come,” he remarked. “They have the power to pick out their true owners.”
“Really, good sir?”
“Really.” He leaned forward and ran a gnarled hand over the lid of the bronze-fitted box. “I’ve sold these sets for years, traveling round Orystinna, and I’ve come to know all about them. Now, the cheap things, they have no power whatsoever. A man I know up in Orysat brings them in from Bardektinna by the crateful. They’re slave-made, I suppose. And those there in the cloth sacks, well, they’re good enough, especially for a beginner. But every now and then a really fine set comes my way, like these. You can just feel, somehow, that they’re different.”
He picked out a tile and held it faceup in his palm. It was the prince of birds, exquisitely carved with a flare of wing and a long beak; into the graved lines the craftsman had rubbed some sort of blue and green dye, staining the bone beyond the power of fingers to rub it away. As she looked at it, Marka felt a peculiar sensation, that somehow she recognized that tile, that in fact she recognized the whole set and particularly its box.
“There’s a wine stain on the bottom,” she said, and then was horrified to realize she’d spoken aloud.
“Well, so there is.” The vendor made the admission unwillingly. “But it’s just a little one, and it’s faded, too. It hasn’t hurt the tiles any.”
In the hot summer day Marka turned icy-cold. She managed to smile, then stood up. All she could think of was running away from the box of tiles. When someone touched her shoulder from behind, she screamed.
“Well, a thousand apologies!” It was Ebañy, half laughing, half concerned. “I thought you’d seen me come up. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Oh, well, I was just, uh, well, talking with this man. He, uh, has these interesting things for sale.”
Ebañy glanced down and went as wide-eyed as a child. When he knelt down for a better look, she wanted to scream at him and beg him to come away. Yet, when he gestured at her to join him, she knelt beside him, as close as she dared. He picked the knave of flowers out of the box and held it up to let the golden blossoms catch the light. With an eye for Ebañy’s expensively embroidered shirt of the finest linen, the vendor leaned forward, all smiles.
“The young lady found those most interesting, sir.”
“Oh, I’m sure she did.” Ebañy was smiling, but his gray eyes were oddly cold and distant, like a flash of steel. “Tell me, where did you buy these?”
“From a merchant up in Delinth, last year it was. He’d won them in a gambling game, he told me, over on Surtinna. He trades there regularly.”
“You don’t happen to remember what city he got them in, do you?” Ebañy put back the knave and picked up a careless handful of other tiles. Seeing them lying in his long, pale fingers made Marka feel like fainting, but why, she couldn’t say.
“Um, well.” The vendor thought for a moment. “Wylinth, maybe, but I wouldn’t swear to that. I’ve talked to a lot of people and heard a lot of tales since then.”
“Of course. How much do you want for them?”
“Ten zotars.”
“Huh, and the moon would cost me only twelve! Two zotars.”
“What! The box alone is worth that.”
“But it’s got that wine stain on the bottom. Three zotars.”
As they went on haggling, enjoying themselves thoroughly, Marka could barely listen. Ebañy knew about the stain, too, just as she somehow knew, when neither of them had picked the box up and looked at the bottom. She was sorry she’d ever stopped to chat with the vendor, sorry she’d wanted the set of tiles, even sorrier he was buying them—and then it occurred to her that he was buying them just for her, just because he knew she wanted them. When he happened to glance her way and smile, she felt as if she would die from happiness. At last five zotars changed hands, and Ebañy settled the lid on the box, picked it up, hefted it briefly, and gave it to her. Clutching it to her chest, she leaned over and on a sudden impulse kissed him on the cheek.
“Oh, thank you. They’re so lovely.”
He merely smiled, so warmly, so softly, that her heart started pounding. He rose, then helped her up, taking the box from her to carry it.
“Let’s get back to the camp. Oh, and by the way. This isn’t much of a place to ask, but will you marry me? I know that under your laws I should be asking your father, but going back to find that esteemed worthy would be a journey tedious beyond belief, and a reunion oppressive beyond sufferance.”
“Marry you? Really actually marry you?”
“Just that.”
When he laughed at her surprise, she realized just how ready she’d been to do anything that he might ask of her.
“Shall I take your silence as a yes or a no?”
“A yes, you idiot.”
With one convulsive sob, hating herself for doing it, Marka began to cry, and she sniveled inelegantly all the way back to the caravanserai.

“You stupid blithering dolt!” Jill was yelling, but she did remember to use Deverrian. “I could strangle you!”
“Do calm down, will you now?” Salamander stepped back, honestly frightened. “I don’t understand why your heart is so troubled, I truly don’t.”
Jill stopped, the anger ebbing, and considered the question as seriously as it did indeed deserve. She was worried about the girl, she supposed, who thought she was marrying a young traveling player much like herself while the truth was a fair bit stranger.
“Well, my apologies for getting so angry,” she said at last. “I suppose it’s because she’s so young, and you’re not, no matter how handsome your elven blood keeps you.”
“But that’s a reason in itself. Here, consider this. I’m well over a century old, my turtledove, old for a human being, young for a full-blooded man of the People, but I’m neither, am I?” His voice cracked with bitterness, quickly covered. “Who knows how long a half-breed lives? Marka’s little more than a child, truly. I keep hoping that this time, we’ll have the chance to grow old together. Before, even if she hadn’t caught that fever, I would have lived long past her.”
“Oh.” Jill couldn’t find it in her heart to reproach him. “Well. I mean, none of my affair, is it now? Whether the lass marries you or no.”
“Mayhap I was a bit sudden about it. It was seeing her with those tiles. Ye gods, how many hours have I watched her, sitting there at that little table, poring over those tiles, and joking with me about what she was seeing, or—”
“Even if they should be incarnations of the same soul, Marka and Alaena are not the same person. No one is, truly, from life to life.”
His eyes filled with tears, and he tossed his head, turning half away. Jill let out her breath in a long sigh. They were sitting in their tent, off at the edge of the campground. From outside Jill could hear Marka, babbling in a frenzy of joy, and Keeta’s low voice, celebrating with her. It was certainly impossible to make Salamander go back on his offer.
“Well, that’s torn it, then,” she said. “I’ll be going on to Anmurdio alone.”
“What? I can’t let you do that!”
“And I can’t let you drag that child along with us, either.”
“Why not? Is it any more dangerous than the life she’s used to, wandering the roads and never knowing where her next copper’s going to come from? We’ll be safe enough. That’s why I’ve been building up the troupe.”
“Are you trying to tell me, you stupid chattering elf, that you want to take all these wretched acrobats all the way to Anmurdio with us?”
“Of course I do.”
Jill could only stare at him. He smiled, all sunny charm.
“List but a moment, O Princess of Powers Perilous, and all will become as clear as a summer sky. Cast your mind backward to our youth, and our adventures in Slaith. Ah, glorious Slaith! Alas, thanks to my brother and his righteous wrath, no more do its beds of fish entrails scent the warm and tropic air, no more do pirates swagger down its rich and arrogant streets, no more do—”
“Are you going to hold your tongue or am I going to cut it out? Get to the point!”
“Well and good, then, but you do take the bloom off a man’s rhetoric, I must say. The point, my turtledove, is this: Slaith was a foul and evil den of pirates, but even there, in that den of the accursed, my humble gerthddyn’s calling made us both welcome and immune to infamy. Far more welcome, then, in isolate, nay, even desolate Anmurdio shall be an entire troupe of performers.”
“Imph. I hate to admit this, but you’re probably right.”
“Of course I’m right. I’ve spent many a long and guileful hour in thought, working this scheme through. We’ll probably even turn a profit.”
“Oh, very well, then! Since there’s naught I can do about it all, anyway, I might as well go along with your daft scheme. Poor little Marka—a fine way to start married life!”
“Aha! You’re the one who’s making the mistake this time. You’re remembering pampered Alaena, the rich widow who lacked for naught. Marka has lived as hard a life as ever you did as a child, following your father round the kingdom.”
Jill said something foul beyond repeating, simply because he was right, but he merely laughed at her.
Later that afternoon Jill went looking for Marka and found her sitting in front of the tent she shared with Delya and Keeta. She’d spread out a large mat and arranged the tiles, which might possibly have come back to her from another life, in tidy lines to study them.
“Marka?” Jill said. “I’ve just come to offer my congratulations.”
“Oh, thank you!” She looked up with a smile of such sheer, innocent joy that it wrung Jill’s heart. “You know, I never ever thought I’d be this lucky, not ever.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re so happy.” Jill sat down on the ground across from her. “Keeta tells me that the troupe’s going to join together to buy you a wedding dress.”
“Yes, and it’s so wonderful of them.” She hesitated briefly. “You look sad, too, just like Keeta and Delya do. Why?”
“Oh, there’s just something about a wedding that takes us old crones this way. Don’t let it trouble you.”
“But it does trouble me. You’re all acting like I’m going to get dragged off to the archon’s prison instead of married.”
Jill hesitated, but the girl deserved an honest answer.
“Well, I suppose it’s because this kind of happiness just can’t last, just because of the way life runs, I mean. It’s sad, in a way, like seeing a spring flower and knowing it’s going to fade when summer comes. I know that sounds awfully harsh, but do you think you’ll always be this gloriously happy?”
“Well, I wish I could be, but of course you’re right. All right, then, if that’s all it is.”
It was, of course, a great deal more than that, but this was no moment to turn vulture and dwell upon all those worries that used to trouble older women at a wedding: the slow death of a girl’s youth, the quick death of the little freedom allowed her in life between her father’s house and her husband’s, to say nothing, in those days—hundreds of years before the dweomer taught women to control their pregnancies—of her possible literal death in childbirth or from the simple exhaustion of birthing too many children.
“That’s a nice set of fortune tiles,” Jill said instead. “Did Salamander buy them for you?”
“Yes. Aren’t they lovely?” But she frowned, tilting her head a little to one side. “You know, it was the oddest thing. I saw these in the marketplace, just sitting in their box, and I didn’t pick them up or anything. I didn’t even touch them. But I somehow knew that there was this wine stain on the bottom. And you know what the oddest thing was? Ebañy knew it, too. And he never looked, either.”
Jill’s doubt that the girl might be Alaena reborn vanished.
