---

Epilogue

The Elven Border
Summer 1096

FOR SIX NIGHTS the alar camped near the ruined dun and waited for news of Rhodry’s father. Because of the stock, they did have to move on the seventh day, heading north a day’s ride to fresh pasture. After two days there, though, the alar split up for Rhodry’s sake. Calonderiel and his warband, with their women and children, along with Aderyn’s magical company and of course Rhodry himself, drove off a herd of extra horses to leave the best grazing for the sheep. They made camp back on the Eldidd border and set a guard every night to keep watch for any hated Round-ears. Every day the dweomermasters would scry for Devaberiel; they always found him easily enough, but he always seemed to be traveling idly north, unaware that his long-lost son was waiting for him on the border.
During all this time Rhodry found himself drawn to Jill in spite of all his best efforts to leave her alone. He had never wanted to lose her, had always planned, from the moment he first met her, to spend his entire life in her company, and now that he’d found her again—or so he thought of it—all that old devotion came back in the same way as a fire, banked with sod for the night, flares up when a servant knocks the lumps of earth aside and lets the fresh air in. He found himself courting her as if she were a young lass, turning up at her side whenever she went walking, bringing her flowers, angling to sit next to her at every communal meal. Although she was mostly cold to him, every now and then she warmed, when they were talking about something they’d done or someone they’d known, all those years ago in his other life on a silver dagger’s long road.
One morning, when Rhodry went looking for Jill in his usual way, he found her sitting on the streambank near Aderyn’s tent. Apparently she’d just bathed, because she was combing her wet hair while Salamander sat with her and talked. When Rhodry joined them, his brother turned to him.
“I’m going to leave today and go look for our father. Obviously Cal’s messengers haven’t caught up with him yet, and I can just see us all wandering back and forth across the grasslands for years and years, passing close by but never meeting, endlessly wondering where the other one is—that sort of thing.”
“I was beginning to worry myself, and you have my thanks, but maybe I should just go with you. I’m the one who wants to see him, after all.”
“Aderyn says your place is here,” Jill broke in. “He doesn’t want you wandering all over the grasslands just yet.”
“Very well, but why not?”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, I’d like to know—”
“Hold up, brother of mine.” Salamander intervened. “Among the People we have a custom. What a Wise One—a dweomermaster, that is—says, we do. That’s one reason why I’ve never aspired to that exalted title myself. Some small dweomer I have, but the wisdom to lead my people—well, I’d just as soon not put myself to the test.”
“Which shows,” Jill said. “That you have a little bit of wisdom at least.” She rose, still holding the bone comb. “I’m going back to camp.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Rhodry started to get up, but she scowled and waved him back down.
“Would you stop following me everywhere?”
“Oh, here, my love—”
“Never call me that again.”
There was the crack of command in her voice, so cold, so harsh that he sat down and said nothing, merely watched her walk away while Salamander pretended to look elsewhere.
“Ah well,” Salamander said at last. “I’m going to take a pack-horse with me. Going to come help me load up?”
“Of course. Let’s go get the parting over with, shall we?”
“Ah, you’re beginning to think like an elf, sure enough.”
On the morrow, Rhodry went riding by himself out to the edge of the wild plains, very much like a green sea indeed, with the grass bowing and sighing like waves under the touch of the wind. For a long time he sat on his horse in the hot spring sun, watched the grass ripple, and thought of very little. All at once he realized that he could no longer remember his name. He swore, slapped his thigh hard with the reins, shook his head and swore again, but the name stayed stubbornly hidden until in frustration he started back toward camp.
“Rhodry Maelwaedd,” he said aloud, then laughed. “Or it isn’t truly Maelwaedd—never truly was—and I suppose that’s one reason I couldn’t remember. But Rhodry ap Devaberiel still sounds passing strange to me. What do you think? Which one should I use?”
The horse snorted and tossed its head as if to say it didn’t care either way.
When he rode back to camp he found Calonderiel waiting for him out by the hobbled herd. The warleader helped him unsaddle his horse and turn it out with the others, in a silence so profound that Rhodry knew something was wrong.
“What’s happened?” he said—and in Elvish, without really thinking about the choice.
“Oh, well, nothing much, really. Aderyn wants you to come share his tent instead of mine, that’s all.”
“All right. But why do you—oh, by the Dark Sun! Jill’s left, hasn’t she? That’s what this means.”
“I’m afraid so. She’s like all the blasted Round-ears—as impatient as babies, all of them! She announced this morning that if Devaberiel couldn’t be bothered to hurry, then she couldn’t be bothered to sit around and wait for him.” Calonderiel frowned down at the ground. “She could have had the decency to wait and tell you goodbye.”
“She’s leaving because of me, you know, no matter what she told you.”
“Oh.” A long pause. “I see.”
Rhodry turned on his heel and strode off alone to the camp. At Calonderiel’s tent he found all his gear gone—moved already, he supposed, at the Wise One’s command. When he went to the old man’s tent, he found the dweomermaster sitting by a banked fire with Wildfolk all around him. In a curve of the wall not far from Gavantar’s place, his bedroll and other gear were neatly laid out below a new pair of tent bags. Aderyn looked up with a wary cock of his head.
“Jill’s gone, then, is she?” Rhodry said, falling back into Deverrian.
“She is. Did you truly think she’d stay?”
Rhodry shrugged and sat down on his blankets. From outside, the normal sounds of the camp drifted into the tent—children laughing and running, a horse whinnying, a woman singing as she strolled by—but all the noise seemed strangely far away.
“I don’t know what I thought,” Rhodry said at last. “I do know it doesn’t matter. Not to her, not to the gods, not to my Wyrd or the wretched dweomer either.”
“Well, that’s probably true enough.”
Rhodry nodded and began pulling off his boots. In a few minutes he looked up to find the old man gone.
That night, some time when his sleep was deepest, Rhodry had a dream. He was walking across a meadow on a night when the full moon shone overhead, guarded with a double ring, and the grass crackled with frost under his feet, but in his dream he was too fevered to feel the cold, his cheeks burning in the icy air. Every step he took drove pain like a knife into his lungs. Yet he kept walking, never considered turning back, forced himself on a step at a time until he reached a copse of birches, white as frost in the moonlight, dancing and trembling with his fever. Among the trees a woman waited. At first he thought it was Jill, but when he went to meet her, he saw that she was neither human nor elven, with her flesh as pale as the birch bark and her waist-length hair as dark blue as a winter sea. She threw her arms around him and whimpered like an animal as she kissed his burning cheeks with cold lips, but when he kissed her mouth, he had to fight for breath between each kiss. Then he started to cough. He shoved her away, turned away and clasped both hands over his mouth while he choked and coughed in spasms that made his entire body rock and tremble. She wept, watching him. When he took his hands away they were covered with blood, dark and fresh, but thick with clots of gore. With a cry the woman flung herself against him and kissed him. When she pulled back, her pale lips were bright with his blood.
He couldn’t breathe. He was choking, drowning in his own blood—Rhodry sat up with a cry and heard the woman’s answering wail echo around him. Yellow dweomer light danced on the walls of the tent. Aderyn was standing over him.
“What were you dreaming?”
“I was choking. She kissed me and killed me. In the white birches.” Then the dream faded and blurred, like a reflection on water as the wind blows across. “I don’t remember any more of it.”
“I wondered what being back on the border would do to you. Come, get up, and we’ll have a bit of a talk.”
At the old man’s bidding Wildfolk made the dead fire leap up with flame. Rhodry was shivering.
“You know, I used to have a nightmare somewhat like that when I was a child, but I don’t remember it very well. This one was blasted real, though. Ye gods, it still hurts to breathe.”
“When you had the dream before—as a child, I mean—did your lungs hurt when you woke?”
“Don’t remember, but I doubt it, because I do remember screaming my head off, and my old nurse running over with her nightdress flapping around her. What does it mean?”
“Most dreams have as many meanings as an onion has peels. I wouldn’t venture to say what the right one might be.”
Rhodry hesitated on the edge of asking more. Although he knew that Aderyn had sworn a sacred oath never to tell an outright lie, he could sense that the old man was leaving a great many things unsaid. And do I want to force them out into the open? Rhodry asked himself. There in the middle of the night, miles and miles away from his old home and his old life, the answer was a decided no. Yet all the next day, he kept thinking about the dream, and every now and then, it seemed he could remember a little piece of it, just a visual image of the woman or the feel of a kiss, until he realized just how familiar to him she was, this White Lady, as he found himself calling her for no particular reason at all.
At dinner that night Aderyn announced that he’d scried Devaberiel out and found him traveling by himself and quickly, heading south through the grasslands but a good many miles away. He’d seen Salamander, too, hurrying to meet him. Since the dweomermaster could assume that one of Calonderiel’s messengers had finally tracked the bard down, he decided that the alar should ride in his direction. When they headed north, though, they kept to the borderlands, because Devaberiel was expecting to find them somewhere near Eldidd. For the same reason they didn’t ride far, finally making a semi-permanent camp not far from the Peddroloc.
Once he was well away from his old rhan, Rhodry turned melancholy, It was one thing to think of having an entire new life ahead of him; another to leave the old completely behind. Much to his surprise, he realized that he missed, his kin far more than he missed the power of rulership. At odd moments of the day he would find himself wondering how his sons fared, and their children, too; he even had the occasional fond thought of Aedda. He took to riding alone to ease his hiraedd, and the elves were willing to leave him alone with his solitude.
One day he borrowed a particularly fine gelding from Galonderiel and rode farther than usual in the simple pleasure of getting to know a new horse. After some hours he came to a little stream that led back to a marshy, spring-fed pond, surrounded with scrubby hazel thickets and some willows. Rhodry dismounted, and as he led his horse to the pond for a drink, he saw a white heron, standing on one leg in the shallows and regarding him with one suspicious round eye. All at once the bird shrieked its harsh cry and flapped off. Rhodry spun around, thinking that someone else had crept up behind him, but he saw no one, not even one of the Wildfolk. Since his horse was elven-trained, he left it to drink without him and walked back into the trees. The golden sunlight of late afternoon came down in shafts, solid with dust; the silence felt just as palpable. Then he saw her standing between two willows and watching him sadly.
Although he knew at once that she wasn’t truly substantial, she wasn’t an illusion, either: a real enough woman but lighter, somehow, than the solid trees around her. Tall and lithe, she was wearing a loose blue dress that left her arms bare and hung in torn dags around her ankles. Her dark blue hair flowed like water over her pale shoulders and curled close to her pale, pale face. When she spoke, he heard her language as Elvish, but it seemed that she wasn’t truly speaking at all.
“You heard me this time.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve been calling and calling, but you didn’t come. You always used to come to me.”
“Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you, that’s all.”
“Ah. That must be because of the old man. He’s a mean old man. I hate him. Why are you staying in his tent?”
“I’ve got to stay somewhere. Do you mean Aderyn?”
“An aderyn? Yes, the owl.”
“No, no, no, he’s a man—Aderyn is just his name.”
She looked so puzzled that he gave up trying to explain.
“Why do you hate him?”
“He lied to me. I knew you weren’t truly gone far away and under the earth. That’s what he said, you know. Far away and under the earth.” She paused, tilting her head to one side in thought. “But it’s taken me so long to find you again. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She pouted like a child, then laughed, tossing off the mood as she sauntered all sway-hip over to him. Her eyes were the same dark blue as her hair, and they were utterly mindless, like pools of water, glittering and vacant.
“You look so cold.” She was staring at him, studying his face. “You don’t love me anymore, do you? You’ve forgotten.”
Big tears rolled down her cheeks, but rather than falling, they merely vanished. Yet her sobs, the big gulping gasps of a heartsick child, were real enough.
“I’m sorry.” Rhodry felt her grief like a stab to his own heart. “Please, don’t look so sad. I just don’t understand.”
The tears stopped. Again she tilted her head to consider him, then suddenly smiled.
“I know what you’ll remember.” She caught his face between her hands and kissed him on the mouth. “Oh, you’re warmer now, truly. Come lie down with me. I want to hold you just like we used to. Do you remember that? I’ll wager you do. Men seem to like it so much.”
As she ran her hands through his hair, Rhodry did remember it, a slow, sensual kind of pleasure, utterly different than being in a human woman’s arms. Yet as he drew her close, as he kissed her, he remembered something else as well: her lips, bright with his blood in the moonlight. That was only a dream, he told himself, it all meant somewhat else. He took another kiss, then another, tipped her head back and softly kissed her throat. She began to laugh and cling to him, so perfectly happy, so suddenly solid and radiant in her happiness, that he laughed himself in the simple joy of finding her again. When they lay down together, he could think of her as nothing but a woman. Yet when he caressed her, his hands knew the difference in their blind way. Her skin felt more like silk; her flesh, oddly soft, without resistance or muscle. At first he was repelled, but with every kiss they shared, the difference faded. She grew warmer, more sold, heavier in his arms. The tattered dress faded away, too; he never took it off, but suddenly she was naked in his arms. He ran his hand over her breast, then cried out and pulled his hand back. She had no nipple, merely a soft curve of not quite real flesh.
It was her need of him as much as lust that kept him in her arms. When he opened his eyes and saw that she had no navel, either, he drew away. She looked up, her beautiful eyes brimming tears, and she seemed so desolate that he kissed her to keep her from weeping. Once he kissed her, he could no longer stop, though for a long time he was content with kisses alone, while he let himself forget what his hands had discovered. Finally, with a little laugh to mock his shyness, she reached inside his brigga and fondled him. At that he could think of nothing but taking her.
Yet the passion was different, a slow thing, languid, wrapping him round like warm water. It was enough to stay inside her, hardly moving, feeling her arms wrapped tightly around him. She whimpered like an animal, shifting under him, keeping him aroused for what seemed like a blissful eternity until his pleasure built close to pain. When he began to move, he nearly fainted from the agonizing delight, and as he sobbed into her shoulder, she laughed, a crow of triumph. He lay next to her, pulled her into his arms, and panted for breath.
“Shall I show you things like I used to?” she whispered. “Shall we go to the pretty places? Not the dangerous ones, not the ones where she is, but the safe ones in my home country.”
“I don’t understand. Who’s this she?”
“You never did get to meet her, did you?” She frowned, thinking hard at the edge of her capacity. “You said she was a demon.”
“I don’t remember saying any such thing.”
“You did, too! And maybe you were right, because when we went to her country, you went under the ground. So we won’t go there again.”
“Indeed? Well, whatever you want.”
She raised her head and kissed his closed eyelids, then his mouth. He felt as if they were gliding together down a slow stream, felt sunlight, too, warm and strong. When he opened his eyes he found that they were lying in a meadow, with banks and hedges of red roses scattered through the grass. Rhodry sat up and stared around him. A flock of peacocks strutted by, led by three males in display, gleaming like blue-and-purple jewels.
“You always liked it here.” She sat up and began combing out her hair with her fingers.
“It’s beautiful, but where are we?”
“I don’t know. Just a place.” She lay down again and ran her hand down his back. “Do that to me again. It’s been so long, my love.”
“Much too long. Ye gods, I’ve missed you all my life and never known what I was pining for.”
But this time, as the pleasure of their lovemaking faded, so did the meadow. They were lying among the hazel thickets on hard ground where dark shadows stretched out long in the setting sun. Only the smell of roses lingered in her hair.
“It’s getting on toward night,” Rhodry said. “I hate to do it, but I have to leave you.”
“I know. I don’t want the old man to find out, anyway. But come back tomorrow?”
“I will. I promise.”
With a scatter of dead leaves she vanished. Rhodry stood up, only to stagger out of sheer dizziness. Cold sweat streamed down his back as he grabbed at a tree to steady himself. It was a long time before he could summon the strength to walk back to his horse, grazing patiently in the long grass. Yet, exhaustion or no, he knew he would come back to her, and not only for the strange sexuality she offered. It was the marvels. Somehow he’d been stupid enough to forget how she could take him to the Wildlands and show him the marvels there. All during his long ride back to the camp, he was wondering how he could have forgotten her at all. Her warning stayed with him, too: don’t let the old man find out
Aderyn was gone when he returned to their tent, off somewhere in the main camp. Rhodry sat down, planning on resting for a few minutes, only to fall asleep where he sat. He woke once and had just enough energy to crawl into his blankets. When he woke again, sunlight was filtering through the tent walls, and Gavantar was crouching by the fire and stirring something spicy-smelling in an iron pot.
“Morning,” Rhodry said with a yawn. “Where’s the Wise One?”
“Oh, he took a packhorse and went down to the sea. There’s a variety of red seaweed ripe for harvest—good for stomach troubles, he told me.”
“And you didn’t go with him?”
“I’m going to leave this afternoon. Bronario’s daughter is still a little bit sick. Aderyn wanted me to stay with her this morning, just to make sure the fever doesn’t come back.”
“All right. I’d best eat and get on my way myself. It’s my turn to help lead out the herd.”
“You’re too late for that.” Gavantar sat back on his heels and grinned at him. “It’s nearly noon. I was going to wake you, but Cal said not to bother. You can take a turn tomorrow, he said.”
“Noon? Nearly noon?”
“Just that.” His smile faded. “Rhodry, are you all right? You look pale.”
“Do I? No, I’m fine. I just . . . I just had the strangest dreams last night, that’s all. Well, I think I’ll ride out and catch up with the herd, anyway. I feel like a cursed fool, sleeping when I should have been riding!”
But of course, instead of guarding the horses, he rode back to the willows and the hazel thickets, and without the slightest remorse over lying to Gavantar, either. She was waiting for him at the streamside, sitting on the ground and running her fingers through her long blue hair. He dismounted some yards away and began to unsaddle his horse.
“You didn’t tell the old man, did you?” she said.
“I didn’t. He’ll be gone for a few days, anyway.”
With a laugh she glinted away like a flash of light from a mirror and reappeared standing next to him.
“Then stay here with me until he gets back.”
“I can’t. I’ve got to go ride with the herd tomorrow. It’s my turn. We have to keep moving the horses around, you see, so they get enough to eat.”
With a puzzled frown she reached up to drape her arms over his shoulders, as light and languid as a bit of cloth. When he kissed her, suddenly he could feel her weight.
“There’s lots of food for your horse right here.”
“True, but we’ve got lots more horses back at camp.”
“You’re one of the elder brothers now. Isn’t that odd.”
“Is it? Why?”
“I don’t understand you people. You change so much.” She pressed herself close to him and kissed him. “Come lie down. Then we’ll go somewhere nice.”
Over the next few weeks, Rhodry grew very sly and very clever about stealing time for his White Lady. He did his share of the alar’s work, spent just enough time with Calonderiel and his other friends to allay any suspicion, and dug up one good excuse after another for his fits of melancholy and long solitary rides. Every now and then he noticed Aderyn studying him, but he always managed to display enough good cheer to put the old man off. Everyone assumed that he was still pining for Jill on the one hand and adjusting to his new life on the other. After all, to go from being the most powerful human being on the western, border to just another man of the People—and one without even any horses of his own—was the kind of change that would leave most men brooding. No one suspected the truth, that he was as much in thrall to his White Lady as any Cerrmor brothel lass ever was to her opium pipe.
Yet, of course, she was as much in thrall to him. Every time he left her, she begged him to stay, and no matter how much he tried to explain, she could never understand that he needed food and shelter. When he tried offering to take her back to camp with him she turned furious, screaming at him and clawing his face like a cat. He had so hard a time explaining those scratches to Aderyn that he resolved to stay away from her, but the next time that he had a chance to slip out and ride her way, he took it. She was waiting for him, as sunny and loving as if they’d never fought. Indeed, he had the feeling she’d forgotten all about it.
That day she took him to a place that she called, quite simply, the sea caves. Enormous amethysts, jutting crystals as big as a horse’s head and sparkling with mineral fire, lined those caves, and turquoise water as clear and warm as liquid light filled them. Together they drifted down winding halls through chambers walled with gold where creatures spoke to them in voices sweeter than any harp. At times it seemed to him that they were asking his help, begging him to stay and rid their country of some evil, but he could never quite understand the sense of their words, only its emotional tone. At other times he and his White Lady were left alone to satisfy his desire. When at last the vision faded he was too exhausted to raise his head from the grass at first, but then he became aware of thirst, so urgent it was like a burning in his mouth. He hauled himself up, staggered out up to his knees in the pond, and gulped water until he could hold no more. She came to sit beside him and stroked his sweaty forehead with a pale, cool hand.
“The sun’s in the east,” he said at last. “It must still be morning. But it seemed we were gone a long time.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Just time passing, that’s all. It seemed like days, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”
She stared at him, her eyes narrow, her lips a little parted, in utter confusion.
“Well, don’t worry about it, my love. It doesn’t matter.”
Yet, when he reached camp, he found that it did matter. As he rode up, a couple of men came running, asking him where in the hells he’d been for the last two days. He realized, then, just how long he’d been gone—lost in her strange world and without a bite of food or a mouthful of water. He ducked into Aderyn’s tent to find Aderyn, Gavantar, and Calonderiel discussing how many rid-ers they should take to search for him. A crowd of overexcited Wildfolk swarmed and roiled round the tent. At the sight of Bhodry, Calonderiel jumped to his feet and grabbed him by the shoulders while the Wildfolk rushed over to grab his ankles or dance around him in glee.
“By the Dark Sun herself!” Calonderiel said. “I thought you’d fallen down a ravine and gotten yourself killed! You dolt! Riding out alone like that! There’s poisonous snakes out there, you know! You ever do this again, and I’ll break your neck myself!”
Rhodry could only stare openmouthed at him.
“Cal? Gav?” Aderyn’s voice was so cold that Rhodry suddenly realized that the old man knew the truth. “Out.”
Sweeping up the Wildfolk, they went without a word of protest. Sick and shivering, Rhodry knelt by the fire and held his hands over the warmth. Aderyn watched, more troubled than angry.
“I’m sorry,” Rhodry blurted at last.
“Don’t be. It’s mostly my fault, because I should have warned you. I was going to warn you, once I figured out how much I could say, I never dreamt she’d find you this quickly, that’s all. To tell you the absolute truth, I was hoping she’d never find you at all. Stupid, wasn’t I?”
When Rhodry started to feed a few more twigs onto the fire, his hands spasmed and sent the twigs fiying. Aderyn got to his knees and laid one hand on the back of Rhodry’s neck. Warmth lowed from his fingers and drove the chattering cold from his veins.
“Where did you meet her?”
“I won’t tell you. You’ll hurt her.”
“That’s not true.”
“You’ll keep us apart.”
“Now that is true.”
Without thinking Rhodry turned and swung at him, an open-handed sweep of an arm intended to knock the old man’s hand away and nothing more, but Aderyn merely swayed back and let him fall spraddled onto the floorcloth. Only then did Rhodry realize just how exhausted he was. He lay doubled over for a long moment, summoning the energy to lift his head up and struggle into a sitting position. Aderyn sat down facing him.
“I’m sorry,” Rhodry whispered. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“She’s like a fever, or a poison in the blood, but it’s your mind and soul that’s infected. And truly, you’ve done it to yourself. She can’t help herself or stop what she’s doing, any more than a fire could stop burning your hand if you were stupid enough to stick it into the flames.”
“How did you know?”
“For the past few weeks I thought you had a love affair going and were just too embarrassed to mention the fact. My age seems to take people that way.” Aderyn smiled briefly. “It was obvious you were hiding somewhat, and every now and then I’d see you smiling to yourself like any man will do when he’s been with a woman he fancies. But then you disappeared, and I was worried sick, fearing the worst, and sure enough, you come staggering in here, drained of your very life and pale as a birch tree—all at once I remembered the dream you had. I should have known she was close by. I’ve been much distracted these days, and busy with my apprentice, too, but I should have seen it then.”
“Well, it’s my shame, not yours. You’re not the one who’s been—” The words stuck like thorns in his throat as he finally saw just how unnatural his lust was. “Oh, ye gods, I’m sorry.”
Aderyn said nothing, staring into the fire as if he could read the flames like writing. Rhodry was only aware of his shame, burning in his face worse than any fever. Yet even in his dishonor he knew that the marvels had snared him more than the sex. He could remember them so vividly, those bejeweled caves deep under waves that never broke on any earthly shore, or the rose meadows, breathing perfume in a golden sunlight. He could hear the harsh shrieks of the peacocks, strutting through the emerald grass, and see just beyond them a ruby mound of roses, big as a dun. He got up and began walking over to those roses, drawn by the scent
until a stinging pain flooded his face. He tried to ignore it and keep walking, but the pain came again. The vision vanished with a rushy hiss like water dropped into a pot of hot oil. Rhodry found himself staring up at Aderyn, who was leaning over him, one hand still raised.
“This is very bad,” the old man said. “She’s come right after you.”
Aderyn stepped back, stretched out his hand, and began turning slowly in a circle while he chanted under his breath in some language that Rhodry didn’t recognize. It seemed that he was using his pointing finger to draw a big invisible circle around the tent and to scribble some sort of figure at each quadrant, too. As soon as he’d gone round three times, Rhodry felt as if he’d been suddenly shaken awake after a night of vivid dreams. While he could remember that he’d seen marvels, he couldn’t remember a single detail, and the tent seemed far more real and solid than it had in weeks. Yet the world around him was also strangely bleak—tawdry, somehow, and dirty round the edges, as if it were some rich and beautiful shirt, all embroidered in Bardek silk, that he’d worn and worn until it was frayed bald and stained, fit only for giving to a beggar to keep off the cold.
“You’ve got to give her up.” Aderyn’s voice was cold and harsh. “Do you understand me? She’ll kill you if you don’t.”
The anger he felt caught Rhodry by surprise. He wanted her, wanted the marvels, wanted them so badly he had a brief thought of killing anyone, even Aderyn, who stood in his way. The old man stepped back so sharply that Rhodry knew his rage must have shown on his face.
“Please, Rhodry, listen to me. You’ve touched on the edge of forbidden things, and it’s hard for me to explain, but—wait, I know. Think of it this way. That dream you had? It’s an omen. She’ll kill you without even meaning to do it if you keep going to her. She’s sucking the life-force out of you, and soon enough your body will weaken and die, because there won’t be enough force to sustain it. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but—”
“Cursed right it doesn’t! Ye gods, don’t you understand? Dying seems a small price to pay for what she gives me.”
Aderyn stared, simply stared at him for a long time.
“Things are worse even than I feared,” the old man said at last. “But there’s one last thing you don’t understand. Maybe you’re willing to die, but what about her? Are you going to drag her down with you? She thinks I hate her, but she’s as much my charge as you are. She has no mind to understand what happens between you. She loves you, and that’s everything and all that she knows about this world.”
Almost against his will Rhodry was remembering her confusion over simple things like names and time passing.
“She’s become the way she is because she knows you want her that way,” Aderyn went on. “You’re doing this to her, Rhodry Maelwaedd. If she goes on trying to please you, she’ll be utterly ruined, caught between the lands of men and elves on the one side and the Wildlands on the other. The Wildlands are her true home, but soon she’ll lose them, get herself shut out of them, and all because of you. Do you want that? She’ll be doomed, a bit of cosmic refuse, suffering for half of Eternity, and all because of—”
“Stop it! Oh, ye gods, hold your tongue! I could never do that! I’ll give her up, then! I swear it on the gods of both my peoples!”
“And I’ll hold you to that vow. Good. Well, then, let me just call Gavantar back in. Looks to me like you could use some dinner.”
Rhodry forced down food that was strangely tasteless, then went to his blankets and fell asleep without even bothering to undress. Almost at once he was dreaming so vividly that he knew it was no ordinary dream, that she’d come to him when he could set no guard against her, because in the land of dream she was the lord and he the vassal. When she reproached him for betraying her, he fell to his knees and begged her to forgive him, groveled at her feet like a bondsman until she graciously reached out a hand and bade him take it. She swept him back to the rose meadows, where even in dream the perfume hung thick in the golden air, and led him to a stream, where fish as bright as jewels slipped through golden rushes and emerald water weeds. As they sat down together in the warm and sweet-scented grass, Rhodry knew that if he made love to her there, he would never wake, that his body would sleep entranced while his mind roamed free in dream.
Until, of course, he died, but her smile was sweet, so sweet that the price seemed very low. He would seem to live for a long time, perhaps, here with her, and they would share a glorious day before the gray night inevitably fell. When she leaned toward him for a kiss, he smiled, welcoming her—then caught her wrists and held her back.
His death would doom her. Aderyn said so, and he knew in his very heart that the old man would never lie. Pouting, she slid closer, sensing his coldness, smiling again, slipping her hands free of his weakening grasp and moving closer yet to run her hands through his hair and waken a desire that made him gasp for breath, just from the sweetness of it. He was about to kiss her when she screamed. Rhodry spun around and saw Aderyn striding across the meadow, his face as grim and set as a warrior’s, and right behind him came a presence. At moments it seemed to be a slender young man, but with flesh and clothes of palest silver; at others, a misty, swirling tower of moonlight. With a howl and shriek of rage the White Lady vanished, sweeping all color from the world along with her. Over a corpse-gray meadow Aderyn came stalking, the ground shaking, rumbling, the trees trembling, rocking and Rhodry woke to find Aderyn shaking him by the shoulders. Although Aderyn’s face was every bit as grim now as it was in the dream, there was no sign of the Silver Lord of the Wildlands.
“By the Dark Sun herself,” Aderyn said. “This is going to be a battle and a half. You’re not leaving the camp alone until we’ve won it. I’m going to find Cal and ask him for some guards.”
Rhodry”s first and immediate thought was to slip out while the old man was gone, but Gavantar was standing by the door with his arms folded over his chest and a grim look of his own carved onto his young face. When he snapped his fingers a horde of Wildfolk materialized to sit on Ehodry’s lap, grab his arms, weigh down his shoulders, and generally do whatever they could to keep him in place. Rhodry studied the floorcloth and tried to ignore her voice, whispering, begging, calling to him like the murmur of a distant sea. Now that he was awake, he could argue with her, warn her, tell her of the evil fate that waited for her if she persisted in loving him, but she only said that she was as willing to die for him as he was for her.
“You don’t even know what death means.”
He realized that he’d been speaking aloud and looked up to find Gavantar listening in a horrified fascination. He felt tears brim in his eyes and spill beyond his power to stop them, but he couldn’t say one word more until Aderyn returned. As soon as the dweomermaster slipped through the tent flap, she fled with one last whisper of desire.
“I don’t sleep as much as most men do,” Aderyn said. “But I do need some rest every now and then, and Gav is only a beginner at this sort of thing. Thanks to the warleader and his men, your body’s going to stay right here, but your soul’s somewhat of a problem. I think me I’d best send for some help.”

