Chapter One

I remember the beginning of the end of my world
clearly, but not for the reasons anyone would usu-
ally associate with remembering such a day. Early
morning dragged me from my bed, and the voice of
the herald from the capital drew me out of Birdie's
cool house into the town square of Blackwarren and
into the already-sticky heat of the early summer day,
where I stood beside my friend, Giraud dar Falcannes,
and listened to the latest news from the city, shouted
by a lovely young herald backed up by a contingent
of cold-eyed enforcers.
"In this the Century of the Constellation Baragar
the Hunter, in the year of Ten Firehawk and the
season of Merroell, on the fifth day of the month of
Tassetti, which We rename Varelle in our honor, We—
Varelle dar Kothia Surdosti—declare that Salgestis
Dargoman the Usurper has been cast down, and
executed, and that We have lifted his head on a pike
in Greffon's Great Square as proof and testament of
Our intentions to all such usurpers." The herald sat
astride her black horse, dressed all in royal red and
empire blue, with a crest on her tabard that I'd never
seen and a weighted scroll in her hands that gleamed
at the edges with the sheen of real gold. She glared
down at all of us who stood listening to her decree,
daring us to dispute her.
I leaned over and whispered to Giraud, "Forgive
me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Salgestis the rightful king?
And isn't Varelle dar Kothia Surdosti the usurper?"
Giraud grinned at me. "Mmm. Well, she was until
she won," he whispered back, "but it would be awfully
impolitic of us to remember that now, wouldn't it?
And possibly hard on our necks, Isbetta. Never for-
get that the winners get to call the losers anything
they want."
The herald spelled out Varelle dar Kothia Surdosti's
decrees to us—that she would be empress, titled
Gloriana Majeste of all the lands of Terosalle; that her
capital city would be Greffon; that she would give par-
don and favor to all who acknowledged her as empress
and would execute those who did not, and with them
their every relation through ten generations; and so
on, and so on. The herald's reading made for an
impressive decree, but I must confess that discover-
ing I had a new ruler in Greffon interested me less
than discovering I owned a new sheep would have. The
fact is, I was about to graduate to journeyman status
and be admitted to the Weavers' Guild, and my fos-
ter mother would, upon my graduation, owe me a
sheep as a gift—the first of what I hoped to turn into
an impressive weaver's flock. The sheep was both sym-
bol and material contributor to my future. Whereas
in Blackwarren the doings of the High Court were so
distant both in leagues and in their effects on our lives
that they didn't even make for interesting gossip.
I rolled my eyes. "This going to make any differ-
ence for you and His Lordship?"
"Oh, sure. The—" Giraud made a face "—the
Gloriana Majeste is bound to want an increase in taxes
to fill her empty war chests. And no doubt she'll want
Da to ride to her county seat in Kingston Bylake with
my brothers to declare undying allegiance. Shouldn't
be much trouble for him otherwise, though. If he
hadn't been in high stink with King Salgestis, we
wouldn't have been in stuck here in Blackwarren in
the first place, lording it over the peat boggers and
the blackflies."
"You don't think you'll have to ride to Kingston
Bylake, too?"
"Nah. I'm third tit, Izza. With Storrin and Baylar
ahead of me in succession, I don't even get invited
to the dances in Straje."
"And we both know how you love to dance."
Giraud snickered. "I won't complain about my
place in life. I'm as happy as I'm going to be, liv-
ing in Blackwarren. And maybe with Varelle on the
throne Da will win a place of favor and we'll be able
to move closer to the capital and get a bit of cul-
ture from time to time."
I recall finding that possibility unlikely. "You think
she'll grant your father new lands? But he didn't sup-
port her."
Giraud saw it as less of a problem, but then, he
was always much more the optimist than I. Being
lord's son instead of poor foster-daughter to a peat
crofter will have that effect on your outlook on life.
Giraud said, "He didn't support Salgestis, either. He
wasn't crazy. From one day to the next you couldn't
tell who would win their fight, or if both of them
would lose and the damned Liedans would come
sweeping down from the north by land and sea and
annex us; and Blackwarren's so far from everything
Da didn't need to make any passionate declarations
of loyalty. Nobody even remembers we're up here,
most times. He just kept his head low and kept it
on his shoulders that way."
The herald had finished reading the new empress's
decree, and sat rolling her scroll, preparatory to
moving on to the next town ... or considering
our position relative to the rest of civilization,
perhaps just heading home. I said, "That's it,
then. The news of the world beyond comes and
goes, and here in Blackwarren, nothing changes.
Nothing at all."
Giraud rested his hand on my shoulder as we
turned to head to my craft-master's shop. "That isn't
true for you, Izza."
I had to smile. Giraud understood my reasons for
anticipating my release from Birdie's care, and was
friend enough to be excited with me. "You're right,"
I agreed. "Finally, change comes."
"How many more days?"
I closed my eyes and pretended to count, but
actually the number of days I had left in my appren-
ticeship might as well have been carved straight
through my flesh into bone, I knew it so well. "Nine-
teen," I said.
Giraud laughed. "One for every year you've lived.
How perfect."
"I still have two years as journeyman weaver after
that, before I can become a master and set up my
own shop. It isn't as if I can leave Blackwarren right
away."
"But no more Birdie, right?"
I nodded vehemently. That was, as far as I could
see, the greatest advantage in achieving journeyman
status. "Exactly right. No more Birdie. I've been
asking around, and I've already found a place living
with the Widow dar Nothellin. She'll give me bed and
board in exchange for three pence a month, and one
bolt of fine blue cloth winter and summer."
"That's less than Birdie's taking."
"Birdie takes everything I make, just because she
can." The anger I felt at that fact was, for once, tem-
pered with satisfaction. "But only for nineteen more
days."
Giraud jumped onto the boardwalk that began
where the cobblestone street became dirt and mud,
and offered me his hand. I took it—I would have
been rude to refuse, even though I was quite capable
of swinging myself up onto the walk, and bounded
upward. Giraud said, "I still don't know why the old
bitch didn't send you off to Watchowl Bards' Keep
to train as a bard. You've the voice, and I think a
touch of the magic, too."
"You think so, do you?"
Giraud smiled, but his eyes were serious. "You've
certainly enchanted me."
I tried to laugh, but the old bitterness came
through too clearly and I stopped myself. I forced
a lightness that I didn't feel and said, "But that's the
way with apprenticeships. Our fosters choose what we
shall be, and leave us the quandary of becoming good
at what they choose." I pretended to shrug it off. "My
parents wouldn't have fostered me with Birdie if they
hadn't agreed with her that weaving would be the
right path for me."
I was not, after all, alone in complaining about my
foster-mother, or about the hardness of my life. Every
other weaver-apprentice who studied with Marda dar
Ellai complained, too. Of chores in the evening, of
poor meals, of hard beds. I was alone in other ways,
though. I alone came to Blackwarren not from a
smaller town but from the greatest city of them all,
Greffon. I alone recalled a life that was not bounded
by the rising and falling of the sun, that was described
neither by the movements of sheep and cattle through
the pastures nor by the growing and harvesting of
crops, nor by the cutting and drying of peat. I recalled
the life I'd led as daughter of the king's own bard—
I'd been a child with free run of court with friends
up to and including the king's youngest daughter. I'd
met Salgestis on occasion. I'd sung for him once—
some trippery song about what a wonderful king he
was. I recall that he'd been charmed, for I'd writ-
ten the dreadful bit of doggerel myself, and had gone
on to tell him that someday I would be a Bard like
my father. Bard with a capital "B," not bard-little-b
without the magic. And he'd clapped me on the
shoulder and told me what a good bard I should be,
too.
I was alone in other ways. Of all Blackwarren's fos-
terlings, only I never received a visit from my par-
ents or an invitation to return home for the Long
Holiday. I alone lived exclusively with my foster-
mother the year round, never so much as receiving
a letter or an Ammas Day gift from my true parents.
My fellow apprentices had endless theories about this,
all of them ugly and hateful to one degree or another.
Either I was an embarrassing bastard child, or my
parents were mad and had been locked away, or I
had done something in the past that was so terrible
my parents had banished me from their lives, or I
was an orphan from nowhere taken in by my foster-
mother and that I was, to boot, a dreadful liar who
made up stories about Greffon and my life before in
order to "give myself airs."
Giraud didn't believe any of the stories, and sym-
pathized with my plight as a fellow outcast from a
better life. He was old enough to remember when
his father had been in favor at court, and to wish for
the return of those days. For him, the Gloriana
Majeste Varelle represented a possible door back.
Giraud had been considering my remark about my
parents fostering me with Birdie. "I wonder," he said.
"As much as she hates me, I sometimes wonder,
too—but I can't say that I see much point in think-
ing about it. I'd rather be a bard, but my life has gone
another way." I peeked in the window of the dar Felpas
bakery as the rich, delicious scent of goldberry pie tick-
led my nose. "Oh, I wish she'd shut the window when
she bakes those. I always want one," I said.
Giraud ducked inside and bounded back out again
with two large berry tarts. "For us, because we are
almost free," he said.
I gave him a quick squeeze—not much of one, for
not even the third son of a lord could be seen hug-
ging a common weaver's apprentice, no matter how
reputedly lofty her birth. I munched the pie as I
walked along, closing my eyes as an especially rich
bit of crust and berries melted on my tongue. "Don't
you wish all of life was berry pies?" I asked.
"And warm, busy houses in big cities," he said,
"with libraries everywhere, and colleges and fairs."
"And silk dresses and silver-stringed guitars and
musicians on the street corners," I added.
"And I would be Lord Giraud in my own white-
walled castle," he said.
"And I would be your chief bard, and wear gold
chains around my waist and ride a black horse."
"And you would never have to look at another loom
or shuttle," he said, grinning at me.
"And you would never have to open another his-
tory book."
Giraud chuckled and shook his head. "Maybe that
wouldn't be such a good outcome after all. I like his-
tory considerably better than I like swords or poli-
tics."
"Lucky for you," I told him. I reached the door
to Marda's shop and grinned up at him. "You'll be
busy for months, rewriting all the records in your
father's library so that they say 'the evil usurper
Salgestis Dargoman,' rather than 'Our Illustrious Liege
Salgestis III.'"
When he realized I was right and he began to con-
template the enormous task before him, Giraud's face
fell. I laughed at him. Cruel of me, I know—but he
was the only apprentice I knew who got to live at
home and learn his work in his father's library, while
sleeping in his own bed and having the comfort of
knowing his father and brothers were nearby and that
his master didn't dare beat him much, for fear of
retaliation.
With such luck, he didn't deserve any sympathy
over the amount of work he would have to do.
And that was how it started. We forgot about our
new empress and went on with our lives. A week
passed, in which I did the final work on my journey-
man piece, a blanket that I wove in honor of my pa-
tron goddess Neithas, the goddess of both weavers
and singers, as well as the goddess of knowledge, the
goddess of handicrafts, and when all wasn't right with
the world, the goddess of war. Very busy, she is, and
encouraging to someone like me who has a hard time
making myself finish anything. I was doing the blanket
in subtle blues and greens around a central circle
composed of interlocking gold rays and pale yellow
diamonds, and all through the outer edge, I'd woven
looms and chariots and cats . . . well, Neithas is the
goddess of beasts, too. Besides I like cats. The blan-
ket was as complex as anything I'd ever tried, and
both the overall design and the minor patterns that
I worked into it required most of my time and all
of my concentration. After all, the journeyman blanket
was my chance to earn my way to adulthood and
acceptance, and even if weaving was no path I would
have chosen for myself, it was, nonetheless, an hon-
orable path, and one blessed by my goddess.
Besides, I could sing while I worked, and that
helped.
I barely saw Giraud the entire week I was finish-
ing my blanket; as he'd predicted, his father and both
his older brothers had to make the trip to Kingston
Bylake to swear fealty, and he stayed behind to make
sure Blackwarren's greathouse continued to run as it
should. That job would have fallen to his mother, but
the Lady dar Falcannes had died of the grippe in the
winter past, and Lord dar Falcannes had not yet
found her replacement. I knew from rumors among
the other apprentices that he had taken a few young
women to his bed, to test them for suitability, but
no sheaves of wheat hung from the greathouse gates,
so evidently he hadn't found one yet who was to his
liking. Or perhaps he hadn't been to the liking of the
women he'd entertained.
I'd met the man frequently. He had cold eyes and
a cruel mouth and a way of never meeting my eyes
when I talked to him, and I thought, personally, that
only a very desperate woman would take him as her
husband.
The day I finished my blanket, I sat for the bet-
ter part of a candlemark just staring at it. I realized
for the first time that I was good at what I did. Truly
good. Neithas had blessed my hands and given me
a talent with them that was, if not equal to the voice
she'd given me, at least good enough to earn me a
fine living—even in a town bigger than Blackwarren.
I was proud enough of myself that I carried the
blanket to Marda to show to her.
"So you're finished, then," Marda said. She gave
the blanket a cursory glance.
I nodded, my heart sinking. I never asked Marda
for her opinion of something that I'd done, because
her opinion was always, "Is that the best you can do?"
But I couldn't help thinking that this time, surely, she
would see that the lovely patterns and fine cloth I'd
created were a reflection of her own skill as a teacher,
and she'd be proud of me. So, like an idiot, I asked
her, "What do you think?"
Marda glanced from the blanket to my face, then
back to the blanket for a longer, harder look. When
she looked at me again, her eyes had become as cold
as a winter wind across the peat bogs—as cold and
as bone-chilling.
"We'll discuss it. But not now."
I left it with her at the shop and trudged home,
completely unable to imagine what she had found to
hate about my work. I ate a silent meal with Birdie,
climbed up to my mat in the little loft about the
single room of her cottage, and tried to sleep. My
mind kept tossing me images of the blanket, and of
Marda, and kept struggling to find some flaw that I'd
overlooked in the work that would so disgust her that
she would look at me the way she had.
No matter how long I lay there, or how much I
tossed and turned trying to find a comfortable posi-
tion on my mat, I couldn't sleep at all.
Which was just as well.
Finally in the full darkness of late night or possi-
bly early morning, when the fire in the hearth below
had guttered down to coals and ashes, as I lay star-
ing up at the slats and thatching just above my head,
I heard a soft scratching at the shutters below. It was
so light it might have been a branch dragging against
the wood in a light wind—except no trees grew
anywhere near the window.
Next I heard Birdie moving to the door, something
about her movements so surreptitious and stealthy that
my gut knotted. Birdie's usual slow, clump-footed gait
had been replaced by something light and quick and
. . . dangerous.
I heard whispers at the door. "Should we go out-
side?"
"No. She's asleep. Been asleep for a while. Both
of you might as well come in."
I could not imagine why anyone would care
whether I was awake or asleep, but I didn't have
time to ponder the oddness of the question. Oth-
ers followed after it, each stranger than the one
before.
"Did you arrange everything with the guild?" Birdie
asked.
"Of course." In the soft reply I recognized the voice
of my craft-master, Marda. What could she be doing
in Birdie's house at an hour which hinted that what
she did, she wanted no one to know about?
"They've agreed not to wait until they pass judg-
ment on the rest of the apprentices?"
"Why should they? With her, we have no worries
of irate parents, and now we need not worry about
interference from His Lordship, either. We'll receive
their judgment just after first bell in the morning."
Marda laughed. The sound was as ugly and cruel as
anything I'd ever heard.
"I got news back from my messenger," a mascu-
line voice said. I didn't recognize this voice at all.
Birdie's "Did you?" gave me chills.
"Lord dar Falcannes is dead along with both of his
older sons."
"And your own pending lordship?"
"Guaranteed by none other than the empress her-
self," the stranger's voice assured her. "Her men will
arrive in the morning and dispose of the last rem-
nants of the dar Falcannes. When the heads of the
household of dar Falcannes adorn pikes in the square,
her duke will name me temporary governor, and I'll
travel to Kingston Bylake to be knighted. Sir Aymar
dar Ressti sounds so much better than just Aymar."
Now I knew who he was. I'd seen him from time
to time, a clever, hawk-faced burgher who came into
Marda's shop to buy bolts of cloth, and who had twice
when I was alone suggested that if I came to his
house and was "nice" to him, he would be sure I had
pretty dresses and silver jewelry, and that I wouldn't
have to worry about weaving for a living. He'd fright-
ened me, but I had no one I could tell about his
attentions. So I'd said nothing.
I'd been right to fear him. He'd found a way to
have Giraud's father and brothers killed. He intended
to see Giraud dead as well. I had to get out of the
house to tell him—
"As soon as the guild rejects Isbetta's journeyman
status," Aymar said, "I want her delivered to the
Wolfshead Inn."
I froze, and my thoughts of charging off to get
Giraud came to a halt. The Wolfshead Inn?
"I thought you wanted her for yourself first," Birdie
said.
Aymar's chuckle was cold and evil. "I intend to have
her for myself first. But I don't want her to be seen
at my house. And the little bitch refused me—let her
know from the beginning what price she'll pay for
her refusal. Tassien will keep her in a room until I
can get to her—after I've finished with her, he can
put her to work."
The only work for women at Tassien's inn was
whoring.
"The whore's guild doesn't object?" Marda asked.
"The whore's guild is willing to pretend she doesn't
exist, as long as she takes only the trade the guild
doesn't want," Aymar said. "Tassien offered to buy her
outright from me, but I decided I'd rather have a
percentage of the money he gets from her. In return,
I'll pay you a gold crown every month in recognition
of your status as her . . . her foster-mother." He
chuckled. "For as long as she lasts, anyway; that will
add up nicely for the two of you, won't it?"
"It will indeed," Birdie said.
Marda just laughed softly. "And to think I prom-
ised the Black Heron we'd kill her after we killed her
father."
I jammed the side of my fist into my mouth to
keep from screaming. My father was dead? And these
were his killers? I'd always thought he'd returned to
Greffon and the king.
For an instant, the darkness that welled up from
the depths of my soul swallowed me. I didn't want
to live. I didn't want to have to move. I thought, in
just that brief, bitter instant, that I would lie in the
loft waiting for whatever came to me; that I would
give in; that I wouldn't fight, because I couldn't win.
But self-preservation pushed back despair.
Birdie's voice raised slightly from its previous cau-
tious low tones. "I told you there was money in
orphans."
"Yes," Aymar said, "but even you wanted to whore
her out as soon as we got her, and think of the
income you would have lost from her weaving in the
meantime. And she never would have lasted a month
whoring at first. Now . . . well, now she might sur-
vive a year. And we've been paid thrice for her
miserable life—the Black Heron's money, and the
weaving, and now this."
They were silent for a while. I lay in the darkness,
wondering how I could get out of the house and flee
before they could catch me. Wondering how I could
save Giraud. Wondering how I could get even with
them for killing my father. . . .
"I'm still surprised," Birdie said, and her voice was
thoughtful, "that the Black Heron didn't have his
people kill us when we couldn't find those pages her
father hid."
"He still hopes we'll find them. And I think we
will. I'm telling you, the bastard hid them in dar
Falcannes house," Aymar said. "I'll start looking for
them tomorrow. And when we find them we'll copy
them. We'll sell the Heron the originals for the
hundred pounds of gold he promised. Then we'll
figure out how to profit from the copies."
"How do you know you'll even recognize them
when you see them?" Marda asked him. "Dar Fal-
cannes has lived in that place for seven years since
the bard left it, and he hasn't found them."
"Maybe. Or maybe he has and he's been using
them all this time. Or maybe the bard hid them in
a book in the library, or buried them in a jar in the
garden. They were just parchment pages. They weren't
anything fancy—I suspect they were copies the bard
made from something else, since they looked new.
I couldn't read them—they were in that script the
bards use that only they know."
"I don't understand why you didn't steal the pages
when you had your hands on them."
They fell silent again. Finally Aymar said, "There's
an old saying—'Never steal from a live bard.' It's good
advice."
I thought, You shouldn't have stolen from a dead
one either, Aymar—you're going to pay for it. But I
certainly couldn't make him pay for it right then.
Both Marda and Aymar left at last, and I listened
while Birdie climbed the ladder to my loft. I had my
back to her, and I kept my breathing regular and slow,
and my eyes closed—I focused on feeling relaxed, on
being calm, on allowing my body to go limp. Mean-
while, I could feel her stare like a knife between my
shoulder blades, and I had to fight the impulse to
hold my breath. I wished her away, feeling as scared
as I ever had in my life. She was a murderer, and
she wanted to sell me to a whoremaster, and if I
didn't get away she would.

Chapter Two

Finally I heard her moving down the ladder again,
and shuffling around. I heard the creak of her bed
as she climbed into it, and the rustle of her blanket
as she pulled it over her. Then I waited some more.
I didn't dare do anything until she fell asleep. In the
meantime, I had to be sure that I didn't give away
the fact that I was awake, or that I knew what had
happened and what was about to happen. So I con-
tinued to think calm thoughts to keep my body
relaxed and limp and my breathing regular and slow
and deep. Calm thoughts—green fills and the steady
rhythm of shuttle through warp forming weft and the
feel of a song in my lungs and my belly and my
throat. Calm thoughts and a relaxed body, when all
I wanted to do was run.
And at last I heard her breathing change, the soft
burr of her snore; the only signal I would get.
I got up carefully and dressed, then packed my few
belongings—my sleeping shirt, my other breeches, my
other tunic, my other undergarments, the wooden
flute my father gave me, my knife and whetstone, my
personals. Everything I owned, when rolled tightly
enough, fit into the pockets of my cloak. I wondered
if I dared climb down the ladder to retrieve my boots.
I had thought to just cut through the rope that bound
the roofing slats to the crossbeams, then push my way
through the thatching to get outside; but the more
I thought about it, the more I realized I would have
to travel in the mountains if I hoped to find some
form of safety, and if I traveled in the mountains I
had to have my boots. Which meant climbing down
the ladder to retrieve them—and then, since time was
my enemy as much as noise, lifting the bar that held
the oaken door locked and slipping out of it into the
street.
Then hurrying clear across the village without giv-
ing the impression that I was hurrying, to get Giraud
up and out of Blackwarren before the empress's hunt-
ers came to kill him. Then running. East to the
Stormfather Mountains, then through whatever passes
the two of us could find, and north into Lieda. Run-
ning ahead of the soon-to-be-knighted Aymar dar
Ressti and the empress's killers and the villagers who
would come after us, eager for reward.
I took a deep breath and eased myself over the
edge of the loft, braced myself on the ladder, and
crept down. Twice as fast a I should have, a thou-
sand times more slowly than I wanted to. The lad-
der didn't creak, and I stepped barefooted onto the
wide-boarded floor of the cottage. I knew from exper-
ience that some of the boards squeaked; what I
couldn't remember but desperately needed to was
which of them. I hadn't been in the practice of
sneaking out of the house; my only experience came
from the rare hurried trip to the outhouse in full
darkness, and in those situations, I'd had nothing to
hide.
And that was my answer, of course. In the event
that Birdie woke enough to notice me, I would say
I had to go to the outhouse. Of course, when I failed
to return, she'd come after me. I'd lose hours of the
small lead I'd have anyway. So I kept quiet, tested
each board with a cautious step before moving onto
it, and balanced my weight as carefully as I could to
avoid making any noise. Even so, something about
my presence disturbed Birdie, for when I was more
than halfway across the room, she rolled to one side
and murmured in a half-awake voice, "Wha's tha'? Did
'ou say somethin'?"
Now I did hold my breath. And I prayed, Neithas,
if you love me, make her go back to sleep.
Neithas heard me, for after a while that seemed
like forever, Birdie's snoring resumed. I finished my
trek across the single room, tugged my boots on—
for if anyone saw me putting them on while sitting
on the boardwalk outside our door, they would know
instantly that I was sneaking about something—and
lifted the door bar. I settled it on the floor in its
customary place. I always left the house to go to
Marda's shop long before Birdie woke and rose—she
was accustomed to seeing it out of place. Only if she
got up during the night for some reason and discov-
ered the unbarred door would she realize something
had gone wrong. If she didn't realize I'd left far too
early, I could hope that she would assume I had gone
to the shop, and that Marda would assume that Birdie
was keeping me busy around the cottage.
The door opened quietly—Birdie had never been
able to stand the noise of squeaking hinges, and so
kept them well-greased. I pulled it shut behind me
as I stepped out onto the boardwalk, then looked
down the street in both directions. I saw no one,
which was good for more than the obvious reason.
In Blackwarren everyone rose when the sun rose and
slept when the sun slept. Anyone out with me would
be up to no good.
I jumped off the boardwalk and moved through
the street, which was terribly dusty but at least not
knee-deep with mud as it always became in the
spring. I didn't mind getting dusty—I just didn't want
my boot heels to clatter on the boards.
I hurried through the streets, keeping to back ways
and always choosing dirt streets over cobblestone ones,
because I could run faster and more quietly over dirt.
I moved steadily uphill, between the huddled houses
over Blackwarren that grew bigger and more attrac-
tive the further uphill I went. Blackwarren House
stood at the top of the hill, unwalled and ungated
because the greathouse held neither an army nor the
wealth that would tempt invaders.
That worked in my favor, of course. It would have
played havoc with my plans if I first had to work my
way past gate guards and an army barracks and a
houseful of servants. Lucky for Giraud his father was
a poor, weak lord. Well, maybe not so lucky. If Lord
dar Falcannes had been rich and powerful he might
have still been alive, and his private army might have
been intimidating enough that the Empress dar Kothia
Surdosti would have thought twice about attacking his
home and replacing him with some sneaking, mur-
dering sycophant.
As it was, I went up the rose trellis outside Giraud's
room and rapped on his window until, rubbing his
eyes and yawning, he opened it.
"Izza! What in the world—"
"Get a change of clothes and your weapons and
come with me," I said. "I don't have time to explain,
other than to tell you that the empress's men will be
here at first light to kill you."
Giraud never had a stupid day, and bleary-eyed and
sleep-fogged though he was, he didn't have one then,
either. Without argument or question, he ran from
the window; only moments later, he returned. In that
length of time, I'd had time to think.
"Which of your servants is most loyal to your fam-
ily?" I asked him.
"Beidus. He served my father when they were both
boys, and has been with us ever since."
"Get him quickly. Shortly after we leave, he needs
to set fire to the house, then rouse the villagers to
fight it; when all the village is stirred, he and the rest
of your servants need to escape in the melee."
Giraud's eyes narrowed and he studied me for a
moment while a cold and terrible blankness stole over
his face, robbing it of expression. "Yes," he said. He
vanished into the darkness of his room again, and this
time took much longer to return.
"It's done," he said. "Those I trust will be wakened
shortly, so that they'll have time to gather what few
belongings they can. I've told Beidus to empty the
stables and chase the horses into the hills, then set
fire to the outbuildings first. I told him that Da had
been murdered and the killers were coming for all
of us next." He handed me one pack, and slipped a
second one under his cloak and shrugged into it. Then
he swung his leg over the window and only when his
back was to me and I'd donned my own pack and
we were both climbing down the trellis did he add,
"That's what has happened, isn't it?"
"Yes," I said.
"And somehow you found out."
"I found out a lot," I told him.
We took only his two best horses. We would not
travel far on horseback—we would be too conspicu-
ous if we rode like lords instead of walking like com-
moners. But the horses would give us some distance
from Blackwarren before anyone discovered our
absence. We could cool the horses down and turn
them loose before we got into the heart of the
mountains—they'd find plenty of food in the uplands
and we wouldn't have to worry about how we were
going to feed them, rest them, water them, or get
them over some of the worst of the mountain passes
that led to Lieda.
We would have enough to worry about with just
ourselves.
We rode out of Blackwarren without a backward
glance. We cantered through the hills to the Gate-
way of the Mountains; we were all the way to the
first difficult traverse of the Gateway Pass before the
pink light of dawn began to creep between the black
spears of the trees that rose from the edge of the path
all around us.
We dismounted and surveyed our situation. The
path had been nearly level, with mountains rising to
either side of it. Now, however, it slid up onto the
hip of the right mountain and the left side of the path
fell away into steadily deepening ravine. Below and
ahead of us, we could hear water rushing.
"Time to get rid of the horses," Giraud said, "while
they can still turn around."
I sighed. I almost never got to ride anymore,
though when I'd been a young girl—before whatever
had brought my father to Blackwarren—I'd had my
own horse and I had ridden every day. I'd been
delighted to discover that I still remembered how.
When I swung down out of the saddle, I was less
delighted to find that, though memory had served me
well, my out-of-condition legs had not.
"Oh, Neithas, I'm sore," I muttered. The insides
of my thighs cramped, my calves ached, and though
this is surely indelicate, I'll admit that my rump
burned like a brush fire.
We stripped the saddles from the horses and threw
them down into the ravine, listening to them rattle
and thump and jingle until either trees stopped them
or distance muted their movement. We rubbed our
mounts down, walked them until they were cool, then
slapped them on their haunches and sent them back
the way they'd come.
Before us lay a sharply rising scree-covered ledge
that didn't look as if anyone had been over it in ages.
"I wonder why this is in such disrepair," I said.
"The dwarves of Kekger Deshin travel the pass
between their mines and Blackwarren several times
a month during the summer."
"Slide must have just happened," Giraud said.
I looked at the mess, wishing that we could wait
for brighter light before essaying out onto it. "I'm sure
you're right." In the half-light of dawn, it seemed to
me that prudence would almost demand that we wait
just a bit longer. The ledge appeared to rise above
the thick forest quickly, and the few trees that grew
on the steep, rocky slopes above were stunted by their
poor soil and twisted by wind—they would provide
us with no cover. Once we had no trees on either
side of us, the passage would become much more
dangerous. Surely we needed better light before trying
something like that.
To stall for time, I said, "I've never been
through the dwarves' city. I haven't even spoken to
any dwarves since I visited with the traders and
officials who used to visit with my parents. Do you
think they'll tell anyone we passed through their
city?"
Giraud shook his head. "We deal . . . dealt . . .
with them often. They don't care much about humans
as long as we leave them alone. And as a rule they
actively dislike human politics and human disagree-
ments. I know this. My father and brothers and a
handful of village volunteers went riding after a thief
once—he'd been robbing the merchants blind every
night—and the dwarves let the thief pass because he
was alone and bothered no one. But when my father's
party tried to pass, even when my father explained
what they wanted with the man and why, the Kekger
Deshinites blocked the roads with stone and refused
them passage. The thief escaped."
"Good," I said, then glanced at him. "Not that the
thief escaped, you know. Just that the dwarves will
possibly be kinder to us than they will be to those
who come after us."
Giraud said, "Let's get moving."
The light was a bit brighter. I nodded and followed
him onto the ledge. We worked our way up the path,
crouching over and brushing off scree with our hands
so that we could keep both feet firmly planted all the
time. Neither of us wanted to try kicking the debris
away only to lose balance and go bouncing down the
rocky wall of the ravine after it.
The path climbed more steeply, and I realized that
seven years of sitting on a stool and weaving had done
little to prepare me for a frantic climb through moun-
tains with a pack of killers after me. We climbed for
the better part of a candlemark, I'd guess, during
which time we left the trees behind and at least part
of the air.
When we finally reached a level wide place, both
Giraud and I stood panting like dogs on a hot sum-
mer day.
"I have to ... stop for a while," I told him.
He nodded. "Yes. This is ... hard work."
I'd thought he would be more able to travel than
I, but I'd forgotten Giraud's habits. He spent his days
in a library with a tutor his father brought in from
Balter. He skipped every sword practice he could get
away with and avoided as much hand-fighting as he
could, too.
We sat with our backs against the stone wall behind
us, and I said, "If someone were to go through the
village and pick the two worst people to run away
through the mountains, they would pick us."
Giraud closed his eyes. "I know. I've been think-
ing that. We have no food with us, and no water, and
nothing to carry water; we don't have warm clothes
or sturdy mountain boots or ropes or picks or any
of the tools people use when they go through the
mountains; we have no map; we've never been on this
path; we have no idea where we're going or how long
it will take us to get there; we have no weapons nor
any tools with which to make them."
Until he listed the problems he saw, I was just
thinking that we were neither one of us in very good
shape to go mountain climbing. I hadn't thought past
that to the fact that we had nothing anyone would
need to survive in the mountains. "Thank you for
making me feel worse," I muttered.
He glanced at me. "You brought it up."
"I hadn't considered all the details."
"Oh."
We sat in silence a while longer. Finally he asked
me how I'd come to find out about his father's mur-
der. I told him. He listened attentively, his face grow-
ing darker with every word.
"They were going to sell you?" he interrupted at
one point, and, "Your father is dead?" at another. But
other than that, he said nothing until I finished. In
fact, he said nothing for a while thereafter.
Finally he turned and put an arm around my shoul-
der and kissed me once on the cheek, firmly. "You
are my family, Isbetta dar Danria," he said, "and I
am yours. You risked your life to save mine and the
lives of my family's loyal servants, and I will die first
before anyone touches you against your will." He
stared into my eyes and I could see in them grief he
could not allow himself to release, and his fury at the
betrayal and destruction of his family. "We must swear
a pact, you and I," he continued, "that no matter what
happens, we will protect each other, and that someday
we will destroy those who tried to destroy us." He
held out his hand.
I thought of how ludicrous we looked to the gods,
sitting on that mountain pass with no guarantee that
we would survive the day, swearing the destruction
of our enemies—but I took his hand. "By Neithas my
patron, who tramples her enemies and feeds their
hearts to her owl, and by my blood and soul, I swear
it," I said. My voice trembled.
"By Hadres my patron," Giraud said, "who remem-
bers all things and who finds all things, and by my
blood and soul, I swear it."
We sat looking at each other, hands still tightly
clasped, until Giraud sighed and loosened his grip.
"May we live to make it so."
A terrified whinny and a scream echoed up from
the ravine below and behind us, distorted by distance
and the rush of water. Both sounds seemed to me
to come from a long way off, but as we walked,
sometimes our own voices had bounced back to us,
making it seem that we were some distance from
ourselves. The whinny could have been from a wild
horse down in the ravine attacked by some hunting
beast, or from one that had fallen and broken a leg,
or perhaps from one of the animals we'd set free that
had become panicked or injured—any of half a
hundred explanations would have explained it. The
scream, however, had sounded human, which meant
that however far off it was, it wasn't far enough.
"Do you think it's them?" I asked.
Giraud nodded.
"Maybe there was only one person coming after
us, and he fell into the ravine," I said. I didn't believe
it, but I said it anyway.
"Maybe we're that lucky. But sensible people
wouldn't travel into these mountains alone. If that
scream was because one of our hunters fell to his
death, I'd almost guarantee that there will be oth-
ers behind who will be more careful."
I looked around. The wide spot where we sat was
the only place we'd yet found along the path carved
across the face of the mountain that might let two
or three pursuers on horseback turn. If there were
more, only the last three would be able to turn
around. The first travelers would have to continue
on. And if we could force them to travel on to the
next wide spot—all of them—while we hid some-
where, we could, perhaps, double back and set a
trap for them ... or ...
I didn't know what we could do, but I knew we
needed to do something quickly.
Wary of the echoes that might whisper my words
to Giraud into the ears of the hunters behind us, I
leaned close to him and said, "We need to figure out
a way to go on far enough that their tracker will be
sure we intend to stay on this path, then either climb
up the rock face above us or down over the side below
us and find someplace to hide until they pass us."
"So that we can go back the way we came?" he
asked, raising his eyebrows. "But that's stupid. We
want to get away from Blackwarren."
"I know. But if we just keep running along this
path, sooner or later they'll catch us. If it isn't in the
next hour or day, it will be when we arrive at the
other side. Maybe when we go back we can set a trap
for them. Maybe. Or something." I stared into his
dark eyes, feeling uncertain and scared, and said, "I
don't know what we should do, Giraud, but my gut
says we have to do something. Soon. Now."
He nodded and rose. My gut feelings were a bit
of a joke between us—along with my father's musi-
cal ability, I had inherited his instinct for coming
trouble, but where I recalled his instinct being almost
magically accurate, my own was erratic. Sometimes
embarrassingly erratic. At that moment, it didn't
matter to me how wrong I'd occasionally been in the
past. I knew we had to get off the path.
"Fine," Giraud said after he'd studied my face for
a moment. "Let's move on. We'll be sure to leave a
clear trail at least until we're completely out of sight
of this shelf. Then we'll go either up or down,
depending on what we find."
I  stood and readjusted my cloak.  I  felt the
emptiness of the pack he'd brought for me on my
shoulders, and the weight in my pockets that wasn't
food and wished I'd taken something to eat from
Birdie's larder before I ran, or that I'd had the pres-
ence of mind to tell Giraud to get us something . . .
but perhaps if I'd taken that time, we wouldn't have
lived to escape. And better alive and hungry than
dead with a full belly.
We moved along the path, this time constantly
looking both up and down for places where we might
safely get off of it. Giraud spotted something prom-
ising, stopped, and pointed. "Look up," he whispered.
I looked up, and saw more of the same damnable
rock covered with the same red and white and green
lichens I'd seen all day. But Giraud said, "There's
another ledge up there, I think. It's just a place where
a line of red lichen becomes green."
Then I saw it. In fact, looking carefully, I could
see that the lichens didn't match up, that a faint,
straight line divided a span as broad as a tall man's
outstretched arms.
"Let's go up," he whispered.
And as sure as I'd been that we needed to get
off the path, I suddenly and as certainly knew that
we didn't dare go up.
I looked down. I could see no sign of haven there
at all, but instead I shook my head, put a finger to
my lips, and carefully moved off the path and down.
Giraud's mouth dropped open, and he waved his
arms wildly, gesturing for me to return, but I just
shook my head and kept on moving downward. I
moved a hand around the smallest of knobs, shoved
a foot cautiously into a tiny crack, shifted balance
cautiously from left to right, then from right to left;
I scrabbled and slipped and clawed, and all the while
as I crept down the cliff face, the feeling of the void
beneath my feet weighed on me as heavily as a kick-
ing child clinging and fighting me, and I felt the sheer
expanse of nothingness behind me and the certainty
of my own death if I fell.
And at the same time, I had the oddest certainty
that I was right. That gut feeling, much maligned—
and often for good reason—assured me that I was
heading in precisely, exactly, the right direction. Hand
to tiny rock knob, boot toe wedged into little crack,
shift my weight from hip to hip, slide down and to
the left, tapping with one toe for a foothold, mak-
ing sure I was steady with both hands and the other
foot, and then, with both feet steady, moving one hand
away from its safe grip, I made progress.
Moving down, and down, and down. And always
at my back I felt the void between me and the floor
of the ravine. I could feel myself toppling backward
through space; I could feel myself hitting the rocks
before my body tumbled into the rushing water. I
could feel—but I kept going anyway, while the right-
ness of my present course drew me onward and
downward, and grew ever more compelling. I'd had
such feelings many times before, but never in my life
had I been so certain. . . .
Now I could hear voices bouncing off the ravine
walls at me.
"They're not too far ahead of us."
ahead of us
"How do you know?"
do you know
"Here. See? They sat here for a while, resting—"
resting
"And then they moved on. They were less care-
ful about clearing the scree from the path. You can
make out the clear edges of footprints here and here."
here and here
"Then we go after them now?"
"Of course. If we rest, they'll gain the lead they
lost when they rested."
when they rested
rested
"Why do you suppose they went this way?"
went this way
I listened closely, for I was as interested in the
question as the answer, but neither men nor moun-
tains replied, and I was left to wonder what our
pursuers meant. Went this way? As opposed to south-
ward, deeper into Terosalle and trouble? Or as
opposed to taking another road through the moun-
tains, a better one that would have been safer?
I heard Giraud slip and swear. Gravel skittered past
my ear, slapped my right hand, and smacked into the
top of my head, and I flattened myself against the
rock face, praying that he wouldn't lose his grip and
fall, taking both of us down into the ravine. I heard
him scrabbling and digging, and then all sounds from
above me stopped, except for the heavy rasp of his
breathing. He'd found something to hang on to.
The shower of stones finally ended, and I began
moving downward again. My arms and back and
thighs and calves all burned, and my hands and feet
hurt. The place in the back of my mind that didn't
believe the feeling in my gut screamed, "You're never
going to have the strength to make it back up. Never.
You're going to die down here." But the instinct that
drew me downward was far stronger than that rational
fear. I knew, though I did not know how I knew, I'd
find safety.
Then I fell.