“Well, odd things like that do happen.” She stood up quickly, before Marka could ask further and touch the edge of secrets. “I think it means you were meant to have them. And meant to have Ebañy, too, most like.”
Marka favored her with a smile as brilliant as the moon at her full.
Later that evening, after the show, when the troupe was eating its midnight meal round a leaping fire, there was a celebration. Vinto was a fine musician, playing the wela-wela, a zitherlike instrument; another of the acrobats played the drum; the flute boy outdid himself, especially since there was plenty of background noise to cover his occasional squeak. Everyone was laughing and singing, toasting Salamander and Marka with cups of red wine and taking turns in wishing them happiness, and even some of the merchants who were sharing the public field drifted over, getting into the spirit of things by bringing stuffed dates and nut cakes and the other traditional gifts for this sort of celebration. After about an hour the noise and the crowd began to get on Jill’s nerves, and when she drifted away for a quiet walk, Keeta and Delya joined her. They found a bench by the public fountain and sat down to watch the water splashing in the moonlight. Although Delya was smiling, a little flushed from the wine and humming a tune under her breath—in fact, she never did add a word to that entire conversation—Keeta looked downright melancholy.
“Ah, well,” she said at last. “At least Salamander looks like he’ll make her a better husband than most.”
“Oh, he certainly will,” Jill said. “I’ve known him a long time, and I can honestly say that.”
“Good. By the way, has he mentioned anything about going to Anmurdio to you?”
“Oh, yes. What do you think of the idea?”
“It’s a good one. The towns over there are so starved for a good show that we should do really well.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I didn’t want to drag the rest of you along only to have it turn out to be a disaster.”
“What I don’t understand, frankly, is how there could be any rare books and things over there for you to find.”
Jill fell back onto a version of the truth.
“There may not be any, indeed. But a long time ago there was a horrible war in the country adjoining our kingdom, and a large band of refugees fled south. Now, they didn’t settle in Bardek proper nor here in Orystinna. What I’d like to know is where they did end up, and what books they brought with them when they fled.”
“I must say that you people seem to have a ghastly lot of wars.”
“Well, yes, I’m afraid so.”
Keeta glanced at her companion and suddenly smiled. “Delly, you’re just about asleep. Want to go back?”
“Mph?” Delya woke with a start and yawned. “I’m fine.”
“I think we’d best get back.” Keeta got up and held out a hand. “Come along.”
With a nod and apologetic smile in Jill’s direction, Delya rose and allowed herself to be led off to camp. Jill considered going, too, then decided to sit in the cool and moon-shot dark for a while. Not only did all the noise and rire’s heat seem a burden, but she was hoping that Dallandra would come through into the physical plane again. Ever since Dalla had appeared to her with Elessario along, Jill had been trying to puzzle out her cryptic last words, which she’d heard only as “islands Evandar.” Whether “Evandar” was the name of the islands where the refugees had settled or of some person, she simply didn’t know. Yet, though she waited there for hours, the elven dweomerwoman never returned.
When Jill got back to the camp, she found it silent, with no one up but Keeta, sitting yawning by a dying fire.
“I moved your gear and blankets and things over to our tent. Better let Salamander and Marka have one to themselves. Thought I’d better wait up and tell you.”
“Ah, I see,” Jill said. “Thank you.”
On the morrow, when the troupe marched off into town to register the wedding officially at the archon’s palace, Jill stayed in camp, but she came to greet them when they paraded back again. At the head of the line, sitting sidesaddle on Salamander’s dapple-gray horse, rode Marka, flushed and smiling, with her new husband walking beside her. In full costume the acrobats followed, singing, laughing, doing a bit of juggling or a dance here and there. A crowd of children and citizens brought up the rear, treating the acrobats’ wedding as just another show, although, in all fairness, Salamander and Marka seemed delighted to provide them with it. When they reached camp, he swept her out of the saddle and kissed her soundly. To the cheering of the crowd they held hands and bowed, while the rest of the troupe scurried round collecting the small coins that rained down upon the pair. Jill could only think that indeed, Salamander had found himself a perfect wife.
Toward evening, however, Jill dragged him away from the dancing and music. In the lengthening shadows they walked together among the palms at the edge of the campground. A sunset wind was springing up, sending drifts of dusts across the dead-flat plains.
“Somewhat I wanted to ask you,” Jill said in Deverrian. “When you agreed to come to Bardek with me, was it mostly on the hope of finding Alaena again?”
“I cannot tell a lie. Indeed it was.”
Jill snorted profoundly, realizing even as she did it that she sounded just like Nevyn.
“But, Jill, it all worked out for the best, didn’t it now? Have I not been your guide, your escort, your loyal companion and faithful dog, even, while at the same time rescuing my beloved from a life of virtual slavery to her bestial father?”
“It was Keeta who did the rescuing. You were just the bait.”
“Imph, well, I suppose so, but how crudely you put things sometimes.”
“My heart bleeds. On the morrow we’re going to find a ship for Anmurdio and get on with our search and that’s that.”
“I’ve already found the ship.” He favored her with a brilliant grin. “We had to wait a fair bit down at the archon’s palace, and there was a ship’s captain waiting there as well to register his last cargo, and so lo and behold! A deal was struck.”
And that was the worst of Salamander, Jill reflected. Just when you were about to allow yourself the pleasure of berating him, he went and did something right.

Evandar lounged upon a hilltop that overlooked the remains of a formal garden, roses gone wild and tangled, hedges sending long green fingers into the air, muddy walks cracking. The plan of squares and half circles stretched out skewed, as well, as if the right half had shrunk and the left grown along the diagonal.
“It looks squashed,” he remarked to Dallandra. “As if a giant had fallen against it.”
“I see what you mean. Is this the garden you showed me when first I came here?”
“It is, yes, but now it’s spoilt. And the house, the splendid rooms I made for you—they’ve all gone away, too, turned into air and blown far, far away. It always happens. I try to build as once your people built, but never does a stone or stick last me out.”
“This world was meant for flux, not forms. If only you’d come be born into my world . . . ”
“Shan’t!” He tossed his head in irritation. “Don’t speak of it.”
She knew his moods and let the subject drop.
“I found a marvel, Dalla. The islands of which your friend spoke? They’ve rebuilt Rinbaladelan there, but it’s a poor thing, all small and flimsy, wood where once stood stone.”
“You found them? You didn’t tell me that!”
He shrugged, then rose, standing for a moment to frown at the ruined garden. Twilight gathered purple in the sky and dropped shadows round him like rain. Wind ruffled his yellow hair with a flash of palpable light. At moments like these Dalla found herself wondering who or what he might be, and where they might be, as well, if perhaps even she’d died and all this bright country was only an illusion of life built of memory and longing. It seemed that her very wondering threatened to destroy the world round her. The hill upon which they stood dissolved and began to float away in tendrils of mist, while the garden below became only a pile of weeds and sticks. Evandar grew as thin as a shadow himself, a colored shadow cast upon empty air. Her heart thudded in her throat.
“Don’t go!” The words seemed torn out of her. “I love you.”
All at once he stood solidly in front of her, and the hands that caught her shoulders, the mouth that caught her own, were warm and substantial. He kissed her again, his mouth all hunger, his hands pulling her tight against him. Together they sank to their knees, then lay down, clasped in each other’s arms. She lost all awareness of her body, if indeed it were anything more than a mere image or form of a body, yet she could feel him, twined round, feel the energy pulsing from him as tangible as flesh, feel the power flowing from her own essence as well to mingle with his, while they shared an ecstasy more intense than any sexual pleasure she’d ever known. On waves of sensation that made them both cry aloud they seemed to soar, a twined, twinned consciousness.
And yet, afterward, as always, she couldn’t quite remember what had happened to make her feel that way. They lay on the hillside, clasped in each other’s arms like an ordinary pair of lovers, and yet, without her conscious thought, whatever illusions of clothing that they wore had returned. She felt cool, alert, almost preternaturally calm, and he merely smiled at her as if he were surprised at what they’d shared. Yet when he released her, she saw the garden blooming down below, renewed and glorious.
“I love you as well,” he said, as if nothing had interrupted their earlier talk. “Dalla, Dalla, I thought I was so clever when I lured you here, but you’re the hunter and the snare both. And in the end you’ll abandon me, no doubt, like some animal left dead so long in a trap that its fur’s all rotted and spoilt.”
She pulled away from him and sat up, running her hands through her long tangle of hair. Already her hands and the hair itself felt perfectly normal to her, no different from the flesh she remembered. He lay back on one elbow and watched, his face as stricken as a man who’s been told he’ll hang on the morrow.
“In the end you’ll force me to go,” she said at last. “I love you too much to stay and watch you die into nothingness.”
“That’s a cruel speaking,”
“Is it? What would you have me do instead?”
“I don’t know.” He paused, then shook his head. “By those gods you speak of, I’m weary tonight. I went a long way, seeking out those islands. You should see them for yourself.”
“I want to, yes. I wish I could talk with Jill about them.”
“Why can’t you? Go with my blessing, my love.”
“It’s not that. I just never have enough time to say much once I find her, before the vision breaks, I mean.”
“Well, if you insist on going only in visions.”
“And how else am I supposed to go?”
“Are you not here in the world between all worlds? Wait! Forgive me. I forget you don’t know. Come with me, my love, and you shall learn to walk the roads.” He hesitated, cocking his head to one side like a dog. “Where’s Elessario?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s just go take a look at her. I have the strangest feeling round my heart.”
A feeling that, it turned out, was well justified. Hand in hand they drifted down from the hilltop to find the Host feasting in the meadowlands. It seemed a huge pavilion of cloth-of-gold, hung with blue banners, sheltered rows of long tablets, set with candles in silver candelabra, but once inside Dallandra realized that she could look through the roof and see stars, spread in the long drift of the Snowy Road. Music floated over the talk and laughter as they made their way through the tables and asked for his child. None had seen her. All at once the pavilion changed, grew stone inside the cloth, the meadow crisping into straw, the banners transmuting to faded tapestries. Out of the comer of her eye Dallandra thought she saw fire leaping in a huge stone hearth, yet when she looked straight at it, she saw only the moon, rising through a mullioned window.
“Come with me.” Evandar tugged her hand so hard that he nearly dragged her away. “I don’t like this.”