After she left the encampment, Jill rode southwest, heading for the seacoast and the islands of Wmmglaedd, which at that time was a small temple complex dedicated to the gods of knowledge and learning. Already, though, a long stone building, where peat fires always smoldered to keep off the damp, held the core of what was to become its famous library. With the help of a young priest Jill settled in, hunting through its collection of some five hundred books and scrolls for any scrap of information that would help decipher the mysteries of Rhodry’s Wyrd in general and the rose ring in particular. Her problem was simple. At that time the entire Elvish heritage of literature and history appeared lost. Although some of the People out on the grasslands could read, and a few more were trained as sages to memorize vast amounts of oral tradition, only two Elvish books were known to have survived the Great Burning. Apparently lost with this heritage was the meaning of the word engraved inside Rhodry’s ring.
Scattered here and there through books in other languages, however, were the occasional reference to Elvish lore and learning, written down by the rare scribe who considered the People worth listening to. Jill was determined to see what she could glean from these less than fertile fields. Since she’d learned to read so late in life, understanding Deverrian text was still a slow process for her, and she had to pause often and ask one of the scribes the meaning of an obscure word. Puzzling out Bardekian was even slower.
After about two weeks of frustrating and unprofitable research, Jill was ready to pack it up as a bad job and depend entirely on meditation for her information, but just as she was about to give up she came upon a passage that made her struggles seem worthwhile. “When our people first came to the islands,” wrote a certain Bardekian historian, “they found other refugees there ahead of them, a strange people who had no name for themselves but who said they came from across the northern sea. There were never very many of them, so the old tales run, and they either all died or sailed south.” That was all, just a tantalizing scrap of legend passed down by word of mouth and quite possibly unreliable—but one that would fit the elvish refugees from the Great Burning of the Cities. What if it were true? And what, furthermore, if descendants of those refugees still lived, off in the little-known islands far to the south? The very thought drew to the surface of her mind long-forgotten memories, little scraps of knowledge about Bardek that had never seemed very important before, such as a certain style of wall painting that reminded her of the decorations on elven tents.
Late one evening she was sitting in the tiny guesthouse, going over a list of names of the more obscure islands and hoping to find some similarities to Elvish words, when she felt Aderyn’s mind tugging on hers. She sat down on the floor by the fire and stared into the glowing coals until at last his face appeared, floating just above the flame.
“Thank god I finally reached you. I’ve been trying to attract your attention for hours.”
“My apologies, but I’ve been on the track of some very peculiar information, and it’s a fascinating puzzle.”
“Could you see your way clear to laying it aside for a while? Somewhat’s dreadfully wrong.”
“What? Of course! I mean, what is it?”
“I need your help. I hate to ask, truly, because I know how you feel about Rhodry, but you’re the only one I can turn to. I beg you, if ever you’ve honored me, ride back to us.”
“I’ll leave on the morrow. Where are you?”
The vision changed to show her the camp, nestled in a valley up at the northern end of the Peddroloc; then Aderyn’s mind left hers in a gust of anxiely, as if every moment was so precious that he simply couldn’t stop to explain.
When she rode out, Jill left her mule and packs of medicines behind, and she borrowed an extra riding horse from the priests, too, so that she could switch her weight back and forth between her two mounts. For the first three days she traveled fast and smoothly; then a summer storm boiled up out of the west. On the fourth morning she woke to a sky as dark as slate and a pair of horses turned jumpy and foul-tempered by the thick and oppressive air. Late in the day it broke, a few fat drops at first, then a hard stinging slash of storm and the crack of lightning. Jill was forced to dismount and calm her trembling pair until at last the lightning moved off and the rain settled to a steady drizzle. Although she made a few more miles, shoving a way through the soaking-wet grass was so hard on the horses that she stopped early, making a wet camp in a little clump of willows by a stream.
Just before dawn she woke, cramped and shivering, to the distinct feeling that someone was watching her. Although the rain had stopped, the clouds still hung gray and lowering over the plains, bringing a dark and misty dawn, but as she looked around, she could just make out a woman, standing among the trees.
“Well, a good morrow to you,” Jill said in Elvish. “Is your alar nearby, or are you riding alone?”
The woman tossed back her head and wailed, one high keen of a spine-chilling note, then vanished. Slowly Jill got to her feet, and she was shivering from more than the damp.
“A banshee, was it? Oh, ye gods! Rhodry!”
Immediately she tried to scry him out, but she could find no trace either of him or the elven camp. Just before she panicked she realized that Aderyn might well have set seals over them all for some reason of his own—if so, a portent of horrible trouble indeed.
All that day, while the storm cleared and the sun and wind dried the tall grass, she pushed herself and the horses mercilessly, but even so, it was on the morrow noon—the fifth day after she’d left the islands of Wmm—that she finally saw the elven camp, a huddle of round tents on the horizon, and the horse herds, spread out and grazing peacefully. The young elf on watch greeted her with a shout that brought Calonderiel and half a dozen men riding hard to gallop her into camp.
“Take her horses,” the warleader called. “I’ll escort her to the Wise One’s tent. Jill, by every god, I’m glad to see you!”
“Is Rhodry dead?”
“No. Aderyn didn’t tell you? Rhodry’s gone mad. Straight off his head, raving, seeing things—I don’t understand it one bit, but it’s terrifying, truly. Just trying to get him to eat is a battle and a half.”
Aderyn’s tent was standing in the middle of the camp instead of at its usual distance. With Calonderiel right behind her and a crowd of Wildfolk shoving and pushing round them, Jill rushed inside. Aderyn was standing by the dead fire and waiting for her. The dweomermaster looked exhausted, pale and stooped, with dark circles round his eyes that were worthy of a drunken warrior. Behind him, crouched in the curve of the leather wall like an animal at bay, sat Rhodry. At first she barely recognized him, just because he sat so quietly, his eyes stripped of all feeling and fire.