Chapter Three

One instant I was sliding my right foot down to
tap around for my next foothold, while I clung with
a firm grip on both handholds and kept most of my
weight balanced on my left foot. The next instant, the
left foothold crumbled out from under me, my swing-
ing right foot encountered nothing but air, and I lost
my grip and dropped. I had only enough time to
realize I was doomed, and then I slammed into a
stone shelf, twisted my right ankle as I landed on it,
and pitched forward into darkness.
I kept sliding, face-first, downward—not quickly
but steadily—until I came to rest in deeper darkness.
My ankle throbbed and burned, a worse and distinc-
tive pain against the background of overall pain that
gnawed at my muscles and bones and skin. My eyes
adjusted slowly. I closed them for a moment to help,
then opened them again.
The darkness resolved into areas of lighter and
darker vagueness. I twisted around to look behind me.
I'd fallen into a narrow crevasse in the rock face
behind which lay a surprisingly large cave. The angled
pile of rock scree and debris down which I'd slid
terminated in a fairly level rock floor that was eas-
ily two times bigger inside than Birdie's house had
been, and half again as high.
I tried to stand so that I could walk to the entrance,
but my ankle wouldn't carry my weight. So I crawled
back up the shallow slope and leaned out the opening
just in time to see Giraud move past on my right,
evidently oblivious to the opening. He was climbing
too fast, and not very carefully, and I realized he
thought I'd fallen into the ravine and he was trying
to get down there to find me.
"Pssst. Giraud," I whispered. I hoped I wouldn't
startle him so much that he lost his grip on the cliff.
He stiffened and his head jerked in my direction.
"Izza?" His eyes grew round as eggs and his mouth
dropped open. "By Hadres, you're safe."
"Hurt my ankle, but that's all. Hurry up and get
in here."
He started working his way toward me, still mov-
ing too fast . . . but the voices of our pursuers now
seemed to come much more from above us than
behind us. The time for caution had passed. He scram-
bled toward me, fingers and toes digging, face red, his
breathing harsh and labored. They could probably hear
him moving, I realized, and could probably hear him
breathing, too. If they followed the source of the sound
downward, we would be discovered.
He lost a handhold and flailed out—I braced
myself and leaned far out and grabbed his waving
hand, and pulled. For the next few instants, the two
of us struggled desperately to get him out of sight
from the ledge above. I pulled, he swung and jumped
and scrabbled, and then the two of us were rolling
down the scree into darkness, gasping and shaking,
to lie together in a little heap at the bottom.
"STOP!"
stop
We froze.
The gentle clop-clopping of hooves, which had
grown clearer and clearer, ceased. I tried to quiet my
breathing; Giraud, still gasping from his exertions,
pulled up his tunic to cover his nose and mouth. That
muffled the sound enough that I didn't think it would
give us away.
A tiny rockfall skittered past our window to the out-
side world. They had stopped directly above us. Did
that mean they knew where we'd gone?
"You see? The tracks go no further." The voice was
triumphant.
"Then the scream we heard . . . was that one of
them falling into the ravine?"
"Perhaps. Perhaps not." Silence followed that
thoughtful reply. We waited. Then, "Aha. Look up.
You see that line of lichen?"
Giraud and I stared at each other. If we'd gone
that way . . .
"I see it," a second voice replied in unison with
a third that said, "Yes, right there!"
Third voice said, "We can't stop here or turn
around, though. We'll have to go on, leave the horses
at the next wide place, and come back."
First voice, scornfully, said, "Whoever told you that
you had a brain? And let them climb down and get
away while we do that? Let them run back the way
we came, as they doubtless planned? No. I think not.
Dischi, you're first in line. You ride on and our horses
will follow you to the next landing. Macs and I will
dismount here and go after them. You turn around
as soon as you can and come back for us. We'll be
waiting with them."
And when Macs and whoever was with him climbed
up and didn't find us, what would happen? They'd
climb down and find us. And when they found us,
we would either go with them or they would kill us.
We had no weapons, no fighting skills, and no place
to run.
I heard the horses clopping away, and then the
sounds of our hunters climbing. They called to each
other as they went up the face of the rock, and from
time to time a stream of debris would rattle down
into the ravine as they knocked it loose. Aside from
those few noises, though, we waited in silence. I
wished I could think of some way out of our trouble,
and from the expression on Giraud's face, he shared
my wish. We didn't even dare move further back into
the cave—sounds carried preternaturally well at this
spot in the path, and we didn't want to give away our
location.
We might still hope, after all, that they wouldn't
be able to find us.
We waited.
"I'm almost there."
"I can't find a handhold beyond this one."
"Hold on. Hold on, will you."
"I can't find . . ."
"By sacred Anyu's dugs ..."
"What?"
"You won't believe this!"
"Throw me your damned rope so I can get up
there, and I'll decide whether I believe it or not."
Another silence this time, followed by grunts and
muttered swearing.
And then, "There, you see—"
—and two horrible screams.
A man hurtled downward past the opening to our
cave, followed immediately by a second. My blood
chilled in my veins and my heart nearly stopped.
We both scooted up to the "door" on hands and
knees and looked out. Far below, we could make out
the two crumpled bodies of what had been our
enemies.
For the longest time, neither of us said anything.
Finally Giraud said, "We almost went up there."
I nodded. I couldn't speak; I was having a hard
enough time breathing around the lump my heart
made in my throat.
A cold, low, slightly lisping voice behind the two
of us said, "As well you did not. Neither promise nor
prophecy guarantees even temporary safety to visi-
tors at my front door."
I turned. Slowly. Very slowly, in case whoever stood
behind us felt inclined to view any movement as a
threat. My eyes had to readjust to the darkness. First
I saw only the size of the one behind us. Its head
reached halfway to the ceiling, making it nearly as
tall as Birdie's house.
Then, as my eyesight improved, I could see its
head, long as a horse's but skeletally lean, and make
out the pallor of its skin and the burning insanity that
gleamed from the row of dark sockets that housed
its many eyes. It moved forward soundlessly, until it
towered over the two of us.
"And there are no guarantees of your safety,
either. Unless you are . . . well . . . we'll deter-
mine that."
It crouched down onto all fours, and its hands
came out of the sleeves of its robe, and they weren't
hands at all, but claws like those on the little stream
crabs the boys in the village caught and sold. "We
. . . will . . . determine . . . that," it said again.
It leaned toward the two of us, and instinctively
we shrank back. Its face wasn't merely lean but utterly
fleshless, with long jaws hinged far back and a black,
darting tongue that it flicked in and out, in and out.
And from eight deep caverns, its hideous eyes glared
out at us, unmoving unblinking crystal-faceted gems
that in the dim light reflected all the colors of the
rainbow, but stained those colors with a horrible oily
darkness of their own.
"So ..." it said, and chuckled softly. "What are
you doing sneaking into my home through my back
door?"
I cleared my throat. "We were hiding from the men
who were chasing us."
"Why? Are you thieves? Scoundrels? Vagabonds?"
Giraud said, "I am the son of Anjourd dar Fal-
cannes, lord of Blackwarren. I'm no thief. And she's
the daughter of Bard Haral dar Danria . . ."
"I have no use for the 'sons of or the 'daughters
of,'" the monster said. "No use. What . . . are . . .
you?"
First I thought "human," but "human" had done
the hunters no good. "I'm an apprentice weaver," I
said. The "apprentice" part stung. "He's an appren-
tice historian."
"So you are . . . are students. Unfinished. Like . . .
like books half-written."
That seemed an odd description, but Giraud and
I both nodded.
"Sing for me ..." the monster said. "The song I
sing." It cocked its head to one side and, in a shock-
ingly pure voice, did a few phrases of a song in a
language I didn't know, with a tune that danced across
the range of a good singer's voice.
I have a good memory for music—a gift left over
from my early childhood as a bard's daughter. I
repeated the song back to the creature, as clearly as
I could, trying to match its sweetness and purity of
tone, though I certainly failed there. I was almost sure
I'd gotten the words right, though, and I was certain
I'd matched the melody.
It studied me for only an instant, then said to
Giraud, "Now you."
It sang the song again—the same words, but this
time in a lower range.
Giraud nodded, then sang it back. He mimicked
the monster, too.
The monster hissed and rocked backward on its
heels staring from one of us to the other, then back.
It rose from its crouch, moving gracefully, and its
claw-hands vanished back into the folds of its robe.
It stared at us still, its head turning slightly left, then
right, then left, then right.
"Two will come," it said, in the voice of one reciting
poetry,
"Two will come,
Unfinished stories.
Books half-written,
Carrying nothing
Containing everything,
They flee death,
Bring life,
Promise the future.
Wait by the back door;
To them give the key."
It watched us a little longer, as if by waiting we
would figure out the meaning of that odd half-song,
half-riddle ourselves.
Finally Giraud asked, "What does it mean?"
It cocked its head. "I don't know what it means.
It's a riddle, and I have the key, but I don't have the
answer. I must ... I must assume . . . that your lives
are the answer. Or at least your living of them. And
if you are to be an answer I don't like, then I will
be better off to kill you now, for all that I've waited
here for you long beyond the time I thought I would."
That didn't sound at all promising. But I had no
idea what to say. Don't kill us sounded weak and cow-
ardly, while We won't do anything to cause trouble
was a promise that, quite frankly, I didn't think I was
qualified to make. I didn't know enough about the
situation I faced to make any promises at all. And
lying to a monster such as this, my gut told me, would
be a very bad idea. So I said nothing.
Giraud evidently couldn't think of anything useful
to say, either. He watched the bony nightmare too,
doing nothing more than blinking and breathing. We
were mute and scared and at the same time intrigued.
After all, for what reason in the universe could such
a monster be waiting in a cave on the side of a moun-
tain for us to visit?
After a long silence, it said, "So you can hold your
tongues, too." It turned with a fluidity the angular,
bony form of its body made especially improbable.
"That's fortunate. Come, then."
Giraud stood. I tried, but the instant I put weight
on my ankle, the dull red throbbing pain in it became
a white-hot agony, and I started a scream that I
immediately cut short. Tears started in the corners
of my eyes, and I balanced on one foot, now terri-
fied. Giraud moved to my side and let me lean against
him so that I could hop, but the monster had already
turned and was watching me.
"You're injured," it said.
"Not badly. Nothing that won't heal—"
"—with time," it said. "Nothing that won't heal with
time. But for all that we had the time from the day
the song was born until the sun burned to ashes for
you to get here, now that you're here I'm afraid we're
in a bit of a hurry."
It walked back to me, reached for me with those
dreadful claws, and Giraud threw himself in front of
it, trying to block its access to me. The monster
brushed him aside as if he were no more significant
than a gnat, and picked me up with a gentleness that
shocked me.
"Don't be ridiculous," it said to Giraud, and with
me caged in its bony arms, it slid through a door-
way of rock that opened before it, glided into a faintly
lighted passageway that led upward, and after numer-
ous twists and turns, through passageways that
branched, folded, and wove around and up and down,
came at last to a bright, high-ceilinged cavern lit by
the reds and golds and deep, rich purples of a bril-
liant, beautiful sunset.
"Ah-h-h-h," it said. "The finest place in the moun-
tain to see the closing of the day." It put me down
on a bench, and said, "Tell me where it hurts."
I pointed. As I was showing it, Giraud burst into
the room, panting like a beast, with sweat dripping
down his face. He glared at the monster.
"You almost lost me in there."
The monster glanced from me to him, shrugged
slightly, and returned its attention to my ankle. "Had
I lost you," it said, "you would not have been the
ones, and I would have killed her, then come back
looking for you."
My breath caught when it said that. It spoke so
calmly of destroying us, as if doing so would be a matter
of no concern to it. And then it touched my ankle, and
the skin began to glow, and for just an instant I could
see the bone beneath it. And the pain went away.
"There," it told me. "Now you'll be able to walk
on it. Be careful not to hurt it again. The next time,
you won't find anyone who will fix it."
It straightened and looked at Giraud. "Sit beside
her. Wait for me. I'll return."
Giraud sat and waited. Neither of us talked—I said
nothing because I feared it might be listening to us,
and I was afraid that I might say something that
would make it decide to kill me. I didn't ask Giraud
his reasons for keeping quiet, of course. We sat on
the carved stone bench, holding hands, staring out
through a beautiful carved archway at the blazing sky
and the creeping edge of twilight that slid down the
sky behind it, and we waited.
"You're hungry," the monster said, reappearing
behind us so suddenly and soundlessly that we both
jumped. "I have food for you—to eat now, and when
you get ready to leave, enough to get you where you
must go."
It handed us a heavy wooden bowl full of little
brown crunchy morsels all mixed in with seeds and
dried fruits and shreds of dried jerky.
I glanced from the meat to it, and it said, "Wild
goat," as if it knew that I wondered where it got its
meat. I had no wish to discover after the fact that
I'd eaten a bit of someone who'd just been passing
through.
It left the food with me, vanished back into its hole
in the wall, and reappeared, this time with two tall
goblets. They held water, I discovered, and sweeter,
more welcome water I have never tasted. I drank
slowly, savoring each drop. And when I finished, I
dug into the bowl and tried some of everything. I
liked the nuts well enough, and the dried fruits were
very tasty, and the jerky had that strong flavor I've
come to associate with goat. The brown, crunchy
tidbits, though, tasted like nothing I'd ever had be-
fore—slightly salty, meaty, incredibly rich, with just
the faintest hint of unfamiliar spiciness. Those I tossed
down by the handful.
I glanced over at Giraud as I ate, and wondered
if I looked as much the starved wild beast as he did.
Not that I cared. After a day without food, I would
have shoved my face into the bowl and eaten with-
out using my hands had that been my only way of
getting to it.
Giraud and I devoured every bit of the meal—I
felt near to exploding by the time I finished. Then
the monster settled itself on the stone bench, lit the
lamp it carried, and set it on the floor between us.
The flickering flame cast pale light upward, illumi-
nating our faces from below and casting distorting
shadows that made Giraud look like a stranger and
transformed the monster into something almost
demonic.
"You do not need to know my name," it said with-
out preamble, "but you need to know why I've waited
for you. Listen closely and say nothing until I've fin-
ished, for I will not answer questions, and I will not
repeat what I tell you.
"I am one of the nantatsu," it said, and those words
froze my heart as solid as river ice in the darkest days
of winter. Like every child, I'd been told stories of
the nantatsu—of their magic and their evil; of the way
they haunted the mountain passes and hunted among
travelers for their next meals; of the rumors that they
tortured and sacrificed and devoured their victims.
They were known as the White Spirits of the Moun-
tains, and every story I'd heard insisted that they were
virtually inescapable, nearly unkillable, and utterly
without mercy.
The monster glanced from my face to Giraud's,
chuckled, and said, "Always, travelers know of the
nantatsu. You will be unique among travelers, how-
ever, in that, if you do as I tell you, you will survive
our meeting. This time."
Giraud took my hand and held it.
"I have been in this cave for a long time—longer
than you can imagine. It is my home, the place
where I was born, but it is not the place where I
will die," the nantatsu said. "I am older than I
choose to be, but because of a spell cast on me by
a long-ago bard, I have been unable to travel to the
dying grounds to prepare my egg or bring forth my
successor. I have been trapped here for long ages,
awaiting your arrival.
"When I caught the bard, I refused to give him
his life, but before I could kill him, he cast on me
this songspell."
It began to sing. I immediately recognized the first
part—
"Two will come,
Unfinished stories.
Books half-written ..."
It sang clear to the last line of the song it had
quoted to us when it caught us in its cave-room
before:
"To them give the key."
It didn't stop there, though. It began another verse
of its song.
"Bag of bones,
Box of wood,
String and voice,
Words and breath—
And as within
So without
And as together
So apart.
Guardian be
By my will
Until they come
Until they come—
Worldsinger and
The voice of time.
And when the song
Is sung, is sung . . .
You will be free."
"Killing that misbegotten snack didn't break the
spell, and trying to destroy the objects he'd left behind
in my care proved impossible, and the Worldsinger
has not yet come through my door, though I tell you
I have tried everyone who has. To some who arrived
before you I've given his cursed pack, and let them
try to leave—but the pack will not leave with any save
the right one, and will not let me leave until the right
one comes.
"I've puzzled this out for years on top of years,"
it continued. "I know what you have to do. You're
to take the spell I've marked in the book, and you're
to go to the Pillar of the Sun at the summit of
Hearthold Mountain, where you're to sing it." It
growled. "I've tried my best to decipher the mean-
ing of the song, but I cannot. I don't know the bards
writing, and I don't know human magic. No doubt
it's a spell I won't like much, but that doesn't mat-
ter. When you sing it and I'm set free, I'll travel to
the breeding grounds to breed and die, and I don't
care what happens after that."
I said nothing. Giraud said nothing.
The nantatsu snarled. "All these years, bards and
wizards have come looking to reclaim their magic
book. They feel it out with their spells, and they
follow it to me, yet none of them has freed me." It
stared at me, then at Giraud. Its eyes sparked fiercely
in the dim light of its lamp.
"Tomorrow at sunrise, I will give you the pack and
try to take you to the road to Hearthold Mountain,
so that you can sing the damned bard's cursed song.
If the pack will let you leave—if you are the two
'unfinished stories' that I've been waiting for—I will
accompany you as far as the base of the mountain,
so that I can be sure that you don't get lost or for-
get the task you are to be about. When you climb
up to the peak of the mountain to sing, I will wait
for you below. If you succeed, I will be freed, and
I will go to the dying ground. If you fail, or if you
do anything to betray me, you will find me waiting
for you when you come down."
The monster picked up its lamp and rose.
"You will stay in here tonight. Don't try to leave,
of course."
It turned and moved quickly away, slipping through
the stone door that opened before it and slid noiselessly
shut behind it.
I squeezed Giraud's hand.
"Well," he said softly.
"What do you think it is?"
"The spell?"
"Yes."
He shrugged. "I was trying to think of stories from
the history I know—tales of bards with spells who
went into the mountains and were devoured by
nantatsu, or stories of wondrous magical spells lost
and never recovered." He shook his head. "I can't
think of anything that would seem to apply to our
situation—but if the Watchowl bards still consider the
spell something that they must retrieve, perhaps they
haven't let word of its existence get out."
I'd done something similar, trying to remember, as
I listened to the monster's story, the conversations my
father had carried on late into the night with his
important visitors from all over Terosalle. Like Giraud,
I came up empty.
But if I couldn't remember any useful stories or
rumors, I could do something practical toward
improving the chances of my survival. I took my other
clothes out of the cloak pocket I'd carried them in
and stuffed them into the empty pack. I didn't have
anything else to put in it. If I had to sleep on a stone
slab, I wanted to do it with a decent pillow. I could
use my cloak as a blanket. The stone bench would
be a cold, hard bed, but after years in Birdie's loft,
I wasn't used to much better.
When I had my pillow made and my blanket read-
ied, I gave Giraud a quick kiss on the cheek, then
moved to the other bench and stretched out on it.
"You're going to sleep?" he asked.
"We're to be awakened at sunrise, and I thought
I ought to get a good rest first."
"Well, yes . . ." He didn't look convinced. Giraud
was no doubt hatching some thrilling plan for sliding
down the side of the mountain without making a
sound, thus escaping the clutches of the nantatsu. He
would have all sorts of historical precedents for such
heroics, and would be certain that we could get to
safety before the nantatsu realized anything was amiss.
I decided I needed to forestall the suggestion of
heroics that would surely be coming my way. I said,
"I'm not going to try to escape from such a monster
in its own lair."
"But you don't think we're the ones this magical
spell that the monster spoke of has been waiting on,
do you?" he asked.
I raised an eyebrow. "No. I figure we're doomed
no matter what happens, but I would rather live for
tomorrow's chances than die for sure tonight." I
shrugged. "If we're going to die, nothing I can do
will change that. But if we're going to live, then I
need to get a good night's sleep, because tomorrow
may be as difficult as today was."
Giraud sat on his own bench watching me for a
moment. I thought he was going to try to talk me
into running, no matter what I'd said, but he didn't.
"You're disgustingly practical sometimes." He shrug-
ged, though, and gave me a wry half-smile. "I won't
leave without you," he said. Then he pulled off his
own cloak and divested it of spare clothing. He made
himself a bed like mine, and settled in to sleep the
sleep of the hopeful.

Chapter Four

The feeling that something watched me woke me.
The nantatsu stood near the doorway into the
stone room, arms crossed and hidden within the
deep folds of its sleeves, alternately studying Giraud
and me. In a soft voice, it said, "Your scent fills my
home, little morsel. Pray you are the ones who can
break the bard's spell, and pray you can do it
quickly, for my appetite grows with every instant that
we linger here."
How wonderful, I thought, to wake and find myself
considered in the role of breakfast snack. I did not
wait for the nantatsu to suggest that I get up. Ini-
tiative was best, I thought. Instead, I jumped up and
shook Giraud until he awoke. The momentary bewil-
derment in his eyes, before he remembered the
terrible day that had brought the two of us to that
place and that predicament, could have broken my
heart. I wished I could give him back his father and
his brothers, his home, his safe, quiet future as a his-
torian—I wished I could give myself back the feel-
ing that I knew what was going to happen next in
my life, or that I had some control over it.
Well, I couldn't, and what's more, I didn't have the
time to worry about it right then, either. I said, "Get
up—fast. It's time to go."
He yawned and stretched, and half-way through
his stretch, saw the nantatsu. He bounded to his feet,
tucked his extra clothes into his pack, and said, "Well,
I'm ready."
The monster watched us, head tipped to one side
and jaws clicking out an unnerving, staccato beat. It
sad nothing for the longest time, and then it giggled.
My skin crawled. "Are you truly ready?" it asked.
And how were we to answer that?
I took a deep breath and stood straighter and said,
"Yes. We are."
It handed each of us something wrapped in oil-
cloth and tied—clumsily—with thick string.
"Your rations," it said, and turned its back on the
two of us. "Now follow me."
The monster hurried along its stony passage, and
Giraud and I scrambled after it, not daring to let it
get too far ahead, even though it seemed bent on
losing us in the twisting labyrinth of its home.
It moved down into the darkness, away from tiny,
cunningly concealed windows carved out of the rock
face, to a place where no natural light touched. In
that place, the corridors twisted steadily downward,
and I felt, as I ran behind the nantatsu, the weight
of the mountain growing over my shoulders and head,
as if I were carrying them with me. The corridor walls
glowed a sickly green—I could feel the touch of magic
in the light, but it was magic of an ugly, twisted sort.
The ugliness got worse quickly, scraping against all
my senses. I noticed a slight tickle of scent at the
back of my throat. Something light but unnerving. It
became denser as we descended, though, and at last
became almost unbearable. Sweetness, cloying sweet-
ness. And the stink of rotting meat. My eyes watered
and I gagged, but I kept hurrying after the nantatsu.
I held one edge of my cloak over my face and
breathed through it, and was grateful that I'd taken
the time and care to weave the material tightly.
I knew that I headed into something terrible, and
with all my heart I wished I could retreat back up
the way I'd come. But the monster seemed to be
hoping for some sign that Giraud and I were not the
people it needed to set it free, because if we gave
that sign, it would devour us. It was hungry, we were
its natural prey, and it restrained itself from killing
us only with difficulty.
"Here," the nantatsu said at last. "Come in." It
giggled again, that same mad sound that set my teeth
on edge and made me want to flee. "Oh, do come
in."
Only the faintest of lights illuminated the center
of this room. The edges lay in darkness, and the dark-
ness, like the smell, had its own frightful weight. The
stink here lay so thick in the air it seemed to be the
mother of the blackness that shrouded us; tears ran
down my cheeks and I breathed through my cloak
in little, shallow gasps and prayed that my nose would
go numb. Beside me Giraud made muffled gagging
noises through the folds of his cloak. We stepped
together into the darkness at the edge of the sickly
light, holding hands tightly. I drew courage from his
presence. It would have been a terrible place to be
alone.
The center of the room held a narrow pillar only
a little shorter than me, and on the pillar lay a worn
leather pack so old that I could see from where I was
that the leather was rotting. The pack looked like the
sort peddlers carry, or traveling priests, or some bards.
"There," the nantatsu said. "There's the bard's prize.
Go get it."
I took a step forward, and Giraud moved with me,
but a sudden crawly sensation at the back of my neck
stopped me. Giraud started to take another step
forward, but I tightened my grip on his hand until
he said, "Ow," and tried to yank it free. He stopped
and elbowed me in the ribs and muttered, "That
hurt."
"Go ahead," the monster said. "Take it."
"No," I told it. "Something's wrong."
"Something's always wrong," it said. "Just as
something's always right. The trick is to figure out
which is which, isn't it?"
Neither Giraud nor I answered.
"Your prize is waiting."
I sensed Giraud turning to look at me in the dark-
ness. I couldn't see his face. I couldn't see much of
anything but that faint glow of light, and the pack
atop the pillar, and the light that just barely reflected
off of the nantatsu, enough to make it visible to me.
It stood to my right, waiting, head cocked to one side,
jaws again clicking.
"You've done something to it, or to the path to it,"
I said, suddenly certain this was the case.
Silence greeted that assertion, a lingering, uncom-
fortable silence in which I thought I could hear the
monster imagining ways to cook me before it ate me.
Then the nantatsu sighed. "Very well," it said. "You
prove again that you are not my meat."
The light in the room's center grew brighter, inten-
sifying from the ugly greenish light to one brighter
and yellower and somehow healthier. And now I could
see what I had not seen before—that thirty or more
doors led into the room from every direction; and that
the floor in front of each of them had been carved
into a deep pit; and that long, exquisitely carved and
polished spikes of stone rose out of the floor of that
circular pit. No safe path led to the pillar. I could
see, too, that others before me had been led into this
room, and that many of them had tried to reach the
pack and had failed. The fleshless skulls of some of
my predecessors stared up at me with grinning jaws
and empty eye-sockets; other more recent victims of
the nantatsu still wore a few remnants of decaying
flesh over the framework of their bones.
The monster giggled. "I've had my dawnmeal and
duskmeal many times over in this place," it said. "I'd
hoped the two of you would join me here for a quick
bite, as well." Then it shrugged philosophically and
snapped its fingers; the pack lifted itself off of the
pillar and floated to the monster. "To daylight," the
nantasu said, "before I grow weary of the novelty of
letting you live. Perhaps if I killed and ate you, I
would find some sort of pleasure in living forever or
eventually the bard's spell would be broken anyway."
It hissed. "No, no, that wouldn't work," it mumbled
to itself. "I'll be forever in here unless the spell
breaks; I become mortal when they go and take the
bard's pack with them. If I kill them I will never die,
but I will never mate, and if I never mate I will never
have my young." It backed into the passageway while
it mumbled to itself and began moving back upward
through the tunnels and corridors again.
"It's crazy," Giraud said.
I nodded vigorously.
"We have to go with it though."
I nodded again.
He hurried after it as quickly as he could. I fol-
lowed.
What were we supposed to do about the mad mon-
ster? Could we do anything? It had every advantage
over us—at least every advantage I could see. So we
followed it as it demanded we do, and we tried to
be unobtrusive.
I wondered if all the nantatsu were mad, or if only
this one was. Perhaps this one had lost its mind from
having been alone so long, trapped in its lair. The
stories of the nantatsu always said they were terrible
creatures, but never mentioned that they were insane.
I had time to wonder while I followed the monster
up the passageway. I hoped, of course, that I would
never make close enough acquaintance with another
such horror that I could compare.
At last we reached a dead end.
"This is where we stop," the monster said.
The tunnel, lit with the same green light as all the
rest of the windowless tunnels, simply stopped, as if
someone had wearied of digging it. I glanced at
Giraud. Had the nantatsu taken us all this way just
so it could kill us here? But it said, "Now I must do
the magic that will take us out of my home—if you
are who you say you are."
Neither of us had said we were anything special.
Still, faced with my imminent death, I found myself
praying that we were, because either we were the
heroes foretold by a dead bard's last prophecy, or we
were doomed. I didn't like our odds.
The nantatsu wasn't paying attention to either of
us right then, however. It stood behind us, blocking
any hope of escape, and it tucked its long chin against
its chest and began to mutter. As it mumbled words
I couldn't understand, it began to glow, and quickly
transformed from a solid, very real monster to a trans-
parent, milky white specter. As it changed, so did its
robes. When they became translucent, they began to
whip around it like the tattered edges of a storm
cloud, or like fog come to life. I gasped, and Giraud
said, "The White Spirit."
The monster screamed—an ear-battering ululating
wail that went on and on and on, as if the nantatsu
didn't breathe like humans did, but used air only to
fuel its mad screaming. As it screamed, my entire
body began to tingle, and the air thickened and grew
terribly cold, and I felt myself beginning to freeze
solid. My eyesight blurred, and I grew lightheaded.
I woke face-down on cold, damp rock, aware first
of the aching pain in every muscle of my body, and
next of the thunderous roar of falling water nearby,
and finally of the fact that something was trying to
wake me. That something shook me and cluttered at
me, and suddenly pinched me. I came bolt upright
with a shriek of pain, and jumped back as I looked
into the grinning, attenuated death's-head face of the
nantatsu.
"I thought I would have my meal for sure," it told
me. "But, no. I don't want to eat you . . . yet. I'm
not yet fully unbound. If you fail me, you'll be my
meal."
I looked around for Giraud. He lay behind me, still
not moving, though I could see him breathing.
"What did you do to us?" I asked the nantatsu.
It chuckled. "You cannot walk through the world-
walls as I can. You are weak, or untrained, or per-
haps just stupid. A wizard or a bard would not have
fainted."
Oh. It was my fault. It figured.
I started to try to wake up Giraud, but the nantatsu
grabbed my shoulder with its claw the instant I turned
away, and snarled, "You shall not leave."
"I'm not leaving. I'm going to get Giraud up so
that we can do whatever you want us to do."
"Oh." Its claw released my shoulder. I could tell I
was going to have a bruise there in a day or two. I
didn't complain, though. I just went to Giraud, drop-
ped to my knees at his side, and started shaking him.
"Giraud. Giraud. Get up. You've got to get up."
He rolled over, stared up at me, and frowned. "I
dreamed you already woke me—" and then his voice
trailed off as he realized we were no longer in the
nantatsu's house, but in a valley at the base of a huge,
single mountain peak that stabbed up through the
trees around us and pierced the black blanket of angry
clouds that butted up against its higher reaches.
"That's Hearthold Mountain?" he said.
I followed his glance to the flashes of lightning that
sparkled along the upper reaches and turned the roil-
ing underbellies of the clouds momentarily gray before
darkness returned. "Evidently. I haven't yet discussed
it with our . . . companion."
He frowned and rose. "So now we all travel up
there, do we?"
The nantatsu joined us. "No. As I told you, I will
wait here. You will follow the path upward—you will
not find it terribly difficult, for all that it is long
and steep. You will have resting places along the
way, and as long as you avoid meeting anyone who
might be there, you should reach the top alive."
Giraud said, "Anyone . . . ? Like other nantatsu?"
"There are no nantatsu on Hearthold Mountain,"
the monster said. "Yet."
Sounded like a good place to be, as far as I was
concerned. "So who are we likely to meet?"
"The Karger Magad dwarves."
"Dwarves are often allies of humans," I said. "They
won't hurt us, in any case."
"I've touched you," the nantatsu said, and lowered
its voice. "My touch and my magic will be as clear
to any Karger Magad as if I had carved my name on
your flesh. And no matter what the Hearthold Moun-
tain dwarves might think of you, I guarantee you they
do not harbor any warm feelings for me. Too many
of them have found a resting place among my piles
of bones, while their tough flesh served to abate my
hunger for a little while."
So. The potential allies we might have found on
the mountain, and the potential safe harbor we might
have hoped for, would be denied us because we bore
the monster's mark. We could not hope for any help
or any kindness, nor for any supplies, either going
up the mountain or coming down. Worse, if we were
discovered, we could expect active resistance. More
danger. More enemies.
I didn't feel I needed any more enemies in my life.
And then the monster said, "Come here. You must
know what you are to be about," and beckoned the
two of us nearer with a hooked claw.
Reluctantly, I went to it, and Giraud went with me.
"This is the destiny created for the two of you long
before you were born," the nantatsu said. It opened
the ancient pack and from it pulled forth a book that
looked quite unusual to me. Its pages, creamy yel-
low and unevenly hand-cut from sheets of parchment,
were bound in octavo by waxed twists of gut string
knotted through the back. The pages were protected
by thin wooden covers hinged along the left and kept
in place by three wooden dowels driven through the
binding. It appeared to be a sturdy book, but it also
looked awfully heavy.
"One of the First Age books," Giraud said.
The monster studied him, and said, "Indeed, little
scholar. Its type is quite recent in relation to the his-
tory of my people; quite ancient, no doubt, in rela-
tion to the history of yours. From what I could gather
from the bard who . . . gave ... it to me, it is a
commonplace book, and was owned by a succession
of bards before the one I ate."
The monster turned the pages carefully, and I
could see that its claws were poorly designed for the
task. When it arrived at the last entry, it pointed to
the scrawling black letters written by a heavy, grace-
less hand and said, "This is the spell and the song
that my dinner was trying to take to Hearthold
Mountain. Before his demise, the bard told me that
Hearthold Mountain resonates with karai, which he
said was the basic and essential magic of the earth
itself." The nantatsu chuckled. "His words, not mine.
He also said the world's karai energy has been thrown
out of tune by some sort of interference with the
living rock, and the resulting magic is subtly warped.
As a result, events in our world are turning even
darker and more evil."
"That would explain a lot," Giraud said.
I glanced at him. "If it were true, it might. But
why would it be true?"
The nantatsu said, "Perhaps it isn't. But whether
it's true or not doesn't concern you. Your only con-
cern is to reach the Pillar of the Sun alive so you
can sing this song."
Giraud said, "But maybe what the bard was tell-
ing you was important."
The nantatsu glanced at him. "Not to me, it wasn't.
He went on at some length, discussing karai and
synchronicity and the evil in the world; trying to tie
them to my actions and me to evil. A lot of blather,
really. Evil would be if people quit going overland
via my path. The rest of what he talked about was
what snacks do when they aren't being eaten, and who
cares about that?"
We do, I thought. But being a relatively bright girl,
and fond of my skin, I kept quiet.
"He thought he'd found a cure for this evil, of
course. I don't doubt at all that's what the song is."
It handed the book to Giraud, who stuck it in his
pack. "So go on. Up the mountain, both of you. Sing
the song and free me, and you'll never see me again."
Giraud said, "Let's go."
"Don't fail," the nantatsu said as we hurried toward
the path that led up the side of the mountain.
"Because if you do, you will see me again. But not
for long."
So we had an old book with a song in it that
we were supposed to sing; we were under strict
orders not to cross paths with any dwarves on fear
of death either from them or from the nantatsu
should we survive them; we didn't know where we
were to go other than up; or what effect the song
we were supposed to sing was intended to have;
and on top of that, it started to rain. Light rain
at first, but the further we climbed, the harder it
got.
And we did climb. The smooth slope of the path
became slick, and changed at some point to steps.
We were too wet and tired to talk to each other. And
I, at least, could think of nothing to say. I had a pleas-
ant enough voice, but I knew only a little more of
bardic magic than the average bogger, and that only
from half-remembered conversations with my father
when I was very young. How was I to do magic? How
was Giraud? He was no more a bard than I.
I wish I could say that I felt somehow special—
that the nantatsu's strange prophecy and murmurings
of magic and bards and spells made me believe that
I had a task in the world that set me apart—but it
wasn't like that. I was cold, and I was wet, and I was
scared. Under such circumstances, you don't feel
touched by the gods. You don't feel courageous and
invincible. You just feel the hard rock under your feet
and the ache in your thighs and the rumbling in your
gut, and you wish you were home in a warm bed,
with someone to take care of you.
The steps we climbed grew steeper and narrower,
and the rain began sluicing down them as if they were
a riverbed readying itself to flood. The dwarves had
carved gutters on both sides of them, and grooved
channels into them to prevent such dangerous flood-
ing. But the dwarves hadn't planned for the rain that
suddenly dropped out of the sky like entire lakes
upended.
And later still, I realized when I stopped to catch
my breath that we had lost the clear, easy path the
nantatsu had set us upon. We were still traveling
upward, and we still had endless switchbacked steps,
but these steps were worn and crudely cut. No rain
channels, no neat gutters to either side.
Giraud came back down to me and shouted over
the rain, "These aren't the same steps!"
"I know. I just realized that!"
"Do you want to go back?"
I thought about losing ground, only to have to turn
around and climb again. I didn't want to climb any-
more. The adventure of the day before had left me
hurting and weary, and the endless climb in the rain
had added to the pain and the exhaustion, and was
giving me chills and an aching head besides.
"No. Up is up. All of them will take us to the top
sooner or later. I want to keep going."
"Me too. But what if we can't get to where we
need to be from here?"
"I don't care," I said. "I don't want to backtrack."
He gave me a quick hug. "Then what do you want
to do?"
"Find shelter," I told him.
So half-blinded by the rain, scared bootless by the
lightning that rattled the upper reaches of the moun-
tain, buffeted by shrieking wind, we began to climb
again.
We didn't climb far before we found the cave.
I never would have guessed it was a cave; I would
have mistaken it for a waterfall, the way the water
poured off of it. But I'd been going forward and
I took what would have been the logical next step
up and forward and there was no step there, and
I lost my balance, staggered forward even further,
arms braced to catch myself on the rock wall ahead
and to my left . . . and I kept right on falling,
through a thin sheet of pouring water and into dark-
ness and dryness.
My first instinct was to get Giraud. I lunged back
out and screamed for him, and somehow he heard
me over the wind and the thunder. He came back
and we tumbled together into the wonderful, tiny
cave. Considering that my situation at that moment
resulted from a previous foray into a cave, I'm sur-
prised I didn't listen to my second instinct, which was
to rush back out into the cold and the wet, with the
lightning and the wind.
The rain drowned my second instinct, though, so
I stayed with the first one. Giraud and I sat together,
our teeth chattering, trying to warm ourselves and
each other.
"Have you . . . ever . . . been so wet?" he asked
me.
"Not . . . not ever," I said. I felt the cold all the
way into my bones, as if I were frozen clear through
and my stupid heart simply didn't know enough to
stop beating. I rubbed my hands over my arms as
quickly as I could move them, but with wet clothes,
wet skin, and cold hands, the warmth I managed to
create for myself was little and less. "Do you think
it will ever stop raining out there, or is it always like
this?"
Giraud said, "It couldn't possibly rain like this all
the time, or whoever carved all those steps never
could have carved them."
"It rains this way more than you might imagine,
though," a third voice said behind both of us, and
as we both yelped and started to jump to our feet
to flee, added, "Oh, don't move. I'd hate to have to
kill you before I even found out who you were."