At the back door they found Elessario, dres sed in a long tunic of blue, kirtled at the waist with a silver, white, and green plaid. In her hands she carried a loaf of bread, which she offered to an old beggar woman, all gnarled hands and brown rags, leaning on a bit of stick.
“Mother, Mother,” the child was saying. “Why won’t you come in and feast?”
“No more am I welcome in your father’s hall. Child, can’t you see that they plot your death? Come away, come with me to safety. Better the life of a beggar on the roads than this murderous luxury.”
“Miother, no, they mean to give us life, true life, the like of which we’ve never had before.”
The old woman spat onto the ground.
“Touching, Alshandra, very touching,” Evandar said suddenly. “Truly, you should go be born into Deverry and grow into a bard.’
With a howl of rage the beggar woman rose up, shedding her rags like water dripping, dressed now in a deerskin tunic and boots; her stick became a hunting bow, and her hair flowed gold over her shoulders. Dimly, at the margins of her sight, Dallandra realized that the stone broch behind them had disappeared, and that the cloth-of-gold pavilion glimmered in the moonlight in its stead.
“My curse upon you, Evandar!” Alshandra snarled. “A mother’s curse upon you and your elven whore both!”
“With a gust of wind and a swirl of dry leaves from some distant forest’s floor, she disappeared. Evandar rubbed his chin and sighed.
“She always could be a bit tiresome,” he remarked. “Elli, come with us. I’ve a lesson to give Dallandra, and I’m not leaving you here alone.”

As Bardekian merchantmen go, the ship was a good one, soundly built and deep, with room enough in the hold for the troupe’s gear and room enough on deck twixt single mast and stern for them to camp under improvised tents. The troupe’s horses had a comfortable place up on the deck tethered by the bow rather than in the stinking hold. During the crossing Jill spent most of her time in their equine company. Even in normal circumstances the troupe lived in a welter of spats and jests, gossip and sentiment, outright nghts and professions of undying loyalty, and now that they were sailing off to unknown country, they were as tightly strung as the wela-wela. Tucked in between the horses and the bow rail, Jill could have privacy for her meditations. Every now and then Keeta joined her, for a bit of a rest as the juggler put it.
“I don’t know how you stand this lot sometimes,” Jill remarked to her one morning.
“Neither do I.” Keeta flashed a grin. “Oh, they’re all good people, really, and the only family I’ve ever had or am likely to have. But they do carry on so. It’s Marka’s marriage, you see. She started out as nothing, the apprentice, the waif we all pitied, and now here she is, the leader’s wife. Everyone’s all stirred up and jockeying for position.”
“And Salamander’s really become the leader, hasn’t he?”
“Oh, yes. No doubt about that, my dear, none at all.”
At that moment Jill realized why she’d objected to Salamander’s marriage. He’d so loaded himself up with responsibility for other people’s lives that she couldn’t possibly reproach him for letting his dweomer studies lapse. She said nothing, merely watched him over the next few days as he busied himself with the troupe or sat grinning beside his new wife. Perhaps he knows best, she would think. Perhaps he simply doesn’t have the strength of will, perhaps he’s too weak, somewhere deep in his heart, to take up his destiny. Yet, despite this sensible reasoning, she felt that she was mourning a death. For Nevyn’s sake, she would do her best to keep him from squandering his talent, but a crowded ship was no place to confront him.
From the moment the troupe landed, Jill hated Anmurdio. While Orystinna was every bit as hot, it was a dry heat there, thanks to the way the mountains channeled and deflected the prevailing winds. Anmurdio, the collective name for a group of volcanic islands, caught the tropic-wet winds full in the face. It seemed that if it wasn’t actually raining, then the wind was howling round, or if the air was still for a brief while, then it became so humid that everyone wished it would rain. The towns—random clusters of wooden houses—sagged in the ever-present mud between stretches of primal jungle. The water wasn’t safe to drink without a good dollop of wine in it; beef was unknown, and bread rare. Yet all of these aggravations might have been bearable if it weren’t for the mosquitoes, drifting in twilight clouds as thick as smoke.
Traveling in heavy wagons would be impossible, but fortunately all the hamlets in the archipelago lay right on the ocean. Swearing and sweating over the expense, Salamander made a bargain with the owner of a little coaster that would just barely hold the troupe. The wagon horses, which Marka loved like pets, had to be stabled at a further cost in the main town—city being far too dignified a word for Myleton Noa—rather than merely sold and abandoned.
Just when all these expensive arrangements were concluded, it began to rain, a dark sodden pour that went on and on and on for three days and washed away the troupe’s remaining coin along with their tempers. In a flood of jokes and compliments Salamander moved from person to person, keeping up morale and stopping fights. As she told him late one night, when they got a moment alone together, Jill had to admire him for it.
“But still,” she remarked. “If you’d only put this much hard work into your studies—”
He busied himself with slapping mosquitoes.
“I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you,” she went on, relentless. “No doubt you’ve lost some ground lately, but now that you’re married and settled, there’s no reason that you couldn’t gain it back.”
“No doubt you’re correct, O Princess of Powers Perilous, as well as accurate, precise, and just plain right, but the times are a bit troubled, not to say noisy, with all of us packed into this stinking inn together, for concentration. At the moment, the only dweomer I feel like working would be a bit of weather magic, to drive away this wretched storm, but I know that such would offend your fine-tuned sense of ethics.”
“Things aren’t quite desperate enough for that, yet.”
“True. It doubtless will clear soon enough on its own. The innkeep assures me that this much rain is most unseasonable.”
Apparently the innkeep knew his weather, because they woke on the morrow to clearing skies. In a much improved mood the troupe set about cleaning and readying their equipment for the coming show.
“I hope to every god that I was right about the profit to be made here,” Salamander remarked to Jill. “If I’m not, we are well and truly in the thick of battle without a sword, as the old saying would have it.”
She said nothing, by a great effort of will.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he went on with theatrical gloom. “You might as well berate me and be done with it.”
“I was merely wondering why anyone bothered to settle here in the first place, and then, in the second, why they bother to stay.”
“Pearls.” All at once he grinned. “Pearls both black and white, mother of pearl and fine shells of all sorts, the best and the rarest for the jewelers of Bardek. And they quarry the black obsidian, too, to send home, and catch the parrots and other rare birds to delight the fine ladies of Surtinna. Merchant ships sail back and forth all the time, trading for their wares.”
“Nothing but a lot of trinkets, if you ask me.”
“Trinkets have made men rich before. Of course, a lot of men have died out here, too. The sea’s bounty demands its price.”
“If it’s that dangerous, maybe you should just take the troupe home now.”
“Not until I’ve put my scheme to the test, O Monarch of Might Mysterious. And tonight, here in the very market square of Myleton Noa, will the test come!”
The market square in question was a big sprawl of mud in the center of town. All round the edge stood such civic buildings as the town could muster: a customs house, an archon’s residence, a barracks for the town guard, and a money changer, who supported a small guard of his own, according to the wine seller.
“He’s a shrewd one, old Din-var-tano,” he remarked to Jill. “And as honest as the sea is deep, too. But a miser? Ye gods! He lives like a slave, and he won’t have a wife because of the expense of keeping one, you see. I’ll wager we won’t see him tonight at this here show. He’d feel obliged to part with one of his precious coppers! But it looks like everyone else in town is here, that’s for certain.”
Jill and the wine seller were standing on the wooden steps of the archon’s palace, a little above the crowd swarming round the muddy square. The old man had set up his little booth on the top step, and as they talked, he was busily chaining wine cups to the rail. In the velvet twilight, the troupe was raising crossed pairs of standing torches round the stage while Salamander himself stood underneath the slack rope and pulled on it to make sure it was secure.
“We’ve never had a show through here before,” the wine seller went on. “I wager I’ll do good business after it’s over.”
“No doubt. I take it things are lonely in Anmurdio.”
“As lonely as the sea is deep, that’s for certain. Sometimes I’m sorry I came, I tell you, but then, a man can live his life as he likes out here without a lot of city clerks laying down the law and grabbing his coin for taxes.”
“Ah. I see. Tell me something. Do you ever hear of ships sailing south?”
“South? What for? Nothing out there but sea and wind.”
“You’re sure?” She paused to kill a particularly big mosquito that had landed on her wrist. “You’ve never heard of any islands lying far to the south?”
He sucked his stumps of teeth while he considered.
“Never,” he said at last. “But I can tell you who you want to ask about that. See over there, that great big fellow standing in the torchlight? The one with the red tunic—that’s right, him. Dekki’s his name, and he’s quite a sailing man, goes to all sorts of places, and not all of them are on maps, if you take my meaning.”
Jill sighed, because she did see. A pirate, most likely, and not her favorite sort of person in the world. Before she could ask the wine seller more, on the stage drums boomed out and flutes sang. In a pleasurable shudder of applause, the crowd surged closer. The show had begun.
From the very first moment, when the youngest and clumsiest acrobat cartwheeled across the stage, Jill could see that Salamander’s commercial instincts had delivered triumph. No matter whether a performer pulled off a difficult trick or fell in the middle of an easy one, the crowd clapped and cheered. At the end of each turn coins clinked and slithered on the stage. After all, these colonists were rich by the standards of the cities they’d left behind, but lacked luxuries to spend their wealth upon. When the heart of the show appeared, Keeta and her flaming torches, Marka dancing upon the slack rope, the crowd screamed and stamped their feet. Silver flashed like rain in the torchlight. When Jill turned to speak to the wine seller, she found him utterly entranced, smiling as he stared. Salamander himself performed the greatest trick of all, making the crowd fall silent again to catch his every word. It seemed to Jill that he luxuriated in their attention like a man drowsing in a hot and perfumed bath. She felt as if she should slap him awake before he drowned.
Finally, when the performers were exhausted beyond the power of cheers and coins to revive them, the show wound down. By then the moon was low on the horizon, and the wheel of stars turning toward dawn. In a cooler wind from the sea the crowd lingered, watching the troupe strike its stage or drifting over the various booths and peddlers selling food and drink. When Dekki came strolling up, the crowd round the wine booth parted like the sea beneath a prow to let him through, and the wine seller handed him a cup without waiting to be asked. The pirate paid twice its worth for it, though; Jill supposed that his high standing in the town depended on his generosity just as a Deverry lord’s respect among his folk depended on his. The wine seller made him a bob of a bow.