“What’s so wrong?” Jill snapped.
“I haven’t slept much in a week, for starters,” Aderyn said. “But I’ll wager you mean our Rhodry.”
Rhodry never moved or looked up at the mention of his name.
“I was afraid he was dead. I met a banshee on the road.”
“It wasn’t a banshee. It—she—was the trouble.” Aderyn turned to the warleader. “Cal, stay here with him, will you? Yell at the first sign of the usual madness. We’ll just be outside, where we can talk privately.”
They went round to the side of the tent, and Jill noticed that no one dared come near, not even the normally curious children, not even one of the dogs.
“It’s a woman from the Wildlands.” Aderyn wasted no time on fine phrasing. “The little bitch has gone and ensorceled him, but it’s hurting her worse than it is him, truly. She’s linked to him from other lives, and there was no way for me to warn him adequately without spilling truths he shouldn’t hear.”
“We’ve got to trap her and turn her over to her lords.”
“Easier said than done. I’ve been trying, but she’s a wily little thing.”
“Look, Rhodry’s a man of honor. Can’t you explain that he’s hurting this poor innocent spirit, and—”
“I did, and that’s the only reason he’s still with us at all. He did his best to resist her, but in the end, she pulled him back.”
“I still don’t see how—”
“She’s his lover. And I mean exactly that. As much his lover as ever you were.”
Her sudden anger caught Jill by surprise—nothing so strong as rage, no, but a definite resentment, a flickering of old jealousies. Aderyn misunderstood her silence.
“You do know about such things, don’t you?” the old man said. “She’s one of the Wildfolk, but many years ago she ran afoul of one of the Guardians, who gave her a false body of sorts. Ever since, she’s been working on becoming a physical being, sucking magnetism from him and other lovers to—”
“Of course I know what she’s doing! Oh, my apologies, Aderyn, I didn’t mean to snap at you. How long has this been going on?”
“A couple of hundred years, more or less and all told.”
“She must be quite . . . well, convincing by now.”
“Very, and beautiful, too, or so he says, but in this case beauty’s certainly in the eye of the beholder. I never cared for the pale and pouty type myself, all wide eyes and simpers, when I was young.”
“Neither did Rhodry. Ych, this is revolting, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe it of him, but here we are. How are you guarding against her? The usual seals?”
“Just that, but she keeps calling to him, particularly when he’s asleep, and I can’t watch him every moment of every day. Gav can help set the seals, but that’s all. In fact, with you here and all, I was thinking that I might just go to Gal’s tent right now and get some sleep. Ye gods, I’m tired!”
Leaving Gavantar just outside the door on watch, Jill went back to Aderyn’s tent. Rhodry never even glanced up when she came in, nor did he say a word to her as she helped herself to bread and smoked meat from the basket lying by the hearthstone. She sat down some feet from him and studied him while she ate, since he didn’t seem to care whether she did or not. He looked his age, she realized with a shock. Even though he didn’t have a single gray hair or a pouch or bag in his weather-beaten face, he looked old, slumped down, drained of the immensely high vitality and magnetism that keeps those of elven blood so “young” by human standards. Since in her mind she always held the image of him as her young lover, she felt that she hardly knew this middle-aged man. The estrangement hurt.
“Rhodry? Don’t you have one word to say to me?”
He looked up, his mouth slack, his eyes narrow, as if he were trying to puzzle out who she was.
“My apologies,” he said at last. “I thought you’d prefer it if I just held my tongue.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I must disgust you.”
She considered the matter with the care it deserved.
“You don’t, truly. But I’m afraid for your life.”
“Does it matter if I live or die?”
“Of course it does. Your Wyrd—”
“Ah, curse my wretched Wyrd! I mean, does it matter to you?”
Another question that deserved a careful answer, not some unthinking reply.
“It does matter. I may not be in love with you anymore, but I like you. I always have, really. Liked you as a friend and admired you, too, and over the long years that’s more important than love.”
“Is it? I—” He froze in mid-sentence.
Jill felt at the edge of her mind the touch of crackling energy that means the Wildlands are lying close by. Her gray gnome popped into manifestation and pointed, all big eyes and gaping mouth, at something behind her. Opening up the second sight, she slewed around and looked. The first thing she saw was the smooth curving wall of the golden sphere of force that Aderyn and Gavantar had set over the tent and marked with flaming pentagrams. Just beyond, though, she could dimly make out a female shape, all wavery like a woman seen through bottle glass. When she rose to her knees, the shape vanished.
“She knows I’m here.”
“Actually, she told me you were coming. I mean, she didn’t know who you were, but she told me that the old man was bringing another dweomermaster. I figured it was you.”
“You knew she knew, and you never told Aderyn?”
When Rhodry blushed with shame she realked for the first time just how divided his loyalties were.
Over the next few days Jill and Aderyn worked out a strange sort of watch. While Rhodry was awake and thus fairly safe, they both rested, too, but the minute he fell asleep, one of them would watch his body while the other stood watch out on the etheric plane. The White Lady was forced to stay far out of reach of his dreams, although Jill did catch a glimpse of her one morning. Normally, on the etheric plane an elemental spirit appears as a nexus of lines of force or as a crystalline brilliance, much more a bit of geometry than a person, but the creature that Jill saw hovering on a billow of blue light seemed caught in between. She’d put on a half-human face, but it kept forming out of and dissolving into a burst of green light and line. At the sight, Jill’s abstract compassion solidified into real sympathy; the poor spirit was being dragged from her own line of evolution and trapped where she didn’t belong. If things went much farther, she wouldn’t long survive her displacement, either, especially without Rhodry to feed upon. Jill sketched the sigil of the Kings of Aethyr into the blue light, then started forward—but the spirit fled from her with an exhalation of rage like a physical howl surging round the etheric.
Jill returned to her body and sat up, stretching and yawning a little, to find Rhodry wide awake and staring at her.
“What did you do to her?” he snapped.
“I was trying to help her, you dolt.”
He did have the grace to look shamed.
All that day Rhodry was painfully restless. He paced back and forth across the tent, then started round and round, until Jill felt half dizzy from trying to watch him. When she suggested that they fetch Calonderiel and go riding, he didn’t even answer.
“Are you going to start chewing your manger next?” Jill snarled.
“What?”
“You’re acting just like a stud being kept from a mare in heat. It’s not very pretty to watch you rut.”
He stopped pacing and swirled around to face her.
“Aderyn’s kinder than I am,” she went on. “He sees you as the poor innocent victim. I know you better than that. I’ll wager this phantom lover of yours didn’t have to drag you into her bed. I’ll wager she didn’t even have to ask twice.”
Blushing scarlet, Rhodry took a furious step toward her.
“Just try,” Jill said, grinning. “I haven’t forgotten how to fight, and I’ll wager I can throw you all over this tent.”
He spun around, hesitated, then flung himself face down onto his blankets. She watched his shoulders shaking for a couple of minutes before she realized that he was weeping. She knelt down and began rubbing the back of his neck, letting a little of her own magnetism flow out to soothe him. In a few moments he stopped crying and rolled over.
“Rhodry, please, I don’t want to see you die. Do what Aderyn and I say. Please?”
He sat up, wiping his eyes on his shirt sleeve.
“My thanks,” he whispered. “I just feel torn in pieces, and I don’t know how to—”
The shriek sounded like a panther’s howl, blind-wild and feline, filling the tent and sweeping round. The slap came out of the shriek, a vicious blow across Jill’s face with the stinging rake of claws. All of Jill’s long years of dweomer training seemed to vanish. Without thinking she was on her feet and hitting back, automatically grabbing for an arm that wasn’t truly there, reaching for an enemy she couldn’t see. Her fingers closed on something more solid than air but not quite real; another slap caught her across the mouth; then she heard Aderyn yelling. Her enemy vanished.
“And don’t I feel like a fool!” Jill burst out. “Here I had my chance to put the sign of the kings upon her, and I lost my head completely.”
“I can’t say I blame you,” Aderyn said. “Instinct and all that. Gavantar felt her presence and woke me, but by the time I got here it was too late.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Jill glanced around to see Gavantar standing just inside the tent flap. “Gav, stay here. Aderyn, let’s go talk where we can’t be overheard. I’m sorry, Rhoddo, but I can’t really trust you.”
Since they could count on the spirit being too frightened to come back immediately, they walked a little way from the camp. Even though the grasslands were silent and sweaty in the heat of a windless summer day, being out of the tent and away from Rhodry’s obsession felt as good as a plunge into a cool river.
“She’s as desperate as a wolf in winter if she’d risk breaching the seals,” Aderyn remarked. “It must have taken every bit of courage and power she has. I can’t believe she misses him as badly as all that.”
“It’s somewhat else entirely. She’s jealous of me, and I think me we can use that to our advantage. Look, the Lords of the Wildlands should be willing to help in this.”
“I’ve already made contact with them. It’s just that she keeps leading them a merry little dance, dashing away every time they get near her.”
“What we need is somewhat to occupy what little mind she has, and I think we’ve found the perfect bait for our snare. Watching us catch her is going to be hard on Rhodry, but he’s brought it on himself, after all.”
“Forgiving sort, aren’t you?”
“And there you’ve put a finger on my weakness. Compassion doesn’t come easy to me, Aderyn. I’m not like Nevyn that way, or like you, either. Maybe it’s because I’ve survived my own hard times, but I don’t have much patience for someone else’s.”
“Just so long as you know.”
Two days later a summer storm whistled in like a curtain of rain moving across the grasslands. Aderyn announced that he was going to talk with Calonderiel and left the tent, ostentatiously taking Gavantar with him. Jill made a ball of dweomer light, hung it near the smoke hole in the ceiling, then brought out a pouch of elven “dice,” tiny wooden pyramids, painted a different color on each side. To play you shook ten pieces in your cupped hands, then strewed them out in a line; how many sides of each color came up, and the pattern they made, determined the winner, with the top score being a highly improbable straight of ten reds. Since the pyramids never fell plumb on tent cloth and grass, usually the players ended up arguing—not that Rhodry seemed to care one way or the other, though. Half the time he barely watched her pieces fall, and she had to remind him when it was his turn.
“We can stop if you want,” she said at last
“My apologies, but my heart’s not in it.”
“Is she calling you?”
“She’s always calling me these days.”
“Ah, Rhoddo, my heart aches for you.”
At the sound of his nickname he looked up and smiled with such a profound melancholy that for a moment she truly did feel sorry for him. She reached out and ran her hand through his hair and caressed the side of his face, and at her touch he turned his head and kissed her fingers, an old gesture, a habit from their time together long before.
The blow from behind slammed into her so hard that Jill nearly fell right into his arms. She heard Rhodry yell; then a slap hit her hard across the face. With a wrench of will she kept herself from using magic and fought back with both hands, blindly grabbing and slapping this way and that like a cat batting at a mouse. At last one hand landed on something fairly substantial with a squishy thwack.
“You bitchl You leave Rhodry alonel.”
Her only answer was another slap. Jill made a two-handed grab and caught something slick and cool but shaped much like an arm. There was a shriek, a slap, and suddenly Jill saw her, writhing in her hands: pale, lovely, but furious, her mouth twisted, her teeth pointed and sharp, her long blue hair waving in a private breeze of its own. She flung herself on Jill and tried to bite her, then disappeared, slipping through her hands as easily as water. Jill turned and made a blind grab, catching what felt like a handful of long hair. With a yelp the sprite reappeared, screaming and clawing at Jill’s face.
“Enough!” Aderyn called. “We’ve got the circle drawn.”
The sprite froze in Jill’s hands, then moaned, such a pathetic little sound that Jill let her go. She was trapped beyond her power to disappear, anyway, because not only had Aderyn and Gavantar slipped in when she was distracted by the fight, but a Lord of the Wildlands had come through to the physical plane. He seemed to be a thickening of the light, a silver shaft that barely hinted of a man shape caught within it. Her eyes springing illusionary tears, the sprite fell to her knees at his feet and buried her face in her hands.
“It’s all over now.” The presence had a voice as soft as water slipping over rock. “You’re coming home with me, child.”
The sprite moaned and raised her head to look desperately at Rhodry. When she held her arms out to him, he took one step forward, but Jill grabbed him and shoved him back.
“I hate you!” the sprite hissed at Jill.
“I don’t hate you, little one.”
Just beyond the lord another presence appeared like a beam of light thrown from a slit in a lantern, enclosing a female form this time. Although Jill heard Aderyn gasp aloud, she kept her attention on the tormented being kneeling in front of her.
“Go with your lord. He’ll make you well again.”
The silver shaft glowed with warm light, then glided forward to envelop the sprite. The vague man shape within stretched out one hand to stroke her hair; then they both vanished. Rhodry fell forward, fainting, into Jill’s ready arms. Swearing a little at his weight, she laid him down on the floor, then grabbed a blanket and covered him, because he was dead pale and icy cold, shivering at the loss of the magnetic link he’d made with his White Lady. When she looked up to say something to Aderyn, she realized that the female presence was still there, in fact more substantial than before. As she stepped free of the pillar of light, her flesh seemed almost solid, though translucent. She herself seemed elven and very beautiful, with hair so pale that it was almost silver and eyes of a cold storm gray. As still as stone, Aderyn watched her, his expression forced into such a hard-set indifference that Jill suddenly realized who she must be.
“Dallandra?” she whispered.
The presence turned her head and considered her un-speaking for a long moment.
“Do you follow the paths of the Light?” Her voice was more a thought touching the mind, but Aderyn heard her, too, judging from the flicker of pain that crossed his face.
“I do.” Jill spoke aloud.
“Good.” She turned to Aderyn. “Elessario’s sorry now. She didn’t realize what she was doing. She was trying to help the poor thing when it loved the man called Maer.”
“I assumed your friend was guiltless.”
Aderyn’s voice was so cold that Jill was honestly shocked, but Dallandra ignored him.
“There is a child that will be born,” she said to Jill. “Soon. Or soon as we judge time. It might be a long time in your world.”
“Does this child concern me?”
“I’d hope so. I see danger all round her.”
“I’ll help if I can.”
She nodded in a sort of wordless thanks, but her attention was drifting already to some other world. She was growing thinner, like a smoke curl in the wind.
“What of the ring?” Jill put all the urgency she could into her voice to try to pull her back. “Do you know the meaning of the rose ring?”
For the briefest of moments she smiled, and for that instant she seemed mortal again and solid.
“I don’t. They never did tell me. They’re like that, you know.”
Her chuckle seemed to hang in the air. She was gone. Aderyn let out his breath in one sharp sigh, tossed his head, and knelt down beside Rhodry as if nothing had happened at all.
“Jill, you’ll stay here for a few days, won’t you? I could use your help.”
“Of course. I’m always glad to pay you a service, and I’d like to see him well again, too. I loved him so much, once.”
“Once and not now?”
“Once and not now.” Jill got up with a sigh. “And I regret it, in a way, losing a love like that, but it never should have been, and now it’s gone, and that’s that.”
Aderyn was silent for a long moment. When he spoke his voice cracked with unnatural calm.
“Too bad you never knew Dalla. I think you two would have gotten along quite well.”