Chapter Five

We both put our hands up, palms out to show we
held no weapons, and we turned. Slowly. I looked way
up, expecting to see another of the accursed nantatsu,
expecting that this time I was going to be a midday
snack for something big and ugly. I discovered . . .
nothing.
I lowered my gaze slowly.
And lowered it further.
And further.
And at the level of my waist—and I am not the
tallest woman alive by any means, nor was I the tallest
girl—I discovered the top of the head of a short,
squat, exceedingly ugly dwarf who held a crossbow
aimed upward between the two of us, pointing his
arrow first at Giraud and then at me. My initial
impression of him was that he was even uglier than
the nantatsu, which seemed to me even as I thought
it to be odd. After all, I couldn't think of a single
story where a dwarf ate a human, and that should
have made him seem more attractive than the nan-
tatsu right away. Still, he was the ugliest dwarf I'd
ever seen. His nose sat off-center on his face, looking
like a melon that had fallen off a farmer's wagon to
the cobblestones and split. His upper lip, swelled to
enormous proportions, protruded from his face almost
as far as his dreadful nose. His eyes were merest slits
peering out of swollen purple-and-green bruises,
though a pair of rimless spectacles perched on the
bridge of his nose, looking delicate and utterly out
of place, added a comical touch of the civilized.
I stared at him a moment longer, and then I began
to laugh.
Giraud glanced at me like one stricken, and then
he stared back at the dwarf, and then, terribly, a
snicker escaped him, too.
The old folks say the gods watch out for children
and fools, and we were, at that moment, both. The
dwarf glared at us, then he lowered his crossbow, and
started to chuckle. "I look terrible," he said. "But you
should see yourselves. I've seen corpses pulled out
of a river that looked better than you."
We looked at each other, Giraud and I, and saw
ourselves as we must have looked to the stranger. Our
skin had turned blue-gray from the cold and, in the
poor light of the cave mouth, seemed to glow with
a distinctly corpselike, waxy sheen. Further, our hair
hung in our eyes and clung to our faces in snaky
ropes, and our clothes stuck to us and dripped in
puddles on the floor.
Giraud said, "Our last two days have been . . .
difficult." I heard the catch in his voice when he said
it, and so did the dwarf.
"I understand difficult," he said. He bowed stiffly
from the waist, in the manner of dwarves, and said,
"My name is Maydellan Ha. I am keeper and owner
of this small, miserable cave, at least until such time
as I enlarge it and make it comfortable, or conversely
leave it to seek my fortune elsewhere. In the mean-
time, welcome, both of you, to such hospitality as I
can offer. Since you invited yourselves in, anyway."
For someone who was supposed to be ready to kill
us on sight because of the magic mark we bore, he
seemed rather friendly. Gruff, but all the same, I
thought I could deal with gruff much more readily
than murderous.
"We fell in," I said, hoping to smooth over our
abrupt arrival in his home. "We couldn't see where
we were going."
He nodded. "And where were you going? I haven't
seen humans here in ... well, let's be honest. I
haven't ever seen humans here."
"Where were we going?" I repeated.
"Where were we going?" Giraud asked.
"Up," I said, and nodded as if that answered the
question.
"Up." Maydellan Ha raised one bushy eyebrow and
said, "I suppose sooner or later you would have to
get where you were going, then, if you were just going
. . . up? But ... by Tharkas, in this weather? Without
rain gear or weapons, you were climbing Hearthold—
and you fell through my door, too, and I'm not close
to any of the main upwalks." He shook his head.
"Hospitality calls for a measure of honesty in return.
If you don't mind me saying so." He snorted. "Or
even if you do."
Giraud and I looked at each other. I thought if we
left out the part about the nantatsu we'd probably
be all right, but then what reason could we have for
climbing to the top right then, instead of waiting for
a day when a thunderstorm didn't wreath the peak?
"It's like this—" I said at the same time that Giraud
said, "It's a long story."
I deferred to him. Who better than a historian to
tell a long story? Except after he told the part about
Birdie and Marda trying to sell me to the whoremas-
ter, and after he told about the death of his family
at the hands of the new empress's men, and after he
told about our daring escape into the cave in the cliff,
he told about the nantatsu, too, and the bard's book,
and what we had to do to survive. He made the story
longer than I would have, and included things I would
have left out, but I will admit he told it better.
Maydellan Ha was a fine listener. He built us a
fire while Giraud talked, and settled himself closest
to the door so that he partly blocked the wind that
blew in on us. He murmured appreciatively at the
exciting parts, shook his head at the sad parts, and
sat gape-mouthed at the mention of our run-in with
the nantatsu. And he didn't shoot us then, either,
which made him my favorite sort of listener. When
Giraud stopped telling the story, Ha turned to me.
"Incredible. Do you have anything to add?"
"Only that the nantatsu said if we crossed paths
with any of the dwarves here, they would kill us
because they would see its mark on us."
"Its mark." Ha shoved his spectacles up his nose
in what looked like a habitual gesture, but when his
hand touched the swollen flesh, he yelped. "Damn
Thatterburgan Vo!" he muttered. "And consign him
to the lowest circle of hell's icefield, head-first." He
sat with his eyes closed for a moment, rocking back
and forth, breathing deeply. I could tell he was try-
ing to gain control of the pain, or perhaps of him-
self. "That burns like a white-hot brand in the eye,"
he added. Then he opened his eyes and sighed. "You
don't have any mark on you that I can see, nor any
mark that I can feel. I'm not the most magically
sensitive dwarf in the world, but you don't glow in
the dark or trail a dreadful cloud after the two of you.
You look to me about as dangerous as any other
drowned rats."
Giraud laughed a little.
I was starting to feel better—my clothes were
beginning to dry out, and along with them my hair
and my skin; the warmth of the fire began soaking
through to my bones; and I could only think of one
pressing need that I had. Well, two. And the second
I thought the dwarf would have the facilities for.
I was right. When I got back, and then Giraud left
and returned, I said, "Would you mind if we ate? I'm
starving, and I don't know what sort of supplies the
nantatsu gave us ..."
He waved me to silence with a tiny gesture. "Eat.
I'll join you. And perhaps add a bite to your fare
while I'm about it. I have a little larder. My own
situation is not . . . good. Not at all good. But I can
certainly spare some food."
He rose, ducked into a little tunnel off the "room"
where we sat, and returned with bread and cheese
and long strips of smoked jerky that was tougher than
shoe soles but wonderful on the tongue. Giraud and
I pulled out the nantatsu's packets and unwrapped
them. They were both filled with more of the same
sort of thing we'd eaten the night before.
While Giraud and I ate, trying not to gorge our-
selves or deplete his larder, Ha said, "I'm interested
in this trip of yours to the top of Hearthold and
beyond. I have a real need to be elsewhere for a
while . . ." His voice trailed off into silence and he
stared up at the low arch of the tunnel overhead.
"... Yes. Elsewhere. And I think, considering I've
seen no weapons on either of you save the knives
you eat with, that you might appreciate some pro-
tection from the ... ah ... the obstacles you might
find on your path."
"The person who beat you up likely to come after
you again?" Giraud asked.
"I wish it were that simple." Ha glanced at him,
eyebrow arched. "The fellow I fought with is in much
worse shape than I am. Much worse. There was, when
I left the alehall, some question of whether he would
survive his last fall. Which is especially unfortunate
since he's Gamber Tok, Fimbal Tok's son, and Fimbal
Tok has spent most of Gamber's life buying him out
of the trouble he got himself into. He'll send trouble
after me if Camber doesn't survive."
I felt uneasy. This ugly, generous young fellow
could turn out to be a killer? I hoped there would
be some logical explanation—perhaps the Tok son had
attacked Ha over the love of a woman ... or per-
haps it had been mistaken identity ... or a fight over
honor. So I asked him, "What happened?"
"We got drunk, and we bet we could knock each
other down," Maydellan Ha said. And there went my
hopes of a story of unrequited love, or even of honor.
Men and their drinking and gambling—it would be
that, wouldn't it? I wrinkled my nose; Ha noticed.
"Not something a lady would do, eh? Well, we weren't
ladies, and we were quite drunk, and we got onto the
stage and started punching each other. I had a friend
of mine hold my glasses—my eyes have never been
as strong as my fists." He grinned.
"Or your mind, either, I bet," I muttered.
"My ears work fine, though," he said. "I grant you,
it wasn't the cleverest thing to do, to bet Tok's son
that I could knock him down before he could knock
me down, and it got worse when I found out he had
little bags of lead clutched in his fists. That's how I
got these." He pointed to the wounds on his face.
"But I'm a good fighter, and if you have time for
it to come down to skill, the good fighter will win,
even if the cheater has more weight in his hands."
"So you beat him up so badly that he might die,"
I said. I felt sick to my stomach.
Ha looked startled. "Of course not. I hit him until
he fell down, and said I'd won the bet. He got up,
one of his friends, a fellow named Thatterburgan Vo,
tossed him his knife, Tok charged me, I jumped out
of his way, and that ass Tok fell off the stage. When
he fell, he stabbed himself in the belly with his knife
and hit his head on the corner of a table when he
landed. The healer thinks he might have broken the
bones in his neck, too, but neither of those injuries
may even get the chance to matter because he has
a crack in his skull and he hasn't woken up since he
fell."
So it hadn't been Maydellan Ha's fault after all.
He'd been fighting a cheater who tried to kill him
when he won—and the terrible injuries had all been
accidental.
I couldn't see much he could do about that, or why
he should be in any trouble with anyone. I said as
much.
"I agreed to fight him," he said. "He's the one who
demanded the wager and the fight—I have a repu-
tation, and he thought I didn't deserve it. But his
father feels that I should have refused the fight. So
he's made it known that he'll be sure I pay for not
having done so."
Giraud leaned forward, looking bewildered. "Even
though Gamber cheated? Even though he tried to kill
you after he lost?"
"This is a family that has never taken responsibility
for anything," Ha said. "Tok the Younger gloried in
the trouble he could cause everyone else because he
knew he could get away with it. Tok the Elder is a
mean bastard with too much money, who could never
see that shielding his son from the consequences of
his own actions might not be as good for him as
allowing him to take his lumps when they came.
Together the two of them need to be dropped down
a deep well, but that isn't going to happen." He
sighed and put another few scraps of wood on his
little fire.
I watched the smoke curl up through a crack in
the top of the tunnel and thought about people I'd
known who'd been like Tok the Younger. In the lim-
ited world in Blackwarren, I could only recall two—
tiny Blackwarren didn't have enough people to have
any particular type in large supply, and spoiled
children of wealthy and powerful men were scarce.
But my memories of my court days with Salgestis and
the children of court hangers-on and high officials
were rife with examples of the sort of people who
traded on their immunity from punishment. Truth be
told, I much preferred the company of the children
of other bards and those outside the circle of the
court to the majority of the offspring of the high-born
and high-climbing; like me, they'd had a bit of civi-
lization thumped into their backsides and knew their
privileges were privileges, not rights.
Giraud said, "Then what are you going to do?"
"Well, I was going to live here for a while. It's a
long way from my real home, hard to find, and in-
convenient to reach." He chuckled. "Which doesn't
seem to be sufficient to keep complete strangers from
falling through my doorway."
"It probably won't be much of a hindrance for Tok
the Elder if he's determined to get to you," Giraud said.
"I've been coming to the same conclusion. And as
for comfort, I think I'd be more comfortable some-
place dry and warm and green and sunny—in other
words, someplace far from here."
I could see the dwarf as our companion. He was
someone who knew how to fight without weapons and
who surely had some skill with weapons as well. He
looked ferocious enough to frighten off at least some
of the people—and non-people—who were hunting
for us and who wanted to hurt us. He would be
another set of eyes and ears and hands. He would
surely have his own weapons—which made him some-
what better off than either Giraud or I were. And
he had a pragmatic air about him that meshed well
with my own views of the world.
Frankly, I liked him. I said, "So come with us. We
could use a friend."
Ha laughed. "I'd say so. If the nantatsu doesn't get
you, the Blackwarreners will."
"The Blackwarreners won't find us. You know your
way through the mountains."
"I do. But I don't want to go through the moun-
tains. Your nantatsu wasn't the only one, I guaran-
tee you, and you aren't likely to find another one with
a curse on it that keeps it from devouring you.
Besides, I have someplace I'd like to go."
"You do?" I asked. He'd said that with a wistful-
ness that startled me. I suppose I'd never considered
that a dwarf might be wistful about anything.
"I've always wanted to become a doctor—a non-
magical healer." He shrugged. "I have no talent for
magic at all, but I've always had some skill with herbs
and poultices, and I think I have the stomach for the
work. I have little love for mining, even if it is what
my father and his father before him did. Tradition
is just another way of enslaving yourself to someone
else's ideas, after all."
"And you have to go someplace to become a doc-
tor?"
"I've heard there's a good school south of here, in
Galarialle. I've always thought someday I'd find a way
to leave here and go there—just to see, you know,
if I could convince them to take me as a student."
"But we don't dare go back into Terosalle," Giraud
said.
"You don't—not as yourselves. But you can be
someone else easily enough. And quite honestly,
neither of you is any major threat to anyone." He
looked at Giraud. "The empress's men will give up
their hunt for you in a few days and tell the empress
you died in the mountains." He turned to me. "And
you're not important to anyone. The whoremaster will
lose a few coins, and your craftmaster and your foster-
mother will harbor a grudge against you for spoiling
their plan . . . but while you might have once been
the daughter of a High-Court bard, you're nothing
but a runaway apprentice now."
Giraud and I looked at each other. I think both
of us had seen ourselves as the subjects of unend-
ing hunts and our clever escapes as something that
would cause enormous consternation. And the idea
that people wouldn't care—that our absence would
not set up a hue and cry from one end of Terosalle
to the other, while in a way comforting, in another
way stung quite a bit. I know I sat there feeling
wounded, realizing that even to the three people from
whom I'd escaped, my life meant nothing of any real
importance.
"So what are you going to do?" Maydellan Ha
asked.
And that was the problem. We didn't know what
we were going to do. I got out the pack the nantatsu
had given us, and opened it, and from it pulled the
book. It felt heavier than it looked; I pitied Giraud,
who'd been stuck carrying it up the side of the
mountain. "I suppose we'll look through this and
figure it out."
I started thumbing through the pages of the com-
monplace book. The first dozen or so entries were
written in a crabbed, completely illegible hand.
The handwriting of the next half-dozen was round
and smooth and flowing, and I still couldn't read it.
I could figure out a word or two, but the spellings
and some of the letter-forms were different than
anything I had ever seen. It had been a long time
since I'd done much reading, though. Maybe, I
thought, I'd partly forgotten how.
The next handful of entries, in a third hand,
remained utterly unintelligible to me, and I realized
that no matter how familiar the writing looked, I
couldn't read it. In frustration, I handed the book to
Giraud. "I thought I knew how to read," I told him,
humiliated by the admission, "but I've forgotten."
He glanced at the page to which the book was
opened, then frowned. Then his expression cleared,
however, and he began to chuckle. "You haven't for-
gotten how to read, Isbetta. This is bardic shortscript.
A lot of the bardic documents are written in it. They
can write it faster than regular script, and it hasn't
changed over the past few hundred years, even though
regular writing has. Here . . ." He looked down at
the page he was studying and ran a finger along the
first line, then the second. "... This one says, 'A
Spell for Becoming Inconspicuous, to the tune of the
chorus for "Fat Lady's Stroll" or other Three-Beat
Dance:
'Here I'll be
Now you'll see
No one important
No one who
Makes you think
You ought to stay
Here I'll be
Don't see me
I'm not important
You can just
Turn back, just
Walk on away.' "
He smiled a little. "The bard who's writing this says
it came in very handy one night when the patrons
at a tavern got too rowdy. He substituted it for the
regular chorus of 'Fat Lady's Stroll' and walked out
before they realized he was gone."
I laughed. "It doesn't seem like it could do any-
thing. It's ugly verse—no imagery, no grace, just
that lumping three-beat canter." I started singing
it, imagining as I did the bard and his tavern full
of unruly customers . . . and both Giraud and
Maydellan Ha turned away from me. They started
talking to each other, completely ignoring me. I
thought they would laugh, but neither of them
even smiled. I said, "Well, I thought it was funny.
I'm sorry you didn't."
Giraud started reading another of the verses to Ha,
and I got angry. "If you didn't like the song, that's
no need to be rude."
They still didn't pay me any attention. Furious now,
I punched Giraud in the arm. "Jackass," I said.
I wasn't prepared for his reaction. He jerked
around and jumped and yelped, pulling back from
me. Ha suddenly stared at me, too, and his mouth
dropped open. "Where were you?" he asked.
I realized then they were making fun of me. "Very
funny." I crossed my arms over my chest and glared.
"Pretending you didn't know I was here—I get it now.
You aren't as funny as you think you are."
Giraud didn't crack a smile. Neither did the dwarf.
Instead, they both sat staring at me like I'd grown
two heads and wings.
"You aren't going to pretend you forgot I was here,"
I said.
Giraud said, "Who's pretending? How did you get
here without me seeing you, and where did you go?"
I looked from him to Ha. "You're playing a game
with me."
The dwarf shook his head slowly.
"You honestly didn't know I was here."
Both of them said no.
"That stupid spell actually works?"
"It works when you use it," Giraud said after a
pause. "I told you I thought you could be a bard."
"A bard-to-be in our midst!" Maydellan Ha grinned.
"Ho, young bardling," he said in a silly voice, "enchant
some young women for me, so that they'll love me."
"Some," I said, smiling slightly. "Not one, but some.
Aren't you the greedy one?" I made light of the
moment as Ha was doing, not because I thought what
had happened was funny, but because I was uneasy
with the little piece of a miracle I'd wrought. I wasn't
sure how I'd done it, or why the stupid spell had
worked; I'd always thought intent was a huge part of
the process of bardic magic. What was more, from
everything my father had told me, I had always
believed a bard needed his lute, or his harp or his
darumbie in order to create resonances. Wasn't that
what Da had said? That a bard's voice and his instru-
ment created resonances? And if that were the case,
then why had the stupid spell done anything? What
other than my voice created those resonances?
Giraud had begun to eagerly flip through the pages,
studying the writings he found.
"Listen to this, Izza—a spell for the compelling
of truth, and one for calling rain . . . well, I guess
we don't need that one. Pity there isn't one for
sending away the rain . . . and . . . oh, this is
marvelous. Some of the bards' regular writings get
out from time to time, you know—their histories and
their records of travels and such—but I don't know
that anyone has ever found one of their spell
records. And there are diary entries in here, too.
This is fascinating."
Maydellan Ha said, "The bards guard the secrets
of their magic carefully. I'm surprised this book got
out."
"It didn't get out, exactly," I said. "The bard who
was carrying it got eaten."
Giraud interrupted. "Your father's name was Haral,
wasn't it?"
"Haral dar Danria."
Giraud frowned and read. "Have you ever heard
the name Tanil?"
"No."
"How about Black Heron?"
I nodded, remembering Birdie and Aymar and
Marda talking about how they'd tricked the Black
Heron. I hadn't mentioned the name to Giraud
before, but . . . "Yes," I said. "I've heard of the Black
Heron. Birdie said she sent word to him that she'd
killed me. Evidently he wanted me dead."
"He wanted a lot more than that." Giraud glanced
at Maydellan Ha. "You want to hear this?"
"Certainly."
Giraud began to read.

Chapter Six

7 Brightsmonth. The Black Heron sent the
message to the court of Salgestis today—Giraud
read—informing the king that the Watchowl
Keep bards uncovered a plot against his life
centered in Blackwarren. He told the king the
bardmaster requested the presence of Haral dar
Danria in the investigation. I'll accompany Bard
Haral when he travels to Blackwarren, where we
have allies. Haral will trust me—we were friends
in school. Heron's allies will take him off my
hands when we arrive, and Heron will replace
Haral as the king's chief bard.
He should be in place by the time I reach
Hearthold Mountain for the second phase of our
work; I'll make sure the news of Haral's tragic
death reaches the king's ears promptly.
18 Brightsmonth. Haral dar Danria arrived
at the Keep today, with his young daughter in
tow. Asked why she hadn't been left with her
aunt back at the court. Haral said he'd done a
farseeing spell, and the child's presence was the
determining factor in the success or failure of
his mission. As if he had a mission, but he can't
know that. We've shielded against farseeing. He
cannot possibly suspect.
Don't relish the idea of killing the girl, but
the Heron says when the time comes, I must.
20 Brightsmonth. Two days of hard riding
brought us to Blackwarren. We're to meet with
the local bard, who knows nothing, then with
the local lord. I've arranged us rooms with a
merchant who is willing to help me make Haral
and his daughter disappear, and who says he'll
be able to eliminate any curiosity about their
whereabouts. That's the good news. The bad
news is that Haral is far too suspicious, and far
too clever. I've taken to hiding this spellbook. I
can't let him discover what it contains.
23 Brightsmonth. Haral has managed to ques-
tion most of the people in this sorry excuse for
a town. Of course he's found no evidence of a
plot of regicide. Further, I know he suspects me
of something. I catch him watching me, and
when I do, he smiles. No matter. Tonight he dies.
Giraud paused and glanced over at me. "This next
entry was written by your father, just under that last
statement."
My apologies, Tanil, for not dying so easily.
But I've discovered that there truly is a plot to
destroy the king. I'm sure he'll find your notes
and spells most interesting. I'll see you at court—
you and your Black Heron.
Haral dar Danria
"Then it goes back to Tanil's handwriting again."
23  Brightsmonth—evening. He's taken my
notes and his daughter and fled Blackwarren.
If I cannot catch him before he reaches the king,
I have lost everything. Aymar is loaning me his
men, and they'll be ready to leave within min-
utes.
24  Brightsmonth. He's dead. The girl wasn't
with him, nor the papers. Now the search
begins.
26 Brightsmonth. He stashed his daughter
with a poor peat-bogger in Blackwarren, and
gave the child the papers he stole from me, along
with a his notes and several spells of his own,
and few personal effects. Don't know what he
thought hiding the girl would accomplish. We
have everything now.
The women is an ignorant peasant, and
greedy. I've paid her to keep the girl and lie
about where she got her if anyone asks. The
Heron wouldn't like this if he knew, but the child
is utterly unremarkable, and I see no need to
kill her. Can do what's best for Terosalle with-
out resorting to murdering children. Unlike her
father, she had no part in this.
Maydellan Ha said, "They're always doing what's
best for their country." He shook his head and studied
me. "How are you taking all of this?"
I wasn't sure, to be honest. I found myself listening
to this tale of a plot to murder my father and to
overthrow a king and wondered why the conspirators
thought they needed to do that. What had my father
done to them? I wanted to hurt Tanil—but he was
already dead—and find the mysterious Black Heron,
but how could I ever hope to do that? Still, I wasn't
filled with despair, as both Giraud and Ha might have
thought. Instead, I had to wonder. My mother had
left my father when I was quite young. But surely
she'd had some connection to him still. She must have
taken some interest in my welfare. Why hadn't she
come looking for me?
Thinking about it further, that seemed plain enough.
If she'd heard anything, she'd probably been told I was
dead. Except how could she have been? Did she know
the Black Heron? More importantly, was she still alive?
Could I find her? I'd lost much, but sitting there lis-
tening to the dead Tanil's tale of treachery, I found my
reaction to be mostly one of hope.
"Keep reading," I said. "I want to know what else
is in there."
Giraud shrugged. "There isn't much. There's
another entry that says he's on his way to the Heart-
hold Mountain to 'sing the crystal.' I don't know what
that means."
"I do," Ha interrupted. "But go on."
Giraud flipped the page. "Then there's an entry
about being captured by the nantatsu, and holding
it off for a while, and thinking he can bargain his way
out, and about a spell he's prepared just in case his
plan doesn't work."
"Which it didn't," I said.
"Right. And a final remark. He who gains the last
look into the future cannot help but win the game.
Then there are some loose pages. They look like the
pages that I noticed had been cut out earlier. One
is titled 'Black Heron's Curse.' The other is 'Change-
wind Song.' They're palimpsests. I can't tell what was
written underneath either of them, but they're both
in a different hand than the rest of this."
I looked at the book. I felt strangely disappointed.
"Is that all?" I asked. There should have been, my
gut told me, something more.
"Yes." Giraud lifted the book by its wooden cov-
ers and gave it a good shake. "See?"
A piece of pale paper slipped out from between
two pages and floated to the cave floor like a leaf
in autumn. Giraud frowned and reached for it, but
my hand got there first.
"That wasn't in there," he said, but of course it had
been. He simply hadn't seen it.
I unfolded the paper and discovered that I still
remembered how to read after all.
My beloved Cee bie,
If you are reading this then I am dead and
your world's future is uncertain. I've sought out
and studied those omens that I could find, and
know that any hope of salvation it might have
lies in your hands.
Dearest daughter, you must travel to Heart-
hold Mountain and sing the Changewind Song
at the Pillar of the Sun. When you do this, the
Black Heron's darkness will lift and your world
will be set right.
Always remember that I loved you.
Tatta
Ceebie and Tatta. I remembered calling him that.
Remembered sitting in a huge chair beside him and
talking to him, asking him a thousand questions, and
having him pretend to steal away my nose and tell
me, "Ceebie, if questions were gold we'd be rich as
kings." I remembered riding on a horse beside him,
in the company of a laughing, pale-haired young man,
on our way to an adventure.
Suddenly I realized the pale-haired young man had
probably been Tanil, and the adventure had been the
trip to Blackwarren and Tanil's betrayal and subse-
quent murder of my father. All that had been so long
ago, and I had forgotten so much. So very much. My
Tatta. A lump rose in my throat, and my cheeks
burned. Blinking back hot tears, tasting their salt, I
handed the note to Giraud and said, "From my
father." The words came out in a croak.
He read the note, then took my hand and squeezed
it. "I'm sorry, Izza. Really sorry."
"Me, too."
The dwarf was reading the note by that time. He
sighed. "I can take you to the Pillar of the Sun first
thing in the morning. Don't expect any sun—the
weather at the top of the mountain is hellish. But the
pillar is still there, and you can sing at it."
I nodded, saying nothing.
"I'll work out the song for you," Giraud said. "It's
short, but there are a lot of technical remarks below
it that you'll need to keep in mind." He rummaged
through the wood-bound book until he came to the
pages he'd called palimpsests. He took out one and
said, "Here. 'Changewind Song.' The bard who wrote
out the spell is specific—it's to be sung by a solo
bard."
"I'm not a bard. I'm a weaver. Apprentice weaver."
"Solo singer," Giraud said, talking over my queru-
lous mutterings. "The singer is to have a clear mind
... or an empty mind. I'm not entirely sure of the
meaning of the phrase. It's a technical term. Manta-
claria." He paused, looked from me to Ha, and when
neither of us said anything, shrugged and said, "We'll
do the best we can and hope we get it right. You can
have accompanists, though—the writer recommends
bagpipes for their . . . hmmm . . . looks like 'thought-
clearing nature' to me, but again, he's using words
and constructions I don't know all that well. He uses
a lot of bardic terms. 'Rote-airy' and 'belling' and
'sostrenadio' and 'teppio.' Those aren't words that
show up in the history texts, so I don't know what
a lot of this means."
"Well, bagpipes," the dwarf said, "I don't know if
they clear your thoughts so much as they trample
them flat and jump up and down on them, but maybe
that was the effect he was looking for. I can't begin
to guess at the rest."
Giraud forced a smile. "We'll hope that these things
are merely augmentary and not essential."
I leaned toward Ha and said, "You don't play pipes
by any chance, do you?"
"I sing no music, play no instruments, and con-
sider the bagpipes an abomination created by mad-
men to further their madness." All of that he said with
a scowl, but he softened the scowl with a wink. "I
like music, though. Ballads, mostly. And love songs—
like 'I to Dalliance Never Fall.' You have a pretty
voice. Do you know that one?" His grin was conspira-
torial. "Could you sing it for me? I've never had a
pretty girl sing a love song for me."
He was trying to cheer me up. I wanted to be
cheered. So I nodded. "I remember it." Everyone
knows that one, of course. It's like asking a singer if
she knows 'Sweet Robin of Spring.' If she isn't dead,
she knows it. But since I lost my parents, no one but
Giraud had asked me to sing, and I found myself
overcome with such shyness that I almost forgot the
words.
I sang:
"I to dalliance never fall,
And never to another flee,
You hold my love in your strong hand,
And so hold all the best of me.
And as you hold me I hold you;
I look for promise in your eyes,
So swear to me you will be true,
And love me till the day you die."
They were both listening, both smiling as I sang.
I'd planned to sing only the first verse and the cho-
rus, but, honestly, I loved the way my voice echoed
and rang in the tunnels of the mountain, and if the
two of them were so pleased by my singing and so
willing to listen, I thought I'd at least do the next
two verses.
"I who wander far and near
And, weary, travel hard and long
Yearn for your love when I am here
And wait to hear your answering song."
"My answering song," Giraud sang in his pleasant
baritone.
"My answering song," Maydellan Ha sang in a rich,
if raspy, bass.
"And as you hold me I hold you;
I look for promise in your eyes,
So swear to me you will be true,
And love me till the day you die.
If into sorrows clinging hand
Or to misfortunes grip we fall,
Beside you I will take my stand
If you just love me above all."
"Love you above all," Giraud and Ha sang.
"And as you hold me I hold you;
I look for promise in your eyes,
So swear to me you will be true,
And love me till the day you die."
I held the last notes, closing my eyes and listen-
ing to the shivery echoes of my own voice that rang
through the tunnels and bounced back to me. I
opened them to find Giraud on one knee, facing me,
and beside him Maydellan Ha with his hands pressed
to his heart and his head lifted.
"I swear I will be true and love you till the day
I die," Giraud said, and half a beat behind him,
Maydellan Ha repeated his exact words in his exact
tone of voice.
They were both staring at me, the expressions on
their faces identical—both lovestruck and somehow
fierce.
Only for the briefest of instants did I think that
they might have been trying to play a joke on me.
That thought died as quickly as it occurred. Their eyes
held no faintest hint of humor, their mouths no slight-
est curve of smile. They both believed that they loved
me.
Somehow, with nothing but the words of a stupid
old love song and the sound of my voice, I had
enchanted them.