“This lady here would like to speak with you, Dekki.” He jerked a thumb in Jill’s direction. “She’s a scholar and a map-maker.”
“Indeed?” His voice was a rumble like distant thunder. “My honor, then. What do you want to know?”
They moved away from the press of thirsty customers and stood by a pair of torches. Jill pulled her map out of her shirt and held it unrolled in the flaring light.
“I got this over in Inderat Noa,” she said. “Do you see those islands far to the south? You wouldn’t happen to know if they really exist, would you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me they did. Let’s put it this way. There’s something out there.” He took the map and frowned at the dim markings. “Once me and my men, we were blown off course by a storm, and a bad one it was, too. We rode south before it for many a day, and we just barely pulled through, and we found wrack from a ship that wasn’t so lucky. We spotted what looked like a figurehead and hauled it on board. We were thinking, see, that it was an Anmurdio ship, and so we’d take it home for the owners’ reward. Huh. Never seen anything like it in my life.” He handed back the map. “It was a woman, and she was smiling and had all this long hair, a nice job of carving it was, you would have sworn you could have run your fingers through it. But she had wings, or, I should say, what we found had stumps of wings. They must have folded back along the bow, like. But anyway, there were these letters carved round the belt she was wearing. Never seen anything like them. I call them letters, but they were magic marks for all I know.”
“And what happened to this thing?”
“Oh, we tossed it back. Wasn’t one of our ships.”
“I see. So, then, it must have come from somewhere to the south?”
“Most likely. And then there’s the bubbles, too. Down on the southern beaches, sometimes you find these glass bubbles after a storm.” He cupped his massive hands. “About so big. Bad luck to break one. The priests say there must be evil spirits trapped inside. But someone must have blown the glass and trapped the spirits.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be interested in sailing south someday, just to find out what lies that way.”
“Not on your life!”
“Not even if someone paid you well?”
“Not even then. You can’t spend coin down Hades way, can you? That storm took us about as far as a man can sail and still get himself home again, and we all came cursed near to starving to death before we made port.”
The way he shook his head, and the edge of fear wedging into his voice, made it plain that not all the persuasion in the world was going to change his mind. Jill stood him to another cup of wine in thanks for the information, then bid him farewell and strolled over to join the troupe. They were laughing, tossing jests back and forth and all round the circle, dancing through their work, so happy—so relieved, really—that she couldn’t bear to spoil their celebration. She would wait to talk with Salamander on the morrow, she decided
“Ebañy?” she called out. “I’m going back to the inn. This trip’s wrung me out.”
He tossed a length of rope into a wagon and hurried over, peering at her in the flickering torchlight. He himself looked exhausted, streaming with sweat, his eyes pools of dark shadow.
“Jill, are you well? Lately you’ve looked so pale.”
“It’s the heat.” As she spoke, she realized the grim truth of it. “I’m not used to it, and I’m not as young as I used to be, you know. And it seems to be taking its toll on you, as well.”
He nodded his agreement and ran both hands through his sweaty hair to slick it back from his face.
“Don’t stay up too late yourself, my friend,” Jill said. “As for me, I think I’ll go have some of that watered wine or winy water or whatever it is, and then just go to bed.”
She was so exhausted that once she lay down in her inn chamber, she fell straight asleep and never even heard the entire troupe clattering in, an hour or so later.
In the middle of the night, though, Jill woke in a puddle of sweat. Since the window was a patch of black only slightly grayer than the room itself, she could assume that the moon had already set but the dawn was still hours away. Swearing under her breath she got up, rubbed herself dry with her dirty shirt, and put on her cleaner one to go outside for a breath of air. The compound was utterly silent, utterly dark except for the faint murmur of water in the fountain and a glimmer of stars far above. She made her careful way across the cracked tiles to the fountain, groped around, and found a safe seat on its edge. Here outside, with a trace of breeze brushing her face and the sound of water splashing nearby, she felt cool enough to think.
Getting an Anmurdio ship for the trip south was out of the question. She decided that straightaway. Even if the crew proved trustworthy, they and their passengers both would still likely die from the bad water and worse food on such a long journey. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she could never subject the troupe to the journey, not even if they had the best boat in the world to carry them. Not even Marka? She indulged herself with a few choice curses on Salamander’s head. They could neither take the lass along nor leave her behind, not now, unless of course Salamander stayed with her. But go alone? She was willing to admit that the idea of traveling alone across the southern sea frightened her, in spite of all her dweomer, but she also knew that if she had to, she would. When she looked up, the stars hung bright and cold, a vast indifferent sweep dwarfing even a dweomermaster and her concerns in a tide of light and darkness. In the spirit of an invalid demanding a lantern in her nighttime chamber, Jill snapped her fingers and called upon the Wildfolk of Aethyr. They came, clustering round the decayed stone nymph in the center of the fountain and shedding a faint but comforting glow.
The silver light made her think of Dallandra, just idly at first, until an idea struck home like an arrow. Jill pointed at one of the spirits hovering nearby.
“You know the lands of the Guardians. Fetch Dallandra for me.”
The spirit winked out of manifestation, but whether it had truly understood the command, Jill couldn’t say. She waited for a long time, was, in fact, about to give it up and go back inside when she saw a wisp of silver light gathering above the fountain.
“Dalla?” She breathed out the name.
But it was only an undine, raising itself up as sleek as a water snake, to stare at her with enormous eyes before vanishing in a swirl of water. Dressed in her elven clothes, though the amethyst jewel no longer hung round her neck, Dallandra herself strolled across the courtyard, as solid as the cobblestones.
“I can’t believe I managed it,” she remarked, grinning, and she spoke in Elvish. “But it worked, and here I am. Jill, I’ve got so much to tell you. Evandar’s found the islands, first off, and we can take you there.”
“Take me there?” Jill felt as muddled as if someone had just struck her on the head. “You’ve got a ship?”
“No, but we don’t need one. It’s Evandar’s dweomer. But I don’t know how many of you we can—”
“I’ll be the only person making the trip. I’ve been dreading taking other people along with me. I can’t tell you how grateful I am! For all I knew, we could all drown out there.”
“Most likely you would.” She paused, glancing over her shoulder at something that only she could see. “I’ve still got to be quick, even though it’s ever so much easier to talk like this. But Evandar said to tell you something else, that these people respect and honor the dweomer more than any other thing under the sun and moon, and so you’ll have a welcome there.”
“And I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that, too! I’d been rather wondering about it.”
“No doubt.” She flashed a grin. “When do you want to go? I imagine that you’ve got farewells to make.”
“And some gear to get together. And, well, there’s somewhat I’ve got to do before I leave, not that Salamander’s going to thank me for it, I suppose. I don’t suppose we can set a time, anyway. If I say a fortnight, how will you know when that comes round?”
“It’s difficult, yes. I do have a plan. There’s a place that I can wait, one that’s next to your world, you see, and so its Time runs a little closer to yours. Get yourself ready, and I’ll come to you as soon as I can. Send me one of the Wildfolk for a messenger.”
“Splendid. And you have my thanks and a thousand times my thanks.”
“Most welcome.” She paused again, staring down at the ground and frowning. “The child. She’s going to have to be born soon, because there’s trouble brewing in our lands. I can’t explain. I only half understand it myself. But it’s going to have to be soon.”
All at once a thought struck Jill. It might well be that Salamander and his new wife would serve the dweomer whether he wanted to or no.
“Tell me something. Could the child be born here? In the islands, I mean?”
“No, not at all. All the omens, and what little logic there is in this thing, for that matter, say she has to be born into the Wesdands.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just that I know a new husband who might make a splendid father for such a child,”
“Good, because, you see, there’ll be other children born later, lots and lots—at least, if I can carry this thing off. Jill, at times I’m frightened.”
“Well, for what my help is worth, you have it.”
“It’s worth a very great deal.”
They clasped hands and shared a smile. Jill was surprised at how warm and solid Dallandra’s hand felt; she’d been expecting some cool etheric touch.
“If great things are on the move,” Jill said, “I’d best wrap up my affairs here and get on my way back to Deverry.”
“When the time draws near, I’ll take you back to Deverry, have no fear about that. I’ve so many marvels to tell you about, to show you, once we’ve time to talk together for a while, but now—”
“Yes, I understand. You’d best go. It’s almost dawn, and if other people find you here, they’ll ask questions.”
Dallandra walked toward the inn-yard gates, turned once to wave, then vanished in a glimmer of gray dawn light. Marvels, indeed! Jill thought. All at once she laughed aloud, thinking what a wonderful jest it would be on Salamander, if indeed he ended up fathering the body for some dweomer-touched child. Even Nevyn, she supposed, would have been able to see the humor in this for all that the old man could be downright grim more often than not.

When Dallandra mentioned trouble brewing, she meant nothing more than the ill will that Alshandra bore her, but as things turned out she’d spoken more truly than she knew. After she left Jill at the inn yard, she traveled back through the twisting roads and the mists to Evandar’s country. He was waiting for her on the hilltop, standing alone and looking down through the night to the meadow where his people danced by torchlight. The music drifted up to them on the wind, harp and drum and flute.
“You’ve come back,” he said. “My heart ached the whole time you were gone.”
“Did you think I’d desert you so soon?”
“I no longer know what to think. I thought I was so clever at jests and riddles, and now you’ve posed me a riddle that I can’t answer.” He shook his head and made his yellow hair toss tike a horse’s mane. “I take it you found Jill?”
“I did, and she’ll follow our road with heartfelt thanks. But what do you mean, a riddle you can’t answer?”
All at once the life flashed in his turquoise eyes, and he grinned.
“Now that I shan’t tell you, because it’s a riddle of mine to top the one you posed me. Or perhaps we can say that—” He hesitated, listening.
Dallandra heard it, too, a thin shriek on the rising wind. Together without need for words they turned and hurled themselves into the air, he a hawk, suddenly, a red hawk from Deverry, while she changed to her usual shape of some gray and indeterminate songbird, both of them with wingspreads of fully fifteen feet across. They banked into the rising wind and rode it down, swooping over the grassy hillside to the flowered meadow where now the court screamed and ran about in confusion. In the darkening night torches guttered and sparked.