When Rhodry woke from that faint, some twenty minutes later, it seemed to him that he’d slept for days. He was muddled, too, wondering what he was doing, lying in Aderyn’s tent with Jill and Gavantar standing round, as solemn as priests.
“What’s wrong?” he mumbled. “Have I been sick?”
“You might say that.” Aderyn handed him a cup of hot liquid. “Drink this, will you?”
The water tasted faintly of herbs, and drinking it made his head clear enough for him to remember the White Lady. All at once he couldn’t bear to look at any of them, and especially not Jill; he felt his cheeks burning with shame.
“Ah, the blood’s returning to your face, I see.” Aderyn sounded amused. “Come on, lad, it’s all ended well enough. I can’t blame you for losing a fight when you didn’t have a weapon to your name and she had a whole armory.”
For days Rhodry refused to leave Aderyn’s tent except in the dead of night, when everyone else was asleep. Under the waxing moon he would pick his way through the grasslands or stride back and forth along the streambank, always hurrying as if he could leave his shame and dishonor far behind or perhaps as if he could meet himself coming in the other direction and at last know who he was. Never once in that long madness did he think of himself as Rhodry Maelwaedd. The best swordsman in the kingdom, the lord whose honor was admired by the High King himself, the best gwerbret Aberwyn had ever known—those men were all dead. Every now and then he did become the old Rhodry who was a father and a grandfather and wonder if his blood kin fared well, but only briefly. Even his beloved grandson seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from him with every minute that passed, as if the child rode a little boat sailing endlessly away down some vast river. Just at dawn he would come stumbling back exhausted from these walks to slip into Aderyn’s tent and sleep the day away in a welter of dreams. Often he dreamt of old battles, particularly the destruction of a town called Slaith; that dream was so vivid that he could practically smell the smoke as the pirate haven burned to the ground. Once, just when the moon was at her full, he dreamt of the White Lady, but it was only a distant thing, a memory dream and perfectly normal. The marvels were gone, utterly gone. When he woke, he was in tears.
Aderyn and Gavantar were sitting in the center of the tent by the dead fire and studying a book together, talking in low voices about sigils and, signs. From, the tight glowing through the walls of the tent, Rhodry could tell that it was near sunset When he sat up, Aderyn looked over.
“Hungry? There’s smoked fish.”
“I’m not, but my thanks.”
Aderyn closed the book and studied him for a moment, or, rather, he seemed to be studying the air all around Rhodry.
“You know, you need to get out in the sunlight more. You’re pale as milk.”
Rhodry looked away.
“Oh, come now,” Aderyn said sharply. “No one outside of Jill and me and Gavantar even knows the truth.”
“Everyone else just thinks I went mad, right? That’s dishonor enough.”
Aderyn sighed. Rhodry forced himself to look at him.
“Somewhat I wanted to ask you,” Rhodry said. “When this, well, this trouble started, you said some strange things that I’ve only just remembered. She found me again, you said. What do you mean, again? I never saw her before in my life.”
“Um, well, I was wondering if you’d remember that. I made a terrible mistake, saying such a thing.” The old man got up and walked over, and at that moment he seemed taller, towering, threatening, his dark eyes cold. “Do you truly want to know? I’m bound to tell you if you ask, but that asking is a grim thing in itself, and the beginning of a long, long road.”
All at once Rhodry was frightened. He knew obscurely that he was about to let some terrible secret out of its cage like a wild beast, knowledge that would rend and rip the few shreds he had left of his old life, his old self. He had seen too many secret places of the world, crossed too many forbidden borders already, to risk more.
“If I’m not meant to know, keep your secrets. It’d be a fine way to repay you, anyway, prying into things you shouldn’t tell me.”
Aderyn sighed in honest relief and looked his normal self again. It occurred to Rhodry, much later, that the old man had been as frightened as he.
That day marked a turning point, as if fear were the only medicinal strong enough to drive out his shame. That very evening Rhodry left Aderyn’s tent and wandered over to Calonderiel’s, where Jill was staying. As usual, the banadar had a crowd around him, young men, mostly, passing a skin of mead back and forth. While Jill watched, a little nervously, everyone greeted Rhodry without comment. He found a place to sit off to one side, took his turn at the skin when the mead came his way, and merely listened to the talk of hunting and the summer’s grass. When he left, everyone said goodbye in a casual sort of way, and that night he only walked for a couple of hours under the waning moon. On the morrow he took his place guarding the horse herd, and again, no one said a wrong word to him or asked him one single thing.
That night he joined Calonderiel’s men for the evening meal. They accepted him so easily that he realized he’d already been marked as a member of the banadar’s warband, another sworn man attached to the only kind of magistrate the People knew. The place suited him, and he took it gratefully, doubly grateful that he never had to say a formal word in acknowledgment. Swearing fealty to a man other than the High King, even to his oldest friend left in the world, would have come hard. After the meal they sat outside around a fire, passing the mead skin around, until Melandonatar brought out a harp and struck up a song. When the others joined in, Rhodry at first only listened. The music swept around him, long lines of sprung rhythm in some minor key, then tangled upon itself in intricate harmonies as the men sang of an ancient battle, a desperate last stand at the gates of Rinbaladelan during the Great Burning long ago. The ending left everyone so sad that the harper struck up a happier tune straightaway, a simple song about hunting. This one Rhodry knew, because it had been a favorite at the Aberwyn court on those occasions when the People came to visit, and without even thinking he joined in, adding his cracked tenor to the melodic line and leaving the difficult harmony to the others. Since the song had its bawdy side, they were laughing as much as singing, making so much noise that Rhodry never heard someone walking up to kneel behind him.
All at once a new voice joined in, a trained and beautiful tenor that rang like a bell on every lighthearted syllable. When Rhodry felt a friendly hand on his shoulder, he turned and looked into a face that was more than half his. Devaberiel’s hair was as pale as moonlight, but his elven-slit eyes were the same cornflower blue as Rhodry’s, and the shape of his jaw and his forehead, and the quick sunny way he smiled, were as familiar as a mirror image as well. Rhodry stopped singing, feeling tears rise in his throat beyond his power to call them back. Devaberiel threw one arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. Slowly the music died away as every man in the circle turned to watch.
“Banadar?” Devaberiel called out. “Is there any man here who is so blind as to deny that this is my son?”
“I doubt it very much,” Calonderiel said, grinning. “He certainly looks yours to me.”
“Then here in the required assembly I claim him and present him to you.”
Rhodry wept in earnest, wondering why even as the tears came. The men rose to their feet and cheered; women hurried over with skins of mead; sleepy children crawled out of tents to join the celebration. In the midst of the uproar it was impossible to hear a word anyone said. Rhodry saw Salamander standing in the shadows with Jill, and his brother was practically jigging with excitement, with Wildfolk swarming around him like bees round a hive. When Rhodry went to join them, however, Jill turned on her heel and walked away. Even though he’d expected no less, still her coldness stabbed him to the heart, and he knew better than to try to follow her.
“Well, I finally caught up with the esteemed parent,” Salamander burst out. “And dragged him back just as I promised.”
“I happened to be on my way here already,” Devaberiel said with a certain amount of frost in his voice. “But no matter. I see you’re wearing that wretched ring, younger son of mine. Has anyone figured out what it means yet?”
“Jill wants to talk with you about that, Father,” Salamander put in. “The morrow will do, however. Tonight let us celebrate, and lo, the moon already rises to join us at our drinking!”
It was two days before Rhodry had a chance to speak with Jill. He was nursing a hangover in Aderyn’s quiet tent when she came in, carrying a pair of saddlebags. He slipped into Deverrian when he spoke, simply because she was so much a part of his youth and his past.
“It looks like you’re leaving us. When?”
“Tomorrow at dawn.”
“Jill, I only wish you’d stay with me a while.”
“I can’t. I’ve told you that before often enough. We don’t belong together.”
“I just don’t understand.”
“That’s true. You don’t.” She got up and paced to the opening of the tent, stood there listening to the sounds of the camp. “And you can’t understand, truly, so for the love of every god, let it drop!”
For a brief moment Rhodry wanted to strangle her; then he wanted to weep; then he sighed and knelt down to feed a twig or two into the tiny fire.
“And where will you go, then?” he said.
“Bardek.”
“Bardek?”
“Just that.” She came back and knelt by the fire. “I’ve just time to get back to Aberwyn and find a ship, I think, before the sailing season’s over.”
“And why do you want to go to Bardek, or is that beyond my poor and pitiful understanding, too?”
“You’re still a sulky bastard when you want to be, aren’t you? Listen, you’ve already nearly drowned in trouble for wanting one woman you couldn’t have. Why do you—”
“Oh, hold your tongue! That’s a nasty weapon to use!”
“But a true-speaking, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m going to find out about the rose ring. Or try to, anyway.”
Automatically he glanced down at the silver stripe on the third finger of his right hand.
“Well, to be more accurate, about those letters inside it.” Jill went on. “Give it over for a minute, will you?”
“I don’t know what makes you think it’s an island word when it’s written in Elvish. Here.”
“I never said I thought it was Bardekian.” She held it up, angling the band a little to catch the light from the fire. “Do you remember when you were a captive in the islands? At that rich woman’s house—I don’t remember her name, but I do remember what you told me about her litter boys. Remember them, with the odd yellow eyes, and you were sure they saw the Wildfolk?”
“By all the gods, so I was! I wondered if they had elven blood in their veins.”
“I still do. Look, I’ve been talking with your father about the old days. After the Burning the People fled every which way. We know they had boats. Rinbaladelan—and it was a seaport, mind—held out for a year, time enough to pack up treasures for an exile. Your ancestors—the folk who fled east—were country people; they didn’t have the time or the inclination to rescue books and scrolls as they ran. But Rinbaladelan was an ancient city of learning and every grace, or so the story runs, and you can carry books a cursed sight easier in a boat than in a saddlebag.”
“And after all this time, do you think any of those books still exist?”
“Not unless someone copied them a couple of times over twixt now and then, no—not in the jungles of the southern islands with all the damp and mildews. But if—what if, just what if some of the People reached a haven there, and survived to build a city, and what if they’ve kept the old lore alive?”
Rhodry sat back on his heels and considered the flames. It seemed that he saw towers of gold rise among them, and the glitter of mighty palaces.
“Jill, let me go with you.”
“Ye gods, you’re as stubborn as a terrier with a dead rat in its mouth! I won’t, and that’s that. Your place is here. I don’t even know why, but it is.”
“Oh, is it now? And I suppose I’m just supposed to sit here and wait for you to come back! Cursed if I will!”
“You might be cursed if you don’t.” Oddly enough, she grinned at him. “If you’re going to keep company with sorcerers, you’d better watch what you say. But truly, I doubt if it matters. Run where you will, Rhodry ap Devaberiel, but the dweomer will catch you when it wants you.”
He tried to think of some clever retort. There was none. She held the ring up to the fire again, and the silver sent a long wink of light into the shadows.
“It’s got to be a name,” she said at last.
“What?”
“The lettering, you dolt! If it was an ordinary word, someone would be able to translate it. Between them your father and brother took it to every sage in two kingdoms. Someone would have recognized it. But a name—well, anyone can call themselves what they like, particularly if they’re neither elf nor human, can’t they now?” She frowned at the writing, then sounded it out. “Arr-soss-ah soth-ee lorr-ess-oh-ahz.” She paused, then spoke it again in a strange tight voice, almost a growl, that seemed to vibrate through the tent and spread out to the ends of the earth. “Arzosah Sothy Lorezohaz!”

And far away to the north, on a rocky ledge high up a mountain that no human eyes had ever seen, a sleeping dragon stirred and whimpered in a sudden nightmare.