Chapter Seven

I rested poorly that night, kept tossing in wild,
nightmare-riddled sleep by fear of the nantatsu that
waited somewhere below for us to finish our task, and
by worse fear of the accidental magic I had unleashed,
and by worry for my friend Giraud and my new
associate Ha, whose feelings I had accidentally altered.
I knew from my father's discussions of magic that
simple bardic spells usually worked only a short time
before they wore off. I hoped that this one, performed
accidentally and without intent, would be gone by
morning.
At least, I thought, I know I can do magic. For
what that's worth.
But when the sky outside Ha's tunnel went from
black to gray and the first light of morning made the
miserable pouring rain a visible source of gloom
instead of just an audible one, nothing had improved.
Ha greeted me with a wistful smile and breakfast,
Giraud kissed my hand and offered to do anything
I needed.
I asked him if he would please not be in love with
me, and his eyes filled with tears, and he told me
that he couldn't do that. I wanted to thump him on
the head and tell him to get over it, but of course
I couldn't. The way he felt wasn't his fault.
So we ate breakfast and I had Giraud write the
words of the 'Changewind Song' into the book in a
form I could read. I practiced them in my head, and
because I didn't know the tune the dead bard had
suggested, I came up with one that I could put to
the words. Da said the specific tune didn't matter to
a spell as much as the intent behind it and the fact
that you could sing it clearly, without squeaking on
any of the notes.
I didn't try singing the spell out loud in Ha's tun-
nel. The bard had been specific—the spell had to be
sung from the Pillar of the Sun, which was near the
top of Hearthold Mountain. Nowhere else would it
do what it was supposed to do.
And so we came to the dilemma that worried me
most of all. What exactly was it supposed to do? The
writer of the spell, whoever he had been, noted that
it was to bring peace and joy and harmony to every-
one it touched. He said he'd created it to repair the
wrongs in the world.
To me, that seemed vague, and the words of the
song struck me as equally vague. The bard undoubt-
edly thought they were clear enough, but a refrain
of, "Whirl wind and clear want, banish sorrow and
need. Silver fountains of laughter where once there
flowed tears," while a pretty sentiment, didn't give
me much idea of what I was supposed to look for
when I sang the stupid song.
The bright point of my morning, and it was a small
one, came when I found out that we didn't have to
climb any further up the outside of the mountain.
Maydellan Ha said his tunnel connected to another,
and that tunnel led, with some winding and twisting,
up the inside of the mountain to the summit near
the Pillar of the Sun. He said that aside from the
singing of the "Changewind Song," I need not deal
with the wind or the slashing rain or the thunder and
lightning that still pounded the mountainside. He
brushed a kiss on the back of my hand and bowed
when he said it, and I cringed.
Ha packed those of his belongings that he wished
to keep. "I won't be coming back here," he said. "So
I want to be sure I don't leave behind something I
might need."
When he told us he was ready, he carried little
more than we did. Each of us took as much of the
food from his larder as we could; for the first time,
the pack Giraud had given me weighed something,
and it was a good, reassuring sort of weight. Other
than food, Ha carried a bedroll, a shortsword, clothes
and a single, small book.
He perched his spectacles on his battered nose,
took his lantern in hand, and led off.
We followed him for half a day, and we were foot-
sore and weary when we finally reached our desti-
nation.
"All you have to do now is sing it," Ha said, point-
ing out of a carved cave mouth into fog, "and then
we can get on our way to wherever we choose to go.
Anywhere, my beloved."
I nodded. I stared out. Clouds swirled across a flat-
floored bowl, alternately obscuring and revealing a
single crystal pillar that soared upward higher than,
ten tall men standing one atop the other. Six-sided
and colorless, the pillar's sides were unblemished by
any touch of decoration. I wondered if someone had
found a way to drag it all the way up the mountain,
or if someone, digging into the summit in search of
gold or precious stones, had discovered it and dug
the bowl out around it.
Ha answered the question before I could ask. "As
far as any of us can tell, it goes all the way from here
to the center of the earth. No one has been able to
find a place where it isn't, though after a while my
people gave up trying."
"Why?"
"It protects itself. It just sits there doing nothing,
but if you try to tap out a chunk of it with a chisel,
you die. At least that's the story, and I don't know
of anyone in my lifetime who's tried to challenge it."
I looked at the crystal pillar. I would like to say
that I felt something magical about it, or that it stirred
in recognition as I approached, or that I could some-
how sense its importance or recognize its purpose.
The fact, though, is that it looked like a big, plain
piece of clear rock, and it felt like one, and it had
about as much to say to me as any other chunk of
rock I've ever found.
I tried to cheer myself. I said, "At least it isn't rain-
ing anymore," but that was too small a comfort for
the situation I faced. I was scared. Scared to walk
out there by myself, scared to sing the song alone,
scared of what would happen. Everything would have
been easier had I not accidentally cast a spell over
Giraud and Ha that lingered even then; if I'd never
known I could cast songspells, I wouldn't have been
afraid of doing it. Those who say ignorance is bliss
are right more often than most of us are willing to
admit.
Scared, scared. So I handed Giraud my wooden
flute and said, "Play along with me."
"I don't know the tune you'll sing," he said, not
unreasonably, but I didn't care at all about reason.
"Match pitch with me and follow along. What you
sound like doesn't matter—I just want you to be out
there with me. I'm scared to do this alone."
And I dragged Maydellan Ha into the dreary,
drizzling, shifting mist, too, and shoved the bard's
commonplace book into his hands, and told him,
"Here, drum on the cover of this book to keep
time."
And the spell that made them both love me to
the point of ridiculous infatuation still held, for
neither of them argued. I prepared myself to sing.
I thought perhaps I ought to touch the pillar while
I did it, but the stone, cold and wet and unwel-
coming, changed my mind quickly enough. I stood
at the base of it, though, facing east, which is the
direction of new beginnings. Giraud stood a third
of the way around the pillar, to my right, Maydellan
Ha a third of the way around to my left. As I
looked at them I could see parts of each of them
refracted in the crystal, warped and partly hazed by
imperfections and occlusions within the heart of the
stone.
The fog that skirled and writhed around us muffled
echoes, but the steep walls of the basin amplified
sound. The result was eerie. When I spoke to Giraud,
telling him to start with a few notes from "Merry
Make" to give me my pitch, my voice sounded flat
but very loud. I hummed the opening bars of the old
song and felt the vibrations of that soft humming clear
to the soles of my feet.
I closed my eyes. With them closed, I could see
the words that Giraud had written out for me. I knew
the song—knew all of it, and knew how I would sing:
it. And I knew, as well, that I shouldn't. That gut
feeling again.
The omens that had brought me to the hold of
Hearthold Mountain, the coincidences and the bits of
old magic, all felt like the hand of my goddess tell-
ing me that she wanted me to be where I was. Neithas
had to have a hand in what I was doing, or else I would
never have survived to be there doing it. My father's
note told me that I was to sing the song if ever the
world were to become as it should be. I knew that I
was special, or else the dead bard's spell would not
have allowed me to take the book from the nantatsu.
I had to do what I was doing, too, because if I didn't
the nantatsu would find me and kill me. So many signs,
so many omens that said, "Sing, girl."
And counter to every argument my mind could
muster, my gut said, "This is wrong. You'll live to
regret this."
And my unruly brain, the part of me that has
caused me so much trouble in my life, said, "I cer-
tainly am, because living to regret it is better than
dying today."
Giraud did the introduction to "Merry Make" again,
looking impatiently at me as he did, and Maydellan Ha
drummed on the book with his fingertips. The reedy,
thin wail of the recorder joined the whispery, leathery
sound of the drumming. The music fit the gray, cold
midafternoon—thin and ephemeral, it was the sort of
music to which ghosts would dance; it was somehow
both joyful and ominous.
I closed my eyes and began to sing.
"Sing the wind down,
Sing the sun gold.
Sing the sky blue,
The day hot, the air cold,
Sing the people to joy,
Sing abundance and life,
Banish toil, banish pain,
Banish care, banish strife
Whirl wind and clear want,
Banish sorrow and need.
Silver fountains of laughter
Where once there flowed tears.
Change wind and change day
Change sea and change sky
World sings now with laughter
And never with fears."
The refrain ended on an open note, so I went back
to the first verse and sang it again. My voice rang,
and the wooden recorder played a bright, quick-
tempoed counterpoint, and the makeshift drum pat-
tered merrily.
As I sang, I realized that the fog was lifting, and
then the sun suddenly burst through and I discov-
ered why the Pillar of the Sun bore its name. It
seemed to catch fire; it glowed and sparkled and
scattered its captured light back out in rainbows that
lit the bowl in which we stood and made all of us
look like spirits who had just stepped through from
a better world.
I kept singing because the spellsong called to me,
and as I sang, I thought of a world without work,
without pain, without any sorrow, without any need,
and I thought of how wonderful that world would be.
Then I thought of Birdie, and Marda, and Aymar and
Tassien, and the empress who'd had Giraud's family
killed, and the nantatsu who had killed so many
people, and the villagers of Blackwarren who had
hunted Giraud and me.
I could not wish them joy. I wished them the oppo-
site, and heard the tone of my voice change as I sang.
But I kept singing. No matter, no matter, I thought,
because my heart filled with the joy of the song, with
the glory of the sunlight, with the magic I made while
I stood there. I wished all the world happiness except
for the people who were evil, and to them I wished
that the evil that they'd sown would race back to them
threefold and devour them.
No matter what I wished. The song I sang spelled
out only goodness. Only joy. No sorrow, no fears, no
pain, no regrets.
A whirlwind dropped into the basin where we
stood. It screamed down out of the cloudless sky and
swirled around the bowl in which the three of us
stood and played.
Call down the wind, I heard myself sing, and
realized this was the maelstrom I had summoned—
this whirlwind; magical Changewind; howling twist-
ing glittering banshee that shouted me down as I sang.
I felt my control of the spell I'd woven, such as it
ever might have been, weakening. The whirlwind that
I'd summoned didn't listen to the sound of my voice,
didn't ride on the notes of my song. It moved in
toward us, beautiful beyond description but somehow
threatening. I sang louder, Giraud blew harder, Ha
drummed faster. None of us could hear what the
other one did. I began to understand why the cre-
ator of this spell had wanted bagpipes to back him
up—nothing softer or more delicate than the mur-
dered-cat howling of bagpipes could cut through the
raging chorus of the wind's many voices.
Louder I sang, and louder yet. I leaned against the
pillar and screamed the words of the song at it ...
and the racing winds kept back from the three of us,
though only by the width of a finger. This was magic,
and I knew nothing of magic, nothing of control or
finesse, and I could think of nothing but brute force
to keep the spell from devouring us.
The racing winds knotted tighter and faster, and
the light from the Pillar of the Sun streamed into the
newborn tornado and illuminated it, and the twister
began to glitter as if it carried the jewels of all the
fiefdoms and kingdoms and princedoms of the world
in its raging heart. I felt the pull of the spiraling
winds, but resisted being sucked out and up. Giraud
and Ha both moved against the pillar. All of us stared
at each other, and I could see my fear mirrored in
their eyes. We did not dare stop, though sweat beaded
on Giraud's brow, and Ha's tanned face had turned
as white as bleached linen, and my throat felt raw
as a flayed carcass. If we stopped the spell might stop
... or it might simply devour us before it went on
its way.
Any joy I had felt at the beginning of the song was
gone, transformed into exhaustion and fear. Beneath
my hands, the Pillar of the Sun darkened, seeming
to match my mood. The wind grew louder, the shim-
mering spiral around us grew taller, and I could only
think that if it didn't do whatever it was going to do
soon, I would collapse.
As I thought that, the single giant whirlwind
spawned, shattering into a thousand lesser whirlwinds
that spun out from the center like shards of a shat-
tered gemstone exploding across the land. And every-
thing they touched, they changed. The barren stone
of the basin seemed to melt beneath the hungry
mouths of those glittering, howling wind-devils; its
steep walls transformed into gentle curves and those
curves sprouted thick emerald grass and carpets of
flowers. A brook began babbling somewhere nearby.
The Changewinds raced away from Giraud and Ha
and the pillar and me.
In the sudden silence that followed, I became
gradually aware that I was still singing. I realized, too,
that I had no idea how many times I'd repeated the
same verse and the same chorus. My throat burned
and my mouth felt dry as emery paper, my back ached
and my legs throbbed.
"Change wind and change day
Change sea and change sky
World sings now with laughter
And never with fears."
I sang those last words on a descending note, and
that last time, closed the chorus so that it didn't invite
me to leap to the verse again. Giraud dropped the
recorder from fingers that looked as stiff as wood. Ha
groaned and sat with a thump on the soft grass.
I shook my head, and tried to speak, and my voice
came out as a croak. "Look at the sun," I whispered.
It was about to set. I wondered how long we had
stood there. How long had the Changewind blown
around us? How long had the magic held us in its
thrall?
The Pillar of the Sun glowed blue and deep and
beautiful as spring hyacinths, reflecting not just the
sun in the west but the sky in the east that already
wore its robes of royal purple. The scene reached into
me and shocked me with its perfect beauty, but
suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be away from
Hearthold Mountain and the Pillar of the Sun. I
wanted to be on my way somewhere, anywhere.
Maydellan Ha crouched over a map he'd scratched
in the dirt with a stick. "If we head due south and
keep to our course, sooner or later we'll cross Stone-
break Pass. From there we can head west to Anatta,
and from Anatta go south to the Burrinee River." He
sketched in a couple of tiny squares along the snaky
line of the river. "Here and here are dockhouses
where we can buy passage downstream. The river will
take all of us to the Bards' Keep."
"I thought you wanted to go to Galarialle," I said.
"To study to be a doctor."
Ha looked surprised. "I can't leave you, my love.
And you are obviously meant to be a bard," he said,
and swung his arm in an arc that encompassed the
rolling hills that had once been jagged, sere moun-
tains; the waterfalls and tiny lakes and fields upon
fields of wildflowers; the edges of beautiful forests
where nothing had grown before. "Look at what
you've done." He smiled at me with that gushy,
lovestruck smile I'd hoped I would never see again.
And I thought, Right. Look at what I've done.
Neither he nor Giraud showed any signs of shak-
ing off the love spell I'd accidentally cast on them.
Neither of them seemed in the least bit jealous of
each other, for which I was infinitely grateful—but
they both remained devoted to me. If I had any idea
how to do it, I would have tried to break the spell,
but I wasn't a bard. I knew only enough about bardic
magic to know that if I tinkered with the spell I'd
created, I might make it worse as easily as I might
make it better. As the situation stood, neither of them
suffered anything for being in love with me. When
we reached Watchowl Keep, I'd have a real bard
unspell them—if the love spell didn't wear off first.
Meantime, we had more important worries.
"Do you think we ought to be traveling in the
dark?" Giraud asked Ha.
The dwarf shrugged. "You're the one with a nan-
tatsu who threatened to come after you if the spell
didn't work to its satisfaction. If you think all of this
was what it hoped for, then we don't have much to
worry us. If it was expecting something else, though,
we should try to put some distance between us and
the places where it's likely to start looking."
Giraud looked to me. "Beautiful Isbetta, we're
going to have to travel tonight. I wish we could rest,
but I don't want anything to happen to you—"
I'd had enough of that nonsense. I said, "Giraud,
shut up. You don't love me. We're friends. Remem-
ber that? Friends. You carry Adalane dar Penalda's
favor, and you're in love with her."
Confusion flickered across his face, and for a mo-
ment I thought I was getting through to him. Then
he said, "Adalane . . . I'm going to have to give that
back to Adalane."
"Not now."
He leaned close to me and pressed his cheek to
mine. He murmured in my ear, "You fixed everything,
beloved. We can go back to Blackwarren now. I can
give her back her token—"
"You brought it?" I yelped. I remembered the cir-
cumstances under which we'd escaped Blackwarren,
and wondered at the impulse that would make him
hunt around in the darkness of his room for a small
sapphire ring tied with a silk scarf rather than using
that time to get us some food.
"Of course I brought it. I love . . . loved her. And
I promised her my undying affection. . . ." He looked
at me, and he looked very much like a fawn caught
between hunters and the cliff.
"You did," I agreed. "You promised her your undying
affection."
"But I love you."
"You don't."
"We have to go back to Blackwarren. Honor
demands that I make this right . . . that I make her
understand."
"We can't go back to Blackwarren." I looked to
Maydellan Ha for support, but he frowned at me—
the slightest of frowns—and said, "I'm afraid I must
agree with Giraud. He cannot leave this girl Adalane
thinking that he loves her when he loves you instead.
That would be ... cruel."
I stared from one to the other.
"We can't go back to Blackwarren."
"You might stay here," Giraud said. "After I've
returned Adalane's favor, we'll come back for you."
Ha smiled. "Of course. You can sleep in my tun-
nel. I'm sure it will be much nicer now. More suit-
able for you, my beloved."
I looked from him to Giraud, and back to him. I
gritted my teeth and said, "I'll go to Blackwarren with
you, thanks."
We walked through darkness, heading back to the
northwest, guiding ourselves by the Faithful Star since
nothing else remained as it was. The thunder of dis-
tant waterfalls serenaded us as we forded uncounted
rushing streams; the songs of night birds accompa-
nied us as we moved through meadows waist-high
with richly scented night-blooming flowers. The stars
above us seemed brighter than I had ever seen them.
They cast shadows that left us not entirely in dark-
ness, but what we saw could never have helped us
find our way.
My spell had reshaped the earth. No mountains
remained around us; instead, we crossed rolling hills
that spread away from us in all directions.
Maydellan Ha said, "We should have passed Kai."
"Kai?"
"The mining city for the mountains around Heart-
hold. The city your nantatsu was no doubt eager to
avoid. We've been heading in the right direction—
it should have been off to our right."
I looked to my right and saw nothing but the dark-
ness, and the blacker outlines of the hills against the
starry sky. Nothing that seemed to be a city. "Would
we see lights?"
"Kai never slept." Ha frowned. "Perhaps we should,
though. Perhaps we should camp here, and when we
wake check to see if Kai still exists."
We hadn't done anything that would kill people,
I thought. Certainly nothing that would destroy cit-
ies, or hurt anyone.
While we set up our meager camp, I kept telling
myself that, and telling myself, that we would find,
come morning, that we'd been walking in the wrong
direction, and that the city of Kai was still where it was
supposed to be ... changed, of course, since the moun-
tains were gone, and any mining the dwarves did would
perforce have to be of a different sort. But still there.
Giraud said little. Ha said less. And I ... well, even
though I was exhausted from our walking, and our
spellcasting, and from the fear that hadn't left me since
I discovered Birdie intended to sell me to a whoremas-
ter, I said nothing at all, and when the time came to
sleep, slept poorly, and what sleep I got was infested
with dreams of whirlwinds that touched and changed,
leaving nothing recognizable in their wake.

Chapter Eight

A cold, wet something shoved against my cheek.
I opened my eyes to bright daylight and waist-high
field grasses and wildflowers and something silhou-
etted just above my face. Large, mobile ears, long
slender neck, big, blunt nose . . .
A doe.
I sat up and the doe took a single step back, study-
ing me with curiosity but without apparent fear. She
didn't look unusual, other than that I was seeing her
from such a short distance. She seemed healthy
enough—plump and glossy, with bright eyes—and I
knew for a fact that her nose was both cold and wet.
"Giraud," I said. Croaked, rather. My voice still
hadn't recovered. "Look at this."
Giraud groaned. I couldn't see him; the tall grasses
hid him from me as effectively as we'd hoped they
would hid us from anyone who might be hunting for
us. But I could hear him just off to my right, rus-
tling and turning over.
The doe's ear twitched toward him, but she didn't
spring away from us, as I would have expected her to
do. She didn't flick her tail in the air, or shudder, or
roll her eyes with fear. All of these responses I would
have expected, but instead she simply glanced calmly
toward Giraud when he sat up, then returned her
attention to me.
I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful.
Her color, a warm honey-brown, darkened to black
at her knees, her muzzle, and the tips of her ears.
Her belly and throat were a pale, creamy almost-
white. Her eyes, warm brown rimmed in kohl, with
thick eyelashes and a sweet, trusting expression,
seemed to me the very definition of gentleness.
She snorted softly, a sort of whuffling sound, and
glanced behind me, and when I turned to see what
she was looking at, I discovered that two other deer
moved toward us from right behind me, while one
came toward us from my far right.
"Hey, pretty girl," I said, and her ears pricked for-
ward. The other deer moved in, stepping silently
through the tall grass, moving slowly as if they didn't
want to startle us.
I heard Giraud say, "Ha, you have to see this," as
I rose and reached out to touch the doe.
Her lips curled back in a snarl and her mouth
stretched back, and I saw, not the blunt bottom teeth
of an herbivore, but well-developed, dagger-sharp
upper and lower canines and a jaw far heavier and
stronger than any plant-eater should have. I screamed
at her and fumbled for my dagger, and as I did, the
other deer all attacked.
I pulled my dagger and jumped to my feet, and
the doe that had been nuzzling at me raised up on
her hind legs and slashed out with her forefeet. Fire
ripped through my left shoulder and blood welled
from the cut. Giraud and Ha made it to their feet,
fending off the deer that attacked them.
My mind refused to accept what I was seeing. I
fought, flinging my cloak over the face of the doe;
then hacking at her throat when the folds of cloth
blinded her. She slashed me and tried to bite me,
but my cloak ruined her aim and eventually tangled
around her front legs. When she tumbled forward,
I grabbed her head and fought it upward, and slashed
through her throat with my knife. Behind me, Giraud
brought the animal he'd caught to the ground. Ha,
armed with his sword and a fighter's reflexes, had
dispatched the other two. We stood in the center of
the downed deer, all three of us soaked in blood and
breathing hard.
I found myself wanting to weep. This horror that
had happened to the deer wasn't right—it wasn't
right at all. I hadn't done anything that might turn
deer into meat-eaters. I'd always liked them; I'd
always thought of them as gentle, peaceful creatures.
That they had attacked us, that they had tried to
kill us—that they would have eaten us if they had
been successful—these facts left me miserable and
hopeless. I felt betrayed. Lost. And very, very fright-
ened.
Maydellan Ha said, "If they had been any more
experienced at being the hunters instead of the
hunted, they would have killed all three of us before
we knew they were even dangerous."
I looked at the dead animals and shivered. "What
happened to them?"
Ha raised an eyebrow and studied me. "Something
about your spell went amiss, I expect." He wiped his
bloody hands on his pants, then cleaned the blade
of his sword on the grass. "I hope the spell only went
awry in its effect on the deer."
We packed our few belongings in silence and fol-
lowed Ha's lead toward the place where he felt cer-
tain Kai should be.
We came across a lovely road after a while; it was
paved all in wide, flat, carefully-shaped stones and
bordered on both sides by morningmary and summer
jonquil and giant freesia and lavender, and the scent
that brushed against us as we walked was surely the
scent of the Summerland.
My ears were keenest. I picked out the sounds of
ela-lute and danceharp before either of the others.
"Music," I said, and began to run forward.
"Wait." Ha grabbed my sleeve and pulled me back.
"We'll get off the road and go on that way. Among
my people, this isn't the time for music."
"It's music," I said, unable to see where anything
could be wrong with those cheerful sounds.
"They were deer," he reminded me. "What's sweet
on the outside isn't always so on the inside."
And how could I argue with that? I had a hard
time, though, imagining how the joyful music I heard
could presage anything but goodness.
We moved off the lovely paved road and into a
grove to our right that looked like a park. Its old
chestnut trees spread outward and upward, their
graceful boughs sweeping near the ground, reaching
just far enough to touch the next tree in each direc-
tion. No dead leaves lay on the ground; instead, short
green grass that looked like it had been cut to a
regular height covered the ground like an enormous
Liedan carpet.
Ha said, "The dwarves had no places of this sort.
No nut groves, no parks, no glades for dancing and
playing music—we had alehalls and tunneled homes
and mines and guilds and shops within the mountains."
Giraud said, "The dwarves I met didn't seem like
the sort who would do much playing."
"We played, all right. Wrestling and quarterstaff
fights and knife throwing and rope-walking—common
entertainments for men. Not dancing around in a
circle to harp music."
We moved forward, always keeping the road to our
left. The music became louder and eventually we
found its source. Two dwarvish women sat on elabo-
rately carved stools, their skirts swept up and their
faces twisted in some bizarre parody of pleasure. One
played the ela-lute, the fingers of her left hand fly-
ing across the broad fretboard while her right hand
plucked, its movements a blur. The other attacked the
harp with a frenzy that would have stood the three
of us in good stead when we fought of the deadly
deer.
All around them, the dwarves danced, though
watching, I could not think of what they did as truly
dancing. None laughed or chatted or called out to
each other as dancers did in the faire dances I'd
attended. They spun and leapt and stamped in utter
silence, sometimes crashing into each other as if they
hadn't seen each other, sometimes falling to the
ground. At the periphery of the rough circle in which
they cavorted, two men ran into each other, and
without missing the steps of their dances, drew
shortswords and began to fight; their swords flashed
and their feet stamped, and for an instant I thought
the fighting was in jest, or perhaps some sort of mock
ritual, until blood spurted from the off arm of the
nearer man. He kept fighting, silently grinning, still
dancing, while the blood soaked through his shirt and
poured down his arm. He got in a vicious cut to the
belly of the other. Gray coils of intestine spurted from
the wound, but still both fighters continued their
dance—the one with the gut wound held one hand
over his belly and swung his sword with the other.
"Are they mad?" Ha whispered. He crouched
beside me behind a low hedge, watching the same
fight I watched. "A gut wound like that should have
shocked the man to his knees. How can he keep
fighting that way . . . unless he's drugged ... or
insane ... or ..." He fell silent as the gut-wounded
fighter lunged forward and ran the other man clean
through the left chest. The point of the blade pierced
the back of his shirt, and as the attacker pulled his
blade free, the other man fell dead to the ground.
The surviving fighter, guts still held into his abdo-
men by a single hand and blood pouring through his
fingers, began to stamp and leap with the other danc-
ers again, though he didn't last long. After only two
turns around the circle, he staggered to the periph-
ery near us and collapsed. I could tell from look-
ing at him that he was dead. He stared up at the sky,
pale eyes unblinking, with foam flecking his beard and
sweat still beaded on his bleached-white forehead.
None of the other dancers looked at him. None
seemed to notice that he'd fallen, any more than they
noticed the other bodies that lay around the edge of
their dance circle.
Beside me, Ha clenched a fist and held it to his
forehead while he closed his eyes. "Avert," he whis-
pered. "Avert."
He caught me looking at him and flushed dark red.
"It won't help," he said. "This has nothing to do with
spirits. But it won't hurt, either."
I nodded. I knew the sign for warding off evil. And
I had to agree with him: watching those poor danc-
ers dropping dead as they danced, I could only think
to press my fist to my forehead and pray to Neithas.
Something had gone wrong with the bard's songspell—
terribly, impossibly wrong. And I had no idea what it
might have been, or what I might do to fix it.
"Do you know any of them?" I asked.
"I know all of them." His mouth had set in a thin
line. "Living and dead."
I swallowed. "Are any of them . . . family?"
"No." He didn't look at me. "My family is back in
Rakkatar, for which I am grateful. Maybe this spell
hasn't gone all the way to Rakkatar." He blinked faster,
and I saw him swallow before he turned his face com-
pletely away from me. "One of them, however," he
said, still looking away, "was my dearest friend."
"Which—?"
He pressed a finger to my lips. "One who is beyond
any help I might offer." I saw tears slide down his broad
cheeks. He tapped Giraud on the shoulder and said,
"Carefully get that sword. We might need it."
Giraud lay on his belly and slid forward, under the
hedge, close to the body nearest us. He reached out,
always watching the remaining dancers, who paid him
no attention, and slipped the shortsword away from
the dead dwarf.
He crawled back and started to hand the sword
to Ha. "It's for you," the dwarf said.
"I could get another," he said. "They aren't pay-
ing attention to anyone at all, and the other dead are
close to the hedge.
"Yes. One other, then, so that Isbetta also will be
armed with something other than a knife. Keep out
of sight, though."
When Giraud retrieved a second sword, all of us
crept back into the depths of the chestnut grove. As
soon as we were safely out of earshot—for even
though the dwarves didn't seem to notice anything
around them, we didn't wish to test this and discover
we were wrong—Giraud said, "If we go back to the
Pillar of the Sun and you sing again, Izza, can you
undo all of this?"
"I'd had the same thought," Maydellan Ha said.
I looked from Giraud to Ha. Both of them watched
me expectantly.
"I'm not a bard," I said. "I don't know the first
detail about crafting spellsongs. All I could do right
now is make the situation worse—tangle another
wrong spell on top of this one that would make the
task of untangling what I've already done impossible
for the best of bards."
"But your father was a bard, and you have the tal-
ent to be one—"
I cut Giraud off. "I have the voice and possibly
the will, and maybe with training I can be a bard.
But I don't have the knowledge. I've already proven
that no one but a bard should sing these spellsongs.
No matter what the will of the gods might have been,
no matter that I did the best I could, I wasn't capable
of doing what I needed to do. And look at what
happened."
"Yes." Ha nodded slowly. "Look at what happened.
I find it hard to imagine worse, yet I'm sure that is
only because I lack imagination, and not because
worse is truly impossible."
Giraud scrubbed at the blade he'd taken with
clumps of grass, trying to get the blood off. "Then
what should we do?"
I didn't know why he was looking at me for
answers. If I knew what to do, I would have done
it. "Only a bard could tell us that."
"Well, there's a bard in Blackwarren," Giraud said.
"Kethu dar Edder kept his study and his shop next;
to the mill."
I frowned. "He wasn't a bard. He was a minstrel."
Giraud shook his head. "He was a bard. The guild
sent him to Blackwarren a long time ago, and he
settled in and started selling instruments. He kept the
fact that he was a bard secret. He made reference to
it one time when he and I were talking, and stopped
himself in midsentence. I pressed him, and finally he
admitted the truth but swore me to secrecy. Until right
now, I've never said another word about it."
I thought of dar Edder sitting in his doorway, carv-
ing the pegs for a lute or stringing a sambrel or play-
ing a light dance tune on a flute. I thought of him
fading into the shadows, selling the instruments he
made and occasionally standing at a crossroads at
Summer Faire, singing for his dinner. Entertaining
at parties by singing ordinary ballads in his ordinary
voice. Surely he wasn't a bard.
But I thought, too, that he knew all the important
people in Blackwarren and was welcome in their
homes. He was a harmless, cheerful, sociable,
entertaining man, a delightful storyteller—an adequate
musician of no particular skill, though a fine luthier.
Perhaps he was more than he'd seemed.
"So we'll seek out this Edder," Ha said. "We'll see
if he can set the spell right."
We'd planned to return to Blackwarren for Giraud's
sake. Now we went there for all our sakes. And my
gut insisted this was the right thing to do.
We headed almost due east, staying off the road
that seemed to follow the track that had once been
the road through the mountains. We thought if we
kept our bearings and walked at a steady pace, we
could expect to reach Blackwarren by midday.
Of course the straight path proved to be not the
quickest way to travel. We crossed half a dozen streams
and skirted several lakes, fought off another small herd
of deer and watched a pack of rabbits bring down an
unwary fox, got lost in a second, huge chestnut grove,
and evidently wandered too far to the east, for finally
we met up with Little North Road, and from that
determined that we were directly south of Black-
warren. So we kept to the tall grass to the right of the
Little North Road, hiding any time we heard anyone
passing, and backtracked. It was close to nightfall by
the time we pushed our way through the last of the
bracken and dragged our weary legs over the top of
one final hill, and saw Blackwarren nestled in the valley
at the edge of a shining lake just ahead of us.
"No bog anymore," Ha said. He shook his head.
"Wonder what happened to the people out cutting
peat in the center of it when the spell hit."
"Should we chance going in while there's still
light?" I asked. "Or do you think we would be bet-
ter to wait until dark?"
"I say dark," Giraud said. "We don't know what to
expect if we're recognized, but if no one can see us,
we won't have to find out."
"I agree," Ha said. "Wait for dark. We can slip in,
locate this bard's house, and discover what we have
to do to end this curse. We're going to need time
and privacy, and if we go into town now, we won't
get either."                                                              
From the hilltop, I could see movement in the
streets. Far too much movement, as if everyone who
lived there had come outside at the same time. I
didn't hear music, but the sound of many voices
shouting reached me clearly enough. Lines of torches
snaking, with erratic stops and starts through the
streets, added to the frightening aura of discord that
radiated from the entire village. I knew the Change-
winds had touched Blackwarren. The lake where the
peat bog had been proved that. The neat pavestone
road that led through the village added to the proof.
If those two details weren't enough, my third proof
was that the houses, which had been mostly wattle-
and-daub with thatched roofs, were now exclusively
built of cut stone or fieldstone, and the roofs were
of the sort of heavy, curved red tile that I'd seen
before as a child, in the far-south city of Greffon. In
Blackwarren, not even Lord dar Falcannes's great-
house had had such a roof.
That was, I suppose, a silly detail to notice, consid-
ering the circumstances. But to me, Blackwarren no
longer looked like the poor village it had been. Now,
though still tiny, it appeared to be as rich as the greatest
cities of Terosalle. Rich, but somehow sick.
We waited well off the road, hidden in deep grass
and with our backs to a hollow in the hillside, so that
we could only be attacked from three directions.
Nothing came at us, though, and at last night blot-
ted out the details of Blackwarren, leaving only the
stuttering lines of torches.
Finally, even the torches died out, and the village
descended into darkness.
We headed down, located the main street, and with
it found the first corpse. Mouth covered with foam,
eyes wide, she lay on her back. Her blouse had been
ripped open, her skirt dragged up around her waist.
I felt my gorge rise. Her name had been Darcelle,
and she'd been an apprentice weaver who sat next
to me sometimes and chatted about her hamlet deep
in the hills—four houses, five families, a flock of goats.
She had planned to settle in Blackwarren, which had
seemed huge and sophisticated to her. I had liked her
a lot.
She had been my friend. She was dead.
I had killed her.
We moved on. The shapes of the streets remained
the same, but all of them were paved. The tall
wooden boardwalks were gone, replaced by raised
stone sidewalks. The houses all displayed elegant
doors and glass windows instead of shutters and
scraped oilskin window covers tacked to wooden
frames. I had a hard time keeping track of where I
was—little clues remained to guide me, but they were
subtle.
"Fishmonger Street," Giraud said, and we turned
down it.
After Darcelle, I wouldn't look at the bodies. I knew
everyone who lived in Blackwarren—perhaps two hun-
dred fifty people in all. We counted ten of them lying
in the few roads along which we crept. I suspected that
more would die if I couldn't find some way to repair
the damage I'd caused. I knew, too, that the dead I
saw were not the only dead. Wherever the Change-
winds had traveled, people were at that moment caught
up in dancing madness or defending themselves from
marauding packs of carnivorous deer or fighting off
whatever form of death had found Darcelle, or things
worse. Unimagined, but worse.
I cursed the nantatsu that had killed the bard, and
I cursed myself for cowardice and stupidity. If I'd
been smarter or cleverer, I would have found a way
to escape the nantatsu, or I would have realized that
I couldn't cast the spell properly because I knew noth-
ing of bardic magic, and I would have run. The
nantatsu might have caught me and killed me, but
what was one life when weighed against so many?
With those dark thoughts in my mind, I followed
Giraud and Ha through Blackwarren's back streets,
to the house of the bard Kethu dar Edder. Unlike
every other house in the village, his home and
shop remained a construction of wattle and daub
with a thatched roof. His door remained a poor
plank affair, his windows had shutters flung open
and scraped oilskin stretched over the frames
within. No lights burned within the house, but we
discovered in the worst of all possible ways that
he was home.
Someone had nailed him to his door.
Spikes driven through the joints of his shoulders
and hips kept him in place, and one additional spike
through his belly guaranteed that if someone had
taken him down, he would not have lived. I could
only think that there were no good ways to die, but,
that his had been worse than most.
"Let's get him off of there and bury him," I heard
myself saying.
"We don't have time to bury him, but at least we!
can carry him into his bed."
Impossibly, Edder lifted his head and stared at us.
"It didn't touch you?" he asked.
Oh, Neithas, he's still alive, I thought.
"It was a spell," he said. "It took me by surprise,
but I fought it off as best I could. ... I never had
much power or any great talent with the magic. . .
I made the best song I could and played as well as I
could, but I couldn't save anyone but myself." He drew
a ragged breath, then groaned. "The magic touched
all the rest of them . . . but you've seen that, of course,
Nothing is the same, and nothing that is good will
survive long." He managed a bone-dry laugh. "But I
found what I was looking for."
Ha and Giraud moved forward to pull out the spikes.
Edder said, "Don't. When you pull them, I'm dead,
and I have important news to give you. You have to
carry the news to Remeys. The 'Song of Belangia' has
been sung . . . you tell him that, you understand?
The 'Song of Belangia.'"
I touched the old man. "What was the 'Song of
Belangia'?"
He gave me a hard look. "I know your voice, but
I can't see you—too dark, and my eyes have gone bad.
And I'm dying. Who are you?"
"Isbetta dar Danria."
"The bard's girl."
He knew me? Knew who I was? Knew my father?
I asked him. He said, "I knew him. Your father
was killed because someone else wanted the Song to
be sung, and betrayed him because he was power-
ful enough to reverse it, and protect both king and
kingdom, and was in the position to do so."
"I knew part of that," I told him. "I just found out
about the Black Heron, and Tanil. And the fact that
they wanted to work a spell. But who was the Black
Heron? What did he want."
"The question is, who is the Black Heron," the old
man said. "I've been here all these years to keep
something important away from him, whoever he may
be. I've waited here to get word that the Watchowl
bards had found him, and that he was dead, and that
I could go home. They never did."
"Why?" Ha asked. "Did you have another spell like
the 'Song of Belangia' that you were hiding?"
"No." Edder hung his head. "Something else."
Giraud said, "I want to know about the songspell.
How do we counteract it?"
Edder hung there, his chest rising and falling like
a bellows, and he didn't answer; I could hear the air
rattling in his lungs and the back of his throat. "This
hurts," he said after a while. And after a longer while,
he seemed to draw strength from the air, for he raised
his head and said, "The song was the work of a bard
gone bad ... a spellsong written by Belangia the
Hawkbard. His colleagues found the song before he
could sing it, and hid the book away. They should
have burned it. Should have . . . and didn't, because
they thought it made a good object lesson . . . and
so, I suppose, it has." His voice weakened.
Giraud ran inside and returned with a tin full of
water, which he held to the old man's lips. Edder
sipped until he'd had enough, then hung there gasping
a while longer, and finally nodded again.
"My thanks," he said. "The man the bards know
only as the Black Heron hired another bard to steal
the book. Tanil, probably—I don't know that anyone
knew for certain which bard who went missing in
those dark days did so to betray us, and not because
he'd been betrayed himself. Your father sent word
shortly after he arrived here that he'd found the book,
and had stolen the applicable pages, and was on his
way back. But he never arrived. Neither, apparently,
did Tanil, for our spies still tell of search that remains
in progress across Terosalle for the book—financed,
rumor has it, by the same Black Heron."
I swallowed. I knew where the original book had
ended up. And the stolen pages. And the fate of the
thief who had stolen it. The world would have been
a better place if the book had come to the same end
as the bard.
Edder sighed and hung his head. "You'll go. You'll
tell the Watchowl bards the 'Song of Belangia' has
been sung, won't you? They will know what to do."
"We'll tell them," I said.
The dying bard shook his head. "Something else.
I can't forget this. You, girl . . . you take the black
lute . . . it's hidden beneath the floorboards under
my bed. ... I only just had time to hide it before
they came for me. The lute is ... special. Protect
it until you get it to Watchowl and give it to ... I
don't know who you'll give it to. The lute will know."
His head dropped forward again, and he drew another
ragged breath. When he looked up, his eyes focused
for the first time. He stared at Ha. "You. Dwarf. I
claim kinbond by deed and oath to the Clan of Sher,
and by kinbond I claim right of grace."
I saw Ha stiffen. "What was your deed," he asked
softly, "and what was your oath, to claim kinbond?"
I was thinking about that cryptic remark, "The lute
will know." I only half-listened to the old man and
Ha. Their words had, to me, the sound of ritual. I
didn't know what they meant, but I sensed that what
passed between them signified more than it seemed.
"My deed was the clearing of the Hills of Chirs
Chase of the legions of the walking dead. I stood
beside Fikkgund Sher and swore I would not turn
back until the hills were clean. Nor did I. And when
we were done, I swore the Oath of First Brothers."
Ha bowed so deeply his head nearly touched the
ground. "Honorable deeds; the story is known to me.
You are brother to the Sher, and so are my brother.
Have you aught to send your kin?"
The words were old words, oddly spoken—stiff and
high and formal; within those old words, power
moved. Power to command loyalty, to extract prom-
ises, to demand favors. It was not the power of magic,
but the power of honor, and I felt its force moving
between Edder and Ha as surely as I'd felt the power
that raised the Changewinds moving through me.
"I do not bind you in that way," Edder whispered.
"If you see them, tell them I died bravely, and that
I brought the Clan of Sher no shame. That's all."
"I swear I shall do it. How shall I give you grace?"
The bard hung on the door, only his chest mov-
ing as he drew in one labored breath, and then
another, and then another. "I'm ready now. Don't
waste time putting me in my bed or worrying about
the proprieties. The proprieties died with the spell-
song. Just do it and get the lute and go."
Maydellan Ha's back went rigid, his face set into
a stiff, thin-lipped mask. Not even the darkness could
hide the struggle raging inside of him. "Go in and
get the lute, Isbetta. Giraud . . . help her find it.
Quickly."
I nodded and pushed the door open. Gently, for
the old man hung on it, and I didn't want to cause
him any more pain. I slipped past him and Giraud
followed me in. Neither of us said anything—we both
knew what would happen when we were out of sight.
We found Edder's narrow bed and moved it, and felt
around until we located a loose floorboard. That and
boards to either side lifted; Giraud pulled them up
and held them out of the way while I reached in and
felt around until I discovered a soft, padded leather
case. I lifted it out. It was the right size and shape
to hold a lute, but I had no wish to flee Blackwarren
only to discover the bard hadn't put the instrument
back in its case.
I loosened the ties and slipped a hand inside. A
lute nestled in there—its wood felt warm to my hand,
and it vibrated almost as if it were alive. "I wish we
had some light," I whispered. "I need to be sure it's
the right one."
"I'll stir the coals in his hearth with a tinder stick,"
Giraud said. "Maybe I'll be able to get enough of a
flame that we'll be able to see it."
Outside I heard a thud against the door. No cry,
no clank of metal, nothing but that one soft thud. But
I knew it was over. Edder had received his grace. I
swallowed hard and shivered at the thought of another
death on my hands.
A moment later, Giraud, holding a stick with a tiny
flame on the tip, knelt by my side. "Let's see it."
I pulled the flaps on the case back. Black wood
gleamed back at us, so finely fitted and rubbed and
so perfectly shaped that it seemed not a creation of
the hands of a man but the flawless work of a god.
"I've never seen anything like it," Giraud whis-
pered.
"Nor have I. If its sound is the equal of its con-
struction, it will be the finest instrument I've ever
seen."
I quickly covered it up and tied the ties. I slipped
the strap of the case over my shoulder, and Giraud
and I hurried back into the night.