“Elessario!” The cry drifted up to them. “She’s been taken!”
The hawk screamed, a harsh cry, and changed course for the river. Dallandra followed, praying for moonlight, and as if in answer a moon began to appear on the horizon, vast and bloated, casting a sickly yellow tight. Far below on the oily river she saw a shape, like a splinter of wood from their height, pushing itself upstream. Evandar stooped and plunged. More slowly in prudent circles Dallandra followed him down and saw a black barge, rowed by slaves, churning against the current. In the prow stood Alshandra, and she seemed that night some ten feet high, a warrior woman dressed in glittering armor, nocking an arrow in her bow. Screaming, the hawk plunged down and upon her before she could aim and loose. His massive claws raked her face and his beak tore at her arms as she fell to the deck, howling in rage, clubbing him with the bow.
Bound round with black chains Elessario crouched, sobbing, some feet away. Dallandra understood enough about this country by then to keep her wits. She landed on the deck and shed her bird-form like a cloak.
“Break the chains!” she snapped. “Just flex your arms, and they’ll fall right off.”
Elessario followed orders and laughed aloud when the chains turned to water and puddled at her feet. With a howl of rage Alshandra threw the hawk to one side and hauled herself to her knees. Boat, slaves, armor, night—they all vanished as suddenly as the chains. In the golden sun of a late afternoon they stood in elven form on the grassy riverbank while the chattering Host swarmed round.
“Oh, go away, all of you!” Alshandra snarled.
Laughing and calling out to one another they fled. Dallandra put an arm round Elessario’s shoulders and drew her close while Alshandra and Evandar faced each other, both dressed in court clothes, now, cloth-of-gold tunics, diadems of gold and jewels, and their cloaks, tipped in fur, seemed made of silver satin. And yet, across her cheek ran the bleeding rake of a hawk’s talon, and on his face swelled a purple bruise.
“She’s my daughter, and I shall take her wherever I want,” Alshandra said.
“Not unless she goes willingly, and the chains show she was less than willing. Where were you going to take her? Farther in?”
“That’s no affair of yours.” Alshandra turned on Dalla. “You may have my man, because I tired of him long before you came to us, but you shall not have my daughter.”
“I don’t want her for my sake. I only want her to have the life that should be hers, that should be yours, truly, as well.”
With a shimmer of tight Alshandra changed her form, becoming old, wrinkled, pathetic in black rags.
“You’ll take her far away, far, far away, and never shall I see her again.”
“Come with her, then. Follow her, the way all of your people are going to do. Join us all in life.” Dallandra glanced Elessario’s way. “Do you want to go with your mother?”
“No, I want to stay with you.”
Alshandra howled, swelling up tall and strong, dressed like a hunter in her doeskin tunic and boots, the bow clasped in red-veined hands.
“Have it your way, witch! You’ll lose this battle in the end. I swear it. I’ve found some as will help me, back in that ugly little world of yours. I’ve made friends there, powerful friends. They’ll get me my daughter back the moment she tries to leave us. I’ll make them promise, and I know they will, because they grovel at my feet, they do.”
She was gone, winking out like a blown flame, but all round them the wind seemed cold and the sunlight, shadowed. Shaking and pale, Elessario leaned into Dallandra’s clasp.
“Friends? Groveling?” Evandar said. “I wonder what she means by that. I very much do. I’d say it bodes ill, an ill-omened thing all round.”
“I’d never argue with you.” Dalla felt her voice as very small and weak. “We’d best try to find out what she means by friends.”
“Will the finding be a safe thing? I don’t know, mind. I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know, either. Can’t we get away from all this music and the noise and ail?”
“Of course. Ell, I fear to leave you alone. Come with us.”
“I’m so tired, Father. I don’t want to.”
“Well, I’m not going to leave you sleeping beside the river like a falcon’s lure. I—” All at once he smiled. “Very well, my love, my daughter, my darling. Rest you shall have. Dalla, if you’ll step here to my side?”
Puzzled, Dallandra did just that. Evandar raised one hand and waved out a circle that seemed to float from his fingers and ring his daughter round. He chanted, too, in some language that Dallandra had never heard before, just softly, briefly while Elessario yawned, reaching up to rub her eyes. It seemed that the wind caught her hair and tossed it, spread it out around her as she reached up higher, grabbed at it, her fingers turning long and slender, growing out, her arms reaching, stretching, stiffening, suddenly, as gray-brown bark wrapped her body round, and her hair, all green and gold, sprouted into leaves. A young oak tree, some seven feet tall and slender, nodded in the evening wind.
“Alshandra the Inelegant will never think to look for her there,” Evandar remarked. “She truly can be a bit thick at times.”
Dallandra merely stared, gape-mouthed, until he took her hand and led her away.

While Evandar was confronting his wife in his strange homeland, in the world of men Jill was trying to discharge what she saw as her obligation to Salamander before she moved on. After the triumph at Myleton Noa, the troupe set sail, falling into the routine of sailing down the coast some miles, then disembarking at yet another sodden hamlet, where they would be received like kings. Jill had the distinct feeling that Salamander was avoiding her. When everyone was crammed on board the small and smelly coaster, it was of course impossible to get a word alone with him. On land, whenever she went looking for him for their talk about his studies, he always seemed to be negotiating with an innkeep, or teaching a member of the troupe a juggling trick, or solving some problem among the acrobats, or arranging their next show. Finally, though, one evening in a good-sized town called Injaro, he made the mistake of leaving the dinner table early while Marka stayed behind to gossip with her friends. Jill followed him upstairs and cornered him in his inn chamber.
“Uh, I was just going back down,” he squeaked. “I have to talk to Vinto and make sure the troupe’s ready to take ship. We’re leaving on the dawn tide, you know.”
“Indeed? Then why have you lit all these lamps?”
“Er, just looking for somewhat. Are you all packed and ready for the journey? Best make sure you are.”
“Stop driveling.”
With a heavy sigh Salamander sank down onto an enormous purple cushion and gestured at her to find a seat opposite him. Sitting so close, she could smell the scent of sweet wine clinging to him and see the dark circles smudged under his puffy eyes.
“I was only wondering how your studies were going.” She made her voice as mild as possible.
“I haven’t done one rotten thing, and you know that as well as I do. Jill, I’m so cursed weary!”
“Well, then, when do you plan to take them up again?”
“Never.”
The last thing she’d expected was candor. He went so wide-eyed and tense that she knew he’d shocked himself, too, but though she waited, he refused to back down, merely watched the insects swarming round the oil lamps and let the silence grow.
“Do you truly think you can just turn your back and walk away from the dweomer?” she said at last.
“I intend to try.” His hands were shaking so hard that he clamped them down on his thighs. “I am sick to my heart of being badgered and prodded.”
“What’s brought all this on?”
“I should think it would be clear, plain, obvious, and evident. I’ve found a thing that I want more than dweomer power.” He paused for one of his sunny smiles, and never had the gesture seemed less appropriate. “A normal life, Jill, a normal life. Does that have one shred of meaning for the likes of you?”
“What are you talking about? What’s so splendid about traveling the roads with a troupe of mangy acrobats and this poor child you’ve married?”
“Of course it’s not splendid. That’s the point.”
“You’re a dolt, Ebañy.”
“Oh, I suppose I must look that way to you, truly. I no longer care. I’ve found the woman I love, and I’ve found a way to have a family of my own while we travel the roads, just like I’ve always loved to do, and cursed, plagued, excoriated, blighted, and scourged will I be before I give one whit of it up.”
“I’m not asking you to give up one thing, just to develop the talent you were born with.”
“Talent? Oh, ye gods!” All at once he exploded, talking much too fast, his voice hissing as he tried to keep from shouting. “I am so sick of that ugly little word. Do you think I ever asked for it? Talent. Oh, certainly, I know I have talent for magic. That’s all I’ve ever heard in my long and cursed life, from the time that my wretched father dragged me to meet Aderyn when I was but a little child. Talent. You have splendid talent for the dweomer. You must study it. It would be a waste to not study it. Your people need you to study it. No one, not one blasted soul, whether elven or human, not one person in the entire world has ever asked me if I wanted to study the blasted dweomer. All they did was push and press and mock and nag until by every god in the sky I’m sick of the very name of dweomer.”
“My heart aches for you, but—”
“Don’t you be sarcastic with me.”
“I wasn’t. I’m trying to point out that—”
“I don’t want to hear it! By the black hairy ass of the Lord of Hell, Jill, can’t you see? I’ve finally found what I want in life, and I’ll have it no matter how many platitudes and how much invective you heap upon my head.”
“Whoever said you couldn’t have it?”
“The dweomer itself. How can you sit there and tell me that I could have both, you of all people on this blasted earth?”
Jill came perilously close to slapping him. Her rage at having that ancient wound reopened took her so much by surprise that for a long moment she couldn’t speak. When he shrank back, suddenly pale, suddenly weak—cringing, or so she thought of it—the rage turned as cold as a steel blade on a winter morning. She got up slowly and stood for a moment, her hands on her hips, looking down as he crouched on the cushion, one hand raised as if to ward off a blow.
“Oho, I think I do see.” She could hear her voice crack like a boot breaking ice. “You’re a coward.”
He was on his feet in a moment, red-faced and shaking with a rage to match hers.
“After all I’ve risked for you, after all I’ve done for you—”
“You haven’t done one thing for me. You’ve done it for the dweomer and the Light.”
“I don’t give a—” He caught himself on the edge of blasphemy. “So I did. Wasn’t that enough, then, everything I suffered for the Light?”
“You can’t measure out service like so many sacks of meal and say ‘enough, no more.’ But that doesn’t matter anyway. My road isn’t your road. I couldn’t have Rhodry and the dweomer both, but there’s no reason on earth you can’t raise your family and study as well. If I’d married, my life would have been my husband’s. That’s a woman’s Wyrd, not yours. You can have Marka’s life and yours as well. You’re just too cursed lazy to study, aren’t you? That’s the ugly truth of it. Lazy and a coward.”
“Mock and goad me all you want. I’ve made my decision.”