---

---

Epilogue

The Elven Border
Summer 1096

FOR SIX NIGHTS the alar camped near the ruined dun and waited for news of Rhodry’s father. Because of the stock, they did have to move on the seventh day, heading north a day’s ride to fresh pasture. After two days there, though, the alar split up for Rhodry’s sake. Calonderiel and his warband, with their women and children, along with Aderyn’s magical company and of course Rhodry himself, drove off a herd of extra horses to leave the best grazing for the sheep. They made camp back on the Eldidd border and set a guard every night to keep watch for any hated Round-ears. Every day the dweomermasters would scry for Devaberiel; they always found him easily enough, but he always seemed to be traveling idly north, unaware that his long-lost son was waiting for him on the border.
During all this time Rhodry found himself drawn to Jill in spite of all his best efforts to leave her alone. He had never wanted to lose her, had always planned, from the moment he first met her, to spend his entire life in her company, and now that he’d found her again—or so he thought of it—all that old devotion came back in the same way as a fire, banked with sod for the night, flares up when a servant knocks the lumps of earth aside and lets the fresh air in. He found himself courting her as if she were a young lass, turning up at her side whenever she went walking, bringing her flowers, angling to sit next to her at every communal meal. Although she was mostly cold to him, every now and then she warmed, when they were talking about something they’d done or someone they’d known, all those years ago in his other life on a silver dagger’s long road.
One morning, when Rhodry went looking for Jill in his usual way, he found her sitting on the streambank near Aderyn’s tent. Apparently she’d just bathed, because she was combing her wet hair while Salamander sat with her and talked. When Rhodry joined them, his brother turned to him.
“I’m going to leave today and go look for our father. Obviously Cal’s messengers haven’t caught up with him yet, and I can just see us all wandering back and forth across the grasslands for years and years, passing close by but never meeting, endlessly wondering where the other one is—that sort of thing.”
“I was beginning to worry myself, and you have my thanks, but maybe I should just go with you. I’m the one who wants to see him, after all.”
“Aderyn says your place is here,” Jill broke in. “He doesn’t want you wandering all over the grasslands just yet.”
“Very well, but why not?”
“He didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, I’d like to know—”
“Hold up, brother of mine.” Salamander intervened. “Among the People we have a custom. What a Wise One—a dweomermaster, that is—says, we do. That’s one reason why I’ve never aspired to that exalted title myself. Some small dweomer I have, but the wisdom to lead my people—well, I’d just as soon not put myself to the test.”
“Which shows,” Jill said. “That you have a little bit of wisdom at least.” She rose, still holding the bone comb. “I’m going back to camp.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Rhodry started to get up, but she scowled and waved him back down.
“Would you stop following me everywhere?”
“Oh, here, my love—”
“Never call me that again.”
There was the crack of command in her voice, so cold, so harsh that he sat down and said nothing, merely watched her walk away while Salamander pretended to look elsewhere.
“Ah well,” Salamander said at last. “I’m going to take a pack-horse with me. Going to come help me load up?”
“Of course. Let’s go get the parting over with, shall we?”
“Ah, you’re beginning to think like an elf, sure enough.”
On the morrow, Rhodry went riding by himself out to the edge of the wild plains, very much like a green sea indeed, with the grass bowing and sighing like waves under the touch of the wind. For a long time he sat on his horse in the hot spring sun, watched the grass ripple, and thought of very little. All at once he realized that he could no longer remember his name. He swore, slapped his thigh hard with the reins, shook his head and swore again, but the name stayed stubbornly hidden until in frustration he started back toward camp.
“Rhodry Maelwaedd,” he said aloud, then laughed. “Or it isn’t truly Maelwaedd—never truly was—and I suppose that’s one reason I couldn’t remember. But Rhodry ap Devaberiel still sounds passing strange to me. What do you think? Which one should I use?”
The horse snorted and tossed its head as if to say it didn’t care either way.
When he rode back to camp he found Calonderiel waiting for him out by the hobbled herd. The warleader helped him unsaddle his horse and turn it out with the others, in a silence so profound that Rhodry knew something was wrong.
“What’s happened?” he said—and in Elvish, without really thinking about the choice.
“Oh, well, nothing much, really. Aderyn wants you to come share his tent instead of mine, that’s all.”
“All right. But why do you—oh, by the Dark Sun! Jill’s left, hasn’t she? That’s what this means.”
“I’m afraid so. She’s like all the blasted Round-ears—as impatient as babies, all of them! She announced this morning that if Devaberiel couldn’t be bothered to hurry, then she couldn’t be bothered to sit around and wait for him.” Calonderiel frowned down at the ground. “She could have had the decency to wait and tell you goodbye.”
“She’s leaving because of me, you know, no matter what she told you.”
“Oh.” A long pause. “I see.”
Rhodry turned on his heel and strode off alone to the camp. At Calonderiel’s tent he found all his gear gone—moved already, he supposed, at the Wise One’s command. When he went to the old man’s tent, he found the dweomermaster sitting by a banked fire with Wildfolk all around him. In a curve of the wall not far from Gavantar’s place, his bedroll and other gear were neatly laid out below a new pair of tent bags. Aderyn looked up with a wary cock of his head.
“Jill’s gone, then, is she?” Rhodry said, falling back into Deverrian.
“She is. Did you truly think she’d stay?”
Rhodry shrugged and sat down on his blankets. From outside, the normal sounds of the camp drifted into the tent—children laughing and running, a horse whinnying, a woman singing as she strolled by—but all the noise seemed strangely far away.
“I don’t know what I thought,” Rhodry said at last. “I do know it doesn’t matter. Not to her, not to the gods, not to my Wyrd or the wretched dweomer either.”
“Well, that’s probably true enough.”
Rhodry nodded and began pulling off his boots. In a few minutes he looked up to find the old man gone.
That night, some time when his sleep was deepest, Rhodry had a dream. He was walking across a meadow on a night when the full moon shone overhead, guarded with a double ring, and the grass crackled with frost under his feet, but in his dream he was too fevered to feel the cold, his cheeks burning in the icy air. Every step he took drove pain like a knife into his lungs. Yet he kept walking, never considered turning back, forced himself on a step at a time until he reached a copse of birches, white as frost in the moonlight, dancing and trembling with his fever. Among the trees a woman waited. At first he thought it was Jill, but when he went to meet her, he saw that she was neither human nor elven, with her flesh as pale as the birch bark and her waist-length hair as dark blue as a winter sea. She threw her arms around him and whimpered like an animal as she kissed his burning cheeks with cold lips, but when he kissed her mouth, he had to fight for breath between each kiss. Then he started to cough. He shoved her away, turned away and clasped both hands over his mouth while he choked and coughed in spasms that made his entire body rock and tremble. She wept, watching him. When he took his hands away they were covered with blood, dark and fresh, but thick with clots of gore. With a cry the woman flung herself against him and kissed him. When she pulled back, her pale lips were bright with his blood.
He couldn’t breathe. He was choking, drowning in his own blood—Rhodry sat up with a cry and heard the woman’s answering wail echo around him. Yellow dweomer light danced on the walls of the tent. Aderyn was standing over him.
“What were you dreaming?”
“I was choking. She kissed me and killed me. In the white birches.” Then the dream faded and blurred, like a reflection on water as the wind blows across. “I don’t remember any more of it.”
“I wondered what being back on the border would do to you. Come, get up, and we’ll have a bit of a talk.”
At the old man’s bidding Wildfolk made the dead fire leap up with flame. Rhodry was shivering.
“You know, I used to have a nightmare somewhat like that when I was a child, but I don’t remember it very well. This one was blasted real, though. Ye gods, it still hurts to breathe.”
“When you had the dream before—as a child, I mean—did your lungs hurt when you woke?”
“Don’t remember, but I doubt it, because I do remember screaming my head off, and my old nurse running over with her nightdress flapping around her. What does it mean?”
“Most dreams have as many meanings as an onion has peels. I wouldn’t venture to say what the right one might be.”
Rhodry hesitated on the edge of asking more. Although he knew that Aderyn had sworn a sacred oath never to tell an outright lie, he could sense that the old man was leaving a great many things unsaid. And do I want to force them out into the open? Rhodry asked himself. There in the middle of the night, miles and miles away from his old home and his old life, the answer was a decided no. Yet all the next day, he kept thinking about the dream, and every now and then, it seemed he could remember a little piece of it, just a visual image of the woman or the feel of a kiss, until he realized just how familiar to him she was, this White Lady, as he found himself calling her for no particular reason at all.
At dinner that night Aderyn announced that he’d scried Devaberiel out and found him traveling by himself and quickly, heading south through the grasslands but a good many miles away. He’d seen Salamander, too, hurrying to meet him. Since the dweomermaster could assume that one of Calonderiel’s messengers had finally tracked the bard down, he decided that the alar should ride in his direction. When they headed north, though, they kept to the borderlands, because Devaberiel was expecting to find them somewhere near Eldidd. For the same reason they didn’t ride far, finally making a semi-permanent camp not far from the Peddroloc.
Once he was well away from his old rhan, Rhodry turned melancholy, It was one thing to think of having an entire new life ahead of him; another to leave the old completely behind. Much to his surprise, he realized that he missed, his kin far more than he missed the power of rulership. At odd moments of the day he would find himself wondering how his sons fared, and their children, too; he even had the occasional fond thought of Aedda. He took to riding alone to ease his hiraedd, and the elves were willing to leave him alone with his solitude.
One day he borrowed a particularly fine gelding from Galonderiel and rode farther than usual in the simple pleasure of getting to know a new horse. After some hours he came to a little stream that led back to a marshy, spring-fed pond, surrounded with scrubby hazel thickets and some willows. Rhodry dismounted, and as he led his horse to the pond for a drink, he saw a white heron, standing on one leg in the shallows and regarding him with one suspicious round eye. All at once the bird shrieked its harsh cry and flapped off. Rhodry spun around, thinking that someone else had crept up behind him, but he saw no one, not even one of the Wildfolk. Since his horse was elven-trained, he left it to drink without him and walked back into the trees. The golden sunlight of late afternoon came down in shafts, solid with dust; the silence felt just as palpable. Then he saw her standing between two willows and watching him sadly.
Although he knew at once that she wasn’t truly substantial, she wasn’t an illusion, either: a real enough woman but lighter, somehow, than the solid trees around her. Tall and lithe, she was wearing a loose blue dress that left her arms bare and hung in torn dags around her ankles. Her dark blue hair flowed like water over her pale shoulders and curled close to her pale, pale face. When she spoke, he heard her language as Elvish, but it seemed that she wasn’t truly speaking at all.
“You heard me this time.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve been calling and calling, but you didn’t come. You always used to come to me.”
“Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you, that’s all.”
“Ah. That must be because of the old man. He’s a mean old man. I hate him. Why are you staying in his tent?”
“I’ve got to stay somewhere. Do you mean Aderyn?”
“An aderyn? Yes, the owl.”
“No, no, no, he’s a man—Aderyn is just his name.”
She looked so puzzled that he gave up trying to explain.
“Why do you hate him?”
“He lied to me. I knew you weren’t truly gone far away and under the earth. That’s what he said, you know. Far away and under the earth.” She paused, tilting her head to one side in thought. “But it’s taken me so long to find you again. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She pouted like a child, then laughed, tossing off the mood as she sauntered all sway-hip over to him. Her eyes were the same dark blue as her hair, and they were utterly mindless, like pools of water, glittering and vacant.
“You look so cold.” She was staring at him, studying his face. “You don’t love me anymore, do you? You’ve forgotten.”
Big tears rolled down her cheeks, but rather than falling, they merely vanished. Yet her sobs, the big gulping gasps of a heartsick child, were real enough.
“I’m sorry.” Rhodry felt her grief like a stab to his own heart. “Please, don’t look so sad. I just don’t understand.”
The tears stopped. Again she tilted her head to consider him, then suddenly smiled.
“I know what you’ll remember.” She caught his face between her hands and kissed him on the mouth. “Oh, you’re warmer now, truly. Come lie down with me. I want to hold you just like we used to. Do you remember that? I’ll wager you do. Men seem to like it so much.”
As she ran her hands through his hair, Rhodry did remember it, a slow, sensual kind of pleasure, utterly different than being in a human woman’s arms. Yet as he drew her close, as he kissed her, he remembered something else as well: her lips, bright with his blood in the moonlight. That was only a dream, he told himself, it all meant somewhat else. He took another kiss, then another, tipped her head back and softly kissed her throat. She began to laugh and cling to him, so perfectly happy, so suddenly solid and radiant in her happiness, that he laughed himself in the simple joy of finding her again. When they lay down together, he could think of her as nothing but a woman. Yet when he caressed her, his hands knew the difference in their blind way. Her skin felt more like silk; her flesh, oddly soft, without resistance or muscle. At first he was repelled, but with every kiss they shared, the difference faded. She grew warmer, more sold, heavier in his arms. The tattered dress faded away, too; he never took it off, but suddenly she was naked in his arms. He ran his hand over her breast, then cried out and pulled his hand back. She had no nipple, merely a soft curve of not quite real flesh.
It was her need of him as much as lust that kept him in her arms. When he opened his eyes and saw that she had no navel, either, he drew away. She looked up, her beautiful eyes brimming tears, and she seemed so desolate that he kissed her to keep her from weeping. Once he kissed her, he could no longer stop, though for a long time he was content with kisses alone, while he let himself forget what his hands had discovered. Finally, with a little laugh to mock his shyness, she reached inside his brigga and fondled him. At that he could think of nothing but taking her.
Yet the passion was different, a slow thing, languid, wrapping him round like warm water. It was enough to stay inside her, hardly moving, feeling her arms wrapped tightly around him. She whimpered like an animal, shifting under him, keeping him aroused for what seemed like a blissful eternity until his pleasure built close to pain. When he began to move, he nearly fainted from the agonizing delight, and as he sobbed into her shoulder, she laughed, a crow of triumph. He lay next to her, pulled her into his arms, and panted for breath.
“Shall I show you things like I used to?” she whispered. “Shall we go to the pretty places? Not the dangerous ones, not the ones where she is, but the safe ones in my home country.”
“I don’t understand. Who’s this she?”
“You never did get to meet her, did you?” She frowned, thinking hard at the edge of her capacity. “You said she was a demon.”
“I don’t remember saying any such thing.”
“You did, too! And maybe you were right, because when we went to her country, you went under the ground. So we won’t go there again.”
“Indeed? Well, whatever you want.”
She raised her head and kissed his closed eyelids, then his mouth. He felt as if they were gliding together down a slow stream, felt sunlight, too, warm and strong. When he opened his eyes he found that they were lying in a meadow, with banks and hedges of red roses scattered through the grass. Rhodry sat up and stared around him. A flock of peacocks strutted by, led by three males in display, gleaming like blue-and-purple jewels.
“You always liked it here.” She sat up and began combing out her hair with her fingers.
“It’s beautiful, but where are we?”
“I don’t know. Just a place.” She lay down again and ran her hand down his back. “Do that to me again. It’s been so long, my love.”
“Much too long. Ye gods, I’ve missed you all my life and never known what I was pining for.”
But this time, as the pleasure of their lovemaking faded, so did the meadow. They were lying among the hazel thickets on hard ground where dark shadows stretched out long in the setting sun. Only the smell of roses lingered in her hair.