Chapter Nine

We stole three horses, but only after we'd checked
their teeth and their hooves to be sure that the
Changewinds had not turned them into monsters that
would creep up on us while we slept and devour us.
If the madness that enveloped Blackwarren contin-
ued, I thought it likely that whoever had owned them
would never realize they were gone, probably wouldn't
survive to realize they were gone.
According to Ha, who had traveled there once
before, Watchowl Keep lay almost directly south of
us, a day's ride away if we dared to ride straight. But
the Watchowl Forest lay between us and our desti-
nation, and Ha said its inhabitants had been terri-
fying before the Changewinds passed through. None
of us wanted to think of what they might have become
afterward.
So we decided we would not chance travel directly
through the forest. We would ride south as far as
Straje. From there, we could either go east until we
reached Anatta and the Burrinee River, where we
would probably have to steal a boat, or we could ride
west along the Black Rock Reaches, then south on
Forest Road until we got to the path through the
forest that led to Galarialle and, beyond it, to the
Watchowl Keep. Neither direction would be safe, and
the one that lay entirely overland had the disadvan-
tage of being longer. We thought we would probably
go to Anatta, but we didn't want to decide until we
found out whether any vestige of normalcy survived
in Straje.
Giraud said, "I think if we keep traveling west, we'll
come to the end of the spelled area soon. Then we
can travel though safe lands until we reach the keep."
"That's true," I agreed. "If we go east at Straje,
we'll be heading closer to Hearthold Mountain."
"You're assuming that somewhere to the west a
place exists that hasn't been touched by the spell,"
Ha said.
I shrugged. "Of course. No spell could be pow-
erful enough to cover the whole world."
Ha brought his horse just ahead of mine and
looked at me over his shoulder. "Under normal cir-
cumstances, I'd say no. But you sang at the Pillar of
the Sun, and I think the pillar was your instrument.
I think it resonated for you the way an instrument
resonates for a regular bard—"
I cut him off. "How did you know about that?"
"About bards and their magic?" He shrugged. "I've
traveled. I have friends—even a bard or two. I've
watched and I've listened, and I've pieced together
observations and bits of conversation and other petty
details about bardic magic. My knowledge is certainly
incomplete, but just because I can't do magic doesn't
mean I can't figure out some of how it works. In any
case, this is what I observed. Hearthold Mountain
sang with you. Perhaps it did so for a reason no more
mysterious than the pitch of your voice vibrated
precisely right. Maybe not; you might be the One
True Messiah of the bards, or some such rot, and
when we get to the keep we'll discover that they've
been foretelling your arrival for the last thousand
years. More likely, the truth lies somewhere in
between." He reined his mount in and edged closer
to me. "All I know is what I observed, to whit: with-
out accompaniment, you sang a spell from that book,
and your friend and I failed to notice you until you
nearly beat us over the heads. Then you sang a song
I requested, again without accompaniment, and I fell
in love with you. As did your friend, who was sworn
to love another, in the manner of all young idiots."
He sighed. "Perhaps young Giraud is a starry-eyed
romantic, but I, beloved, am not. And while I am still
passionately in love with you," he smiled a wistful
smile in my direction, "I have gained control of my
reason. And I am far too much a realist to think that
this ridiculous passion comes from within me."
I considered that for a moment. "So you think the
crystal pillar accompanied me. What effect would that
have?"
"The Pillar of the Sun goes deep into the earth.
Perhaps it goes all the way through to the other side.
Perhaps, as some of our storytellers suggest, it is the
true heart of the world, and when you sang, it sang
with you. If that's the case, then when you sang the
'Song of Belangia,' maybe all the world fell under your
spell."
I got queasy thinking about that. What if with a
single song I had destroyed my world? Not just a
small area of it, which had been nightmarish to con-
template, not even an entire country, or a whole
continent . . . what if I had destroyed my entire
world?
I rode in silence for a while, imagining the entire
world as terrifying as Blackwarren. The ebon night
through which I rode, in which the stars glittered cru-
elly, could represent not just my village and my coun-
try, but every place I might ever run to. And unlike
the night, this would be a darkness from which there
would be no hiding, and no escape—perpetual night,
from which daylight could never escape.
Giraud interrupted my gloomy ruminations. "So
you're saying we shouldn't go west. That there's no
sense looking for the place where the Changewinds
stopped."
Ha shook his head. "No. I'm saying if we go west,
it should be because the route looks safer. Places
untouched by the magic might not exist, and we
shouldn't waste any time trying to find them. If we
come across them on our way, well and good. We can
take comfort from that. We shouldn't build our plans
around something that might not exist."
Giraud grumbled something that I didn't quite
catch. In a louder voice, he said, "You're right, I'm
sure. But look here. What if the Watchowl Keep has
fallen under the spell of the Changewinds, too? What
if the bards have danced themselves to death or gone
mad in some other way, as so many others have?
What if Watchowl Keep has been destroyed?"
Ha shrugged. "Then our problem will be worse
than it already is, won't it?"
The dead glared at us from the streets of Straje.
Dozens of them hung by their necks from balconies
that jutted over the street, staring down out of empty
eye sockets. Crows, as well as smaller birds, perched
on their shoulders. Vultures studied us as we rode
along the outskirts of the town, their eyes keenly inter-
ested. They hoped, perhaps, that we would furnish
later meals for them. I realized we might, and began
to hate the birds.
We heard screaming and mad laughter from some-
where near the center of the town. Once I caught
a glimpse of women armed with spears and swords
chasing a naked man through the streets. I thought
of my friend Darcelle. The terror went both ways,
I realized—lone men were no safer than lone women.
I could find no comfort in that thought; evil was no
less evil if both men and women participated in it.
We approached the last few houses in Straje, keep-
ing our attention evenly divided between what lay in
front of us and what lay behind. Behind us, the
screaming grew louder and more terrible. Ahead of
us lay quiet and stillness.
Then two bright-eyed children stepped out from
behind a house to watch our approach; they smiled
fearlessly, and something about their calm, in the
midst of all the madness, sent little skittering spider-
chills down the back of my neck.
"Wouldn't you like to take us with you?" the boy
called out as we approached. "We want to go away
from here."
The girl said, "I'm afraid. Please help me."
They were the first children I'd seen in all of
this. As soon as I realized I hadn't seen any chil-
dren anywhere, I wondered what had happened to
the others. The pictures my mind painted made me
shudder.
"We ought to take them," Giraud said. "Their par-
ents will be glad enough to have them back safely
once this is over ... if they're even still alive. And
if they aren't, we'll be able to find someone who will
take them in."
"Don't go close," I said.
"They're only children." Giraud looked at me as
if I'd become as mad as the people we feared.
"The deer were only deer, too," I said, paraphrasing
Ha. Intuition did not whisper at me; it screamed.
"Quite so." Ha nodded. "Stay well back. If they're
still alive when we return, we'll help them then."
"That," Giraud said, "will be far too late to do these
two any good."
Which was the truth. If they needed help, they
needed it right away, and not in a couple of days.
So I asked them, "What are you doing?"
"Running away. And hiding," the boy said. "Mama
and Dada ate the baby, and we don't want to be next."
I winced. Well, if I hadn't wanted to know, I
shouldn't have asked.
Giraud glared at me. "And you think I should just
leave them there?"
Ha groaned. "No. Of course not. We can't leave
them here now, can we?" He jerked his horse's reins
and the animal grunted, but took him toward the two
of them. Giraud followed, and even I wheeled around
so that I could offer to ride one of them pillion. I
was furthest back, so I saw the movement before
either Giraud or Ha did. A simultaneous shifting from
the left, behind a woodpile, and from the hedgerow
to the right—colors that I realized I'd seen before,
but that, now that they were in motion instead of
stationary, my mind declared deadly.
"Get back!" I screamed, spurring my horse. "It's
a trap!"
At the sound of my voice, other children poured
out of their hiding places—a dozen from behind the
woodpile, as many or more from around both sides
of the hedgerow, and even more out of the door to
the house, which I suddenly realized had never been
entirely closed.
Giraud and Ha yelled and wheeled their mounts
around, and we galloped down the road, the preda-
tory children falling behind us. Evil, evil—everything
that was not evil was dead, I thought. No matter how
lovely my world had become, with its transformed
houses and beautiful fields of wildflowers and gen-
tly rolling hills and crystal streams and waterfalls, it
was as full of corruption as a rotting corpse.
Giraud's comment, that perhaps we would find even
the bards' keep changed by the spell, made me shiver.
We reached the intersection and looked down the
road to the east—the one that led to the river. Both
Giraud and I saw a tall, black-garbed, bone-white fig-
ure in the distance, which stood surveying the coun-
tryside, then crouched over a dark pile of something
unidentifiable that lay in the road.
Nantatsu, I thought, and as the word crossed my
mind, Giraud spoke it aloud.
Ha stared at the form we pointed out. "In truth?
I'd never seen one."
"And you don't want to see one now, either," I said.
As simply as that, our decision made itself. We rode
west, settling into a rocking-horse canter that covered
the ground without too seriously tiring our mounts.
We passed houses burned to the ground, more
corpses, occasionally small bands of people. Most of
them were bent on misdeeds of their own and gave
us no more attention than a sideways glance as we
rode past. One group of bloody, scarred, wild-eyed
men and women dropped out of trees to either side
of us as we rode along a part of the road where forest
grew up to the pavement on both sides. They charged
us with swords, but they were on foot. Ha killed the
leader with his pike, and both Giraud and I slashed
at the others with our swords; our height, and the
fact that they attacked us instead of our horses,
allowed us to escape unhurt.
My left shoulder, the one the deer laid open with
its hoof, began to give me trouble. I'd been unable
to do anything more for the wound than bind it from
time to time with fresh strips of cloth ripped from
my second-best tunic. It had stopped bleeding quickly,
and I thought it would heal without causing me grief.
I thought wrong.
My shoulder started to burn like fire as I rode; the
pain that had been a forgettable dull throb while I
was walking now felt like someone jamming a knife
blade into my shoulder joint. Every hoof that hit the
ground jarred the wound and increased the pain a
little more.
Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.
"Ha, we have to stop."
"We're making good time," he said, and then he
saw my face. It must have looked like a philosopher's
description of the Coldhell, because he said, "Giraud,
make sure this place is safe." And he pulled up and
sat studying me.
"What's wrong with you?" he asked me.
"Shoulder," I told him.
"Shoulder?"
"Where the deer got me."
I saw surprise in his eyes. "The deer? I didn't know
it had done you any harm."
I nodded. "I've been taking care of it. Clean strips
ripped from my other shirt when we stopped, washing
it as often as we find clean water—I haven't been
able to do much, but I've done what I could."
"Oh, Grum." He glowered.
I didn't know who or what Grum was, but it evi-
dently was something bad.
"Let me see what you've been doing."
Giraud came back. "Nothing around right now,
though we don't dare stay for long."
"Right. She's been riding with a hurt shoulder, and
didn't bother to tell us," Ha said. "How bad do you
suppose it's gotten since yesterday morning?"
"Couldn't be too bad," Giraud said.
I'd had the same thought.
But Ha just snorted. "Couldn't, eh?" He peeled the
bandages away, and I whimpered as the crusted blood
ripped off. "Oh, have mercy, Grum you motherlover,"
he muttered. "Too much more of your heroics, girl,
and you wouldn't have had a shoulder to worry about,
or an arm either."
"What?" I frowned at him. I preferred the sooth-
ing administrations of a healer when I was unwell,
and kind reassurances that I would be fine, not the
gruff warnings of an irate dwarf. I said as much.
"Is that so?" His eyebrows slid up, and his mouth,
somewhat less swollen and bruised than it had been,
twisted into a cold little smile. "Soothing words and
vague reassurances don't cure infection."
"But a good spell would."
"A good spell might." He shook his head, disgusted.
"Would you use the heel of your boot to drive a nail?"
"Of course not."
"You might." He glowered. "If you didn't have
anything better, you might use your heel to drive a
nail, because it might be able to do the job, and if
the job needed doing, and all you had was your boot,
you'd take whatever tool you had. Magic is a bootheel.
Physical sickness is a nail. You can use magic to cure
illnesses, but what's the first law of spellcasting, eh?"
"Part of the whole acts on the whole?"
"Farting, fire-eating Gram!" His eyes grew narrow.
"That's the second. Anyone with even a trace of magi-
cal ability ought to at least know the laws of opera-
tion of magic."
"You said you have no magical ability."
"And I know them anyway, because if you don't
understand the world you live in, you aren't living
in it, are you? You're just wandering through with a
stupid expression on your face, getting surprised when
events don't go the way you wish they would, even
though any reasonable person could see that they
were going to turn out the way they have because
that's . . . the . . . way . . . life . . . works. I know
how life works." He took a deep breath and waited
for a moment. His face, which had gotten quite red
while he was shouting at me, returned to a more
normal color. "The first rule of magic is: Like begets
like. Remember that. Like begets like."
"Like begets like," I repeated. I didn't want him
shouting at me again. My head was starting to feel
light and my temples were pounding, and I felt hot
and cold at the same time.
"Another way of saying the first law is that effects
resemble causes. And a logical extrapolation of the first
law of magic is that if something is caused by magic,
magic will effect a reasonable cure. However ..." his
heavy eyebrows drew down and his voice began to get
louder again, "if something isn't caused by magic, then
magic will not offer the most effective cure. Or solu-
tion. You don't hammer nails with the heel of your
boot."
"Right," I said. I'd begun to notice that Maydellan
Ha when he was angry reminded me more than a
little of Poor Gojas, who had been god-touched when
he had a terrible fever, and whoever afterward walked
around Blackwarren shouting at the skies and de-
manding that everyone worship him because he was
the second coming of Thural. Ha even had the same
expression on his face. I wondered, briefly, if he
would stand up and start tearing off his cloths, as Poor
Gojas sometimes did. I hoped he wouldn't. "I need
some more willow bark," I said, hoping to distract
him his tirade.
"Willow bark?"
"For the pain in my head and my shoulder. I've
been gathering it whenever we stopped and chew-
ing on it as we rode—"
"That's exactly what I mean," Ha said. He started
digging through his pack, snarling. "You don't need
willow bark. That just hides your symptoms until
you're so sick everyone else can see it, too. Idiot."
He pulled out a small vial of yellow powder. When
he opened it, the stink of rotten eggs assailed my
nose. He took water from a vial and poured it onto
a square of coarse cloth and without warning began
scrubbing at the cut in my shoulder. I yelled. The
wound, which had been closed and scabbing over,
opened, and blood and pus covered his rag.
"Idiot," he muttered again. "You'll have a scar from
this, and if you had said something sooner you
wouldn't have, but at least I got it early enough that
the wound won't kill you." He was still scrubbing. I
tried to pull away from him, but he was incredibly
strong. And determined.
"You're hurting me," I said through clenched teeth.
"If you hadn't been stupid, you wouldn't have this
mess now." He poured some of the egg-stinking pow-
der into the wound. Pain whited out the sky, and I
howled as if he'd run my shoulder through with a
sword. He patted at the cut with his rag, forcing the
powder into all the places it hadn't reached on its
own. The pain, incredibly, got worse. "Effects
resemble causes. If you have an injury of non-magical
origin, you need a non-magical cure to obtain the best
results. Healers know this. They just keep going back
to magic when situations are gravest, and they're going
in the wrong direction. Everything they know tells
them this, but they do it anyway."
I nodded my head, trying to look like I agreed with
everything he said. I would have agreed with anything
if it made him quit digging into my shoulder.
When he did quit, he wrapped the wound in soft
white cloth and told me we had to redress the wound
at nightfall, when the potency of his stinking pow-
der would have worn off.
I could barely contain my excitement.
Once he was done, he mixed white powder in a
thimbleful of his water and made me drink it. The
taste was bitter beyond words, but somehow famil-
iar. "What was that?" I asked him when my face had
unscrewed itself enough to allow speech.
"Willow bark powder," he told me. No expression
crossed his face.
I nearly exploded. "Willow bark powder! I thought
willow bark was the evil remedy that that would kill
me!"
"Not at all." His voice, so even and calm, was meant
to chastise me for my display of temper. Never mind
that he'd been the one with the temper moments
before. "No harm in treating the pain if you're also
getting treatment for the wound-sickness. Just don't
expect it to do more than make you hurt less."
As the day wore on, I was grateful enough for the
willow bark powder, bitter though it was, and for Ha's
ministrations to my shoulder. I moved stiffly, but I
could almost believe that stinking burning stuff he'd
poured onto my skin was helping. I no longer felt
both hot and cold. I still ached, but the jarring of
my mount's hoofbeats no longer seemed like an attack.
Lucky for me, because just outside the village of
Konatar Bridge, where we stole replacement horses,
Giraud, who had become increasingly distant and
quiet, broke one long silence to say, "I may have
imagined this, but I thought I heard hoofbeats behind
us."
We stopped, and from the line of trees where the
road curved out of sight, we heard what might have
been the echo of our own mounts' hoofbeats echo
into silence. Three extra beats, maybe four, and then
the day became still. The road curved ever further
southward and Watchowl Forest on our left hid what
lay behind us as well as what lay ahead.
We looked at each other. "Might have been noth-
ing," I said.
"Might have been," Ha agreed, face impassive. "But
we dare not act as if it was."
"One of us ought to double back?"
Ha shook his head. "Poor strategy to split our
forces when we don't know what's back there, or
what's yet to come."
I thought of the book I carried, and the black lute.
I thought of magic that I didn't understand, and
couldn't control, and I thought of death that might
or might not be riding behind us, and lives I'd cost,
and lives I might yet save.
As we urged our horses forward, south and west
toward Dar Betis, I said, "I could sing the song I sang
in the tunnel. The one that made you not notice me.
I could wait behind and see what follows us, then
ride ahead and tell you."
"And you could die trying it, too," Giraud said. "If
we stay ahead of the rider and stay together, we'll
have the best chance of reaching the keep alive."
"The road had been empty of travelers. If some-
one else is riding a horse, maybe he's someone like
us. Someone not touched by the Changewinds."
Ha snorted. "Then why does he hide himself back
of us? Why doesn't he show himself?"
"Maybe he's as afraid of us as we are of him. No
one else seems sane. Maybe he's afraid we're mad."
I wanted so much to believe someone remained
untouched by the nightmare I'd created. I wanted to
think we might reach a place where the Changewinds
hadn't blown. Someone else normal would be like a
gift, or a promise. There might be an end to this hor-
ror.
Ha shrugged. "Then that's damned sensible of him,
and we ought to leave him back there with his fears.
Fear will keep him alive a lot longer than hope."
I wondered if the dwarf had always been such a
miserable pessimist.
"Fear might have saved Adalane," Giraud said
softly.
I glanced over at him. "She might still be alive."
"She isn't," he said.
"You don't know that."
"Yes, I do. I saw her and her mother and sisters
hung in front of their house when we were leaving
town."
I stared at him. "You didn't say anything."
"What was I supposed to say? They were dead.
I couldn't help them. I couldn't do anything but slow
us down and we couldn't take a chance of being
slowed down, could we? We have to get to the
keep."
I tried to remember anything that might have been
Adalane hanging from a balcony in Blackwarren, but
I'd made a point of not looking at the bodies. I didn't
want to know, as we left, who was only possibly dead
and who was dead for sure.
"I'm sorry," I said. I felt as inadequate as anyone
ever feels when faced with offering a dear friend sym-
pathy at the death of someone he loved. I wished I
could do something to make everything better. Know-
ing that if not for my actions, Giraud's beloved would
still be alive, I wished I could make myself disap-
pear.
Well, I thought, I could make myself disappear.
Maybe. If the spell still worked for me when I was
away from the mountain. But what would my instru-
ment be? Certainly not the lute—the worst of idi-
ots wouldn't try to play a lute while riding a cantering
horse.
Did I remember the spellsong? Well enough, as
I thought about it. It had been written to be sung
to the "Fat Lady's Stroll." Why? I hummed the tune
of "Fat Lady's Stroll," and fell easily into the rhythm
of my horse's canter.
Of course. Three-beat tune.
My skin prickled with the idea that came to me.
I knew of bards who sang to the rolling beat of a
hand-drum. Could the drumming of my horse's hooves
be my instrument?
I hummed, trying to feel anything happening as
I did it—DUM-bah-da, DUM-bah-da—and tried to
remember the words the bard had created to get
himself out of his fix. They don't have to be exactly
right, I thought. Not exactly. They only have to be
close enough to do what I need them to do.
DUM-bah-da, DUM-bah-da . . .
It took me a moment and some effort, but finally
I had the words in my head, close enough to be
satisfying. I started singing softly, rocking to the
drumming of my horse's hooves, riding the beat clear
through my body. I'd find out who rode behind us,
if anyone did. I'd make myself useful.
"Here I'll be
Now you'll see
No one important
No one who
Says to you,
You ought to stay
"Here I'll be
Don't see me
I'm not important
I can just
Turn back, just
Ride on away."
We hadn't been talking before, so I couldn't tell
if Ha or Giraud had forgotten about me. Maybe my
spell was doing nothing—I was probably an idiot to
think I could use a horse as a musical instrument. I
kept singing, though. Sang through my version of the
song again, and then again.
I started to drop back a bit. Neither of them looked
sideways. Neither of them noticed me at all. I reined
in a little tighter, but not enough to encourage my
mount to shift from a canter to a trot, which was a
four-beat rhythm that—if my spell were working, of
course—could shatter it all to bits.
Still cantering, still singing, I turned the horse and
headed back the way I'd come.

Chapter Ten

I can't say that I had a plan. I only wanted to find
out if someone was following us, and if someone was,
then who and why. So I rode back, singing softly in
time to the beat of my horse's hooves, not sure how
far the spell would carry, or when Ha and Giraud
would notice I was gone, and not sure how far ahead
the spell would reach, either, or whether it would
work on the person or people who followed us.
I thought I'd hide right at the edge of the woods
as soon as I heard hoofbeats. I didn't get the chance.
Someone was following us, but that someone had
decided to hide in the trees beside the roadway when
he heard my horse approaching. Evidently as I got
closer, the songspell took effect, because he was just
riding out of the trees as I came around the bend.
His appearance so startled me that for an instant I
lost the beat of my song. I got it back, but for just
that instant I thought he realized I was there.
He was an old man, but not in the manner that
I was accustomed to thinking of old people. His hair
was white, certainly, and his face deeply creased, but
he did not have the stoop that I associated with the
very old, or the slowness of movement, or the gen-
eral air of frailty. His eyes, hooded like a falcon's and
deepset beneath thick, straight brows, were quick and
fierce and observant. His hands, spotted by time and
sunlight, remained thick and knotted with muscle.
He'd filed his nails to points in the manner of the
southern dancing warriors. He rode easily, with his
back straight and his shoulders relaxed.
I tried to figure out what he was. I had never seen
clothing as fine as his, nor as odd. He dressed all in
black and emerald green silk—his shirt, cut with bil-
lowing sleeves and worn under a plain green tunic,
was black embroidered with black in a pattern so thick
and detailed and many-layered that to me that the
old man appeared to be sprouting black dragons. His
sword hung in an emerald green scabbard that was
polished so deeply and to such perfection that it could
have been carved from a single gemstone.
His horse was as black as his shirt and pants; the
horses trappings green silk, the saddle dyed green
leather with onyx trimmings. I wondered if he always
wore black and green, or if he had other saddles to
match his other outfits.
I rode along beside him, watching him, trying to
figure him out. He gave me no notice, never glanced
in my direction, kept himself just behind the curve
that separated us from Giraud and Ha. He was alto-
gether the most intriguing human being I had ever
seen, and I wondered why he followed us.
"I'm following you because you and your friends
are the only sane people I've found other than myself,
and you seem to have a destination and a plan. Since
I found myself without either, I decided to borrow
yours," he said. He still didn't look at me. The shock
of his reply to a question I'd only asked in my mind
shook me so badly I lost both song and rhythm, and
nearly lost my balance as well.
My mount shifted from her smooth canter to a
bone-shaking trot, and I let myself be bounced around
for a long, painful moment before I got control of
both of us again. I urged her forward, and caught up
with the old man.
"Your little spell almost worked, by the way," he
told me. "In spite of the wards I've set round myself
to prevent such surprises, you almost had me. I'd be
more than a little curious to discover how you accom-
plished that."
"How long have you known I was here?"
"Since you came around the corner and lost your
place in your song."
"Then why didn't you say something ... or do
something . . . ?" I felt like an idiot. I'd been riding
along gawking at him, thinking I could do so with-
out him knowing, and I was embarrassed beyond
words to discover that he'd known all along.
"Why didn't I say something? Because, quite
frankly, I wanted to know your intentions." For the
first time he looked over at me, and I saw that his
eyes were as intensely, unrelievedly black as his shirt,
his saddle, his horse . . . He smiled. If nothing else
about his face was reassuring, still he had, I thought,
the gentlest smile I'd ever seen. "I wanted to know
whether you would try to kill me if you thought I
didn't know you were there, or if you would do what
you did—ride along trying to figure out what I
wanted."
"And now that you know?"
He looked forward again. "Now I will see if you
and I can convince your two friends to let me travel
with you. This road, after all, is no place for one old
man—even an old man as capable of taking care of
himself as I happen to be."
He looked like a fierce old man, but upright and
honest and honorable—and by Neithas, I liked him.
I didn't trust him—I wouldn't have trusted my own
father if I met him on the road right then—but I
liked him. I said, "Well, I can't guarantee that they'll
want to travel with you, you know. I don't know yet
if I do."
He smiled and nodded as if I'd told him we'd take
him in with open arms, feed him and his horse, and
find him a free room. "Good," he said, and his smile
vanished. "You'll live longer if you don't trust every-
one. Caution is the wellspring of wisdom, child."
I started to answer him. ... I don't remember what
I was going to say, only that I didn't get the chance
to say it. Down the road from us, I heard shouts, a
scream, and the clash of metal. "Giraud and Ha!" I
shouted, and dug my heels into my horse's flanks,
urging her to a flat-out gallop. She balked and slowed
down. I dug harder, leaning forward on her withers
and clicking my tongue. Her ears went back and she
snorted. She started prancing and weaving from side
to side. Then the stranger drew his gleaming sword
from his scabbard, and without a cry, he and his horse
launched forward at an incredible pace.
Then, of course, my horse decided it must not be
such a bad idea, and she took off in pursuit. Since
I wasn't ready, she almost unseated me. She galloped
forward with me hanging half out of the saddle, one
foot slipped all the way through the stirrup and the
other completely out of it, hanging on to the pom-
mel for sweet survival and feeling the cinch slipping
as we went. I grabbed a hank of mane and pulled
myself upright, and managed with great difficulty to
kick my loose foot back into the flapping stirrup—
though I couldn't untangle the one that had slipped
all the way through. With my weight balanced on one
foot and the terrible feeling that my head was about
to end up under my horse's hooves at any instant, I
raced after the old man.
Ha and Giraud came into view, and I could see
they were in desperate trouble. They stood back to
back in the center of the road, with three big men
attacking them and one sitting on horseback a dis-
tance off. The rider held an instrument in his hands
and played. It took me a moment to realize that he
wore the garb and insignia of a court bard. A full
bard.
My first reaction was one of relief. A court bard
could sing a calming spellsong, or put the attackers
to sleep, or take any of a dozen other useful actions
that would eliminate them as a danger. My second
reaction was horror, when I realized that the court
bard was working with the attackers and not against
them.
And the stranger, with sword out, was galloping
toward the melee, and I had no idea whether he in-
tended to help us, or whether he was riding to the
aid of associates who had been waiting in ambush.
A hard yank to one side got the bit out from
between the teeth of my mount, and I slowed her from
a headlong gallop to a canter. I sang the "don't notice
me" song again, and worked my shortsword out of my
belt as I did it. I didn't think my spell would do any-
thing against the bard, but it might be sufficient to
confuse the three ruffians who attacked my friends.
If I could get close before they noticed me, maybe I
could slow them down or stop them, even though I
had very little idea what to do with a sword.
The old man charged straight at the bard—so we
had an ally. Our numbers were even, if not our odds.
An apprentice historian, an apprentice weaver, a
dwarf, and an old man were hardly equal opponents
for three men who looked like trained fighters and
one full bard.
And yet the bard blanched as the old man went
at him, and threw his instrument to the ground and
reached for his sword. An odd reaction, I thought.
Then I didn't have time to think. I reached the
fighters and got in one good stroke, slashing a huge
red-headed man across the back of his right shoulder
and down the center of his back. He screamed, my
horse reared and bolted again, and I was thrown from
the saddle. My left shoulder slammed into the ground,
and my left arm, and the left side of my head.
I bounced, and slammed down again.
My left boot was still all the way through the stir-
rup. I hit ... bounced ... hit ... bounced . . .
hit. . . .
Rolled onto my stomach, smashing my face into
the paving stones of the road.
Skidded.
And lay there, bleeding and in pain, knowing
vaguely that my friends needed my help but unable
to move.
Darkness descended.
"There . . . she seems to have heard that. . . ."
Voices in the darkness, hands tugging, lifting,
hurting.
"Try to give her a little water. ..."
Drowning, choking, pain.
Coarse, urgent cry—"No! No more water!"
The pain billowing upward, outward, filling every-
thing with white heat, red anguish. . . .
. . . blackness flowing in behind the pain. . . .
"Can you hear me? Isbetta? Can you let me know
if you hear me?"
Of course I can, I thought, but I couldn't change
thought to action.
"We need for you to wake up," the voice said.
Yes. I knew that. I couldn't remember precisely
why it was important, but I had no doubt at all that
it was. Something big was at stake.
I managed to open my eyes. Blurry faces stared
down at me from too close. I wanted them to back
away, but they didn't. They moved closer, and I felt
hands at my back, sitting me up.
Pain ripped me into a thousand pieces, and noth-
ingness devoured the pieces.
"—thirsty. I'm thirsty. I'm thirsty." Said over and
over in a monotonous whisper, until I got so tired
of the same two words I wanted to slap the person
who said them. I tried to say shut up, and in that
way discovered that the voice complaining of thirst
was my own.
I opened my eyes. I remembered other times and
other attempts, but this time was different. This time
I didn't hurt. I didn't hurt at all. I was lying on some-
thing soft, beneath a bower of huge chestnut trees,
under an early morning sky, and at first I seemed to
be alone.
Then I heard voices speaking softly from a little
distance off. I sat up and looked around. Through a
screen of trees, I saw Giraud talking with Maydellan
Ha and the mysterious old man who'd fought beside
us. I couldn't hear what they said—only the steady
rise and fall of voices speaking with some urgency.
I got to my feet slowly. The last clear memories
I had were of falling from the horse during my single
attempt at heroism. After that, I only had glimpses
of light between patches of darkness, and faint rec-
ollections of terrible pain. I'd been hurt. I knew I
had, but I wasn't hurt anymore. Even the wound on
my shoulder that I'd gotten from the deer had
stopped hurting.
My clothes were a mess—cloak torn, shirt shred-
ded at the left shoulder, everything stained with blood.
I pulled back the shoulder of my shirt and twisted
around to peek at the skin underneath. A thick, pink
scar slashed across the muscle and down toward my
chest, and smaller but broader scars showed where
I'd been dragged across the pavestones. I slid my
fingers up to my head and ran them through my hair;
on the left side of my scalp, I found more smooth
scar tissue, and a slight indentation in the bone that
I was certain had never been there before.
I began to be frightened. How long had I held
everyone up? We were supposed to have reached
Watchowl Keep in the same day that we left Black-
warren. We were going to ride all day and part of
the night if necessary. The whole of the world I knew
had depended on us reaching the bards and trying
to find a way to undo the spellsong I'd sung, and only
haste might save more death and destruction. . . .
And there I lay, on a soft, grassy bed, with my
wounds all healed and no more pain, and we weren't
at the Watchowl Keep and we hadn't saved anyone.
I rose carefully, expecting stiffness or twinges, or
at least weakness from having been ill and unable to
move for a long time. Instead, I felt as if I'd done
nothing more than spend a restful night asleep. No
pain when standing, no pain when moving, no diz-
ziness, weakness, no queasiness. . . .
I joined my friends and the stranger. I noticed
immediately that Ha's blackened eyes and battered
face had healed, too. I wondered if, after so long,
anyone remained to save. "I'm awake and I can
travel," I said without preamble. "How many days did
we lose? How many weeks?"
Giraud gave me a tired smile. "We only lost the
time between nightfall and sunrise. No days, no
weeks. Ondan Shanxi is one of the Ko Mystics. He's
both a warrior and a healer—his medicine is even of
the sort that our friend Ha considers worthwhile, so
he didn't get the lecture about nails and boots that
you and I got."
Ha gave Giraud a cold look that shut him up. The
dwarf turned to me and said, "An ondan of the Ko
deserves respect. The Ko are the foremost students and
teachers of natural medicine, magic and philosophy in
the world. And even I have heard of Ondan Shanxi,
who is a renowned practitioner of all three disciplines."
"That you have heard of me," the ondan said, "is
perhaps not all to the good. I have never desired
fame; only the furtherance of knowledge."
Ha said, "He came down out of the mountains
after the Changewinds blew through, to see what
had happened and to try to find a way to undo the
damage."
The old man laughed softly. "Not entirely true,
good Ha. The mountains came down. I merely came
out. And I find that you, dear child," he nodded
toward me, "are the singer of the spellsong that flat-
tened the world." He smiled at me again with that
same calm, kind smile that had so enchanted me the
first time I saw it.
I stared down at my feet. "I think I knew better
than to sing a bardic spellsong," I said. "But the
omens . . . well, I knew I shouldn't, but I was so
afraid of the nantatsu—"
"As well you should have been. They're deadly,
evil creatures, and best avoided. I happened to cross
paths with one outside of Straje that was hunting
an evil bard that had tricked it, then destroyed its
mountain home. It was muttering of revenge. I
never seek out such monsters, but on principle, I
kill them when I cross paths with them; they dedi-
cate themselves entirely to the inflicting of pain and
terror and death."
I felt my heart drop into my boots. I could see
the ondan's revelation was news to Ha and Giraud,
too. They had both paled as he mentioned that the
monster had been looking for us. "What happened
to the nantatsu?" I asked.
"I listened to it until I learned as much as I could
from its ramblings. Then I moved ahead of it and
presented myself to it as a corpse in the road. It came
to me, intending to devour me before going on its
way. When it moved within range, I killed it."
I thought of the enormous monster, and studied
the old man in amazement, trying to imagine him
killing such a creature. "How?"
He shrugged. "By being where it thought I wasn't,
and doing what it thought I wouldn't."
Giraud and I exchanged bewildered looks. May-
dellan Ha simply smiled. "Ondan Etsran, yes? The
answer to the question, 'How does the single warrior
defeat the evil nation?'"
The faintest flash of surprise crossed the ondan's
face. "Indeed," he agreed. "You are a gem with many
facets, Maydellan Ha."
"Some of those facets require polishing," Ha said.
"I wanted very much to study medicine with the Ko,
but I knew of no one who knew how to find your
temples."
"We often say, 'When the student is ready, the
teacher will appear.'"
Neither of them said anything more on the mat-
ter, but I had the feeling that between them they had
come to some sort of agreement.
"Since you are ready, child, I suggest we resume
our travels."
"But you can't undo the spellsong?"
The ondan shook his head. "The spell that you have
cast must be uncast. It cannot simply be undone. And
your ways aren't my ways—a master of your bardic
magic will have to form the uncasting."
So we were going to have to continue to the
Watchowl Keep. And only Ondan Shanxi and May-
dellan Ha had horses. Mine was gone, Giraud's dead.
"We're not far from Dar Betis," Giraud said.
"Maybe we'll be able to replace our horses there."
The ondan shook his head slowly. "I believe we
must avoid the towns."
"But how else will we find replacements for our
horses?" I asked.
"You're asking the wrong question. Evil coalesces,"
the old man said softly. "When I feel the pulse of
the world, I feel the madness dying away, and the
mindful wickedness that has awakened reaching out.
It moves into position both before you and behind
you, gathering in the places where you have been and
where it expects you to go. It searches for you."
He looked directly at me when he said this, and
a coldness washed over me like icy rain, and left me
shivering. "You mean us, don't you? Not just me."
"I mean you. The evil seeks you."
I didn't want to believe him, but my gut told me
he was right. "Why me?"
"Because only the caster of a spell can uncast it,
child. Others can turn it, alter it, and try to undo
some of the damage that it does, but in all the world
only you can truly undo what you have done. If the
awakened evil can destroy you, then it gains ascen-
dancy. And that ascendancy, which it seeks always,
and which those who follow goodness have always
managed to tear away from it, is what it most craves."
"So this evil wants to stop me."
"Don't use soft words for hard truth." The old man
studied me. "The evil wants to kill you. If it can reach
you, it will."
"Then what are we going to do?" Giraud wanted
to know. "If we can't go to the villages to get horses,
we're going to lose time—"
The ondan pressed a finger to his lips, and Giraud
grew quiet. "She knows," he said. "If she lets her
heart speak, it will take her by the safest route."
I had no idea how to listen to my heart. My gut,
in its usual fashion, had plenty of worries but no prac-
tical advice. With everyone looking at me, I tried to
think of what we ought to do, what I was supposed
to know, and as far as I could tell, I didn't know a
damned thing. Something the old man had said came
back to me as I was standing there, though, and it
made the sort of sense that my head didn't like but
that made my gut happy.
"Be where it thinks we aren't," I said. "Do what
it thinks we won't."
The ondan studied me, waiting. I had expected
praise for reciting his bit of wisdom back at him, and
was disappointed when he didn't tell me what a clever
girl I was. I wasn't going to get credit for coming up
with the words unless I could also come up with a
plan that would put them into action. And action was
the difficult part. Ondan Shanxi's bright black eyes
watched me, and I felt certain that he knew the
answer, but that if I didn't figure it out, or gave the
wrong one, he would let me lead us to our deaths
as a lesson on listening to my heart. My mute, impa-
tient heart.
Giraud's mouth popped open and the ondan raised
a single finger, and it closed again. There'd been
plenty of times when I wished I could do that. Giraud
was never without an opinion. But this time, what-
ever it might have been, he kept it to himself.
"Where doesn't it expect us to be?" I said, more
to myself than to the others. "What doesn't it expect
us to do?"
And the answer came to me. I hated it, and knew
even so that I had found the solution to the puzzle
the ondan had set for me. "We have to go through
Watchowl Forest," I said.
Ha erupted. "That's insane!" he shouted. "We have
no idea what sort of monsters the Watchowl Forest
harbors now. It was deadly before the Changewinds.
It won't have gotten better."
Giraud crossed his arms over his chest and glared
at me. "No. Not that. Think again, because I'm not
going through that forest."
But Ondan Shanxi merely nodded. "Your heart has
shown you the path you must take."