“Well and good, then. Far be it from me to stop you. Not one thing on this earth or over it or under it can force you to take up the birthright you’re throwing away. But cursed and twice cursed if I linger to watch you.”
She turned on her heel and spun out of the chamber, slamming the door behind her, and strode down the narrow hall that stank of dust and damp in the cloying heat. She meant to go for a walk in the night air and let them both come to their senses, but he was furious enough to follow her.
“I am sick half to death of you lording it over me,” he snarled. “Don’t you think I know you despise me?”
“Naught of the sort! I’m merely sick at heart to see you pissing your life away into a puddle.”
“Oh, am I now? Is that all you think Marka is? A waste of my most exalted and ever so talented self?”
“Of course not! It’s got naught to do with the lass.”
“It’s got everything to do with her. That’s what you don’t understand. You’re just like Nevyn, Jill. As cold and nasty hearted as ever the old man was.”
“Don’t you say one word against Nevyn.”
The snarl in her voice frightened even her. He stopped in midreply and stepped back against the wall as if she were a thief come to murder him.
“You spoiled stinking mincing little fop,” she went on. “Have it your way, then. My curse upon you!”
She slammed out of the inn, strode across the courtyard, slammed out of the gates, and stomped off for a long walk round the town. Wildfolk clustered round her like an army, and whether it was her rage or their unseen but bristling presence, she didn’t know, but no one, not one single thief or drunkard, so much as came near her all during that long aimless trek. Through the muddy streets of Injaro, out into the surrounding cleared land along a rutted road—only the light from the Wildfolk of Aethyr kept her from breaking her neck and ending that particular incarnation then and there. All at once she realized that she’d gone dangerously far from the town, no matter how much dweomer she had, and turned back. For all that she’d walked herself exhausted, she still was too angry to judge Salamander fairly.
Toward dawn her wandering brought her back to a small rise overlooking the harbor, where she paused among a tangle of huge ferns, as big as trees, to catch her breath. Down below, out at the end of a long jetty, a boat lay at anchor in a pool of torchlight. Like ants the troupe moved back and forth, hauling their personal goods for the sailors to stow below. At the landward end of the jetty, Salamander was supervising while a pair of stevedores unloaded the troupe’s props and stage from a wagon. Jill swore aloud. She’d forgotten how early the tide would turn for their journey out. Fortunately there was still plenty of time left. She could trot right down, tell Salamander that she was going back to the inn for her pack and suchlike, then return to the coaster before they sailed.
For a long time she stood there, leaning against one of the tree ferns, and wondered why she wasn’t hurrying. Already out to the east the sky was beginning to lighten to the furry gray that meant dawn coming. Her gnome appeared to grab the hem of her shirt and pull on it as if he wanted to lead her to the ship. She picked him up in her arms and made sure she had his attention.
“Go tell Dallandra it’s time. Find her among the Guardians. She’ll know who sent you.”
In a puff of moldy air the gnome vanished. Jill watched the bustle at the pier. It seemed that everyone was on board, but Salamander lingered on land, looking up the road into the town, pacing back and forth, pausing to stare again. When the captain left the ship and walked over to argue with him, Salamander waved his arms in the air and shook his head in a stubborn no. The sky was all silver now, and already the heat of day was building in the humid air. Jill had one last stab of doubt. Was she simply being stubborn? Was she deserting a friend, and him one she’d known for years and years? Yet with the cold intuition of the dweomer she knew that she was doing the right thing, that she could no more force him to take up his Wyrd before he wished than Nevyn had been able to force her, all those years ago.
At last, Salamander flung both hands into the air, shook his head, and followed the captain on board. Just as the ship was pulling away from the jetty, the gray gnome appeared, all grins and bows. Jill picked him up again and held him like a child clutching a doll as she watched the ship sail away, heading south on a rising wind, until it disappeared into the opalescent dawn. In the day’s fresh heat, sweat trickled down her back.
“Well, we can hope, at least, that the Elder Brothers found themselves a better island to settle than this one, but somehow or other, I have my doubts.”
The gnome mugged a mournful face, then disappeared.

The ship had sailed some miles down the coast before Marka realized that something was wrong with Salamander. She was standing in the stern of the boat, watching the wake and chatting with the helmsman, when a grim Keeta made her way back through the piles of trunks and boxes.
“Marka, you’d best tend to that husband of yours. He’s up in front.”
When she hurried forward, Keeta followed, but she hovered a respectful distance away, back by the mast. At the prow, Salamander was leaning onto the wale as if he were a lookout, but she could tell that he was staring off toward nothing and seeing nothing as well.
“Ebañy?”
He neither moved nor seemed to hear. For a moment she felt paralyzed by a sudden mad fear, that no words of hers would ever reach him, that if she tried to touch him her hand would pass right through his arm, that never again would he hear when she tried to speak. As if a waking nightmare had dropped over her like a net the light turned strange, all blue and cold for the briefest of moments. She could not speak, knowing that he would never hear. She caught her breath in a sob, and he spun round, masking his face in a smile.
“Well, we’re under way nice and early, aren’t we?”
The illusion shattered. Ordinary sunlight danced on the sea and fell warm on her skin and hair. Yet, when he went on smiling, she felt as if he’d slapped her, that he would hide his hurt this way.
“I thought something was wrong.”
“Oh, no, no. Just thinking.”
In her sudden misery she could only study his face and wonder if he still loved her.
“Salamander?” Keeta strode forward. “Where’s Jill?”
“Oh, she’s not coming with us. There’s really nothing she in these stinking islands, so she’ll be catching a ship back to Orystinna.”
“Really?” Keeta raised one eyebrow.
“Just that.” Ebañy smiled again, easily and smoothly. “She’s got her work to do, you know, and she could see that she’s not going to find any rare books in these rotting little towns.”
“Well, that’s certainly true enough.” Keeta hesitated, on the edge of asking more. “I always wondered why she came out with us in the first place. But do you think she’ll be all right?”
“My dear woman!” Ebañy laughed aloud. “I’ve never known anyone better able to take care of herself than Jill.”
Keeta nodded, considering, then smiled herself.
“Well, that’s most likely true, too. Just wondering. I’m surprised she didn’t say good-bye, but then, she’s not the kind of woman who likes a long drawn-out parting. You can see that.”
Ebañy kept smiling until she wandered off, picking her way through the deck cargo in search of Delya; then he flung himself round and leaned onto the wale again, staring out as if he were struggling not to cry. Marka could think of nothing to do but lean next to him and wait. Ahead the sea stretched out like a road, green-blue and flecked with brown kelp. Gulls darted and shrieked in the rising sun.
“Ah, well,” Ebañy said at last. “Even old friends must part, sooner or later, I suppose.”
“Are you going to miss Jill?”
He nodded a yes, staring off to sea.
“Well, darling,” Marka felt like sobbing in relief, just from having something to say. “If the show keeps doing so well, maybe can go to Deverry someday and see her again. If she’s at this Wmmglaedd place, we’ll know where to find her.”
He turned to look at her, and this time his smile was genuine.
“Maybe so. Somehow I managed to forget that.”
“Silly.” She laid her hand on his arm. “My beloved idiot.”
“You do love me, don’t you? Truly, truly love me?”
“What? More than my life.”
“Don’t say that.” He grabbed her by the shoulders so tightly that it hurt. “It’s ill-omened.”
“I didn’t know.”
“But do you love me? Oh, by the gods! If you don’t love me, I’ve—” His voice caught in a sob.
“Of course I love you. I love you so much I can’t even say.”
“I’m sorry.” He let her go, caught her again, but gently this time. “Forgive me, my love. I’ll admit to having had days when I’ve been in better humor.” He kissed her mouth. “Why don’t you leave me to my fit, sulk, temperament, or whatever this may be?”
All morning he stood there alone, brooding over the sea and sky. Marka had a sudden premonition that had nothing to do with dweomer, that even if their marriage lasted for fifty years or more, she would never truly know her husband, realized it then, when by every law in Bardek and Deverry both it was far too late to change her mind. She also remembered the old fortune-teller in Luvilae. The knave of flowers, she thought. That’s who it was: Ebañy. I’ve married the knave of flowers, and I’ll never be the princess now.

After she watched the ship sail out of sight, Jill returned to the inn, paid off the bills that the troupe had left behind them, then gathered a pack’s worth of possessions: her clothes, the various maps and bits of manuscripts that she’d found in the archipelago, a judicious selection of herbs and oddments, then in a fit of thrift stored the rest with the innkeep, just as if she might come back again someday. Laden like a peddler she strolled out of town by the west gate and followed the road, keeping more on the solid shoulder than the mucky middle, for about a mile. As soon as she turned off into the tangled forest, she saw Dallandra, waiting for her between two trees. In the sunlight the elven woman seemed as insubstantial as a wisp of fog caught in branches.
“You’re ready?” Dalla said, “Now remember, Time runs differently, even on our borders. We won’t seem to be in the Gatelands very long, but we might come out again years later or suchlike. We have to travel fast.”
Together they walked through the dappled shade and between the enormous trees. At first Jill thought that nothing had happened, but then she realized that the thick jungle foliage was so intense a green that it seemed fashioned from emerald. When she took a few steps, she saw ahead of her windblown billows of grass. She spun round and found the jungle gone, swallowed by a mist hanging in the air, opalescent in a delicate flood of grays and lavenders shot through with pinks and blues. As she watched, the mist swelled, surged, and wrapped them round in welcome cold.
“There,” Dallandra said. “You’re not truly in your body anymore, you see.”
Jill felt a weight round her neck and found, hanging from a golden chain, a tiny statuette of herself carved from obsidian. Dallandra laughed.
“Mine’s of amethyst. That’s rather rude of Evandar, to use blackstone for you. It’s so grim.”
“Oh, it suits me well enough.”
Ahead three roads stretched out pale across the grasslands. One road led to the left and a stand of dark hills, so bleak and glowering that she knew they had no part in any country that Dallandra would call home. One road led to the right and a sudden rise of mountains, pale and gleaming in pure air beyond the mist, their tops shrouded in snow so bright that it seemed as if they were lighted from within. Straight ahead on the misty flat stretched the third. Dressed in elven clothes, a man was walking to meet them down that middle way, whistling as he came, his hair an impossible yellow, bright as daffodils. When he drew close Jill noticed that his eyes were an unnatural sky-blue and his lips red as cherries. She felt magical power streaming from him as palpably as she felt the mist.