“It’s getting on toward night,” Rhodry said. “I hate to do it, but I have to leave you.”
“I know. I don’t want the old man to find out, anyway. But come back tomorrow?”
“I will. I promise.”
With a scatter of dead leaves she vanished. Rhodry stood up, only to stagger out of sheer dizziness. Cold sweat streamed down his back as he grabbed at a tree to steady himself. It was a long time before he could summon the strength to walk back to his horse, grazing patiently in the long grass. Yet, exhaustion or no, he knew he would come back to her, and not only for the strange sexuality she offered. It was the marvels. Somehow he’d been stupid enough to forget how she could take him to the Wildlands and show him the marvels there. All during his long ride back to the camp, he was wondering how he could have forgotten her at all. Her warning stayed with him, too: don’t let the old man find out
Aderyn was gone when he returned to their tent, off somewhere in the main camp. Rhodry sat down, planning on resting for a few minutes, only to fall asleep where he sat. He woke once and had just enough energy to crawl into his blankets. When he woke again, sunlight was filtering through the tent walls, and Gavantar was crouching by the fire and stirring something spicy-smelling in an iron pot.
“Morning,” Rhodry said with a yawn. “Where’s the Wise One?”
“Oh, he took a packhorse and went down to the sea. There’s a variety of red seaweed ripe for harvest—good for stomach troubles, he told me.”
“And you didn’t go with him?”
“I’m going to leave this afternoon. Bronario’s daughter is still a little bit sick. Aderyn wanted me to stay with her this morning, just to make sure the fever doesn’t come back.”
“All right. I’d best eat and get on my way myself. It’s my turn to help lead out the herd.”
“You’re too late for that.” Gavantar sat back on his heels and grinned at him. “It’s nearly noon. I was going to wake you, but Cal said not to bother. You can take a turn tomorrow, he said.”
“Noon? Nearly noon?”
“Just that.” His smile faded. “Rhodry, are you all right? You look pale.”
“Do I? No, I’m fine. I just . . . I just had the strangest dreams last night, that’s all. Well, I think I’ll ride out and catch up with the herd, anyway. I feel like a cursed fool, sleeping when I should have been riding!”
But of course, instead of guarding the horses, he rode back to the willows and the hazel thickets, and without the slightest remorse over lying to Gavantar, either. She was waiting for him at the streamside, sitting on the ground and running her fingers through her long blue hair. He dismounted some yards away and began to unsaddle his horse.
“You didn’t tell the old man, did you?” she said.
“I didn’t. He’ll be gone for a few days, anyway.”
With a laugh she glinted away like a flash of light from a mirror and reappeared standing next to him.
“Then stay here with me until he gets back.”
“I can’t. I’ve got to go ride with the herd tomorrow. It’s my turn. We have to keep moving the horses around, you see, so they get enough to eat.”
With a puzzled frown she reached up to drape her arms over his shoulders, as light and languid as a bit of cloth. When he kissed her, suddenly he could feel her weight.
“There’s lots of food for your horse right here.”
“True, but we’ve got lots more horses back at camp.”
“You’re one of the elder brothers now. Isn’t that odd.”
“Is it? Why?”
“I don’t understand you people. You change so much.” She pressed herself close to him and kissed him. “Come lie down. Then we’ll go somewhere nice.”
Over the next few weeks, Rhodry grew very sly and very clever about stealing time for his White Lady. He did his share of the alar’s work, spent just enough time with Calonderiel and his other friends to allay any suspicion, and dug up one good excuse after another for his fits of melancholy and long solitary rides. Every now and then he noticed Aderyn studying him, but he always managed to display enough good cheer to put the old man off. Everyone assumed that he was still pining for Jill on the one hand and adjusting to his new life on the other. After all, to go from being the most powerful human being on the western, border to just another man of the People—and one without even any horses of his own—was the kind of change that would leave most men brooding. No one suspected the truth, that he was as much in thrall to his White Lady as any Cerrmor brothel lass ever was to her opium pipe.
Yet, of course, she was as much in thrall to him. Every time he left her, she begged him to stay, and no matter how much he tried to explain, she could never understand that he needed food and shelter. When he tried offering to take her back to camp with him she turned furious, screaming at him and clawing his face like a cat. He had so hard a time explaining those scratches to Aderyn that he resolved to stay away from her, but the next time that he had a chance to slip out and ride her way, he took it. She was waiting for him, as sunny and loving as if they’d never fought. Indeed, he had the feeling she’d forgotten all about it.
That day she took him to a place that she called, quite simply, the sea caves. Enormous amethysts, jutting crystals as big as a horse’s head and sparkling with mineral fire, lined those caves, and turquoise water as clear and warm as liquid light filled them. Together they drifted down winding halls through chambers walled with gold where creatures spoke to them in voices sweeter than any harp. At times it seemed to him that they were asking his help, begging him to stay and rid their country of some evil, but he could never quite understand the sense of their words, only its emotional tone. At other times he and his White Lady were left alone to satisfy his desire. When at last the vision faded he was too exhausted to raise his head from the grass at first, but then he became aware of thirst, so urgent it was like a burning in his mouth. He hauled himself up, staggered out up to his knees in the pond, and gulped water until he could hold no more. She came to sit beside him and stroked his sweaty forehead with a pale, cool hand.
“The sun’s in the east,” he said at last. “It must still be morning. But it seemed we were gone a long time.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Just time passing, that’s all. It seemed like days, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”
She stared at him, her eyes narrow, her lips a little parted, in utter confusion.
“Well, don’t worry about it, my love. It doesn’t matter.”
Yet, when he reached camp, he found that it did matter. As he rode up, a couple of men came running, asking him where in the hells he’d been for the last two days. He realized, then, just how long he’d been gone—lost in her strange world and without a bite of food or a mouthful of water. He ducked into Aderyn’s tent to find Aderyn, Gavantar, and Calonderiel discussing how many rid-ers they should take to search for him. A crowd of overexcited Wildfolk swarmed and roiled round the tent. At the sight of Bhodry, Calonderiel jumped to his feet and grabbed him by the shoulders while the Wildfolk rushed over to grab his ankles or dance around him in glee.
“By the Dark Sun herself!” Calonderiel said. “I thought you’d fallen down a ravine and gotten yourself killed! You dolt! Riding out alone like that! There’s poisonous snakes out there, you know! You ever do this again, and I’ll break your neck myself!”
Rhodry could only stare openmouthed at him.
“Cal? Gav?” Aderyn’s voice was so cold that Rhodry suddenly realized that the old man knew the truth. “Out.”
Sweeping up the Wildfolk, they went without a word of protest. Sick and shivering, Rhodry knelt by the fire and held his hands over the warmth. Aderyn watched, more troubled than angry.
“I’m sorry,” Rhodry blurted at last.
“Don’t be. It’s mostly my fault, because I should have warned you. I was going to warn you, once I figured out how much I could say, I never dreamt she’d find you this quickly, that’s all. To tell you the absolute truth, I was hoping she’d never find you at all. Stupid, wasn’t I?”
When Rhodry started to feed a few more twigs onto the fire, his hands spasmed and sent the twigs fiying. Aderyn got to his knees and laid one hand on the back of Rhodry’s neck. Warmth lowed from his fingers and drove the chattering cold from his veins.
“Where did you meet her?”
“I won’t tell you. You’ll hurt her.”
“That’s not true.”
“You’ll keep us apart.”
“Now that is true.”
Without thinking Rhodry turned and swung at him, an open-handed sweep of an arm intended to knock the old man’s hand away and nothing more, but Aderyn merely swayed back and let him fall spraddled onto the floorcloth. Only then did Rhodry realize just how exhausted he was. He lay doubled over for a long moment, summoning the energy to lift his head up and struggle into a sitting position. Aderyn sat down facing him.
“I’m sorry,” Rhodry whispered. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“She’s like a fever, or a poison in the blood, but it’s your mind and soul that’s infected. And truly, you’ve done it to yourself. She can’t help herself or stop what she’s doing, any more than a fire could stop burning your hand if you were stupid enough to stick it into the flames.”
“How did you know?”
“For the past few weeks I thought you had a love affair going and were just too embarrassed to mention the fact. My age seems to take people that way.” Aderyn smiled briefly. “It was obvious you were hiding somewhat, and every now and then I’d see you smiling to yourself like any man will do when he’s been with a woman he fancies. But then you disappeared, and I was worried sick, fearing the worst, and sure enough, you come staggering in here, drained of your very life and pale as a birch tree—all at once I remembered the dream you had. I should have known she was close by. I’ve been much distracted these days, and busy with my apprentice, too, but I should have seen it then.”
“Well, it’s my shame, not yours. You’re not the one who’s been—” The words stuck like thorns in his throat as he finally saw just how unnatural his lust was. “Oh, ye gods, I’m sorry.”
Aderyn said nothing, staring into the fire as if he could read the flames like writing. Rhodry was only aware of his shame, burning in his face worse than any fever. Yet even in his dishonor he knew that the marvels had snared him more than the sex. He could remember them so vividly, those bejeweled caves deep under waves that never broke on any earthly shore, or the rose meadows, breathing perfume in a golden sunlight. He could hear the harsh shrieks of the peacocks, strutting through the emerald grass, and see just beyond them a ruby mound of roses, big as a dun. He got up and began walking over to those roses, drawn by the scent
until a stinging pain flooded his face. He tried to ignore it and keep walking, but the pain came again. The vision vanished with a rushy hiss like water dropped into a pot of hot oil. Rhodry found himself staring up at Aderyn, who was leaning over him, one hand still raised.
“This is very bad,” the old man said. “She’s come right after you.”
Aderyn stepped back, stretched out his hand, and began turning slowly in a circle while he chanted under his breath in some language that Rhodry didn’t recognize. It seemed that he was using his pointing finger to draw a big invisible circle around the tent and to scribble some sort of figure at each quadrant, too. As soon as he’d gone round three times, Rhodry felt as if he’d been suddenly shaken awake after a night of vivid dreams. While he could remember that he’d seen marvels, he couldn’t remember a single detail, and the tent seemed far more real and solid than it had in weeks. Yet the world around him was also strangely bleak—tawdry, somehow, and dirty round the edges, as if it were some rich and beautiful shirt, all embroidered in Bardek silk, that he’d worn and worn until it was frayed bald and stained, fit only for giving to a beggar to keep off the cold.
“You’ve got to give her up.” Aderyn’s voice was cold and harsh. “Do you understand me? She’ll kill you if you don’t.”
The anger he felt caught Rhodry by surprise. He wanted her, wanted the marvels, wanted them so badly he had a brief thought of killing anyone, even Aderyn, who stood in his way. The old man stepped back so sharply that Rhodry knew his rage must have shown on his face.
“Please, Rhodry, listen to me. You’ve touched on the edge of forbidden things, and it’s hard for me to explain, but—wait, I know. Think of it this way. That dream you had? It’s an omen. She’ll kill you without even meaning to do it if you keep going to her. She’s sucking the life-force out of you, and soon enough your body will weaken and die, because there won’t be enough force to sustain it. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but—”
“Cursed right it doesn’t! Ye gods, don’t you understand? Dying seems a small price to pay for what she gives me.”
Aderyn stared, simply stared at him for a long time.
“Things are worse even than I feared,” the old man said at last. “But there’s one last thing you don’t understand. Maybe you’re willing to die, but what about her? Are you going to drag her down with you? She thinks I hate her, but she’s as much my charge as you are. She has no mind to understand what happens between you. She loves you, and that’s everything and all that she knows about this world.”
Almost against his will Rhodry was remembering her confusion over simple things like names and time passing.
“She’s become the way she is because she knows you want her that way,” Aderyn went on. “You’re doing this to her, Rhodry Maelwaedd. If she goes on trying to please you, she’ll be utterly ruined, caught between the lands of men and elves on the one side and the Wildlands on the other. The Wildlands are her true home, but soon she’ll lose them, get herself shut out of them, and all because of you. Do you want that? She’ll be doomed, a bit of cosmic refuse, suffering for half of Eternity, and all because of—”
“Stop it! Oh, ye gods, hold your tongue! I could never do that! I’ll give her up, then! I swear it on the gods of both my peoples!”
“And I’ll hold you to that vow. Good. Well, then, let me just call Gavantar back in. Looks to me like you could use some dinner.”
Rhodry forced down food that was strangely tasteless, then went to his blankets and fell asleep without even bothering to undress. Almost at once he was dreaming so vividly that he knew it was no ordinary dream, that she’d come to him when he could set no guard against her, because in the land of dream she was the lord and he the vassal. When she reproached him for betraying her, he fell to his knees and begged her to forgive him, groveled at her feet like a bondsman until she graciously reached out a hand and bade him take it. She swept him back to the rose meadows, where even in dream the perfume hung thick in the golden air, and led him to a stream, where fish as bright as jewels slipped through golden rushes and emerald water weeds. As they sat down together in the warm and sweet-scented grass, Rhodry knew that if he made love to her there, he would never wake, that his body would sleep entranced while his mind roamed free in dream.
Until, of course, he died, but her smile was sweet, so sweet that the price seemed very low. He would seem to live for a long time, perhaps, here with her, and they would share a glorious day before the gray night inevitably fell. When she leaned toward him for a kiss, he smiled, welcoming her—then caught her wrists and held her back.
His death would doom her. Aderyn said so, and he knew in his very heart that the old man would never lie. Pouting, she slid closer, sensing his coldness, smiling again, slipping her hands free of his weakening grasp and moving closer yet to run her hands through his hair and waken a desire that made him gasp for breath, just from the sweetness of it. He was about to kiss her when she screamed. Rhodry spun around and saw Aderyn striding across the meadow, his face as grim and set as a warrior’s, and right behind him came a presence. At moments it seemed to be a slender young man, but with flesh and clothes of palest silver; at others, a misty, swirling tower of moonlight. With a howl and shriek of rage the White Lady vanished, sweeping all color from the world along with her. Over a corpse-gray meadow Aderyn came stalking, the ground shaking, rumbling, the trees trembling, rocking and Rhodry woke to find Aderyn shaking him by the shoulders. Although Aderyn’s face was every bit as grim now as it was in the dream, there was no sign of the Silver Lord of the Wildlands.
“By the Dark Sun herself,” Aderyn said. “This is going to be a battle and a half. You’re not leaving the camp alone until we’ve won it. I’m going to find Cal and ask him for some guards.”
Rhodry”s first and immediate thought was to slip out while the old man was gone, but Gavantar was standing by the door with his arms folded over his chest and a grim look of his own carved onto his young face. When he snapped his fingers a horde of Wildfolk materialized to sit on Ehodry’s lap, grab his arms, weigh down his shoulders, and generally do whatever they could to keep him in place. Rhodry studied the floorcloth and tried to ignore her voice, whispering, begging, calling to him like the murmur of a distant sea. Now that he was awake, he could argue with her, warn her, tell her of the evil fate that waited for her if she persisted in loving him, but she only said that she was as willing to die for him as he was for her.
“You don’t even know what death means.”
He realized that he’d been speaking aloud and looked up to find Gavantar listening in a horrified fascination. He felt tears brim in his eyes and spill beyond his power to stop them, but he couldn’t say one word more until Aderyn returned. As soon as the dweomermaster slipped through the tent flap, she fled with one last whisper of desire.
“I don’t sleep as much as most men do,” Aderyn said. “But I do need some rest every now and then, and Gav is only a beginner at this sort of thing. Thanks to the warleader and his men, your body’s going to stay right here, but your soul’s somewhat of a problem. I think me I’d best send for some help.”