Chapter Eleven

We rode pillion into the deepening gloom of the
old forest: Ha behind Giraud and me behind the
ondan. We rode in with swords in hand. Giraud
carried the commonplace book in his pack, and I
rode with the lute in its case slung across my
shoulders. I was still amazed that it hadn't been
destroyed when I fell from the horse; lutes were
incredibly delicate instruments, after all. When I
mentioned it, though, the ondan gave me an enig-
matic frown and said that it would survive worse
than a mere fall.
We didn't worry about the lute or the book, how-
ever, or meals or anything else. Around us the
Watchowl Forest had come to hideous life. The edge
of the forest, which had been made up of wide rows
of graceful chestnut trees, quickly gave way to taller,
narrower trees that crowded closely together. We lost
the sunlight beneath tangled, matted branches over-
head, their leaves as thick as thatching. The forest
began to feel almost airless—no breeze moved against
our skins, and breathing felt like sucking air from an
inflated sheep's bladder.
The oppressiveness of the atmosphere heightened
as we began to see changes the spell had wrought
in the forest life. Vines coiled along the branches of
trees overhead, uncoiling in silent, deadly loops as
we moved near them, so that the forest appeared to
be infested with giant, writhing serpents. I could see
the animals some of the vines had caught in their
coils, hanging from the upper branches like meat in
a butcher's shop, while the vines extruded delicate
tendrils that pierced the carcasses and sucked the life
and the nourishment out of them. A huge clawed deer
thrashed above us, caught around the belly and still
alive, though already pierced in a hundred places. I
will never forget the terror in its eyes.
The deer looked much like the fanged carnivores
that had injured me, but this one appeared better
adapted to its new life as a predator. Along with the
canine teeth and a jaw reshaped with powerful
muscles, its hoofed forelegs sported a set of bony,
wickedly curved claws, and its eyes sat forward on its
head, closer together and high on its narrowed nose.
Hunting animals, I've always noticed, have eyes like
that. As do humans. Eyes that look at you in pairs.
The ondan said, "Everything here has become
predatory. See there?"
He pointed to a fallen, rotted log, where a trio of
lush red flowers on thick stalks grew out of the rich
earth. Two of them were in full bloom. One looked
like a bud ready to open . . . until we moved close
enough that I could see it twitching and writhing as
vigorously as the vines overhead. "What is it doing?"
"Just an instant ago, it reached out and caught a
mouse. I think we would be wisest to stay together
at all times, and to assume that everything we see
has some secret way of attacking us." He shook his
head. "This is a situation that cannot be allowed to
continue. When everything is a predator and noth-
ing is prey, everything will die."
Nothing attacked us, though I constantly felt eyes
watching me. The vines would loop down towards us,
then whip back into the upper branches again as if
they were frightened. It seemed like something pro-
tected us, for the sounds of animals screaming stopped
us in our tracks more then once—the many starving
predators caught something in that forest.
Finally I asked, "Why do the vines move away from
us? Why don't the animals attack?"
"For now, I'm making use of a bit of Ko sorcery,"
the ondan said. "I've built the shamadi temple around
us, that travels with us as we move."
"Shamadi temple?"
"A construct of the mind, child. A moving house
of magic, formed of points and angles and planes that
stretch through this world and the Five Listening
Worlds and intersect around, beside, above and
beneath us."
I wished I knew how to construct a shamadi
temple. "So we can travel safely through the forest.
Nothing will touch us."
"Not so." The ondan shrugged. "At best, my
strength is limited. I can hold the temple for a long
time before its walls begin to weaken, but they will
weaken. Further, I can have some effect against
mindless plants, or animals with simple minds. Crea-
tures with more complex minds, however, will be able
to find ways in at us. What the mind builds, after all,
the mind can tear down."
"So if we run into people ..."
"... You had best be prepared to use your sword."
Birds flapped above our heads. We'd seen crows,
of course, and vultures in plenty—they'd had a feast
unlike any they'd ever known because of me. These
weren't of either sort, though. They were bigger, more
ponderous, and though they flew through the canopy
above us, they never called out. No cheeps or caws
or squawks. I didn't like the feel of them up there,
watching. Following. Nothing for us to do, though,
but go on.
So we went on.
The undergrowth grew tighter around us, and more
vicious. Thorns crowded the narrow trail we followed,
and low understory trees leaned toward us as we rode
between them, branches grasping like clawed hands.
We didn't hesitate to hack off those branches with
our swords, but no matter how many we hacked, more
moved toward us.
"You see," the ondan said, "already the temple
becomes less effective."
I saw.
It was as if we were inside a great house, and out-
side of it stood hungry children with their noses
pressed against the glass—but these weren't looking
in wistfully at food on the table. They were looking
at us, because we were the food. And, I thought, if
I had been standing in Giraud's family's greathouse,
panes of leaded glass would have stood between me
and the hungry outsiders. Here, nothing but the
ondan's "temple" kept disaster at bay.
We pressed on.
"At least," Giraud said, "this route has the advan-
tage of cutting off a great deal of distance."
"It has," Ha said. "And of cutting years off my life,
too." He rode with his neck craned, looking up and
to the sides and down, up and to the sides and down,
his head never resting. "I don't know a dwarf who
likes the open sky much—but I know I'd rather have
the open sky above my head than these trees. I can
see movement up there, but I can't make out what's
causing it."
The ondan said nothing.
I shivered and held tighter to the hilt of my sword.
Travel through forest at the best of times is hard
going, and through unknown forest, along poorly
cleared trails that wind up and down hills and across
rocky streams, it's harder. I tried to keep my sense
of our direction clear in my head, but without the
sun to guide me, I quickly felt lost. I knew from what
Ha told me, and what the ondan confirmed, that the
road to the Watchowl Keep cut straight through the
heart of the Watchowl Forest. If we could keep
ourselves heading mostly south, or even southwest or
southeast, we'd cross it. Proof that the trails we fol-
lowed had been made by animals, though, instead of
humans, was that none of them followed straight lines
or headed in a specific direction. They looped,
switched back, paralleled themselves, and pointedly
didn't go anywhere. So we were continually leaving
one trail and whacking our way through writhing,
hissing underbrush until we found another—more
often than not, as we worked our way deeper into
the forest, we found ourselves on foot, one leading
each horse, one following behind to keep anything
deadly from moving too close.
"Clearing ahead," Ha said.
"Does it look like the road?" I called. I was third
in line, leading the ondan's magnificent black horse,
while the ondan brought up the rear.
"No." Ha cleared his throat. "Maybe. It's hard to tell
from here, but I think we've found someone's house.
No one found this news cheering. My own expe-
riences with houses since the Changewinds blew
through convinced me that I'd rather be in the
woods—but there it was. As we got closer, I could
see the thatching of the roof, and the wattle-and-daub
packed in between the timber framing. It looked like
an ordinary house. The only ordinary house I'd seen
since the disaster had belonged to the dying bard in
Blackwarren, and it had remained ordinary because
he'd managed to keep the Changewinds from touching
it. Or him.
Maybe this is another such house, I thought. I
found myself hoping.
We stepped out of the forest into the clearing,
carefully because we had to assume that someone was
watching through the upper windows with bow drawn
and arrow nocked. But we did step out. Somewhere
around the house, which did not sit beside the road,
there would certainly be a path that led to it. And
after we discussed the matter, we decided that we
might have a chance to acquire a couple of additional
horses, if any had been present and had survived, and
if the people of the house hadn't.
We approached through a garden that showed early
signs of neglect. A few weeds grew among the neat
rows. Several staked plants had toppled and been
trampled, with no effort to set them right. The plants
hadn't been watered. I could see nothing that told
me something was terribly wrong with the place, but
nothing reassuring me that it was right, either.
"Barn will be around the other side," Ha said.
The ondan said, "Perhaps we ought to take the
time to find out if anyone still lives here."
We skirted around to the front of the house.
From there, we could see a broad path, the two-
tracked sort that would have been made by a wide
cart. It already showed heavy overgrowth by the
forest's predatory plants—I thought traveling along
it looked more dangerous than the going right
through the woods had been, since the trees in the
woods took up space where the deadly vines and
creepers and thorns couldn't grow. The path gave
them plenty of room.
Nothing encroached into the cleared circle, though.
"I'll just knock on the door," Ha said, and stood
on the broad stone stoop and knocked.
The door swung open. Ha looked back at us.
"Wasn't completely closed," he said.
"Don't go in alone," Giraud said, handing the reins
of their horse to me.
"Wait," the ondan said. "I'll accompany you."
"Not without me you won't," I said. I had no
intention of standing in the clearing alone, holding
the horses. I tied both of them to the hitching post
and followed the others.
They moved into the room and stopped. I heard
them gasp. But I couldn't see past them until I
pushed Giraud (the only pushable one of the three)
out of the way.
I wished I hadn't.
That sickening sweet-rotten odor that bypasses all
logic to go straight to the gut hit me as I got fully
into the house. Two bodies lay on the floor, decom-
posed and swelling. Vines coiled out of their gaping
mouths—thick, smooth, fleshy vines black as tar, with
broad, pale leaves. The plants were as malignantly
ugly as anything I'd ever seen, but they were noth-
ing compared to the fruit they already bore.
Attached by their navels to ropy tendrils of vines
were half a dozen human-looking . . . what shall I
call them? Gourds? Mannequins? Offspring, perhaps.
Those closest to the bases of their respective plants
were nearest to being ripe, and I had the feeling that
when they ripened completely, they would resemble
in every way the humans from which their parent
plants sprouted.
The male plant—it couldn't have been a male
plant, of course, or it wouldn't have borne fruit, but
it was the one upon which the man-fruits grew—had
three offspring that were recognizable. The first was
full-sized, gray-haired, brown-skinned, with a skinny
body. The hands, feet, and face were still blobby and
unfinished—fingers and toes were stubs, the eyelids
looked like they were fused together, and some sort
of filmy membrane covered both the nostrils and the
half-opened mouth. The second had the unfinished
look I'd only seen before when I helped Maura dar
Kastokan wrap the body of her newborn baby for
burial. It hadn't lived more than a few minutes, poor
thing, and had been small enough to fit in the palm
of her hand.
The third was a brownish blob with stubby pro-
trusions that would become arms and legs and head.
Two flowers just beyond that had already set fruit.
Two more were open, and flies buzzed around them.
The story was the same with the woman-plant,
though I guessed the development of the woman-fruit
was at least a few hours behind that of the man-fruit.
None of the women looked so near completion.
"That's obscene," Ha said.
Giraud walked outside and threw up on the stoop.
The ondan alone of all of us moved closer. "How
does it seed?" he asked.
For a moment, I couldn't understand his curios-
ity. More than anything else, I wanted to be away
from the clearing and on the road to the keep. Then,
however, I realized his curiosity had a purpose be-
yond mere gruesome curiosity. Something had killed
the man and the woman who had lived here. Some-
thing had planted the seeds of those two vines in their
mouths. That something was presumably still around.
The fruits of plants carried the seed. The fruit of
this plant looked human and acted human. So now
we faced not only people who were mad, and people
who wanted to kill us ... but people who weren't
even people.
"Get away from there," Ha said.
The ondan didn't seem to hear him.
I looked more closely. As I watched, the fingers
on the ripest of the man-fruits stretched and puck-
ered, and little fingernails appeared on them. The toes
developed, too. And then the eyes opened. Blank
eyes, pale blue and as empty as the space between
the Abyss and the knife-edged rock that lined its floor.
"Get back!" I shouted, but still the ondan didn't
respond.
The man-fruit's arm began to slide toward the old
man, bonelessly, horribly, and Ha reached forward and
grabbed him and pulled him back. I leaped forward
and swung my sword down, striking the base of the
plant just above the head of the dead man. I swung
again and again, hearing as I did the thin keening
wail of the nearest of the man-fruits.
I became aware that someone stood next to me,
dispatching the woman-fruit plant. Giraud. He looked
pale but grimly determined, and he handled his sword
with an efficiency and a finesse that I would have
suspected was beyond him. My historian friend bore
marks of becoming a warrior after all.
When we finished with the vines, he and I hacked
apart the vine-offspring, too. Pulp flew; no matter how
real they looked on the outside, their insides held no
bones or organs that I could discern. They seemed
to be made up of nothing but bands of fibrous flesh
running in all directions around a dense core of bright
reddish material that looked and felt to me like wood.
Ha stopped us. "Leave them," he said. "If we've
found these, there will be hundreds or thousands of
others we won't find. The only way we can get rid
of them all—if we even can—is to make it to the
keep."
Giraud, sweating, said, "These won't go walking
around." I was almost certain I saw tears in his eyes,
but I couldn't understand why.
When we got outside, I asked him.
"You don't have anyone," he said, "and you haven't
for a long time. So you wouldn't think of this, I guess.
But me—I had brothers and a father. What if when
the bitch-queen killed them, she had their bodies out
where these plants could seed into them? What if I
saw my da walking down the road toward me, or
either of my brothers? What if, Isbetta? How would
I know whether to hug them because they were still
alive, or kill them because they weren't?"
I gripped his shoulders and stared into his pale
face. "You would know because your real brothers and
father are dead. Anything you see that looks like them
has to be something evil."
He shook his head and glared down at me. "I never
saw them dead. I don't know for sure that they didn't
find some way to escape at the last minute. And my
heart will tell me there's always a chance, no mat-
ter what my mind says." He closed his eyes and took
a slow, deep breath. "You know there's always a
chance, Izza."
I did know. Some perverse part of me whispered
in the back of my mind even then that my father
might still be alive somewhere. That what I had heard
from Birdie had been false. That my dreams of being
reunited with him weren't hopeless.
Hope. I clung to the threadbare dreams it spun
for me, never letting myself admit that I was lying
to myself. I was lying to myself about so much. Telling
myself that I would be able to undo the damage I'd
done. That the world would go back to being a famil-
iar place. That everything I had ever cared about
might somehow be restored. I could see the stupid-
ity of my hopes, but I couldn't release any of them,
even as I watched the fabric they were made of
tearing and shredding before my eyes.
Giraud stared into my eyes and nodded. "There,"
he said. "You do see."
I nodded slowly. "Yes. I do."
We found the barn locked, the horses within it
frantic. They hadn't been fed or watered since their
people died—I didn't know how long that had been,
but it was long enough that the buckets hung on pegs
in their stalls were empty and bone-dry and not a wisp
of hay remained in any of the hayracks.
Again, and oddly, they were untouched by the
Changewinds that had reshaped everything else in the
world. They were just horses—four broad-chested,
sturdy-legged plow beasts with backs wide enough to
dance on. And when we'd watered them and given
them something to eat, they became sweet, docile
creatures.
The old couple had no saddles for their horses.
They'd owned a heavy wagon, certainly a produce
wagon of some variety, and a lighter one that would
only do for transportation. Both were in good shape,
and had we been planning to travel toward civiliza-
tion instead of further away from it, we would have
taken one or the other.
But while we hoped we would soon reach the
road that led to the Watchowl Keep, we would be
going further into land where people didn't live, and
where horrors reigned unchallenged. With horses, we
would have some mobility. Tied to a cart of any sort,
we would be trapped by the road we wished to
travel.
So Giraud and I tied the plow horses in two strings,
and he rode the first one, and I took the second.
Once we were away from the farm, I wasn't sure how
we were going to get back on the backs of our fine
steeds; we wouldn't have the mounting block in the
barn to climb on, and neither of us was likely to
consider climbing a tree as an option.
We met the ondan and Ha coming out of the
house. They carried supplies.
"We want to reach the keep by late today, but we
might not," Ha said, looking way up at the two of
us. "Might as well take some food along in case we
need it." Then he grinned. "Yah. And now the two
of you get a feel for what it's like for me, don't you?"
It took me an instant to realize he was talking
about his height. I grinned at him. "Or we could
trade. You could ride mine and I could ride yours.
Then you'd get an idea what it feels like to be me."
He arched an eyebrow and smiled. Then his eyes
shifted, and the smile died. His hand moved to the
hilt of his sword, and he unsheathed the weapon. The
ondan, too, gripped his weapon. "Move," Ha said
under his breath. "Fast."
I turned in time to see people walking toward us
through the forest. They were naked, all of them, and
they moved unbothered by the needle-tipped plants,
the coiled vines, the biting flowers. Their expression-
less faces studied us, and their oddly fluid movements
brought them toward us at a slow-looking walk that
nonetheless covered more ground than it should have,
and faster.
Five or six of them were repetitions of a little
girl, several more were identical copies of a young
man who could have been her brother. I turned my
horse toward the two-track path we hoped would
take us to the road, and urged the giant horse into
a run. It broke into a heavy-footed, graceless gal-
lop, as frightened by the approaching monsters as
I was.
Behind me, I heard Giraud shout, and the sick-
ening sound of a sword slashing through something
soft and wet and heavy. And the same high-pitched
scream I'd heard in the house when we killed the
vines tore through the air again. Hooves pounded the
ground behind me. Above me, the coils of vines began
to drop. We were going to get killed before we even
made it to the road—we were never going to make
it to the keep. I hacked through vines with my sword
while the horse tried to run through the clearest parts
of the path; I swung and stabbed and slashed keep-
ing them away from the horse I rode, the horse I led,
and myself, while vine sap covered my hands and face
and clothes, numbing my skin.
I longed for the protection of the ondan's magi-
cal temple, but he was fighting his own battles and
couldn't give shields to anyone. I heard his shouts
behind me, along with those of Ha and Giraud. I
knew I wouldn't get any help until we reached the
main road—maybe I wouldn't get any there, either.
But getting there was the only goal I could think of
that might make my situation easier. So I dug my
heels into my horse's sides and leaned forward along
his withers, tightening my thighs as I did. The horse,
a good animal, pushed himself harder.
We galloped around a curve in the road, straight
into a trap the human-looking vine-monsters had set.
They'd dragged logs across the road, blocking the
passage, and now they stood along either side in front
of their barricade, waiting, holding sharpened sticks
in their hands. I felt the coldness of their blank,
unblinking eyes as they stared at me.
Hands grappled for my legs as we rode by, trying
to pull me from the horse's back. I slashed through
them with the blade, and felt the fingers go limp as
the acid plant juice spattered all over me. I swung
at faces and heads, and gripped my beast's mane with
my left hand so that I wouldn't lose my seat. My wrist
ached from swinging that sword, from the bone-jarring
impact of cutting my way through obstacles. The
muscles of my arm and shoulder and back burned.
The sword felt like it weighed twice as much as a
man; worse, when I lifted it and swung it, it seemed
to fight against me.
Neither my mount nor I had time to make any
adjustments in our course, and even if we'd had the
time, we still didn't have the space. The horse tucked
his forelegs under him like a prize jumper and lifted
his massive body over the lowest part of the barri-
cade. I heard a rear hoof drag a little as he came
over, and felt the shock as he missed his stride, but
he was steadier than I would have imagined. He
faltered for two steps, then regained his footing, and
I was finally able to regain my own balance. I lost
the horse on the lead-line. She had balked at the
fallen trees and broken free, taking her halter and
most of the rope with her. I heard her fighting behind
me. I didn't look back.
More rumbling hooves followed in my wake, and
I prayed that all of my companions would get safely
away from the waiting monsters. I couldn't do any
more than I already was to make that happen, though.
The vines were still dropping at me, the tree branches
reaching out, the flowers still snapping and biting.
Sweat blurred with tears, burned my eyes and
scored my cheeks—blinded me. Something lashed
across my face before I could get out of the way, and
the right side of my mouth and my cheek went numb.
I felt like that side of my face had fallen off. My
breath came hard. I hurt everywhere that wasn't
numb, but I kept swinging. I had to keep swinging
or I would die. More vines, and more vines; claw-
handed trees scrabbling for my eyes; movement at
the edges of my vision that I knew I didn't want to
see, didn't dare see. Overhead, the birds, big and
heavy and silent, flapping along, going in the same
direction that I was. The horse blowing and snort-
ing as he ran, tossing his head, while lather darkened
the hair on his sloping shoulders and his sweat soaked
through my leather breeches and made my seat pre-
carious. He was as tired as I was, and as scared.
The scents of horse-sweat and my own terror and
crushed and bleeding vines and moist, soft earth; the
shouts and keening screams behind me and the wind
rustling through the leaves overhead and the whis-
pered flap, flap of the birds above and the muted
thudding of my mount's hooves on the rutted, over-
grown road; the feel of my pain and the cool air we
stirred up as we galloped and the steady, heavy
rhythm of warm, wide horse beneath me; the blacks
and greens of the dark forest striped with blades of
light that cut through from the sky to the ground like
daggers, and hellish, writhing movement of the for-
est all around me; the taste of my blood and my sweat
on my tongue—all those details blurred together and
numbed me and made me mute and stole rational
thought, and I became a sword arm welded to a torso
attached to a horse, moving, moving, moving because
if I failed to move, I would die.
Then, without my realizing when it happened or
how, I reached up to swing at a vine and no vine was
there. I slashed to my right to cut away the grasp-
ing talons of a twisted branch, and my sword met with
no such branch. I dared a look upward, and saw a
strip of blue over my head. I looked to my sides and
found that nothing green grew right beside me, and
the trees closest to me in every direction were chest-
nuts, broad-trunked, gracefully branched, unmoving
and untouched by anything that did move. Except for
the birds. Those—massive gray creatures with heads
the size of cantaloupes and gleaming yellow eyes—
sat in the branches and watched.
Let them watch, I thought. If I had a bow and
sufficient arrows to do the job, I would have shot
them. But I didn't. Let them sit in their trees and
stare, then.
I looked down at the ground and saw broad, black
paving stones beneath my horses hooves. The road.
I'd reached it. I slowed the horse to a walk, then
turned him back to face the way we'd come. And I
waited. A moment later, Giraud burst from between
the trees, and Ha and Ondan Shanxi thundered out
behind him. They were bloody, sweat-soaked, and
pale, and their horses blew and shuddered and stared
around them with white-rimmed eyes. But they'd
survived. Like me. More trouble certainly lay ahead
of us, but we'd beaten the Watchowl Forest.

Chapter Twelve

We killed another dozen of the plant-people just
before we reached Galarialle, and heard movement
in the trees all around us as we skirted the forest
town. Unlike the other inhabited places we'd passed,
though, we didn't see corpses everywhere, or even
bones, which I guess after that much time, we could
have expected. Galarialle lay silent and still, devoid
of any signs that it had ever been inhabited.
Once we got past it, we began to travel faster
again. Several facts motivated us. The first was the
pressure of our mission. The second was our fear
of spending a night in the middle of the Watchowl
Forest, even on the road. The third was the
uncanny, inescapable certainty that we were being
watched. With time to recreate his spell, the ondan
rebuilt his traveling temple around us. I modified
the "don't notice me" song to include all four of us,
and changed it to a four-beat rhythm with some
judicious reworking of the tune so that I could sing
it while we trotted.
The road stayed good.
The birds that had been following us went away.
And at last, as twilight leached the light from the
sky, we rounded a final curve and discovered ourselves
at the Burrinee River, and saw, glaring down at us
from the far side of the river and from the top of
an imposing cliff, the Watchowl Keep. Our relief at
reaching our destination was short-lived ... in fact,
it lasted precisely as long as it took for the four of
us to realize that the central portion of the bridge
that crossed the river was a drawbridge, and to dis-
cover that the drawbridge was raised. From the other
side. The bards of the Watchowl Keep were at home,
but they weren't welcoming visitors.
We all stood on the bridge watching the water race
by beneath us. At the point where the Burrinee
passed the keep, it was wide, deep, and fast. Though
I knew it was neither as high nor as deadly as it would
have been in early spring, when runoff from the
mountains would have swollen it to flood stage, still
I couldn't avoid looking at the inky swirls and dimples
that marred its surface and thinking about the snags
and deadfalls that lay beneath, waiting to catch the
careless swimmer and trap him until he drowned.
No one said anything for a long time. Then Ha
cleared his throat. "I don't suppose we could just
shout at someone up there and ask him to let down
the bridge."
Another long silence followed that comment.
Giraud broke it to say, "Figure if anybody there is
still alive, it's because of this bridge, don't you think?"
"They have very good defenses," the ondan noted
after another little while. "See how the far side of
the bridge is built with pins and held up by chains
attached to the cliff?"
We all looked into the deepening gloom, then nod-
ded.
"They can pull those pins. If anyone got past the
raised drawbridge without their welcome, they could
just start winding in the chains. The pins that hold
the structure together would come out, and the bridge
would fall apart, and the wood that held it together
would go into the water with whoever was on top of
it at the time." He sighed. "It's a very good design
for a bridge," he added.
"They've probably got sharpened stakes or some-
thing underneath, too, in case they have to pull the
pins," Ha said. "That's what I'd do, anyway."
"Yes." The ondan nodded. "We must certainly
assume they've done that."
We stood there a little longer, watching the water
rushing by all around us, and I said, "Maybe we could
just camp on the bridge tonight. I'm sure tomorrow
we'll think of some way across."
"If we were attacked while we slept out here, we
would have no place to run. We'd have the water to
our sides and back, and the attackers in front of us.
They would have all the advantages," Giraud said.
Both the ondan and Ha looked at him with
approval. "Quite right," Ha said. "Good thinking."
Giraud said, "That's what happened to the warriors
in the Battle of Fremish. It's a hard story to forget."
"Then where will we sleep?" I asked. "The road
wasn't too bad during the day, but I bet it gets worse
at night." As if to prove me right, behind us and some
ways off, something screeched. I shivered.
"We'll figure something out," Giraud said.
We turned and started back to the riverbank.
Behind us something enormous groaned. My heart
leapt straight into my throat and my knees knocked
together. I spun, yanking at my sword. The ondan and
Ha were faster, while Giraud cleared his blade at the
same time I did. The horses stomped and whinnied.
In the darkness, I couldn't figure out what it was that
threatened us ... and then I realized the raised part
of the bridge was growing larger—first wider, then
wider and shorter. And then I realize that it was doing
the groaning; its wood creaked and protested as it
moved closer to us. Someone inside had decided to
let us cross.
The bridge settled into place, and after a moment's
hesitation, all four of us led our horses onto it. We
didn't know yet whether we were moving away from
danger, or simply toward another form of it, but I
know in my mind I'd decided that any odds of doing
something in our favor were better if we crossed the
bridge than if we stayed where we were.
The drawbridge lifted again behind us, almost as
soon as the last horse had stepped off of the plank.
No one and nothing was going to follow us across;
I found myself letting my breath out slowly. It almost
felt, once we were across the bridge and on the far
bank, that we'd reached a place where sanity still
existed.
"I almost wonder if the Changewinds came here?"
I said.
Giraud rested a hand on my shoulder. "I feel it,
too. Like there's a wall around this place that noth-
ing evil can pass."
The ondan chuckled. "That's because there is."
All three of us peered at him through the dark,
trying to get a good look at his expression. I said, "Are
you serious?"
"Indeed. A rather clever sort of wall exists around
this place—I couldn't see it until we stepped through
it, and even now, I cannot begin to guess how it's
been created. Nonetheless, it exists."
"Then we're finally safe."
Ha snorted. "Safety is an illusion. If anything, we're
finally in a place where the dangers are more likely
to be known."
Right in my ear, a voice murmured, "Well said.
Quite well said."
I glanced at the ondan. "Did you say that?"
"No."
"Ha, you didn't say that?"
Ha said, "I didn't."
"And Giraud—"
"Not me."
"Then who?"
The same voice, still right beside me, said, "I'm
in the keep. I can hear and see everything you do
from up here—I've been watching you for a long
time. You're obviously untouched by the madness that
has destroyed so many others, but I won't let you
come up here until I know why you're here."
Giraud and I started in on the story of how we'd
come to seek help at the keep. We didn't get any
further than describing my singing the spell at the
Pillar of the Sun, though, before the voice said, "That's
enough. Turn to your left and walk along the cliff until
you see a small, green light."
We did.
"Now, one of you touch the light."
Giraud reached out, and for an instant cool green
flames enveloped his hand. Then the cliff began to
rumble, and a large panel slid back into the rock face.
Torchlight illuminated a broad, sand-floored passage
that sloped upward and curved to the right, so that
even though it was well-lit, we could only see in a
little ways. Anything might be waiting for us beyond
that curving wall of stone.
"Please step in."
When we hesitated, the voice grew annoyed.
"You've come all this way through enormous danger
and hardship to talk with us. You're going to have
to trust us, now that you've arrived. If you don't, none
of us will be able to help you."
Ha sighed and stepped forward first. The ondan
followed. Then Giraud. I held back until last—even
though my gut told me I was safe and among friends,
recent experience left me feeling sure something ter-
rible was going to happen. At last, though, I had to
go forward. The speaker in the keep was right. I'd
come all this way to meet with the bards, to see if
I could undo the damage I'd done. I couldn't turn
back; I couldn't undo the deaths I'd already caused,
but I could prevent more. Maybe.
Maybe.
I followed Giraud up through the corridor, which
climbed steadily in an upward spiral. I heard noth-
ing but the sound of breathing and the soft thudding
of hooves and feet in the sand. I didn't feel like
talking to anyone. Evidently none of the other three
felt much more cheerful than I did. It was, I think,
too easy to recall how narrowly we'd missed death
before.
We reached a doorway, and now heard the disem-
bodied voice again. It said, "Wait, please."
We waited.
"Ondan Shanxi, please step to the wall and rest
your hand against it. The rest of you, stand well back
and wait until the ondan has come through."
"I don't like it," Ha said. "They're splitting us up."
"We are," the voice said. "For our own protection,
and until we can be sure of you. We apologize for
the necessity of this, but you will be reunited shortly."
"I am willing to go first," the ondan said.
He stepped forward and pressed his hand against
the wall. His entire body glowed with the same
unearthly fire that had surrounded Giraud's hand
when he put it in the light. No further doors opened,
though; instead, the ondan simply disappeared.
"Good design," Giraud said softly. "They bring us
all the way up a blind tunnel, and the only way
through to the keep is by magic. If we don't do what
they want, they just leave us in here. We might be
able to get out through the door at the bottom, but
I wouldn't bet on it."
I said, "And these are the people who are supposed
to help us, are they?"
"Look," Ha said, "if they're still safe and sane, their
security measures must be worth something. Right?"
"Maydellan Ha. You will please step forward to the
wall now and rest your hands against it."
"Both hands?"
"Both hands."
Ha suddenly looked less confident of the good
intentions of the keep's denizens.
I looked at him and shrugged. "Go on. If we can't
trust them, everything is lost anyway."
The dwarf sauntered forward and rested his hands
on the stone. Like the ondan, he vanished.
We waited again, this time longer. I looked ner-
vously at Giraud, and he gave me a quick hug. "It
will be all right," he said.
"I know. I'm just scared. What if we've come all
this way and they can't do anything?"
"Then at least we know we tried."
Small comfort, looking at the end of the world, to
think you tried to stop it. I said nothing of the sort
to Giraud.
"Giraud dar Falcannes, step forward and rest your
hands against the stone."
He handed me the reins to his horse and took a
deep breath. Then he nodded sharply and stepped for-
ward. "See you on the other side," he said. He laughed.
I didn't. "See you on the other side" was what
warriors in all the old stories said to each other when
they knew they were facing death and expected to
be killed at any moment. The old heroes—Blaylock
and dar Sturmran and the Fanged One—were all sup-
posed to have said those very words as they bravely
stepped forward into the maelstroms of blood and
misery that were to be their doom. "I'll see you in
the keep," I corrected, and then the green light took
him away from me, too.
The horses shifted restlessly. I looked around for
some place to tie them, so that when I was called, they
wouldn't be left alone to panic and hurt themselves.
But the stone walls were smooth. So I dropped the
reins on the ground, busied myself with removing all
the tack and piling it against the far wall, and let them
roam. If the bards in the keep intended to bring them
after me, they would certainly know how to retrieve
them. And if they didn't, I didn't want the poor horses
trapped in the passage with saddles and bridles still on.
"Isbetta dar Danria, please come forward."
I knew what to do. I placed my hands on the stone
wall and waited. For just a moment nothing hap-
pened. Then I felt a tingling, warm and soft as kit-
ten fur, that brushed all over my body. At the same
time, the world turned green—but it wasn't as simple
as that. It would be easy to assume that I could still
see the passageway and the horses and the tack and
our few meager supplies, and that these had all been
dyed green by the light. That was what I'd expected.
Instead, though, green was the sum total of all I could
see. Details and objects dissolved in the featureless
emerald light, and the whole of the world ceased to
exist except for the single color—and oddly, because
green was all there was, after a moment I couldn't
see that, either.
Then the pleasant tingling went away. The unpleas-
ant blindness didn't.
I felt hands clasping my wrists, and heard two
voices saying, at almost the same time, "Walk, please,"
and "Don't hurry her, Durral—I don't think she can
see us."
"I can't," I said.
I heard one exasperated sigh. "She would come
through gate-blind."
"Sometimes it takes a moment for sight to return,"
the second voice said. The first voice, the one iden-
tified as belonging to Durral, had been the voice my
three companions and I had heard while we stood
out on the riverbank and waited in the corridor. The
second voice was younger, female, and with a gentle-
ness to it that made me think she didn't hate me, even
if Durral did.
After no time at all, Durral said, "She's had her
moment. Can't you see anything yet?" He didn't try
to hide his annoyance.
"No. Nothing."
"She's a sensitive," the woman said.
Durral disagreed. "She's lying."
I felt a breeze brush by my face, and had the
uncomfortable feeling, when it was far too late to do
anything about it, that I had been tested in some way.
"Well, fine, then. She isn't lying," Durral said. "We
can lead her blind."
I locked my knees and refused to budge. "What
did you do?" I said. I felt helpless, standing there with
two people I couldn't see hanging on to me, not
knowing whether I stood on the edge of a cliff or
in the center of a room, or whether the three of us
were alone or on a dais in front of a thousand wait-
ing people who silently watched and judged me.
"We could, but we aren't supposed to and you know
it. The rivergate is disorienting enough for the people
who come in by it. Don't do anything to unsettle her
further." The woman paused, then answered my ques-
tion. "I just moved something in front of your face,
Isbetta; moved it very close to your eyes. If you had
been able to see it, you would have blinked."
"Oh." I felt terribly helpless. Frightened. I won-
dered if I had been blinded forever by my passage
through the rivergate. Then, however, I realized that
the darkness was beginning to resolve itself into areas
that were darker and ones that were not so dark. I
blinked, hoping to help the transition along, but blink-
ing did nothing.
Time, however, helped a great deal. "I'm begin-
ning to be able to see something," I said, "though
everything is still very dark."
"Wait a moment," the woman said.
I had to wait longer than a moment, but eventu-
ally darkness receded and my vision returned.
"Now we need to get her along to Inquiries,
Cynta—or do you intend to find something else you
can baby her about?" Durral asked. He was short and
muscular, broad-shouldered and broad-faced, with
dark straight hair pulled back in a heavy braid, and
pale, angry eyes.
Cynta had sounded older, so I was surprised to dis-
cover that she appeared to be about the same age
as me. She was taller, though not tall. Her black hair
curled loosely down to her shoulders, and her eyes,
as dark as the ondan's, looked at me with a kindness
and a compassion that I hadn't seen or felt in years.
I could be her friend, I thought. Under different cir-
cumstances, if I weren't the one who wrecked the
world. I looked away from her—her kindness made
me feel even guiltier than I had before.
I looked down at my boots and my filthy leather
breeches and asked, "Is that where my friends are?"
I didn't get an answer. Instead, Cynta said, "Durral
is right. We need to take you to Inquiries."
Inquiries had sounded ominous when Durral had
mentioned it; it didn't sound any better when Cynta
repeated the name; and as I stood alone on a pol-
ished stone floor looking up at rows of seats filled
with men and women whose drawn faces and heavy
movements suggested warriors facing one battle too
many, I thought it was worse than it sounded. I've
heard people say they got butterflies in their stom-
achs when they were nervous; I had warring falcons.
Cynta had shoved me through a heavy, black-painted
door with a worried frown and the admonition, "Tell
them everything you can." The sound of the door
clicking behind me had sounded like a single beat
from a death-drum.
They were all bards. Full bards, dressed in the
flowing forest green tunics and pale cream breeches
that bards not associated with any court or town
affected. They were of all ages, of all shapes and
colors, of all heights, of both sexes. They had in
common only their clothes and the single expression
that stamped each of their faces—an expression of
weariness touched with cold appraisal and deep
underlying anger. They had suffered, and I was the
one who had made them suffer, and they were going
to call me to account for my sins. I stood staring back
at them, schooling my outward expression to calm as
I had done so often when Birdie was in one of her
rages. With her, any display of fear, of pain, of weak-
ness, only set her at me harder. I expected no bet-
ter from these strangers. In fact, I expected worse.