“Good morrow, fair lady.” He spoke in Deverrian. “My true love tells me that you wish to hurry on your way and not linger here in my beloved land. What a pity, for I’ve many a marvel to show you.”
“No doubt, and truly, I’m honored by your invitation, but I’ve another kind of marvel to find. If I remember the tales about you rightly, it’s one that I think you’d find interesting yourself, the island refuge of the sea elves.”
He grinned, revealing teeth that were more than a little sharp.
“And someday, perhaps, I’ll come visit you there.” He turned to Dallandra. “I’ve found the road we want. Shall we travel it?”
For an answer she merely smiled and caught his hand. Jill walked alongside as they sauntered off down the middle road, as casually as a lady and her lover taking a stroll through the park lands of his estate. All round the mist hovered, parting directly ahead in swirls of watery sunlight to reveal dark mounds of trees. Off to her right she could hear a distant ocean crashing big waves onto some unseen shore.
“Those three roads you saw at first? They’re the mothers of all roads,” Evandar remarked. “Men and elves, every thinking creature under all the suns everywhere—they like to think they’re following a road of their own building, don’t they? But all those earthly roads are just the daughters of one of these three.”
“Indeed?” Jill said. “I won’t argue with you when you could well be right, for all I know.”
“And since the three are the mothers of all earthly roads, all those earthly roads start and end here. You can move from one to another and come out where you choose, providing, of course, that you know how to get here in the first place.”
“I see.” Jill allowed herself a smile. “That’s the trick, is it?”
“Just so.” He smiled in return. “And not so easy a trick to learn.”
“I well believe that.”
“Now, of course, I could show you that trick, if you’d care to stay and learn it.”
Jill felt a pang of temptation as strong as a stab of pain, but she merely laughed and shook her head no.
“I’m grateful for the offer, mind. But I’ve got a bit of work on my hands just now.”
“Your choice, of course.” Evandar bowed, a half-mocking sweep of his arm. “Now, it does take a bit of learning to untangle the roads from their mothers. It’s rather like a tapestry weaver’s remnants, a big basket of yarn of all colors, all tangled up together, and pulling just one strand free without knotting it round the rest isn’t such an easy thing to do. Which is why we’d best stop for a moment and let me think.”
They had reached a low rise, dropping gently down in front of them to another wide and grassy plain, crisscrossed with tiny streams and dotted with thickets of trees. Off on a far horizon in a gathering mist Jill could just make out a rise of towers, all white stone flecked with the occasional glint of gold, as if some mighty city stood there. Although Evandar had talked of many roads, she could only see one, meandering through the plain like a stream. He seemed to hear her thought.
“It’s all in the walking, which road you end up traveling. They all do look alike at first. Come along, we’ll just head down past those gray stones, there.”
Now that he pointed them out, Jill could indeed see the boulders, shoving themselves clear of the earth about halfway down the rise. As they strolled past, she noticed that the stones seemed worked, shaped into flat slabs with some crude tool, and arranged into a roughly circular ring.
“We turn here, I think,” Evandar said.
The sun turned brighter by a sudden streamside, all dappled with coins of gold light and bordered with a spill of yellow wildflowers. Even though it seemed they had traveled a long way, Jill could still hear the mutter of the invisible ocean.
“And what of the sea roads? Do all ships sail on that sea I hear over there somewhere?” She waved vaguely in the direction of the sound. “Is there a harbor where all sailors come to port?”
“There is, truly. Again, if they can find their way to it. If. Your ancestors sailed that sea when Cadwallon the Druid brought them free of slavery and defeat in the land they called Gallia. But, of course, you know that.”
“What?” Jill stopped walking and turned to him. “I don’t know in the least. What are you saying?”
Evandar tossed his head back and laughed.
“Cadwallon was a splendid man, if a bit dour at times. I knew him well, my lady. Now, if only you’d come take the hospitality of my hall, there’s many a tale I could tell you.”
When Jill wavered, Dallandra intervened, shooting a scowl in his direction.
“Don’t listen to him, Jill. You’ve not got years and years of idle time to waste over a goblet of mead.”
“You are a harsh one, my love.” But Evandar was laughing. “Unfortunately, you speak true, and it would be too unscrupulous even for me to tempt our guest further. Look, see where the sun’s breaking through? I think me that it shines on the island you’re looking for.”
The mist ahead opened like a door and let through sunlight in a solid shaft. As they came close Jill felt the steamy heat of a tropical day streaming out to meet them.
“A thousand thanks, Evandar. Dalla, will I see you again?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I was thinking of coming with you, just for a little while.” She glanced at her glowering lover. “To you it’ll be but moments.”
“So it will, and go with my blessing, as long as you come back.”
“Oh, that I will.” Dallandra flashed a wicked smile. “This time.”
Before he could protest farther she dropped his hand and strode forward into the shaft of sun. When Jill hurried after, the light was so strong that it burned her eyes and made them blink and water. Blind and stumbling, she stepped forward and fell to her knees in soft sand.
“”Ych, this is awful,” Dalandra remarked, from nearby. “I feel like I’m made of lead, and I’ve tripped over some driftwood or somewhat.”
Finally, after a lot of swearing and muttering, Jill got her sight back and realized that they were kneeling on a beach under a blazing; sun that lay halfway between the zenith and the horizon—whether it was setting or rising, Jill couldn’t know. Off to her left the ocean stretched glittering; to her right, cliffs of pale sandstone rose up high; ahead the white sand ran, on, and on. Wildfolk swarmed round, climbing into their laps, patting their arms with nervous paws. Dallandra rose to her knees and shaded her eyes with one hand to frown up at the clifftops. Her figurine was gone, and when Jill automatically laid a hand at her own throat, she found that hers had vanished as well. She also realized that she could feel her pack on her back again; it had seemed to weigh nothing at all in the misty lands of the Guardians. For a moment Dallandra stood, looking this way and that, chewing on her lower lip in hard thought.
“Wait! I can just see . . . a long ways down the coast there. Look at those black dots wheeling round in the sky.”
“I can’t make them out at all.”
“My apologies; I forget you’re not elven. But I can just see what looks like birds, wheeling round and diving and suchlike. I’ll wager there’s a river mouth, and where there’s a river mouth there might be a harbor.”
“True spoken. There’ll be fresh water at least, and fish and suchlike.”
“You’ll need food, truly. Are you sure you should do this?”
“I don’t have much choice, do I? Don’t worry, Dalla. I’ve spent many a long year alone in wild places, and I have the elementals, too, to help me if need be.”
“Well and good, then. And I’ll be listening for you. If you call me, I’ll come. It may take me a while, but I will.”
“You have my thanks, and so does Evandar.”
Dallandra smiled, then turned and began walking toward the sea, heading for a place where it seemed the sun laid a road of gold across the water. She waded out into the gentle waves, seemed to step onto the golden road, and disappeared like mist vanishing in the glare of sun. She apparently knew the trick, as Evandar had called it, of traveling to the home of the three mothers of all roads.
Jill allowed herself the luxury of a brief moment of envying her, then made herself concentrate on the job at hand. The wildfolk were still clustering round, undines thronging all silver in the breaking waves, sylphs and sprites hovering overhead, crystal glimpses in the strong sun. At the head of a pack of warty green and purple gnomes, her faithful gray fellow was wandering around, poking at the sand with a piece of stick. When Jill called him, he trotted over, the others straggling slowly after.
“Now look, I need your help. You know who the Elder Brothers are.”
The gray gnome nodded and grinned, revealing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. The purple fellows were suddenly all attention.
“Well, somewhere around here they have a city, somewhere away from the shore, most like. I need to know where it is.”
With a scatter of sand they all disappeared, leaving her to hope they’d understood her.
Sticking to the hard-packed sand at the water’s edge, Jill headed down the beach, keeping the cliffs to her left—going south, she finally decided, once the sun had moved enough for her to judge that it was setting, not rising. It was a long time before she could see the specks wheeling and diving that Dallandra had noticed, and longer still before those specks did indeed resolve themselves into white birds. At that point she realized as well that the land was sloping ever so gently down, and that the cliffs rose lower and lower, finally petering out ahead in a last curve of broken hill. She could also see a brownish surge of water heading out from land and flowing across the ocean. So Dallandra had found her a river, indeed, and Jill was glad of it. In the blazing heat she wanted a swim in fresh water as badly as she was beginning to need the shade of the trees that bordered it.
Unfortunately, when she reached the shallows of the estuary, she found crocodiles, piled on a tumble of gray rocks or flopped onto each other as they lazed on the mud among stands of water reeds. Although Jill started to count them, she gave up after fifty. While the creatures blinked and drowsed in the afternoon sun, little brown birds walked among and over them without the crocodiles even noticing, but Jill had no desire to try the trick herself. She got one of her water bottles out of her pack and had a long swallow—warm, tasting of leather, but at least it was wet. If, as seemed likely, the river got deeper and ran faster upstream, she’d be able to find a safer spot to drink later.
By then the sun was sinking off in the west, and with the
cooler air of evening came swarms of insects, rising like a mist from the riverbanks. Deep in the jungle ahead birds began to call back and forth. With a yawn and a grunt, a few of the crocodiles scrambled out of the pack and flopped into the river. Birds screeched a warning and flew. Jill decided that she’d be better off with a good stretch of dry land between her and them. Rather than face the night jungle she hurried back to the beach and went back the way she’d come for some hundreds of yards. Well above the current waterline she found the bleached-gray trunk of an entire tree, its roots all twisted with dead kelp, and a long scatter of smaller pieces of driftwood, plenty of bone-dry fuel for a fire. Crocodiles, she assumed, would dislike fire as much as other wild animals did. She swung her pack free of her aching shoulders, set it down in the shade of the trunk, and set about making camp.
As she was gathering small chunks and sticks, she discovered her first concrete bit of evidence that Evandar had indeed found her the right island. Lying half-buried in the sand was a broken plank, cut and curved in such a way that it could only have come from a ship. It might, of course, have been nothing more than wrack from some Bardek merchanter, carried hundreds and hundreds of miles by the currents, but she preferred to doubt it. In the last of the day’s light she scurried round, searching for more driftwood, scrabbling like a mole in the sand, until at last, just as the twilight was growing thick and gray, she unearthed a flat panel of wood that must have once formed the side of a chest or back of a bench. It seemed to be the splintered half of a big oblong, and it was carved with designs that no Bardekian would have drawn.