After she left the encampment, Jill rode southwest, heading for the seacoast and the islands of Wmmglaedd, which at that time was a small temple complex dedicated to the gods of knowledge and learning. Already, though, a long stone building, where peat fires always smoldered to keep off the damp, held the core of what was to become its famous library. With the help of a young priest Jill settled in, hunting through its collection of some five hundred books and scrolls for any scrap of information that would help decipher the mysteries of Rhodry’s Wyrd in general and the rose ring in particular. Her problem was simple. At that time the entire Elvish heritage of literature and history appeared lost. Although some of the People out on the grasslands could read, and a few more were trained as sages to memorize vast amounts of oral tradition, only two Elvish books were known to have survived the Great Burning. Apparently lost with this heritage was the meaning of the word engraved inside Rhodry’s ring.
Scattered here and there through books in other languages, however, were the occasional reference to Elvish lore and learning, written down by the rare scribe who considered the People worth listening to. Jill was determined to see what she could glean from these less than fertile fields. Since she’d learned to read so late in life, understanding Deverrian text was still a slow process for her, and she had to pause often and ask one of the scribes the meaning of an obscure word. Puzzling out Bardekian was even slower.
After about two weeks of frustrating and unprofitable research, Jill was ready to pack it up as a bad job and depend entirely on meditation for her information, but just as she was about to give up she came upon a passage that made her struggles seem worthwhile. “When our people first came to the islands,” wrote a certain Bardekian historian, “they found other refugees there ahead of them, a strange people who had no name for themselves but who said they came from across the northern sea. There were never very many of them, so the old tales run, and they either all died or sailed south.” That was all, just a tantalizing scrap of legend passed down by word of mouth and quite possibly unreliable—but one that would fit the elvish refugees from the Great Burning of the Cities. What if it were true? And what, furthermore, if descendants of those refugees still lived, off in the little-known islands far to the south? The very thought drew to the surface of her mind long-forgotten memories, little scraps of knowledge about Bardek that had never seemed very important before, such as a certain style of wall painting that reminded her of the decorations on elven tents.
Late one evening she was sitting in the tiny guesthouse, going over a list of names of the more obscure islands and hoping to find some similarities to Elvish words, when she felt Aderyn’s mind tugging on hers. She sat down on the floor by the fire and stared into the glowing coals until at last his face appeared, floating just above the flame.
“Thank god I finally reached you. I’ve been trying to attract your attention for hours.”
“My apologies, but I’ve been on the track of some very peculiar information, and it’s a fascinating puzzle.”
“Could you see your way clear to laying it aside for a while? Somewhat’s dreadfully wrong.”
“What? Of course! I mean, what is it?”
“I need your help. I hate to ask, truly, because I know how you feel about Rhodry, but you’re the only one I can turn to. I beg you, if ever you’ve honored me, ride back to us.”
“I’ll leave on the morrow. Where are you?”
The vision changed to show her the camp, nestled in a valley up at the northern end of the Peddroloc; then Aderyn’s mind left hers in a gust of anxiely, as if every moment was so precious that he simply couldn’t stop to explain.
When she rode out, Jill left her mule and packs of medicines behind, and she borrowed an extra riding horse from the priests, too, so that she could switch her weight back and forth between her two mounts. For the first three days she traveled fast and smoothly; then a summer storm boiled up out of the west. On the fourth morning she woke to a sky as dark as slate and a pair of horses turned jumpy and foul-tempered by the thick and oppressive air. Late in the day it broke, a few fat drops at first, then a hard stinging slash of storm and the crack of lightning. Jill was forced to dismount and calm her trembling pair until at last the lightning moved off and the rain settled to a steady drizzle. Although she made a few more miles, shoving a way through the soaking-wet grass was so hard on the horses that she stopped early, making a wet camp in a little clump of willows by a stream.
Just before dawn she woke, cramped and shivering, to the distinct feeling that someone was watching her. Although the rain had stopped, the clouds still hung gray and lowering over the plains, bringing a dark and misty dawn, but as she looked around, she could just make out a woman, standing among the trees.
“Well, a good morrow to you,” Jill said in Elvish. “Is your alar nearby, or are you riding alone?”
The woman tossed back her head and wailed, one high keen of a spine-chilling note, then vanished. Slowly Jill got to her feet, and she was shivering from more than the damp.
“A banshee, was it? Oh, ye gods! Rhodry!”
Immediately she tried to scry him out, but she could find no trace either of him or the elven camp. Just before she panicked she realized that Aderyn might well have set seals over them all for some reason of his own—if so, a portent of horrible trouble indeed.
All that day, while the storm cleared and the sun and wind dried the tall grass, she pushed herself and the horses mercilessly, but even so, it was on the morrow noon—the fifth day after she’d left the islands of Wmm—that she finally saw the elven camp, a huddle of round tents on the horizon, and the horse herds, spread out and grazing peacefully. The young elf on watch greeted her with a shout that brought Calonderiel and half a dozen men riding hard to gallop her into camp.
“Take her horses,” the warleader called. “I’ll escort her to the Wise One’s tent. Jill, by every god, I’m glad to see you!”
“Is Rhodry dead?”
“No. Aderyn didn’t tell you? Rhodry’s gone mad. Straight off his head, raving, seeing things—I don’t understand it one bit, but it’s terrifying, truly. Just trying to get him to eat is a battle and a half.”
Aderyn’s tent was standing in the middle of the camp instead of at its usual distance. With Calonderiel right behind her and a crowd of Wildfolk shoving and pushing round them, Jill rushed inside. Aderyn was standing by the dead fire and waiting for her. The dweomermaster looked exhausted, pale and stooped, with dark circles round his eyes that were worthy of a drunken warrior. Behind him, crouched in the curve of the leather wall like an animal at bay, sat Rhodry. At first she barely recognized him, just because he sat so quietly, his eyes stripped of all feeling and fire.
“What’s so wrong?” Jill snapped.
“I haven’t slept much in a week, for starters,” Aderyn said. “But I’ll wager you mean our Rhodry.”
Rhodry never moved or looked up at the mention of his name.
“I was afraid he was dead. I met a banshee on the road.”
“It wasn’t a banshee. It—she—was the trouble.” Aderyn turned to the warleader. “Cal, stay here with him, will you? Yell at the first sign of the usual madness. We’ll just be outside, where we can talk privately.”
They went round to the side of the tent, and Jill noticed that no one dared come near, not even the normally curious children, not even one of the dogs.
“It’s a woman from the Wildlands.” Aderyn wasted no time on fine phrasing. “The little bitch has gone and ensorceled him, but it’s hurting her worse than it is him, truly. She’s linked to him from other lives, and there was no way for me to warn him adequately without spilling truths he shouldn’t hear.”
“We’ve got to trap her and turn her over to her lords.”
“Easier said than done. I’ve been trying, but she’s a wily little thing.”
“Look, Rhodry’s a man of honor. Can’t you explain that he’s hurting this poor innocent spirit, and—”
“I did, and that’s the only reason he’s still with us at all. He did his best to resist her, but in the end, she pulled him back.”
“I still don’t see how—”
“She’s his lover. And I mean exactly that. As much his lover as ever you were.”
Her sudden anger caught Jill by surprise—nothing so strong as rage, no, but a definite resentment, a flickering of old jealousies. Aderyn misunderstood her silence.
“You do know about such things, don’t you?” the old man said. “She’s one of the Wildfolk, but many years ago she ran afoul of one of the Guardians, who gave her a false body of sorts. Ever since, she’s been working on becoming a physical being, sucking magnetism from him and other lovers to—”
“Of course I know what she’s doing! Oh, my apologies, Aderyn, I didn’t mean to snap at you. How long has this been going on?”
“A couple of hundred years, more or less and all told.”
“She must be quite . . . well, convincing by now.”
“Very, and beautiful, too, or so he says, but in this case beauty’s certainly in the eye of the beholder. I never cared for the pale and pouty type myself, all wide eyes and simpers, when I was young.”
“Neither did Rhodry. Ych, this is revolting, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe it of him, but here we are. How are you guarding against her? The usual seals?”
“Just that, but she keeps calling to him, particularly when he’s asleep, and I can’t watch him every moment of every day. Gav can help set the seals, but that’s all. In fact, with you here and all, I was thinking that I might just go to Gal’s tent right now and get some sleep. Ye gods, I’m tired!”
Leaving Gavantar just outside the door on watch, Jill went back to Aderyn’s tent. Rhodry never even glanced up when she came in, nor did he say a word to her as she helped herself to bread and smoked meat from the basket lying by the hearthstone. She sat down some feet from him and studied him while she ate, since he didn’t seem to care whether she did or not. He looked his age, she realized with a shock. Even though he didn’t have a single gray hair or a pouch or bag in his weather-beaten face, he looked old, slumped down, drained of the immensely high vitality and magnetism that keeps those of elven blood so “young” by human standards. Since in her mind she always held the image of him as her young lover, she felt that she hardly knew this middle-aged man. The estrangement hurt.
“Rhodry? Don’t you have one word to say to me?”
He looked up, his mouth slack, his eyes narrow, as if he were trying to puzzle out who she was.
“My apologies,” he said at last. “I thought you’d prefer it if I just held my tongue.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I must disgust you.”
She considered the matter with the care it deserved.
“You don’t, truly. But I’m afraid for your life.”
“Does it matter if I live or die?”
“Of course it does. Your Wyrd—”
“Ah, curse my wretched Wyrd! I mean, does it matter to you?”
Another question that deserved a careful answer, not some unthinking reply.
“It does matter. I may not be in love with you anymore, but I like you. I always have, really. Liked you as a friend and admired you, too, and over the long years that’s more important than love.”
“Is it? I—” He froze in mid-sentence.
Jill felt at the edge of her mind the touch of crackling energy that means the Wildlands are lying close by. Her gray gnome popped into manifestation and pointed, all big eyes and gaping mouth, at something behind her. Opening up the second sight, she slewed around and looked. The first thing she saw was the smooth curving wall of the golden sphere of force that Aderyn and Gavantar had set over the tent and marked with flaming pentagrams. Just beyond, though, she could dimly make out a female shape, all wavery like a woman seen through bottle glass. When she rose to her knees, the shape vanished.
“She knows I’m here.”
“Actually, she told me you were coming. I mean, she didn’t know who you were, but she told me that the old man was bringing another dweomermaster. I figured it was you.”
“You knew she knew, and you never told Aderyn?”
When Rhodry blushed with shame she realked for the first time just how divided his loyalties were.
Over the next few days Jill and Aderyn worked out a strange sort of watch. While Rhodry was awake and thus fairly safe, they both rested, too, but the minute he fell asleep, one of them would watch his body while the other stood watch out on the etheric plane. The White Lady was forced to stay far out of reach of his dreams, although Jill did catch a glimpse of her one morning. Normally, on the etheric plane an elemental spirit appears as a nexus of lines of force or as a crystalline brilliance, much more a bit of geometry than a person, but the creature that Jill saw hovering on a billow of blue light seemed caught in between. She’d put on a half-human face, but it kept forming out of and dissolving into a burst of green light and line. At the sight, Jill’s abstract compassion solidified into real sympathy; the poor spirit was being dragged from her own line of evolution and trapped where she didn’t belong. If things went much farther, she wouldn’t long survive her displacement, either, especially without Rhodry to feed upon. Jill sketched the sigil of the Kings of Aethyr into the blue light, then started forward—but the spirit fled from her with an exhalation of rage like a physical howl surging round the etheric.
Jill returned to her body and sat up, stretching and yawning a little, to find Rhodry wide awake and staring at her.
“What did you do to her?” he snapped.
“I was trying to help her, you dolt.”
He did have the grace to look shamed.
All that day Rhodry was painfully restless. He paced back and forth across the tent, then started round and round, until Jill felt half dizzy from trying to watch him. When she suggested that they fetch Calonderiel and go riding, he didn’t even answer.
“Are you going to start chewing your manger next?” Jill snarled.
“What?”
“You’re acting just like a stud being kept from a mare in heat. It’s not very pretty to watch you rut.”
He stopped pacing and swirled around to face her.
“Aderyn’s kinder than I am,” she went on. “He sees you as the poor innocent victim. I know you better than that. I’ll wager this phantom lover of yours didn’t have to drag you into her bed. I’ll wager she didn’t even have to ask twice.”
Blushing scarlet, Rhodry took a furious step toward her.
“Just try,” Jill said, grinning. “I haven’t forgotten how to fight, and I’ll wager I can throw you all over this tent.”
He spun around, hesitated, then flung himself face down onto his blankets. She watched his shoulders shaking for a couple of minutes before she realized that he was weeping. She knelt down and began rubbing the back of his neck, letting a little of her own magnetism flow out to soothe him. In a few moments he stopped crying and rolled over.
“Rhodry, please, I don’t want to see you die. Do what Aderyn and I say. Please?”
He sat up, wiping his eyes on his shirt sleeve.
“My thanks,” he whispered. “I just feel torn in pieces, and I don’t know how to—”
The shriek sounded like a panther’s howl, blind-wild and feline, filling the tent and sweeping round. The slap came out of the shriek, a vicious blow across Jill’s face with the stinging rake of claws. All of Jill’s long years of dweomer training seemed to vanish. Without thinking she was on her feet and hitting back, automatically grabbing for an arm that wasn’t truly there, reaching for an enemy she couldn’t see. Her fingers closed on something more solid than air but not quite real; another slap caught her across the mouth; then she heard Aderyn yelling. Her enemy vanished.
“And don’t I feel like a fool!” Jill burst out. “Here I had my chance to put the sign of the kings upon her, and I lost my head completely.”
“I can’t say I blame you,” Aderyn said. “Instinct and all that. Gavantar felt her presence and woke me, but by the time I got here it was too late.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Jill glanced around to see Gavantar standing just inside the tent flap. “Gav, stay here. Aderyn, let’s go talk where we can’t be overheard. I’m sorry, Rhoddo, but I can’t really trust you.”
Since they could count on the spirit being too frightened to come back immediately, they walked a little way from the camp. Even though the grasslands were silent and sweaty in the heat of a windless summer day, being out of the tent and away from Rhodry’s obsession felt as good as a plunge into a cool river.
“She’s as desperate as a wolf in winter if she’d risk breaching the seals,” Aderyn remarked. “It must have taken every bit of courage and power she has. I can’t believe she misses him as badly as all that.”
“It’s somewhat else entirely. She’s jealous of me, and I think me we can use that to our advantage. Look, the Lords of the Wildlands should be willing to help in this.”
“I’ve already made contact with them. It’s just that she keeps leading them a merry little dance, dashing away every time they get near her.”
“What we need is somewhat to occupy what little mind she has, and I think we’ve found the perfect bait for our snare. Watching us catch her is going to be hard on Rhodry, but he’s brought it on himself, after all.”
“Forgiving sort, aren’t you?”
“And there you’ve put a finger on my weakness. Compassion doesn’t come easy to me, Aderyn. I’m not like Nevyn that way, or like you, either. Maybe it’s because I’ve survived my own hard times, but I don’t have much patience for someone else’s.”
“Just so long as you know.”
Two days later a summer storm whistled in like a curtain of rain moving across the grasslands. Aderyn announced that he was going to talk with Calonderiel and left the tent, ostentatiously taking Gavantar with him. Jill made a ball of dweomer light, hung it near the smoke hole in the ceiling, then brought out a pouch of elven “dice,” tiny wooden pyramids, painted a different color on each side. To play you shook ten pieces in your cupped hands, then strewed them out in a line; how many sides of each color came up, and the pattern they made, determined the winner, with the top score being a highly improbable straight of ten reds. Since the pyramids never fell plumb on tent cloth and grass, usually the players ended up arguing—not that Rhodry seemed to care one way or the other, though. Half the time he barely watched her pieces fall, and she had to remind him when it was his turn.
“We can stop if you want,” she said at last
“My apologies, but my heart’s not in it.”
“Is she calling you?”
“She’s always calling me these days.”
“Ah, Rhoddo, my heart aches for you.”
At the sound of his nickname he looked up and smiled with such a profound melancholy that for a moment she truly did feel sorry for him. She reached out and ran her hand through his hair and caressed the side of his face, and at her touch he turned his head and kissed her fingers, an old gesture, a habit from their time together long before.
The blow from behind slammed into her so hard that Jill nearly fell right into his arms. She heard Rhodry yell; then a slap hit her hard across the face. With a wrench of will she kept herself from using magic and fought back with both hands, blindly grabbing and slapping this way and that like a cat batting at a mouse. At last one hand landed on something fairly substantial with a squishy thwack.
“You bitchl You leave Rhodry alonel.”
Her only answer was another slap. Jill made a two-handed grab and caught something slick and cool but shaped much like an arm. There was a shriek, a slap, and suddenly Jill saw her, writhing in her hands: pale, lovely, but furious, her mouth twisted, her teeth pointed and sharp, her long blue hair waving in a private breeze of its own. She flung herself on Jill and tried to bite her, then disappeared, slipping through her hands as easily as water. Jill turned and made a blind grab, catching what felt like a handful of long hair. With a yelp the sprite reappeared, screaming and clawing at Jill’s face.
“Enough!” Aderyn called. “We’ve got the circle drawn.”
The sprite froze in Jill’s hands, then moaned, such a pathetic little sound that Jill let her go. She was trapped beyond her power to disappear, anyway, because not only had Aderyn and Gavantar slipped in when she was distracted by the fight, but a Lord of the Wildlands had come through to the physical plane. He seemed to be a thickening of the light, a silver shaft that barely hinted of a man shape caught within it. Her eyes springing illusionary tears, the sprite fell to her knees at his feet and buried her face in her hands.
“It’s all over now.” The presence had a voice as soft as water slipping over rock. “You’re coming home with me, child.”
The sprite moaned and raised her head to look desperately at Rhodry. When she held her arms out to him, he took one step forward, but Jill grabbed him and shoved him back.
“I hate you!” the sprite hissed at Jill.
“I don’t hate you, little one.”
Just beyond the lord another presence appeared like a beam of light thrown from a slit in a lantern, enclosing a female form this time. Although Jill heard Aderyn gasp aloud, she kept her attention on the tormented being kneeling in front of her.
“Go with your lord. He’ll make you well again.”
The silver shaft glowed with warm light, then glided forward to envelop the sprite. The vague man shape within stretched out one hand to stroke her hair; then they both vanished. Rhodry fell forward, fainting, into Jill’s ready arms. Swearing a little at his weight, she laid him down on the floor, then grabbed a blanket and covered him, because he was dead pale and icy cold, shivering at the loss of the magnetic link he’d made with his White Lady. When she looked up to say something to Aderyn, she realized that the female presence was still there, in fact more substantial than before. As she stepped free of the pillar of light, her flesh seemed almost solid, though translucent. She herself seemed elven and very beautiful, with hair so pale that it was almost silver and eyes of a cold storm gray. As still as stone, Aderyn watched her, his expression forced into such a hard-set indifference that Jill suddenly realized who she must be.
“Dallandra?” she whispered.
The presence turned her head and considered her un-speaking for a long moment.
“Do you follow the paths of the Light?” Her voice was more a thought touching the mind, but Aderyn heard her, too, judging from the flicker of pain that crossed his face.
“I do.” Jill spoke aloud.
“Good.” She turned to Aderyn. “Elessario’s sorry now. She didn’t realize what she was doing. She was trying to help the poor thing when it loved the man called Maer.”
“I assumed your friend was guiltless.”
Aderyn’s voice was so cold that Jill was honestly shocked, but Dallandra ignored him.
“There is a child that will be born,” she said to Jill. “Soon. Or soon as we judge time. It might be a long time in your world.”
“Does this child concern me?”
“I’d hope so. I see danger all round her.”
“I’ll help if I can.”
She nodded in a sort of wordless thanks, but her attention was drifting already to some other world. She was growing thinner, like a smoke curl in the wind.
“What of the ring?” Jill put all the urgency she could into her voice to try to pull her back. “Do you know the meaning of the rose ring?”
For the briefest of moments she smiled, and for that instant she seemed mortal again and solid.
“I don’t. They never did tell me. They’re like that, you know.”
Her chuckle seemed to hang in the air. She was gone. Aderyn let out his breath in one sharp sigh, tossed his head, and knelt down beside Rhodry as if nothing had happened at all.
“Jill, you’ll stay here for a few days, won’t you? I could use your help.”
“Of course. I’m always glad to pay you a service, and I’d like to see him well again, too. I loved him so much, once.”
“Once and not now?”
“Once and not now.” Jill got up with a sigh. “And I regret it, in a way, losing a love like that, but it never should have been, and now it’s gone, and that’s that.”
Aderyn was silent for a long moment. When he spoke his voice cracked with unnatural calm.
“Too bad you never knew Dalla. I think you two would have gotten along quite well.”