Chapter Thirteen

A few latecomers straggled into Inquiries through
a door at the top of the room, just behind the high,
distant back row of seats. They filed in and moved
down rows and across occupied seats until they
reached empty ones scattered seemingly at random.
But I noticed that the older bards sat closer to the
center, the younger ones further away. Though they
wore no outward symbols of rank, then, they still had
rank. I kept that in mind.
The heavy door at the top of the amphitheater
slammed shut—the second beat of the death-drum.
I tried to control my breathing, and I waited. Stand-
ing. I had no place to sit and no one around me; the
lowest row of seats started well above my head so
that everyone looked down on me from far above.
I felt very alone, and very small. I still carried the
lute in its case, and my small pack on my back. These
dragged at my right shoulder and sent little shoot-
ing pains down my back and up my neck until I put
my burdens on the floor. I slid them in front of my
feet. They gave me a little something to stand behind.
The fierce old man who sat front and center above
me stood at last. He said, "We are the bards of
Watchowl Keep. You and your friends have come to
us seeking help, telling wild tales and saying that you
know what set the deadly magical storm winds to
blowing. We've watched you since we noticed you and
your two companions traveling along the edge of
Watchowl Forest. We saw you join up with the ondan.
We have seen and heard much, that you've done and
said. So don't bother telling us any lies." He leaned
forward, resting his hands on the low rail that sepa-
rated us. In a rich, full voice, he said, "Tell us now,
from the beginning, how this disaster came to hap-
pen."
He sat down, crossed his arms, and glared at me.
Around him and behind him, the other bards stared.
And waited.
I knew this moment would come. I knew all along
that I was going to have to explain to a hostile
audience how I had come to destroy the world. I'd
hoped for sympathetic listeners, for fewer people, for
the opportunity to sit and gather my thoughts, or even
that I might be permitted to answer reasonable
questions reasonably. Since I wasn't going to get those
better circumstances, I had to make the best of the
opportunity I had. I had to convince this room full
of angry strangers that I intended to make right the
wrongs I'd done, and that I would be able to do that
only if they helped me.
I said, "My name is—" and my voice cracked. I
wished I had a glass of water. I tried again. "My name
is Isbetta dar Danria. I'm the—" I could hear my
words trembling on the air, as full of fear as mice
before a stooping hawk. I drew a deep breath, tried
to focus myself as I would have while weaving a
complex design or singing a song. "I'm the daugh-
ter of Lannee Andras the Liedan and the late King's
Bard Haral dar Danria."
I heard little gasps of surprise. There were those
among the audience, I realized, old enough to have
been my fathers companions and fellow students, and
others old enough to have been, perhaps, his teachers.
Maybe some of them knew my mother still. According
to my father, she'd been a bard. I sensed that I had
struck a surprise blow in my own favor, and contin-
ued quickly, telling them about Birdie and her plan
to sell me, my overheard revelation about the man-
ner of my father's death, and Giraud's and my des-
perate escape from Blackwarren.
I tried to get a feeling for their mood as I talked,
but they were bards, skilled in letting the world see
only what they wanted it to see. My father had been
the same way. I gathered nothing from their faces;
their eyes said they were watching me, their postures
indicated that they were listening, but their faces were
closed. Maybe they liked me, maybe they hated me,
maybe they wanted to see me hanged; their expres-
sions said nothing.
I told them about fleeing into the Stormfather
Mountains, about finding the cave that saved our lives
and the nantatsu that almost cost us them, about
Hearthold Mountain and Maydellan Ha and the book
and the songs. Still no response. I could have been
talking to a room full of corpses.
I detailed my singing of the song the nantatsu had
indicated, and our adventures afterward. I told them
what Bard Edder had told me to tell them—about
Belangia the Hawkbard and the 'Song of Belangia,'
about being instructed to bring the black lute to
Watchowl. I passed on Edder's odd remark about it
finding its player. And I told them about fleeing and
fighting and nearly dying.
Finally, when I couldn't think of anything else to
say, I stopped. I stood on the hard, cold stone with
my legs aching and my throat sore and my nerves
rattled, and I waited. They looked at me, all those
bards, and then they began to look at each other. To
lean over and whisper to each other. I seemed to no
longer exist to them. Once I stopped having a story
to tell, I didn't matter at all.
I was too tired by that point to care what they
thought about me. I wanted only to find food to eat,
water to drink, and a place to lie down. I could do
nothing about my first two needs, but my third was
simple enough to meet. I knelt on the stone, spread
my cloak, placed my pack on top of it and curled up
in a little ball with my pack as my pillow and my arms
wrapped around the leather-cased black lute. I closed
my eyes, and my worries went away.
"Isbetta? You have to wake up now. Isbetta?
Isbetta!"
A stranger cajoled me and shook my shoulder. I
burrowed deeper beneath heavy blankets, vaguely sur-
prised at how comfortable the floor had become.
"Isbetta, Inquiries is meeting again in half a
candlemark, and you have to be there. You'll need
to shower and change before they meet, and get
something to eat."
I woke up completely at the words "something to
eat." I didn't particularly want to shower or change
clothes—given the choice between doing that or
sleeping for a week, I thought I'd take the sleeping.
But food was another matter. I wanted some, and I
wanted it soon.
I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. I was
lying in a sun-filled room, in a bed softer and more
wondrous than any I'd ever been in, even when I was
little and stayed at Court with my father. I wore noth-
ing but my shirt, and felt a moments panic as I won-
dered how I had come to be in a strange bed in a
strange room, nearly undressed. But after a moment's
thought, I realized I recognized the girl who had
awakened me. I trusted her.
"Cynta," I said. "How did I get here?"
She laughed. "You fell asleep on the floor of
Inquiries, and one of the bards carried you in. I
undressed you and covered you up. They decided
after all you'd been through to let you sleep." She
shook her head slowly, the expression on her face
one of bemusement. "I have to tell you, I don't
think anyone has ever fallen asleep in Inquiries
before. I've heard mention of it from every bard I've
passed this morning."
She was kind to me. I tried considering her kind-
ness in light of the impression I'd gotten while
speaking to the bards, that I was something despic-
able—that I was nothing but a problem with which
they all needed to deal—and keeping in mind that
I knew what I'd done, and how many people I'd
murdered, and how desperate a situation I'd thrown
my world into. I couldn't make all the pieces fit. So
I nodded and said nothing.
Cynta gave me an encouraging smile. "Come on—
get up. If you'll get in the shower, I'll call down to
the kitchen and tell Cook to send your food up now.
It will be here by the time you're out and dressed."
I thought about that. The shower didn't present
much of a problem, but getting dressed did. I'd cut
up my only other shirt for bandages, and both of my
sets of breeches and tunics were filthy. I said as much.
"We have clothes in stock for students," she said.
"I can have a set brought up for you."
She directed me into the bathroom. I recognized
the plumbing as the sort we'd had when I was a child,
and didn't have to ask for directions—one humilia-
tion spared me, anyway. After I showered, I found
folded clothes waiting for me on the towel shelf. I
pulled it on—fresh underwear and a uniform that was
a variation on the one that the bards wore, consist-
ing as it did of pale green shirt, a quilted white tunic,
a narrow white cloth belt, and black leather breeches.
I found worn spots on the clothing, and places where
both the shirt and the tunic had been carefully
mended. I found that while I slept, someone had
cleaned my boots for me.
Being clean and wearing clean clothes felt won-
derful. I toweled off my hair and braided it to get
it out of my way, then headed out to rejoin Cynta.
She sat in one of the two chairs at the small table
next to the room's single window. "I got something
for me, too. Figured I might as well eat with you so
that we can talk."
She wanted to talk with me. That, I thought, prob-
ably meant bad news. I didn't want her to jolly me
along, though, discussing the weather or food or my
childhood and youth. I settled myself in front of the
place she'd sat for me, and before I even took a bite,
got right to the point. "So what have they decided
to do to me?"
Her eyebrows twitched, and she tried to hide a
smile, but failed. "Do to you? We aren't going to do
anything to you."
"Right." The smell of the food—fresh fruit and a
slab of broiled mutton as thick as my thumb, some
sort of boiled, sugared grain, and slivers of hard
cheese sliced across waybread—got to be too much
for me. I hadn't had anything good to eat since the
nantatsu fed me. I dug in. If it was going to be my
last breakfast, at least it would be a delicious one.
"I'm telling the truth. No one is going to do any-
thing to you, Isbetta. We compared your story with
the ones your friends told, and none of us can see
where you could have done anything differently.
Everyone regrets the terrible outcome, but . . ." She
sighed and took a bite of her cheese on waybread,
chewed thoughtfully, and frowned. "I have to tell you,
if everything that happened to you had happened to
me, I don't know that I would have even made it out
of the house. Weren't you scared?"
I nodded. I was surprised she was trying to see
events from my point of view. I definitely had not
expected anyone to do that. "I was."
"Having someone trying to sell you . . . and finding
out the same person had murdered your father . . ." She
shook her head again and took a large bite of her
mutton. "And then to escape and be captured by a
monster, do what you were told to do, and find out later
that the nantatsu had been coming after you again
anyway . . ." She looked up at me and smiled. "You're
very brave. We—the bards, that is—spent most of the
night talking about this. We aren't certain that we can
teach you how to undo the 'Song of Belangia,' but we
think we can. And we're going to do everything we can
to help you."
After we ate, she leaned up to a metal tube sticking
out of the wall—one that I hadn't noticed before—
and said, "Cook, please send someone to the num-
ber three guest quarters to pick up the dishes." Then
she pointed to the lute case. "Bring that. We'll need
it."
We obviously weren't going to waste any time. I
took the lute and followed her through a maze of pas-
sageways, down a central spiral staircase so long I
began to wonder how anyone had ever managed to
lug me all the way up to that tower bedroom with-
out waking me, and at last into a bright, airy room
full of books, instruments, and in the center, a long
wooden trestle table and perhaps twenty straight-
backed wooden chairs. Maydellan Ha already occu-
pied one of them, Giraud another, and Ondan Shanxi
a third. The dislikable Durral was there, and the
bearded old man who had asked me the night before
to tell the bards what had happened. Up close, I
realized that he was built like a bull, and I could see
much more clearly the ferocity of his eyes and the
hardness of the set of his mouth. Three other bards,
these somewhere between Cynta's age and the old
man's, also waited.
Everyone turned to look at us when we came
through the doors, and I felt as awkward as I had
the night before, standing in Inquiries. I felt my face
growing hot, and looked down at my feet, hoping that
no one would notice.
"Isbetta dar Danria," a man's voice said. I looked
up, and one man smiled at me. Not the old one, or
Durral, but a tall, lean one with sun-browned skin
and straw-pale hair. "I'm Remeys. I was a friend of
your father's while he was alive . . . and I knew your
mother. You look very like her."
I felt a surge of hope. "You know my mother?" But
he hadn't said "know." He'd said "knew." And even
as the words burst from my mouth, I realized I
shouldn't have said anything. The expression on his
face confirmed that. He paled and I saw a flash of
pain in his expression. I didn't even need to hear him
say the words to know that she was dead.
"She was . . . very dear to me," he said.
"Later," the old bard said. "Later, damnall. We have
things to accomplish. And the first is to find the owner
of the lute. It has found its way home to us after all
these years—the fact that it has chosen now to do
so is not coincidence."
I carried the lute case to the old bard and handed
it to him—and felt an overwhelming wash of regret
as I did so. Though I had no claim to it, I felt as if
I was giving away a part of myself.
Odd the reactions people have when they've been
through stress, I thought.
The old bard lifted the lute out, every bard in the
room gasped.
I hadn't taken time to look closely at the instru-
ment while I carried it. I'd seen it once when Giraud
and I had taken it up from under Bard Edder's floor-
boards—but that had been in very poor light. Then
I'd carried it and I'd done my best to protect it, but
part of doing my best, as far as I could see, meant
keeping the lute safely encased. So aside from that
one quick look I got when we took it, and the sec-
ond when we checked to make sure it hadn't been
damaged when I fell off the horse—also in poor light,
I might add—that's all I'd done with it. I admit, seeing
it in the warm light of the conservatory, it took my
breath away, too.
It had the typical shape of a lute—round back,
short, wide neck, sharply back-turned head. It had
an unusual number of singled and doubled courses—
unlike the lutes I was most used to seeing, the first
two strings on this were singles but the other six
courses were doubled. Its oddness went beyond that,
however. Every bit of it was purest flawless black,
from the inlaid semiprecious stones around the rosette
to the beautifully carved pegs, to the metal frets, to
the gut strings. I couldn't think why Bard Edder
would have taken the trouble to dye the strings black,
but I had to admit the final effect was stunning.
The old bard stared at it. He ran his fingers over
the instrument like a blind man studying a particu-
larly interesting carving. He closed his eyes, shivered,
and opened them again. He looked at me. "Did you
play it?"
"It wasn't mine to play," I told him. "Bard Edder
told me to bring it, so I brought it." I sensed more
in his question than idle curiosity, though, so I added,
"We didn't exactly have time for songs around the
campfire, anyway. We spent most of the trip fight-
ing our way through one problem or another. If you
follow my meaning."
He nodded. Then he sat on a tall stool, rested his
left leg on the top rail, propped lute on leg, and
began to tune.
I'm an admirer of a well-played lute. Giraud has
a bit of talent with one, especially if you don't mind
listening to sappy love songs about the wistful maid
who died of a broken heart when her true love sailed
out to sea. I'm fonder of the bawdy ballads and the
adventure songs, and of course of the dances, but
Giraud has a pleasant voice, and had a very nice lute,
and I was willing to listen to him sing of broken
hearts and twining vines. He taught me to play it
when we had time, and I found that I could pick out
the tunes I liked fairly well. I inherited my fathers
ear for music, and evidently some of his facility with
instruments as well. Though I can't say that I was
brilliant on lute, I knew how one was supposed to
sound.
The bard finished his tuning, and played a few
experimental notes on his new instrument. They
sounded off to me, and I thought maybe he had the
tuning wrong. Everyone else waited, patiently, as if
what he was doing were as important as figuring out
how to undo the 'Song of Belangia.' I kept my mouth
shut and waited to see why.
Then he quit plucking around at it and dove into
a song I recognized—"Sinking of the Raiders' Pride."
It's usually a good, lively song, full of drama and
tension, and with a nice bit at the end where, just
when you think all is lost for the heroes, they find
a way to attack one more time and take down the
Raiders' Pride before their own ship founders and
they have to row home in dories. He didn't sing the
words, but the tune is as unmistakable as a best
friend's face—even under the circumstances, I couldn't
mistake it. And the circumstances were odd—deeply
odd. As I said, I like lute music and I liked the song
the old bard played, but listening to that rendition
of it, my skin started to crawl. In the back of my
mind, I could see images of destruction, men fight-
ing each other on the tossing decks of ships, blood
spreading across the scrubbed planks, bodies flung
overboard to sink into the depths of a stormy sea.
I'd never felt the horror before in the tale of the
Raiders' Pride. I'd never heard the men screaming;
I'd never seen them dying, I'd never thought of the
terrible waste of life, of the tragedy of that battle.
I couldn't see the heroes anymore in the song—I
could only see the cannons pounding both ships to
ruin, and the sons of distant mothers dying horribly
a long, long way from home.
Not even the rousing ending could wipe away the
pain I felt. He brought the song to a close and I
found myself sniffling, with a few stray tears running
down my cheeks. Nor was I alone. All of us, from
oldest bard to youngest, and both dwarf and human,
stood crying. All of us, that is, but the old bard.
He stared down at the black lute and said, "I can't
play it."
The bard Remeys said, "No. We should have felt
a surge of joy at the end, where the heroes win the
day. But I felt nothing of that. I felt only horror, at
the deaths and the pain and the loss."
"Me, too," Cynta said.
"And me," another bard agreed. The rest nodded.
The old bard turned to the ondan. "How about
you?"
"Only the same effects everyone else seems to have
felt. Seen, rather. I wasn't so much listening to you
play as watching a battle at sea. I found it most dis-
turbing."
The bard looked at the rest of us to see if any-
one had something other to offer, then frowned. "Dis-
turbing doesn't seem to be a strong enough word. The
music this lute made sent shivers down my spine, and
holding it now is making my skin crawl."
"I can see that it has been strongly spelled," Ondan
Shanxi said softly.
Everyone turned to look at him.
"I noticed it when I picked up Isbetta after her
fall from her horse. I lifted the instrument to get it
out of the way, and even through the case, I could
feel the power of the spells the builder had placed
on it. It has a personality, I believe. Maybe you could
even say it has thoughts of its own—thoughts about
what it should do and who should play it."
"You picked it up?" Remeys asked.
"Only briefly, to move it to our campsite. I found
the merely lifting the case so unpleasant I was
delighted to put it down again."
The old bard said, "That's precisely how I feel."
He stood and laid the lute back in its case.
Remeys said, "Perhaps it means to come with me.
Considering . . ."
The old bard's face brightened. "How foolish of me.
I never considered that—I only thought of it seek-
ing me out."
Remeys picked it up—and a look of horror twisted
his face and froze it.
He put the lute down so quickly I could almost
say he threw it, and backed away. "No. Not me that
it wants. And I can't imagine anyone who would pick
it up with it doing that."
The old bard sighed. "Perhaps it isn't the tool we
need to reverse the 'Song of Belangia.' We've held that
note before us as if it were sacred—we've been waiting
for the black lute to return because we were sure she
left us the key. But perhaps the note was meaningless.
Or intended for another time, another disaster."
A younger bard recited:
"The mighty bard
Who wields the black lute
Who at the gate stands
Who carries a flute
With ties of blood
Unbinds the spell
Breaks the world free
From its magical hell."
The old bard shrugged. "I remember the note. The
puzzle of it has always been the flute with the ties
of blood. No one has ever known what that meant."
Cynta looked at the old bard. "Bard Troman, she
was dying when she wrote it. You cannot judge it the
way you would judge her usual work. And anyway,
this wouldn't be the first time that someone has
looked at the vision spun out in a crystal globe and
seen something that could be taken two ways, only
one of which was obvious at the time."
"Then we should have every bard here try to play
the lute?" the old man asked. He glanced in Cynta's
direction and sighed. "And when none of the bards
can bring themselves to touch the instrument, do we
admit that Lannee erred in the casting of the spells,
and that the black lute will be useless to us?"
The ondan cleared his throat. "I don't know why
the spelled lute is so important to your plans," he said,
"but I think, regarding its player, that you may be
overlooking the obvious."
Bard Troman looked at him. "What an interesting
observation. I'd like to think I'd passed the point of
overlooking the obvious in my rash youth, but perhaps
I'm mistaken. If you see a solution, please share it with
us, ondan." He didn't have the reverence in his voice
that I was used to hearing when people spoke to the
ondan. In fact, to me he sounded slightly sarcastic.
If Ondan Shanxi heard the sarcasm, he gave no
sign of it. He said, "I'd note, Bard Troman, that
Isbetta has carried the lute without the first complaint
of distress or discomfort since she took it from the
dead bard's house."
Bard Troman nodded. "True. But she isn't a bard,
so that's meaningless. The black lute is a bardic instru-
ment built for bardic use."
The ondan nodded. "You are certainly correct when
you assert that it has been built for bardic use. From
the spells woven into its making, it appears to have
been built as a weapon. A powerful one, in fact—
one built to take a bard's magic, shape it, amplify it,
and target it."
Troman paled and said nothing.
The ondan smiled a grim, tight-lipped little smile.
"Ko magic, good bard, focuses on seeing reality, on
acknowledging details as they are and not as we wish
them to be, or as we remember them, or as others see
them. I am, within my ondanary, best of all at seeing."
His smile went away. "It was my special talent that
brought me through the dangers I've faced and led me
to these two children and the dwarf. Isbetta, untrained
though she is, has the bardic gift in abundance. Giraud
has certain gifts that will be useful wherever he goes,
though I suspect for him to survive to use them, he will
either have to find a place like this, whose inhabitants
are outside of the reaches of the government of Tero-
salle, or else leave Terosalle entirely."
"And the dwarf? You with your clear sight have
discovered this band of heroes," Troman said. He had
begun marking with a pen on a pad of wood-pulp
parchment, but he wasn't writing. Instead, he was
drawing: little knives and spears and roped twisted
into nooses. I thought it clear that no matter who had
championed us and our cause and permitted our entry
into the keep, it hadn't been Troman—and whoever
it was had done it contrary to Troman's opinions and
wishes. The old bard said, "Surely, you have heroic
claims for your dwarf, too."
"None that need concern you. Our only reason for
seeking out your people is to get training for Isbetta,
so that she can unsing the 'Song of Belangia.' And
I would suggest that the black lute found its way into
her keeping because she is the one with whom it has
chosen to work." The ondan sounded so reasonable
and so kind that he made Bard Troman look almost
foolish by comparison. I noticed the way his own
people looked at him when the ondan finished
speaking.
The other bards murmured to each other. Troman
flushed. "The black lute is an instrument. A fine one,
but nothing more than spelled bits of wood and bone
and gut. It chooses nothing."
The ondan shrugged and folded his hands on his
lap. "I see life as it is, not as I wish it to be. You
have been working since the disaster happened, trying
to find a way to reverse the damage because you wish
to claim that your bards rescued everyone who was
scarred by the 'Song of Belangia'—by this spell your
own people let loose through carelessness. But you
know as truly as I that your bards can do nothing to
reverse the spell save teach the girl what she needs
to know to go back to the mountain. She will need
the power the lute can give her to succeed, and you
would rather deny her that than give up the politi-
cal edge you think you can gain from having your
people named as the heroes—"
"You dare to imply," the old bard interrupted, "that
I would put political gain ahead of the good of my
world? I should have you thrown out for that."
"I state," the ondan said, "that you want the best
for your people, and have lost sight of the fact that
sometimes they may not be able to achieve what is
best for them on their own."
I sat listening to this, feeling a bit sick to my stom-
ach. I hated fighting, and I especially hated fighting
that centered around me. I wished I could be any-
where else until they worked out their differences,
but that wasn't to be.
The bard said, "You make great claims for the girl.
You say she has bardic potential, when in fact she
probably did nothing more than loose a resonance
spell laid upon the Pillar of the Sun by some ancient
wizard. But I will not have it said that I put my own
political ambitions ahead of the welfare of the rest
of the world. I have never acted solely on self-interest
before, and I'm not doing it now."
"Then test the girl."
"Test her how? She has no training. She can't sing
any of the lays, or any of the spellsongs."
"One of her spellsongs got her past my notice until
her horse stumbled and she lost her rhythm."
"I heard nothing of this. You're saying that she has
demonstrated magical ability away from Hearthold
Mountain and the Pillar of the Sun?"
"Yes," the ondan said. "Not much, and it has been
uneven, but yes."
"Then you won't object if I test her now."
"Without preparation? Without any training? That's
hardly fair."
"You claim she's a potential hero. I say if she had
any ability at all, someone would have sent her to a
bardic school long ago. As old as she is now, she will
have to have an enormous amount of latent ability
for us to train her. So fair or not, let's see what she
can do."
"Then let her play the black lute," the ondan said.
The old bard's mouth dropped open. "You jest."
"Either I'm right and she can use it, or I'm wrong
and this is hopeless anyway."
They glared at each other from across the table,
two old men as different as old men can be, both
fierce, both unbending, and both determined to be
right at all costs. I wished I could run away. I said,
"I didn't mean to cause this trouble. I only brought
the lute—"
Bard Troman waved me to silence.
Ondan Shanxi glared at me with a look that told
me I would have been better to keep my mouth shut.
Both men stared at each other again.
Finally the bard said, "Very well. Have her play
the black lute."

Chapter Fourteen

In such a way, I found myself facing my second
hostile audience in two days—for after the ondan
insulted their highest master and called into question
his integrity, any compassion that might have been
in their eyes died. They hoped to see me fail. Even
Cynta's expression had chilled. Their hope for my
failure was as clear on their faces as it would have
been had they sat cursing me aloud.
Remeys handed me the lute, and pointed to the
high stool. "Sit there and brace it on your leg so you
don't break it." His tone added his opinion that I was
an idiot child; he didn't need to put that into words
for me to get the message.
"I know how to play," I told him. I caressed the
warm wood of the black lute, feeling comfort just in
touching it. No one else liked it? That wasn't my
problem. I . . . loved it. When I touched it, I could
feel the wood singing beneath my fingers. It seemed
happy to be with me. I could almost hear its voice
as I held it, even though I had yet to touch the
strings. I was sure, hugging it against my chest, that
it wanted to be with me, which may sound silly when
talking about a box of wood and string, but it was
the way I felt. I glared up at Remeys and, in the
coldest voice I could manage, said, "What I don't
understand is what my playing will prove."
Troman spoke for him. "It will prove nothing, and
nothing is all it needs to prove for us to send you
back the way you came."
I wasn't sure what he meant by saying that. Well,
the second part, that he intended to send me back
where I came from . . . that part I got well enough.
But the first bit, about proving nothing and nothing
needing to be proven, sounded like bad poetry to
me—the sort where the poet has put so much work
into his fine words that he forgets to make them mean
something. I decided I'd do myself a favor to play
a song I knew well, rather than one that I thought
would impress my listeners. I couldn't bring myself
to start into one of my favorites, though. I couldn't
imagine any of that cold group being amused by my
version of "Mistress Moirna's Breeches" or "Laddies
in the Bath" or "What the Donkey Said to the Cock."
I liked the reels too, but bards sang as well as played,
and the reels were just instrumental. They way I had
it figured, the bards would let me play one song, or
a part of one song, and probably as small a part as
they could get away with. I didn't think they cared
much about fairness. However, I had to believe that
what I was doing mattered. We'd come so far, and
their willingness to help us depended on me prov-
ing myself to them even if I didn't know what they
were looking for.
So that left the sort of music Giraud preferred—
wistful ballads. Of those, the one I did best and
minded least was "Lady of the Glass Lake." It's sad,
of course; it's the story of a handsome young man
who, while walking by a lake on a foggy morning,
meets a beautiful girl. He falls in love with her at
once, and the two of them seek each other out by
the banks of the lake every morning, until at last he
wants to be introduced to her parents so that he can
ask for her hand in marriage. She runs away from
him weeping, and he pursues; she says that he must
never meet her parents and he insists. The young
idiots in these songs always insist, of course, and the
pitiful young women always eventually give in.
In any case, like her kin of other weepy songs, she
finally tells him that she will take him to meet her
parents, but that he must carry a token that she give
him and must not let it out of his hand until he once
again stands on the shores of the lake beside her. She
then hands him this token, a single greenish coin, and
leads him down into the waters of the glassy lake.
He follows, marveling at the beauty of the underwater
world and the magic that lets him breathe there
without drowning. I wouldn't have followed on a bet,
not if a thousand gold coins hung in the balance. But
young idiots always do the ridiculous.
Anyway he goes down under the water, and he
meets her parents, who are magical lake people,
beautiful beyond words and enchanting. They treat
him to a great feast, and tell him how much they care
for him, and how delighted they are that he loves
their daughter. But after the feast, the girl's mother
and father insist on standing one to either side of him
and taking his hands in theirs, welcoming him into
the family, and as the girl's mother takes his hands,
she dislodges the green coin from his fingers and it
drops to the floor of their underwater castle. Imme-
diately the castle fills with water, the young man
drowns, and the girl, of course, dies not long after
of a broken heart. The parents bury them together
in the deep heart of the lake, which, in deference
to the young lovers, is forever after still as glass, no
matter the weather above.
The story itself is silly enough, but the melody is
lovely, and the lute part is poignant. Plus, I could do
the fingerings, including some fierce stretches and the
trills and hammer-ons and pull-offs that add to the
difficulty and make the piece more impressive. It was
still a common folk piece, but I thought it was a good
one.
But besides being good, it was also the most diffi-
cult bit of music that I knew except for the reels, and
I couldn't watch my audience's reaction to it. I had to
concentrate on getting all the words right, plus play-
ing the music on an unfamiliar lute with an extra
course and a flatter, wider neck. The lute at least
sounded good to me when I played it, and I threw
myself heart and soul into singing the song and making
myself feel the tragedy of it. And I didn't even miss
that hellish bit of fingering in the bridge from the first
position and the first string to a barred eighth posi-
tion with most of the notes played clear across the neck
on the sixth and seventh courses and back to the third
position and the first, second, and fourth strings. That
bit always gave me trouble, and when I was past it,
I let out a mental breath and relaxed a little.
I was so lost in what I was doing that I forgot to
think about anyone listening to me. I was singing for
myself, telling myself that sad story all over again, and
this time believing it. When I reached the end, I felt
almost reluctant to stop playing, and at the same time
I felt drained.
I looked up.
Every person in the room wept, save only for me.
A few knelt on the floor, sobbing into their hands.
The old bard had his head on the table, and his
shoulders heaved as he cried. Giraud curled on his
chair with his knees up against his chest, his face
hidden in his hands. I could see him shaking. Tears
streamed down the ondan's face, and he tried to catch
his breath, and that, I thought, was astonishing.
I waited for my audience to get itself under
control.
And I waited.
And I waited some more.
Some of them quit crying alone and started
leaning on each other, weeping like the blasted
bereaved.
I realized that the situation was out of control—
that, as I had done in Maydellan Ha's cave, I'd once
again started something fiercer and madder than I
was capable of finishing.
"Stop it," I said, and when they didn't listen, I
shouted, "STOP IT!" I might as well have tried to
stop a flood by my word alone. I stared at the lute.
It might not have worked for Troman, and it might
not have worked for Remeys, and it might not work
for any of the other bards, but it had damn well
worked for me. And if it had worked for me once,
it would work for me again. What I needed, I
thought, was something cheerful. Something to make
everyone laugh.
I thought better of that, though. I could just see
them standing around laughing as helplessly as they
were weeping right then. Trading the flood for the
drought, I thought, and decided that I would have
to play one of the reels. A cheerful one. No words,
just music. No story to manipulate the emotions, and
nothing that would linger after I finished playing. I
considered only an instant, then jumped into "The
Wellsbro Beggar's Reel." I tapped a foot to keep my
beat and focused on keeping the melody right to the
front of the music. I didn't let myself slip into the
endless variations—just skipped up and down the neck
with a syncopated four-beat tune that, sure enough,
started drying up the tears. I saw other feet beside
my own begin to tap, and then people who were
sitting stood, ready to dance. I watched them, wait-
ing for the last of the weepers to dry up. The sec-
ond the last of the sobs died away, I stopped the song
in mid-phrase. The few bards who'd been dancing
broke off as if they'd been puppets who'd had their
strings cut. Faces cleared, and eyes turned in my
direction.
Remeys stared at me, no longer glaring; still, I
couldn't guess at the meaning of the look I saw in
his eyes.
Bard Troman glanced from me to the window to
the ondan to Remeys, then settled on watching me.
His eyes were red, his furrowed cheeks were tear-
stained, and his mouth took on a thin-lipped line that
I didn't like at all.
With all eyes on me, I felt like fidgeting, or turning
to look away, or staring down at the lute, but I didn't.
I met the master's eyes.
At last he nodded, and while I saw nothing of sat-
isfaction in the gesture, I could make out nothing of
anger, either. He said, "They were remiss. You should
have been trained long ago."
I wanted to ask him who had been remiss; I
assumed he meant my foster-mother and my guild-
master, but I couldn't be sure. I waited.
"Edder should have spotted you, or Dans dar Pell
should have."
I must have looked as surprised as I felt, for he
nodded. "Dar Pell was one of ours. In towns where
bards disappear and are never heard from again, we
make sure we have sources of information other than
the ones the villagers will know about."
But dar Pell, I thought. He'd been a bogger, out
in the day cutting peat bricks, then through the town
after his day's work was done checking to see who
needed more peat for their fires and who, not so inci-
dentally, I realized, had a good bit of gossip or a bit
of news to share with him. He'd been well liked, but
a less musical man I'd never met.
And he certainly must have thought the same of
me. I only saw him when he came by Birdie's, and
when I was home with Birdie, any song that might
have been in my heart during the day had gone to
its hiding place for the night.
So even though he had to have known that I was
a bard's daughter, he must have believed that I was
one who'd inherited no talent for music, and he must
have believed, like everyone else, that I'd been well
treated to find a place to live and someone willing
to stand behind me for a guild education.
The old master straightened the front of his tunic—
a gesture at odds with his ferocious demeanor—and
said, "You have your father's way with a song, and
can think on your feet as well. That reel was a clever
touch. Broke the spell you cast with the first song
and didn't bind us all up in a second spell. Good
thinking on your part."
I swallowed. "Thank you."
"You don't need to thank me. You earned your
welcome to Watchowl Keep several times over. You
. . . and your friends." He seemed unhappy about
that; nor could I blame him. Neither Giraud nor Ha
had done anything to deserve censure, but the ondan,
in trying to champion me, had been rude. Had I been
Bard Troman, I would not have been happy about
extending him welcome, either.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered
why the ondan had been so rude. Perhaps he and
the master had known each other before. Perhaps
they shared an unpleasant history. Or perhaps they
knew each other by reputation, and didn't like what
they knew. I considered that possibility and thought
it likely. It said nothing negative about either of them;
even I could see that the disciplines and practices of
the bards were very different from those of the Ko.
Ondan Shanxi told me the Ko renounced the world,
all material possessions, all worldly and physical rela-
tionships, and all the affairs of men, secluded them-
selves in far-off places, and devoted their lives to the
gathering of knowledge without ever intending to use
it for practical purposes. The bards, on the other
hand, intended to affect the world around them, and
trained for most of their lives to learn to control the
magic that would let them influence the actions of
others. They renounced nothing; did not deprive
themselves of good food and good drink, or of
monetary gain, of wealth and titles and family, or of
the amusements offered by the opposite sex, or, if they
preferred, their own. They went out into the world
and tried to change the part of it that they lived in
for the better.
Those two philosophies seemed to me to have very
little room for common ground, and I thought the
two masters of their own philosophies might have little
liking for each other's ways. So when the master of
the bards dismissed me, telling me that Cynta would
be by later to tell me what would be expected of me,
I regretted leaving. Everyone else had settled in
around the table with the air of people who expect
to be up all day, and perhaps all night as well.
When Cynta tapped on my door, I was grateful
beyond all words. Twilight had already descended, and
night was not far behind. I'd wearied of the four walls
of my room, wearied of leaning out the window and
staring down at the river, wearied of plucking half-
heartedly at the old lute someone had seen fit to leave
in my room for me to practice on. I'd talked once
into the tube in the wall, discussing with the cook
my requirements for a late afternoon meal. I'd paced.
I'd fretted. I was ready for news.
Cynta, thank Neithas, came ready to supply it.
"I can't believe they hate each other so much," she
said, settling into one of the two chairs by the window.
"The master and the ondan?"
"You saw it too, then?"
I nodded.
"They never raised their voices with each other.
In fact, they were terribly polite." Cynta opened the
basket she'd brought in with her and began setting
out food: cheeses and three different varieties of hard
salami and a bit of smoked pork, a bowl of berries,
some honey, a bowl of lovely golden-brown crackers,
a little pot of cream whipped into a froth and sug-
ared, some milk, a bottle of wine.
As my eyes got wider and wider at the feast she
spread before us, she began to laugh.
"I told Cook I would starve—that I hadn't had any
breakfast and that you hadn't either."
"But Cook knows we had," I said. "He gave me
supper, too. Rice and broth and black bread."
"I waited until the day cook left and the night cook
took over the kitchen before I went in," she said, and
grinned at me. "Night cook must think none of us
eat during the day—he provides food for the bards
who stand night watch and for the late-arriving trav-
elers and all, and for those of us who tell him we'll
simply starve if we don't get a bit of something."
She started slicing salami. I did the same; after all,
rice and broth and black bread is filling for the stom-
ach, but leaves the soul wanting more.
I said, "But you were telling me about the ondan
and Bard Troman."
Around a mouthful of salami, she said, "Terribly
polite. The way you would expect of two tomcats in
an alley, when both are pretty sure the other is big
enough or mean enough to take him. If you know
what I mean." She sawed of a huge hunk of cheese
and popped that into her mouth.
"Surely. I wondered what was going on between
them when they were glaring at each other earlier."
"It might become a problem, but it isn't yet. After
all, the ondan has turned you over to the master for
teaching."
I almost missed what she'd said—almost, but not
quite. I quit spooning cream onto the berries I'd taken
for myself, and put down the spoon. I ran what she'd
said through my mind again, and said, "He what?"
She nodded, not seeming to notice my change of
mood. "He said he brought you here so the master
could teach you."
I frowned then. "But that isn't true. Giraud and
Maydellan Ha and I were already on our way here
when he joined up with us." I stared out the win-
dow, but I wasn't seeing anything out there. I was
too busy thinking. "He has no right to assume respon-
sibility for me. Nor any right to tell someone else he's
turning me over to him for training. I'm on my own;
I have no family or foster-family or guildmaster
anymore, and I alone am responsible for decisions
made regarding who I study with and what I'll do."
"But . . ." Cynta looked at me. "You didn't ask him
to bring you here? You didn't make some agreement
wherein he took responsibility for you?"
"No. He helped us along the way—" I paused,
wanting to be sure I said what I was thinking and
didn't say it wrong. "—and I'm grateful for his help.
I might have died after the fall from the horse, had
he not used his skill as a healer. But while I'm
beholden to him on a personal level, he owes all of
us, too. We fought together, and I don't think any of
us would have arrived here had we been traveling
alone." I whacked a piece of white cheese off of the
block and stabbed it with my knife. "I didn't swear loy-
alty to him, or tell him I wanted him to provide for
me."
"Maybe he just thought—"
I cut her off. "I don't care what he thought. I'll
be happy to study with Bard Troman, but I'll do it
because he and I agree about it. Not because the
ondan has given permission."
"But the permission has already been given."
"It means nothing. He had no right to give it."
Cynta looked at the feast spread in front of us, her
expression mournful. "Oh, gods. Then we're going to
have to talk to the master. And probably tonight. You'll
have to tell him what you told me."
"Fine."
"Do you suppose you and I could finish eating this,
first? I don't often get such delicacies from Cook, and
if the master comes up here and sees them, he'll take
them away."
I nodded and we began eating faster. I wasn't hun-
gry—my anger saw to that as much as my earlier
meal. But like Cynta, I had rarely in my life had such
good food. I didn't see any reason to let it go to
waste.
Bard Troman was not amused. He glowered at me,
and I had the feeling he thought I was trying to trick
him in some way, or at the very least to waste his time.
"If you only intend to agree with what he agreed
to, then we need not discuss this," he said.
"And how am I to know if I care to make the same
agreements, or something different? He didn't dis-
cuss this with me, and I don't know what he agreed
to." I crossed my arms over my chest and tried not
to be intimidated by his workroom, which held more
instruments of more types than I had ever seen, and
books in shelves from floor to ceiling all around the
walls, and sheets of music spread like snowdrifts in
all the room's corners, and in the center of what
appeared to me to be controlled havoc, his desk. The
room would have been intimidating on its own.
Containing the master, though, and putting him
behind that desk, which deserved to be declared a
county, or at least a borough, the room seemed to
me to be the place where my life would at any
moment end.
I was, in a word, terrified. But I was determined,
too. I wouldn't allow anyone to have more say-so in
my life than I had. Not ever again.
And finally Bard Troman saw my point, and I told
him the details of how Ondan Shanxi had joined us,
and after I finished, he told me the details of my
apprenticeship with the bards as it had been set out
by him and the ondan.
I was to have been a beginning apprentice, owing
my seven years service once again. I was to have had
obligations of duty and work to the Watchowl Keep
for five years after that. During the time that I was
apprenticed, I was to have had apprentice pay, and
never mind the fact that apprentice pay is intended
for children, not adults. I was to have only the same
rights as any other apprentice—children's rights.
I looked at the master and said, "This goes. Every
bit of it."
"This is the standard contract of apprenticeship."
"I know it is. But I'm not the standard apprentice,
and I won't be treated as if I am."
"You need us. You have no guild. And if you want
to take training with us—"
I cut him off. "Just stop it. This isn't about what
I need. This is about what you need. If you want
me to risk my life to go back to Hearthold Moun-
tain to sing the undoing of the 'Song of Belangia,'
you'll face the fact that I'm not twelve years old.
I won't sign away the next seven years of my life
to be a virtually unpaid groveling worm. We work
out an accelerated apprenticeship with merit test-
ing for the work I do, full junior bard's pay begin-
ning with the successful undoing of the Song of
Belangia, and no obligations of duty and work when
I attain full hardship."
"That's ridiculous."
"You think so, do you? Do you think it's fair that
I already earned journeyman status as a weaver, but
had that stolen away by my foster-mother and my
guildmaster because they wanted to sell me as a slave?
Do you think it's fair that I never received any pay as
an apprentice, because my foster-mother and my
guildmaster were in collusion, and my money went to
line their pockets? Do you think it's fair that I spent
all those years in the care of my father's killers because
you and the rest of his colleagues didn't bother to come
looking for me when he disappeared? As if I didn't
matter?" I glared at him. I was so angry I shook, and
I felt that I would either cry or scream in the next
instant. Instead of doing either, I forced my voice to
go very soft, and I said, "I've already paid my dues and
more, bardmaster. I won't pay them again. You need
me. I am the only person in the world who can undo
all the trouble, and I won't do it under terms of inden-
ture or slavery. I'll do it only as your free equal right
from the start." I leaned forward and put both palms
flat on the edge of his desk, and said, "When you can
meet me on my terms, we'll talk."
He blinked at me. "I see."
"I hope you do."
"I think you could at least consider reduced pay
while you're learning, and at least several years of
obligation to the keep following your . . ." He inter-
preted the look I gave him correctly, for his next
words were, "I suppose I do see. Those demands
weren't your opening negotiations, were they? Those
were your terms?"
"Those were my terms."
"And if we refuse to meet you on your terms?"
I smiled at him. Not a friendly smile, I'm afraid.
A rather nasty smile, the sort you might give to the
neighborhood bully who has beaten you up for years,
when you meet him alone and you are finally are
carrying your staff and he has his arms full and has
just bent over to pick up a package he dropped.
"Then I will pack my belongings and leave, and you
can find someone else who is capable of setting the
world aright."
He nodded. "Yes. You are both your father's and
your mother's daughter, and combine the worst, appar-
ently, of both of them." He sighed. "Then your terms
you shall have." He pulled pen and ink and parch-
ment out of a drawer in the desk, and began to write.