Once she got a fire going with less interesting driftwood, Jill studied her discovery by firelight streaked blue from the sea salt impregnating the wood. Although the panel was bleached and blistering, she discovered on one edge two indentations that could only have been made by hinges—so it was part of a chest, indeed. With her fingertip she could trace a long pattern of vines and flowers, looping casually, almost randomly across the entire surface rather than being contained in strict bands, such as a Bardekian craftsman would have chosen, and among the foliage were the little faces of Wildfolk. On the reverse side of the panel she found deep-graved letters, recognizably elven though somewhat different from the profuse syllabary she’d learned.
Enough of the symbols were familiar for her to make a stab at deciphering the words, most of which seemed to have vanished with the missing piece of panel. There was the graceful hook that spelled “ba,” and here the slashed cross of “de.”
“Iran rinbaladelan linalandal—” she said aloud, and her blood ran cold at the sound of the city name. “Rinbaladelan son of the something? Or wait! The son of Rinbaladelan, not the other way round.”
A new city, then, founded by exiles? Quite possibly, if its name had been inscribed on this long-sunk ship to show her home port. She tossed the panel over near her gear, then got up and laid more wood on the fire. In the blue and gold flame the salamanders leapt and sported, rubbing their backs like cats on the burning sea wrack. Jill wandered away from the pool of light so that she could look up at the stars, hanging bright and clear above her, so close, seemingly, that she felt she could stretch up a hand and touch them. She wished she had a navigator’s lore, to read the stars and learn how far south she might be, but of course, for all the strange lore she did know, the book of the stars was closed to her. Far down the beach at low tide, the ocean lapped soft waves,
What, then, was the noise? All at once she realized that for some time now she’d been hearing a distant sound that she’d been assuming, only half consciously, was surf, but here in this sheltered bend of coast, and with the tide so far out at that, no waves pounded on the shore. She went cold again, freezing motionless, straining to hear, to place, the soft but rhythmical boom, boom, boom floating through the night.
Alter some long minutes she realized that the sound was growing louder, coming closer, pounding like the footsteps of an enormous animal walking at a stately pace. She hurried back to the fire, wondered if she should keep it or smother it, cursed herself for not traveling armed, decided that one sword wouldn’t have been much good, anyway, against a beast as big as this one must be, then laughed aloud at herself. She did, after all, have dweomer to fall back upon. No doubt a blaze of etheric fire would frighten away any animal, gigantic or not, if indeed a beast was what she was hearing. The sound was definitely closer now and definitely coming from the distant river. She walked away from the fire, peered into the dark until her eyes adjusted, then saw pinpoints of light flickering far off in the estuary. The booms grew louder still.
Drums. Drums and torches coming along the riverbank, and she was willing to wager that whoever came marching was pounding those drums to scare the crocodiles off. All at once Wildfolk swarmed into manifestation around her, a whole army of green and purple gnomes, a flock of sprites, jumping or fluttering round in sheer excitement. Her own gray gnome appeared, jigging up and down on top of her pack.
“The Elder Brothers, is it?”
He nodded a yes and grinned, gape-mouthed. In a few minutes she could see the dark shapes of ten men break free of the shadows around the river and turn, torches held high, onto the beach. She could even pick out the drummer, marching at the rear of the line and banging a large, flat drum with some kind of stick. She went back to her fire, threw on more wood to make it blaze in greeting, and waited, arms crossed over her chest, as they drew nearer, stumbling a little on the soft beach sand. With the crocodiles far behind, the drummer fell silent. About ten feet away they stopped, just out of the pool of light, but she could see them clearly enough: elves, all right, with their long, delicate ears and moonbeam-pale hair. They were dressed in full tunics, belted at the waist with a glitter of gold, which came just above their knees, and each man carried a quiver of arrows at his hip and a bow slung over his back. Jill hoped that they spoke the same elven language that she knew.
“I give you my heartfelt greetings,” she said, “and hope I might be welcome here.”
She could just make out a rustle of surprised whispers. One man stepped from the crowd and walked a few paces in her direction. A dragon’s head, worked in gold and as big as the palm of his hand, clasped his belt. When he spoke, she could indeed understand him, but with some difficulty. His dialect was far more different from that of the Westfolk than, say, Eldidd speech is from that of Deverry proper.
“Strangers are always less than welcome. Are you a victim of the sea’s rage?”
It took her a moment to realize that he meant a castaway. “No, good sir. I came here quite deliberately, looking for you and your people, in fact.”
Automatically he turned to glance at the cove, turned back to her with a slight frown.
“I see no boat.”
“Well, no.” There was nothing she could say but the truth. “I traveled by dweomer, and I come to greet you and ask your aid in the name of the Light that shines behind all the gods.”
Jill had never seen anyone look so surprised. He turned on one heel, staring at the beach, turned back to her with a shake of his head, his mouth half-open as he fought for words. The men behind him went dead-silent for a moment, then all began talking in a gabble of surprise until their leader shouted at them to be quiet.
“It seems discourteous in the extreme to ask you for some proof, but given the circumstances . . . ”
Jill smiled, flung up one hand, and called upon the Spirits of Aethyr. In a blaze and stream of bluish light they flocked to her and made her hand and arm blaze with etheric fire far brighter than a torch. All round them Wildfolk swarmed into manifestation and spread out on the beach like an army.
“Forgive me for doubting you.” The elven leader bowed deep. “My name is Elamanderiel, and in the name of the Light, I bid you welcome.”

When Dallandra left Jill, she followed the sun road until the gold faded and the dappled tiles gave way to daffodils blooming by a stream. Following the stream uphill led her back past the circle of stones, through the mists, and down the long road by the sea whose waves broke on every shore and none of them. At length she made her way back to the river and found the Host scattered across the meadow and dancing, as if nothing troubling had ever happened in these lands. Under the young oak tree that hid his daughter, Evandar was sitting in the grass and playing sour notes on a bone whistle, about six inches long and bleached dead-white.
“Odd little trinket,” he remarked. “I found it lying over there, in among the bushes, as if someone had dropped it by mistake. What do you think it is, my love?”
“Oh, ych! It looks like it was made from an elven finger.”
“Doesn’t it? What is it? Two joints somehow glued together? No, but it’s much too long for a single joint.” He held his own hand against it in illustration. “I wondered what it would call up, you see, but so far, naught’s appeared in answer to my playing.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well. It gives me the strangest feeling, seeing it, and a worse one to hear it call. I wish you’d just smash it.”
“I would, except it’s a riddle, and I think me a good one at that,” He tossed it into the air, seemed to catch it, but when he opened his hand it was gone. “Now I know where it lies, but no one else does, and so I’ve covered a riddle with a riddle.”
“I can’t imagine any of your people making such a thing.”
“Indeed, no, and so I wonder: who dropped it here, and why were they prowling beside my river? I think me we’d best tend to our borders.”
All at once they were no longer alone. Like flames leaping out of the ground, soldiers of the Host were gathering round him—how many, she couldn’t tell—in a glitter of coppery-colored mail and helmets, each man armed with a long bronze-tipped spear. The music drifted away and stopped as the Host swelled, spreading across the meadow. At some far distance she heard horses neighing.
“While you were gone, Alshandra was seen again,” Evandar said to Dallandra. “With some of those from farther in.”
“Farther in? I wish you’d explain—”
“There are two hosts, my love, the bright court that I keep, and then the dark who live farther in. And that’s all I’ll say about it now, for look! our horses!”
A young boy hurried forward, leading two golden horses with silvery manes and tails. As Dallandra mounted, she saw that the foot soldiers had turned into cavalry as suddenly as changes always came about in this country. In the clatter and jingle of metal-studded tack they followed Evandar as he led the way out with a whoop and a wave of his arm. Dallandra rode up next to him as the road beneath flattened out and broke free into sunlight. Yet always the mist remained, a gray and shifting wall, seeming solid at times, thin and teased to silver at others to reveal glimpses of shining cities or forested mountains. Dallandra noticed that it always hung just at their left hand, as if they were traveling deosil in a vast circle round a grassy plain.
“The riding of the border,” Evandar called out.
Behind him the Host roared their approval, and silver horns blew.
On horses that never seemed to tire they rode for hours, till the day faded into a greenish twilight, and a moon hung pink and bloated just above the horizon, never rising, never setting. In that ghastly light they traveled past ruins of cities fallen to some great catastrophe and the black and twisted stumps of dead forests, blanketed with ancient ash stretching as far as Dallandra could see. The horses never stumbled, never paused, ambled on and on and on through death and night, till just as she was ready to scream from the terror of it day broke, blue and clear, to drench them all in golden light. The mist writhed one last time, then blew away on a fresh and rising wind. Just ahead in the flowered meadow stood the pavilion of cloth-of-gold. Dallandra caught her breath in a sob of relief.
“Tne border lies secure!” Evandar cried out. “Go then to your music and the feast, but come again when I call.”
Behind him the host of soldiers blew away, like dead leaves swirling in an autumn wind. He swung down from his horse, helped Dallandra dismount, then turned the reins of their horses over to the same boy, who appeared as silently as before. Dallandra watched him lead them away round the pavilion and wondered aloud if there they would disappear.
“No” they’ll return to their pastures, from whence we stole them.” He was grinning. “Are you weary, my love? Shall we join the feast?”
“I’d rather you explained a few things to me.”
“If a riddle has an answer, it’s a riddle no more.”
Simply because she was indeed very tired, she dropped the subject and let him lead her into the pavilion. Their seats, couches on which they could semirecline, stood at the head of the hall. She sank gratefully onto the soft cushions and accepted a golden goblet of mead from a page. As always, the mead and the bread seemed real to her fingers and her taste, solid and so delicious that she realized how hungry she was after the long ride. While they ate, various members of the Host would come to Evandar and talk in low voices, reporting things they’d seen, apparently. Harpers played nearby in long, sad harmonies, while young voices sang, until at last, she slept.

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