When Rhodry woke from that faint, some twenty minutes later, it seemed to him that he’d slept for days. He was muddled, too, wondering what he was doing, lying in Aderyn’s tent with Jill and Gavantar standing round, as solemn as priests.
“What’s wrong?” he mumbled. “Have I been sick?”
“You might say that.” Aderyn handed him a cup of hot liquid. “Drink this, will you?”
The water tasted faintly of herbs, and drinking it made his head clear enough for him to remember the White Lady. All at once he couldn’t bear to look at any of them, and especially not Jill; he felt his cheeks burning with shame.
“Ah, the blood’s returning to your face, I see.” Aderyn sounded amused. “Come on, lad, it’s all ended well enough. I can’t blame you for losing a fight when you didn’t have a weapon to your name and she had a whole armory.”
For days Rhodry refused to leave Aderyn’s tent except in the dead of night, when everyone else was asleep. Under the waxing moon he would pick his way through the grasslands or stride back and forth along the streambank, always hurrying as if he could leave his shame and dishonor far behind or perhaps as if he could meet himself coming in the other direction and at last know who he was. Never once in that long madness did he think of himself as Rhodry Maelwaedd. The best swordsman in the kingdom, the lord whose honor was admired by the High King himself, the best gwerbret Aberwyn had ever known—those men were all dead. Every now and then he did become the old Rhodry who was a father and a grandfather and wonder if his blood kin fared well, but only briefly. Even his beloved grandson seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from him with every minute that passed, as if the child rode a little boat sailing endlessly away down some vast river. Just at dawn he would come stumbling back exhausted from these walks to slip into Aderyn’s tent and sleep the day away in a welter of dreams. Often he dreamt of old battles, particularly the destruction of a town called Slaith; that dream was so vivid that he could practically smell the smoke as the pirate haven burned to the ground. Once, just when the moon was at her full, he dreamt of the White Lady, but it was only a distant thing, a memory dream and perfectly normal. The marvels were gone, utterly gone. When he woke, he was in tears.
Aderyn and Gavantar were sitting in the center of the tent by the dead fire and studying a book together, talking in low voices about sigils and, signs. From, the tight glowing through the walls of the tent, Rhodry could tell that it was near sunset When he sat up, Aderyn looked over.
“Hungry? There’s smoked fish.”
“I’m not, but my thanks.”
Aderyn closed the book and studied him for a moment, or, rather, he seemed to be studying the air all around Rhodry.
“You know, you need to get out in the sunlight more. You’re pale as milk.”
Rhodry looked away.
“Oh, come now,” Aderyn said sharply. “No one outside of Jill and me and Gavantar even knows the truth.”
“Everyone else just thinks I went mad, right? That’s dishonor enough.”
Aderyn sighed. Rhodry forced himself to look at him.
“Somewhat I wanted to ask you,” Rhodry said. “When this, well, this trouble started, you said some strange things that I’ve only just remembered. She found me again, you said. What do you mean, again? I never saw her before in my life.”
“Um, well, I was wondering if you’d remember that. I made a terrible mistake, saying such a thing.” The old man got up and walked over, and at that moment he seemed taller, towering, threatening, his dark eyes cold. “Do you truly want to know? I’m bound to tell you if you ask, but that asking is a grim thing in itself, and the beginning of a long, long road.”
All at once Rhodry was frightened. He knew obscurely that he was about to let some terrible secret out of its cage like a wild beast, knowledge that would rend and rip the few shreds he had left of his old life, his old self. He had seen too many secret places of the world, crossed too many forbidden borders already, to risk more.
“If I’m not meant to know, keep your secrets. It’d be a fine way to repay you, anyway, prying into things you shouldn’t tell me.”
Aderyn sighed in honest relief and looked his normal self again. It occurred to Rhodry, much later, that the old man had been as frightened as he.
That day marked a turning point, as if fear were the only medicinal strong enough to drive out his shame. That very evening Rhodry left Aderyn’s tent and wandered over to Calonderiel’s, where Jill was staying. As usual, the banadar had a crowd around him, young men, mostly, passing a skin of mead back and forth. While Jill watched, a little nervously, everyone greeted Rhodry without comment. He found a place to sit off to one side, took his turn at the skin when the mead came his way, and merely listened to the talk of hunting and the summer’s grass. When he left, everyone said goodbye in a casual sort of way, and that night he only walked for a couple of hours under the waning moon. On the morrow he took his place guarding the horse herd, and again, no one said a wrong word to him or asked him one single thing.
That night he joined Calonderiel’s men for the evening meal. They accepted him so easily that he realized he’d already been marked as a member of the banadar’s warband, another sworn man attached to the only kind of magistrate the People knew. The place suited him, and he took it gratefully, doubly grateful that he never had to say a formal word in acknowledgment. Swearing fealty to a man other than the High King, even to his oldest friend left in the world, would have come hard. After the meal they sat outside around a fire, passing the mead skin around, until Melandonatar brought out a harp and struck up a song. When the others joined in, Rhodry at first only listened. The music swept around him, long lines of sprung rhythm in some minor key, then tangled upon itself in intricate harmonies as the men sang of an ancient battle, a desperate last stand at the gates of Rinbaladelan during the Great Burning long ago. The ending left everyone so sad that the harper struck up a happier tune straightaway, a simple song about hunting. This one Rhodry knew, because it had been a favorite at the Aberwyn court on those occasions when the People came to visit, and without even thinking he joined in, adding his cracked tenor to the melodic line and leaving the difficult harmony to the others. Since the song had its bawdy side, they were laughing as much as singing, making so much noise that Rhodry never heard someone walking up to kneel behind him.
All at once a new voice joined in, a trained and beautiful tenor that rang like a bell on every lighthearted syllable. When Rhodry felt a friendly hand on his shoulder, he turned and looked into a face that was more than half his. Devaberiel’s hair was as pale as moonlight, but his elven-slit eyes were the same cornflower blue as Rhodry’s, and the shape of his jaw and his forehead, and the quick sunny way he smiled, were as familiar as a mirror image as well. Rhodry stopped singing, feeling tears rise in his throat beyond his power to call them back. Devaberiel threw one arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. Slowly the music died away as every man in the circle turned to watch.
“Banadar?” Devaberiel called out. “Is there any man here who is so blind as to deny that this is my son?”
“I doubt it very much,” Calonderiel said, grinning. “He certainly looks yours to me.”
“Then here in the required assembly I claim him and present him to you.”
Rhodry wept in earnest, wondering why even as the tears came. The men rose to their feet and cheered; women hurried over with skins of mead; sleepy children crawled out of tents to join the celebration. In the midst of the uproar it was impossible to hear a word anyone said. Rhodry saw Salamander standing in the shadows with Jill, and his brother was practically jigging with excitement, with Wildfolk swarming around him like bees round a hive. When Rhodry went to join them, however, Jill turned on her heel and walked away. Even though he’d expected no less, still her coldness stabbed him to the heart, and he knew better than to try to follow her.
“Well, I finally caught up with the esteemed parent,” Salamander burst out. “And dragged him back just as I promised.”
“I happened to be on my way here already,” Devaberiel said with a certain amount of frost in his voice. “But no matter. I see you’re wearing that wretched ring, younger son of mine. Has anyone figured out what it means yet?”
“Jill wants to talk with you about that, Father,” Salamander put in. “The morrow will do, however. Tonight let us celebrate, and lo, the moon already rises to join us at our drinking!”
It was two days before Rhodry had a chance to speak with Jill. He was nursing a hangover in Aderyn’s quiet tent when she came in, carrying a pair of saddlebags. He slipped into Deverrian when he spoke, simply because she was so much a part of his youth and his past.
“It looks like you’re leaving us. When?”
“Tomorrow at dawn.”
“Jill, I only wish you’d stay with me a while.”
“I can’t. I’ve told you that before often enough. We don’t belong together.”
“I just don’t understand.”
“That’s true. You don’t.” She got up and paced to the opening of the tent, stood there listening to the sounds of the camp. “And you can’t understand, truly, so for the love of every god, let it drop!”
For a brief moment Rhodry wanted to strangle her; then he wanted to weep; then he sighed and knelt down to feed a twig or two into the tiny fire.
“And where will you go, then?” he said.
“Bardek.”
“Bardek?”
“Just that.” She came back and knelt by the fire. “I’ve just time to get back to Aberwyn and find a ship, I think, before the sailing season’s over.”
“And why do you want to go to Bardek, or is that beyond my poor and pitiful understanding, too?”
“You’re still a sulky bastard when you want to be, aren’t you? Listen, you’ve already nearly drowned in trouble for wanting one woman you couldn’t have. Why do you—”
“Oh, hold your tongue! That’s a nasty weapon to use!”
“But a true-speaking, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m going to find out about the rose ring. Or try to, anyway.”
Automatically he glanced down at the silver stripe on the third finger of his right hand.
“Well, to be more accurate, about those letters inside it.” Jill went on. “Give it over for a minute, will you?”
“I don’t know what makes you think it’s an island word when it’s written in Elvish. Here.”
“I never said I thought it was Bardekian.” She held it up, angling the band a little to catch the light from the fire. “Do you remember when you were a captive in the islands? At that rich woman’s house—I don’t remember her name, but I do remember what you told me about her litter boys. Remember them, with the odd yellow eyes, and you were sure they saw the Wildfolk?”
“By all the gods, so I was! I wondered if they had elven blood in their veins.”
“I still do. Look, I’ve been talking with your father about the old days. After the Burning the People fled every which way. We know they had boats. Rinbaladelan—and it was a seaport, mind—held out for a year, time enough to pack up treasures for an exile. Your ancestors—the folk who fled east—were country people; they didn’t have the time or the inclination to rescue books and scrolls as they ran. But Rinbaladelan was an ancient city of learning and every grace, or so the story runs, and you can carry books a cursed sight easier in a boat than in a saddlebag.”
“And after all this time, do you think any of those books still exist?”
“Not unless someone copied them a couple of times over twixt now and then, no—not in the jungles of the southern islands with all the damp and mildews. But if—what if, just what if some of the People reached a haven there, and survived to build a city, and what if they’ve kept the old lore alive?”
Rhodry sat back on his heels and considered the flames. It seemed that he saw towers of gold rise among them, and the glitter of mighty palaces.
“Jill, let me go with you.”
“Ye gods, you’re as stubborn as a terrier with a dead rat in its mouth! I won’t, and that’s that. Your place is here. I don’t even know why, but it is.”
“Oh, is it now? And I suppose I’m just supposed to sit here and wait for you to come back! Cursed if I will!”
“You might be cursed if you don’t.” Oddly enough, she grinned at him. “If you’re going to keep company with sorcerers, you’d better watch what you say. But truly, I doubt if it matters. Run where you will, Rhodry ap Devaberiel, but the dweomer will catch you when it wants you.”
He tried to think of some clever retort. There was none. She held the ring up to the fire again, and the silver sent a long wink of light into the shadows.
“It’s got to be a name,” she said at last.
“What?”
“The lettering, you dolt! If it was an ordinary word, someone would be able to translate it. Between them your father and brother took it to every sage in two kingdoms. Someone would have recognized it. But a name—well, anyone can call themselves what they like, particularly if they’re neither elf nor human, can’t they now?” She frowned at the writing, then sounded it out. “Arr-soss-ah soth-ee lorr-ess-oh-ahz.” She paused, then spoke it again in a strange tight voice, almost a growl, that seemed to vibrate through the tent and spread out to the ends of the earth. “Arzosah Sothy Lorezohaz!”

And far away to the north, on a rocky ledge high up a mountain that no human eyes had ever seen, a sleeping dragon stirred and whimpered in a sudden nightmare.

---