Chapter Fifteen

When we'd signed the papers, and after I watched
the master bard burn the other ones, I swore him
to secrecy, as I had with Cynta. "Don't tell the ondan
we changed the apprenticeship agreement. Let him
think the version he signed still stands."
The old man sighed heavily. "If you've always been
this much trouble, I can see where your foster-mother
wanted to sell you."
He didn't say it unkindly, however, and I realized
that he had been joking, even if the joke wasn't as
funny to me as it was to him. I laughed politely and
said, "I have a reason."
"Then let me hear it."
"I want to know why the ondan signed me into
apprenticeship. I want to know what he was think-
ing, and why he thought he could do that without
me protesting—and if he knows we've changed the
agreement, he might feel that he has to hide some-
thing."
"You don't trust him."
"Bardmaster," I said quietly, "I don't trust you. I
don't trust anyone but Giraud, and Giraud I trust
provisionally. As long as he continues to act the way
I expect him to act—"
"—like a young idiot—"
"—I'll listen to him without questioning every word
of advice he offers. No one else gets that courtesy.
No one."
"As humans, we have to learn to trust each other,"
he protested.
"As someone who got burned more than once, I
say you earn trust, and until you earn it, you don't
get it."
I could see from the look on his face that he was
regretting ever letting me into the keep, whether I
was the answer to everyone's prayers or not. I didn't
care, though. I didn't see any reason to lie to the man
about what I thought of him and the rest of the
world. Maybe it was tactless, but I'd surely earned
the right to my opinions.
"Then you have no more reason to distrust the
ondan than you have to distrust me."
I watched him, trying to decide if he was ready
for any more honesty. I guessed he might not be, but
I decided to risk telling him what I thought anyway.
"Maybe I do. My gut says he's a good man, but his
actions in apprenticing me to you don't make sense
to me. I don't dare trust what I don't understand."
I settled myself in to the chair opposite his desk and
closed my eyes. "I imagine there's a simple explana-
tion," I said, as much to comfort myself as to reas-
sure the master.
He said, "I'm sure there is, Isbetta. But until we
find it, I'll keep our arrangement a secret between
the two of us."
We knew we were racing against an implacable
enemy: time itself. Those forces that both Ondan
Shanxi and Bard Troman insisted on naming Evil, with
an emphasis in their voices that made it more
personal than just the opposite of good, gathered and
grew stronger with every day that escaped us. I heard
whispered rumors that anarchy had spread as far as
the capital, that some of the bards who went out to
spy didn't come back—and not because they were
killed, but because the evil or the madness overtook
them.
The havoc didn't seem to be dying down. Outside
the walls of the keep, it still ruled. And inside the
keep, the bards who maintained the warding spells
to protect us grew weary and frayed, and their tem-
pers got shorter and more combustible.
Cynta came off of spellcasting duty to teach me
finger exercises, voice, focus, and visualization, spell-
shaping and spell theory, improvisation ... I had to
master an unending stream of knowledge in a finite
time. She and I kept out of everyone else's way. The
spell-casters didn't want to see me, because I was the
reason they had to spellcast. The historians and theo-
rists didn't want to see me either; the book I'd
brought back was one of the Three Lost Keys, all of
which had been missing for so long they'd begun to
believe they didn't exist. But if the book I'd come
back with, the Red Key, was lost, then the other two
Key books might still be sitting around somewhere,
too, waiting to cause trouble.
She and I sat together all day every day for a full
week, and I learned more about music in those seven
days than I'd learned in the whole of my previous
life. After that week, she passed me on to several of
the bards who specialized in various forms of fight-
ing. In three days, they took me through a rudimen-
tary course in the blocking of mental suggestions and
forces of attackers and practice in spellcasting while
under duress.
I hated every minute of those three days, because
my training consisted of playing set pieces on the prac-
tice lute I'd been given while the bards pelted me with
beans and small stones, and then fruit, and then larger
stones, and finally spells. My task was to play and sing
through my allotted pieces without losing my place,
while still building and maintaining a protective bar-
rier that would keep out their projectiles.
Three days, and during those three days, I played
my fingers raw and sang my throat to hoarseness, and
suffered agony in my back and my knees. And some-
times my head and shoulders, too, when the projec-
tiles got through. Meanwhile, I had to keep my voice
steady and play correctly. On the fourth day, they
changed the focus, so that I also had to concentrate
on song dynamics—on putting emotion and belief into
the songs I sang.
The bards kept me away from magical songs. We
discovered early on that anything with the potential
to alter behavior when sung resulted in the bards
having to shield themselves against my spells. I didn't
mean to cast spells, but according to Bard Armayra,
I had years of magical potential built up inside of me
that had been waiting for an outlet. When I began
to train, she said I became like a dam that was for-
ever threatening to burst. According to her, she and
the rest of the bards were going to have to find a
way of lowering my magical level—but not, she added,
until after I'd sung the reversal of the "Song of
Belangia."
While I struggled with my crash course in bardic
magic, and the spell-casters labored to keep the mad-
ness outside from slipping inside, the scholarly bards,
plus Giraud and Maydellan Ha, closeted themselves
with every book they could find. According to Giraud,
they worked their way from the history of magic to
the theory and on to practical applications, one book
at a time, dissecting the spell I'd cast and trying to
understand why something that was outwardly so
simple had exploded with such complex results.
Giraud said they had plenty of theories—and all
of them were ugly. He said the one he thought was
most likely to be true was that long before he and
I arrived on the mountain, a wizard had done some
sort of spell on the Pillar of the Sun, and that his
spell had waited for another spell to activate it. That
spell would have had disastrous results no matter what
the next spell to be cast from the pillar had been.
My spell had simply been the worst of all possible
spells to follow.
I considered that. Considered the fact that much
of the evil that had happened might have been set
in motion long before I arrived at the mountain. Per-
haps even long before I was born. I might not have
been the single cause of the destruction of everything
I loved.
I wasn't ready yet to absolve myself of all guilt,
but I did begin sleeping better.
Or maybe that was just due to exhaustion.
Ten days of living, eating, sleeping, breathing bardic
magic. Ten days, and I thought I was casting spells
in my sleep. I still had not done anything with the
black lute, nor had I cast any spells except for warding
spells while I sang songs, but I was gaining control
of my voice and my breathing, learning to use my
belly and not my throat, and feeling pleased with
myself because I was making progress. I could visu-
alize solid three-dimensional images and rotate them
to any angle in my mind's eye. My fingers ached, but
they moved faster and hit the strings I wanted them
to hit. And neither stones nor spells got through my
barrier.
I woke in darkness from dreams of self-satisfaction
and success, and instantly realized something was
wrong. My pleasant little room seemed too close and
somehow watchful; the darkness, which I had never
minded, felt like a stifling blanket. The little shields
I kept around my bed to wake me in case of danger
yielded to the stronger, more aggressive shields Cynta
had taught me to weave. I spun them almost without
thinking. The endless drills came my assistance and
they locked in place around me, close and tight and
hard. I had my eyes open, but only barely—I tried to
keep my breathing regular and deep, as if I were
asleep, but I knew the pattern had broken when I
woke. Breathing always changes from sleep to waking,
and if someone is listening for the change, no amount
of artful acting afterwards can undo the damage that
first uncontrolled instant of wakefulness has caused.
I tried to hear breathing, for more than anything
I felt certain someone stood in my room, studying
me. Someone. Something. Some thing. Intelligent,
wary, malicious. Intent on hurting me.
I rested my hand on the dagger that stayed always
beneath my pillow when I slept, and tried to get a
fix on the direction of the person or thing that
observed me. I couldn't. The sense of danger, the
miasma of barely controlled rage and hatred, came
from everywhere in the room at once, filling it like
cloying smoke.
This invader knew I was awake. I felt his amuse-
ment along with his hatred, and I got scared. I
grabbed the dagger and dove from the bed to the
floor, hoping that my sudden action would prod
something from the intruder that would give away his
location. All I wanted was a target, a place to throw
my weapon.
I didn't get it.
Instead, the door to my room flew open and Cynta,
burst in, breathing hard.
"What?" she shouted.
The feeling in the room didn't fade like the scent
of smoke, or flow away like water down a gutter.
It shattered like a pot full of water being thrown
to a stone floor, throwing shards of insane fury
everywhere.
I wasn't the only one who felt it. Cynta crouched
and pulled her hands over her head and her shields
flew up so quickly they glowed. She cried out—the
sort of softly muffled cry someone makes when she's
been punched in the gut but doesn't want anyone
around to know. Something got through before the
shield went up, I realized.
The effects of the silent explosion lingered, then
died away, and I finally felt secure enough to say,
"Cynta, why did you yell 'what?' when you ran in
here?"
"I heard you scream," she said.
"You couldn't hear anything from my room. Your
room is down a floor from mine."
"I know that . . . but I heard you scream," she
insisted.
"I didn't scream."
She'd unfolded; she began walking around the peri-
meter of my room very slowly, moving through the
darkness with precision and an air of direction. "We'll
talk about this later."
The character of her movements and the tension
in her voice forestalled any further protests from me.
I waited, watching her, hoping the first bell of morn-
ing would soon ring so that I would have an excuse
for getting up. I didn't want to go back to bed or
face the idea of trying to sleep again.
She moved near the bed. Then away from it. Then
back again. "Something scarred your shields," she told
me.
"It might have. I felt something in here—I think
that feeling was what woke me up, or maybe a light
disturbance of my sleep shields—but I couldn't see
anything."
She turned away from the bed and walked to the
table by the window. "Nothing should have been able
to get in from outside." She leaned one palm on the
center of my little table to balance herself, and with
the index finger of her other hand traced a line along
the sill of my window. I heard the soft intake of her
breath. "And nothing did. The spells we put around
the keep are still intact."
"So that means—" I started to say, but she cut me
off.
"It's early, but you and I might as well get going.
I'm to work with you today. We'll be doing some final
work in shielding and some preliminary work in
spellcasting. The scholars have almost constructed the
song you're to sing to reverse the 'Song of Belangia.'"
She gave me a hard look, one that said, Don't argue;
don't ask questions; just come on.
I said, "I don't think I could have gotten back to
sleep anyway. After ..." I chose my next words
carefully "... nightmares, I've never been able to
sleep well."
She smiled at me and nodded. I'd gotten her hint.
"Just let me get dressed and get my lute and I'll
be on my way. To the . . . practice room?"
"I'll wait," she said. "We can stop by the kitchen
and pick up something from Cook before we go to
work."
I pulled my apprentice garb on, shoved my feet into
my boots, and grabbed up my lute. Cynta pointed to
the dagger lying on my bed and I slipped it into my
belt. That interchange passed without either of us
speaking a word. I knew she thought someone could
hear us—there was no other reason for her to act the
way she was. But I couldn't imagine who might want
to listen in to our conversation—neither of us knew
anything that would qualify as important gossip or vital
secrets. Neither of us would be able to give away
essential information to a spying enemy, because we
weren't the ones who had such information.
But she evidently thought something we had said
or might say was of interest to the unseen listener.
I tried to imagine what.
I was ready to leave. She said, "Breakfast, then,"
and led me out into the hallway. She stopped to lock
the door and took the time to spell-ward it carefully.
I tried to watch what she did, and listened to the
eerie little tune she hummed under her breath while
she touched the keypad. At some point I was going
to have to learn how to do the spell-warding myself.
Not yet, though. Not until the business that occupied
all of us was done.
She led me through the curving hallway and down
the stairs. At first I thought we were going to the
kitchen, as she'd said. Then I realized she'd taken
another path through the building altogether and that
we were going someplace I'd never seen.
She hummed as she walked—not absent-minded
humming, but a bit of spellcasting the purpose of
which I couldn't begin to guess. I could almost see
the shape of the spell she surrounded us with, but
I couldn't unravel the threads to decide what it did.
I felt like I was looking at the work of a much more
advanced weaver, trying to figure out how she'd
created the complex patterns I was admiring, and
finding that I didn't even have the knowledge to ask
intelligent questions. I hated feeling ignorant, and I
hated feeling helpless, and I especially hated feeling
inept.
I supposed I would get used to it, however.
She stopped in the hall, still humming, and rested
her hands against the stone wall in front of us. It slid
back, and she stepped through. I followed, though
warily.
When the stone slid into place behind us, she
turned.
"We should be able to talk safely here," she said.
We'd stepped into a bubble in the center of what
appeared to be solid rock. Light suffused the room,
but not from any discernible source. Neither windows
nor the visible lines of doors marred the smooth
curves of the stone that arched over our heads and
rolled away from us at the sides to curve at last
beneath our feet. I tried to imagine carving a form
of such perfection, and couldn't. I tried to understand
the mechanism of the door that ceased to exist when
we stepped through its barriers. My mind could not
comprehend that, either. Finally I satisfied myself with
the miracles present, and let my curiosity about them
go. Other, more immediate mysteries awaited my
attention.
"Fine," I said. "So what happened in my room, and
what did you find at the window that made you so
scared?"
Cynta's face was pinched with an anxiety so acute
it looked like pain. She sat cautiously on the floor,
settling herself down like an old woman disguised in
young woman's flesh, like she expected her bones to
break if she moved to fast or too hard. "The spell
came from someone inside the keep."
I nodded and waited.
"I don't know who." She shook her head. "I should
know. There are ways to tell who has cast a spell,"
she said. "It isn't easy, and not everyone can do it.
Even the best of bards sometimes can't do it. But
magic is nothing but the energy of the person who
uses it, wrapped in a package of music or words that
holds within it the caster's intent." Deep, slow breath.
"If you know people—if you let yourself get to know
them, and if you care about them ... I mean deeply
care . . . you can begin to recognize their spells from
the feel of the magic."
I waited. Cynta wasn't always direct to her point,
but from what I'd seen, she arrived there sooner or
later, and I'd discovered that if I would just be patient,
I would learn more than just the single fact I had
expected to comprise the answer to my question.
"I ... that's one of the things I'm good at," she
continued. She was sitting cross-legged, arms and
hands still clenched and tight, back straight and stiff
as an old pine. "And its something I always do. That's
. . . how I knew something was wrong with you. I
didn't precisely hear a scream . . . but ..." slow
shaking of her head, biting of the lower lip "...
your shields aren't like anyone else's, and something
made your shield scream . . . and I felt it."
"So you didn't have to hear me with your ears?"
"Right."
"But what does that—"
Her hand came up. "I couldn't feel the magic in
your room until I stepped in and disrupted it. When
the spell that was in there shattered, that was the first
I realized you weren't alone in the room. But when
it shattered and parts of the rebounding energy hit
me, something familiar hit me, too, and I didn't know
why."
She looked up at me.
"You figured out what had happened when you
touched the window."
"I confirmed something that I didn't want to
believe.
"I told you that purpose is wrapped up in the spell,
and that I can make out purpose as well as—some-
times—the identity of the caster?"
"Yes."
"Whoever watched you—and the one who watched
you was careful to disguise the making of his spell,
so I don't know who it was—watched to figure out
how you are connected to the black lute. And more
importantly, to determine how to break the bond
between you and her. There were a number of furious
bards when she chose you. One of them means you
harm, I think."
My head spun. "What are you talking about? Who
chose me?"
"The lute."
Now I was lost. I'd thought Cynta would tell me
who had been spying on me. I expected to hear from
her some tale of discovered treachery at the hand of
one she'd considered her friend. None of this made
any sense to me at all. The lute was a she? It was
supposed to bond? It had chosen me, and not some-
one else, and this left people angry? I sat down
opposite her and said, "We'll never get anywhere if
I just ask you questions. I don't know what questions
to ask. So tell me."
"No one would have told you anything about that
lute before because it was such a ... grim story . . .
and you're still an outsider . . ." She sighed. "Well, I
know most of the tale. I don't know if anyone knows
all of it."

Chapter Sixteen

Cynta sat up straighter and shifted around, try-
ing to find a comfortable position. "I wasn't here for
all of it, but at least I've heard the tale. Go back about
ten years. There was a bard here named Lannee. Per-
haps you heard her mentioned when the master was
discussing the making of the lute."
I nodded. "I wondered at the time if she might
be my mother."
Cynta winced. "I hope not. Probably not. It is a
common enough name in these parts—we have two
bards here now who share the name. In any case, this
Bard Lannee taught time-sight songs, and did a great
deal of research and writing, and apparently quite a
bit more than that. If you listen to the rumors, she
had affairs with most of the male bards here and a
not inconsiderable number of the female ones."
I interrupted. An instant into her story, Cynta had
already lost me. "What are bardic time-sight songs?"
"Songspells that open windows into the future. I
thought you'd know that."
"I've spent my last seven years learning to weave."
"Right.  Sorry.  But as I was saying, apparently
Lannee spent as much of her time on sex as she
did on magic. That's important. She was brilliant,
and beautiful, and enormously respected for her
theoretical work in time-sight, and for her applied
spellcraft, too. She was not respected for the manner
in which she managed her personal life. Her end-
less stream of indiscreet romances kept relations
between other bards in an uproar, and led to a
couple of rifts between colleagues that still exist
today." Cynta sighed.
"And it didn't end well. About a week before
everything fell apart, she had some sort of argument—
several people heard the shouting from outside her
room; and everyone knew that one of her affairs had
gotten ugly, though even today no one knows who
she fought with or what they fought about. After that
fight, though, she started working all the time; she
said she'd seen something in time-sight that scared
her, and she needed to pin it down. She broke off
her romances with everyone and disappeared into her
quarters, only showing up from time to time for
meals. She quit giving her classes, she quit present-
ing research, and she didn't talk to anyone about what
she saw coming."
Cynta brushed her curls away from her face and
shook her head. "At last, when she didn't come down
to meals for two or three days in a row, someone
checked with the cook and discovered nothing had
been sent up to her for that same length of time. So
several of the masters went to her room, just to check
on her. They hated to disturb her; apparently her
work habits were such that slight noises and disrup-
tions could throw her off for hours. But they got up
their nerve and knocked on her door. And when no
one answered, they knocked harder.
"At last, they battered their way through the door.
What they found was very strange. She was dead, but
by the time they reached the point where they were
willing to break down her door, they were almost
certain they would find her dead. Nothing about her
death was normal, though. Her body hung from the
ceiling, her ankles tied to a beam. A big block of black
wood beneath lay her; no one knew the type of wood
it was, or where the block had come from. Her body
was bloodless, but no blood was found anywhere in
the room; her wrists had been slit—the knife still lay
on the block of wood beneath her.
"At first, everyone was certain that she had been
murdered; further, they thought whoever had fought
with her that night before she changed so much had
murdered her.
"But her room seemed to have been locked by her
own hand from the inside; there were no signs that
anyone else had breached the wards that lay around
it. And the knife that had slit her wrists was her own."
"How awful."
Cynta said, "It gets worse. Everyone began to sus-
pect everyone else. Lannee had never been prone to
depression, to strange moods, to self-destructive
behavior. Her only real character flaw was promis-
cuity. The rifts between the various bards who had
loved her—and they were many—grew deeper and
uglier. Actual fights broke out, and several prominent
bards left the keep and never returned.
"Only after more than a month, after Lannee's body
had been buried and her room cleaned out and all
her belongings moved to storage so that another
master could take her rooms, did one of the archi-
vists—well, you know him. Remeys. The one who said
he knew both of your parents. Anyway, he finally got
around to cataloguing the contents of her common-
place book. We all keep them, you know," she added
in a thoughtful aside. "We keep notes on what we're
working on, on whether what we do fails or succeeds,
on personal problems, and whatever else happens.
That way, if anything happens to one of us, our
colleagues will be able to reconstruct our research
and our work won't be lost."
I nodded. I'd been far too close to a bard's com-
monplace book. "And Remeys found something in her
commonplace book?" I guessed.
Cynta's expression went bleak. "Her suicide note."
"Suicide?"
"She had witnessed a time-sight event that sug-
gested a deadly eruption of magic was building, and
she had been doing research to figure out how that
eruption could be stemmed or averted. Her notes said
the bard was already born who would stem the evil,
but that the weapon this bard would need was not
yet in existence. The weapon was to be a soul-lute.
You have heard of such instruments?"
"No."
"Bards have always considered them evil. Not only
lutes can have souls—any instrument can. They are
instruments made by sacrificing a human being, and
binding the soul to the instrument or the materials
that will be used to make the instrument before it
can escape to return to the Summerlands."
Suddenly I knew where this horrible story was
going. "The block of wood ..." I said.
Cynta nodded. "She poured her blood and her soul
into that wood—sacrificing herself voluntarily to create
the materials to make this incredible instrument."
I'd held that lute. Played it. "The black lute."
"Her notes said that once the wood was readied,
it should be given to Bard Edder to be turned into
a lute. She said the instrument would then find its
way to the bard who would play it."
"And everyone assumed that bard would be some-
one from the keep."
"Right." Cynta gave me an approving look, evi-
dently pleased I could figure out some of the sim-
pler points on my own. "Her sacrifice of her own soul,
offered freely by her own hand, she said, would create
a lute that would not turn to evil; she could not ask
for anyone else to fulfill the conditions that would
save the world from the fate she foresaw."
"And things didn't turn out the way anyone guessed
they would."
"No. We all thought Bard Troman would be the
one to play it. He had loved her longer than any of
the others, I think. Or perhaps Remeys. He was one
of her lovers, and ardent; he almost died of grief after
her death. There were others we thought she might
have chosen. But no one else had her way with time-
sight, or does even to this day. And she didn't write
down what she saw coming . . . she just left that poem
in her commonplace book, and that was more of a
puzzle than a help. Perhaps she thought writing down
her visions would seal them into fact. Maybe she
thought the future she saw might be averted. But I
don't think so ... otherwise, why would she have
killed herself? Izza, everyone wondered for years what
she saw coming that was so terrible she killed her-
self to fend it off. And if the madness that devours
the world now is what she saw, then every guess any
of us made was wrong."
I thought about that lute, black as moonless night,
more beautiful than any instrument I had ever seen
. . . and haunted by the soul of a suicide. A suicide
that shared both my mother's name and profession.
I shuddered, wondering if I would ever be able to
pick the instrument up again. "What can this lute do
that another lute can't?"
"I don't know," Cynta said. "I don't think anyone
knows. The creation of soul-instruments is forbidden,
and such instruments as are found are destroyed in
such a way that the souls bound to them are freed
to move on. Not the black lute, of course, because
Lannee gave her life to recreate herself as the weapon
that would fight off the future she saw. But all we
have are rumors of what such instruments can do.
There was a flute once that made listeners dance until
they died of exhaustion. A war drum that was so
terrible that when it beat, enemies of the drum's army
died of terror . . . but the drum supposedly terror-
ized the soldiers in its own army, too, so that only
a few could be induced to fight, and they had to have
wax stoppered into their ears before they would march
before the drum. A guitar . . ." She shrugged. "Dif-
ferent stories, different magics, but all of them fright-
ening . . . and the fact is, none of those stories can
give you any idea what to expect from Lannee's lute."
I thought about that for a moment. "I'll tell you
now—if I had known the lute was haunted by a soul,
I never would have touched it, not even to bring it
here. That kind of magic terrifies me. But what does
the lute have to do with the bard who watched me
in my room?"
Cynta cleared her throat. "This is ugly—and I'm
not sure that I know for certain. I can only tell you
what I felt from that spell. But this is what I think.
The lute chose you. She picked you out above all the
bards who were presented to her. And she won't
choose anyone else as long as you're alive."
I stared at her. "But if I'm dead . . ."
Cynta nodded slowly. "If you're dead, the lute will
certainly choose someone. What she created herself
to do she has not yet done. And I'm betting that who-
ever was watching you thinks he can influence her
choice."
"Then I'm in danger even here."
"A bard wants the black lute. And so I think he
means to see you dead."
I've had better news.
For the final two days of my emergency training,
I worked only with the master. We sat together in
the top of a heavily shielded tower, with shields
around me and shields around him. And I played the
reversal of the "Song of Belangia" that the bards had
worked out. I played nothing else. First he sang it
for me, so that I could learn it. Then I sang it back
to him. Then I added the lute part. He shouted at
me when I forgot words or missed my fingerings,
screamed imprecations at the gods when I made
mistakes, and from time to time, for no apparent
reason, threw things at me.
After two days, when I had done the song hun-
dreds of times without error, he finally deemed me
ready to go back to the Pillar of the Sun.
We walked down out of the tower, and everyone
stared at me. "We're ready," he said to the first bard
we met in the halls.
He walked with me to a workroom. A number of
bards waited for us, including Caylan and the bard
Remeys. Giraud and Maydellan Ha and Caylan and
the ondan were already there, as well. I hadn't seen
any of them but Caylan since my training started; and
not even Caylan those last two days. What I'd been
through must have shown on my face, for Giraud held
me tightly when I walked over to join him, and looked
at me with worried eyes. "No one told me you'd been
sick," he said.
"I haven't," I told him. But I was exhausted, and
the most pleasant thing I could think of at that
moment was curling up in my bed and sleeping one
day for every day that I had studied. "I've only been
working hard."
Remeys smiled at me, and said, "Once we're
through this, you won't find life so onerous. New
apprentices have simple duties, if dull ones."
I must have let my surprise show on my face, for
the bard raised an eyebrow and said, "Your ondan was
telling me that you would join us as an apprentice
once this matter at the Pillar of the Sun was con-
cluded. I assumed you . . . knew."
I hoped my expression hadn't told anyone too
much, for I felt the ondan watching me closely. I
answered, "Yes. Caylan told me he had arranged this
several days ago. I simply didn't think anyone else
would know."
He nodded. "Of course."
Though I looked at him, I also watched the ondan
out of the corner of one eye. Shanxi looked visibly
relieved by my response. So Bard Troman hadn't
betrayed our agreement.
The master raised a hand. The rest of us fell silent.
"All of you have been chosen, or have chosen on
your own, to travel to Hearthold Mountain for the
uncasting of the "Song of Belangia." You know you
face danger—perhaps death. I'm giving each of you
a chance right now to change your minds. To stay
behind."
"I'm going," Giraud said.
The rest of the people in the room all concurred.
"Then we won't wait any longer. Isbetta is ready, I
am ready, the rest of you were told to be ready."
I stared at him. "I thought I'd at least get a night
to sleep before we took to the road. We'll have so much
fighting to do on the way to the mountain ..." I shut
up. All the bards were staring at me as if I'd lost my
mind.
"You didn't think we were going to travel overland,
did you?" Caylan asked.
"What other way are we to go?"
"Remeys will open a Gate for us."
I had no idea what she meant by that. Everyone
else, though, nodded as if what she said had made
perfect sense.
Bard Troman took pity on my ignorance. "You've
never seen a Gate, Izza; it was still a lost magic in
your father's day. It is a rare one even now. Remeys
has spent years studying the ancient manuscripts and
daybooks, and a few years ago, he discovered a
songspell that opens a door between places. He'll sing
the songspell and the air will part for us, and we'll
step across to the mountain. It will be the work of
an instant, and will be, perhaps, the only safe part
of our journey."
Remeys smiled and nodded once.
Another of the bards came into the room, lugging
a lute case. "I came as quick as I heard," she said,
putting the case on the floor as if it were full of
spiders. "I brought it. Please don't ever make me carry
it again."
Bard Troman turned to me. "The black lute. You'll
have to carry it, I'm afraid. It has taken even more
of a disliking to all of us since you began your train-
ing. None of us cares to touch it now."
I nodded and walked over, lifted the case, swung
the strap onto my shoulder. I felt the stares at my
back as I did, and I thought about what Cynta had
told me of the lute—that someone wanted it enough
to kill me for it. Even through the case, I could feel
the soft, welcoming hum the lute gave off. I won-
dered that I had not been able to feel it before. Had
I felt it, and just ignored it because I couldn't explain
it?
I turned and looked into the faces of those who
waited for me. I hoped to see something evil in one
of them; I hoped to be able to catch a shiftiness of
eye, cold and callous smile, something that would tell
me which one of them meant me harm. But all the
faces of all those who would accompany me on the
trip to the Pillar of the Sun were guileless. Trouble
waited for me, but Maydellan Ha and Giraud would
stand by me. And Cynta. If only they knew to look
for trouble. Cynta knew.
I told the master, "I'd like to talk with my friends
for just a moment before we go." He frowned at me,
and I gave him the same hard look I had when I was
hammering out my terms of apprenticeship with him.
His frown grew darker; I could tell even then that
he was growing tired of me. But if I died before I
had the chance to sing the reversal of the "Song of
Belangia," he'd have worse problems than thinking
me impertinent. So I stood my ground, and he
shrugged, disgusted, and I pulled Ha and Giraud out
into the hall. I made sure no one was looking. Then
I hummed a shield into place, as Cynta had taught
me, surrounding all three of us. I fixed it with my
mind, and when I was sure it would hold, I said, "One
of the people going with us wants to kill me and take
the lute. I don't know which one, but you are going
to have to watch with me."
Giraud looked surprised, but Ha didn't. "There are
intrigues going on here that I can only guess at," he
said. "Some of them have been in motion for a long
time, girl. So we'll watch out for you. But you watch
your back, too. Whenever you think an attack won't
come, that's when it will hit you."
We didn't say anything else. I hugged both of them
in turn; we'd been through a lot together, and we
weren't done yet. And I was terrified that we wouldn't
all live to see how the story turned out.
Remeys had a beautiful voice. He stood at one
corner of the room and sang the spellsong that
opened the gate. The words, in an ancient tongue,
meant nothing to me, but they obviously meant some-
thing to the bard, for as he sang, a curtain of light
opened in the air beside him, and everyone who
waited for this "gate," which looked nothing like any
gate I'd ever seen, began to step through.
I went last, as I'd been instructed, with only
Remeys after me. I stepped through, feeling my heart
pounding and my gut twisting—and for nothing. One
instant I was in the stone chamber of the keep, the
next I stood in the basin of what had once been
Hearthold Mountain, next to the Pillar of the Sun.
The pillar stood as it had stood when we left it,
both weeks and lifetimes ago—unchanged. It shim-
mered in the sunlight, reflecting rainbows into the
grass. The bards and my friends stood around the
outside of the basin, facing outward, weapons drawn.
Remeys came through the gate behind me, and as
he did, it shimmered out of existence. He smiled at
me and briefly rested a hand on my shoulder.
"You'll do wonderfully," he said. "You're even stron-
ger than your mother was."
I looked at him, debated asking him what I really
wanted to know, and decided I might as well. "You
said you knew my mother. And Cynta said you were
in love with a bard named Lannee. And I was just
wondering if the two were the same."
His smile died, replaced by a bleakness so all-
encompassing I thought it would swallow me. Remeys
nodded, momentarily without words. He just looked
at me, pity and sorrow and pain in his eyes, until at
last I stared down at my feet. His soft voice made
me look at him again. "You didn't know?"
"No."
"Then you didn't realize until just now that your
mother was . . . dead?"
It was my turn to discover that no words would
come to me. I just shook my head.
"You know about the lute, too, then." This as a
statement, not a question.
I nodded.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't give you better
news; I'm sorry you found out now."
I felt the lute thrumming at my back, and became
aware of a sense of urgency that emanated from it.
I pulled away from Remeys. "I have to sing," I said,
and wondered even as I said it if I would be able
to hold the lute, or sing, knowing what I knew. That
my mother, who had left me and my father when I
was very young, had killed herself to become the spirit
of that lute.
Then I lifted my chin. I would do what I had to
do.
I removed the lute from its case and tuned her.
She sang beneath my fingers, and I heard inside my
head a voice that had never been there before.
Caution, my daughter. We have far yet to go, and the
danger for you has only just begun.
But what I've just said is not entirely true. I heard
the lute speaking to me, and that is was she said—
but I heard no words. I only felt them. And my gut
told me that the lute spoke the truth—that bad things
were coming, and that we had begun to run out of
time. "I'm ready," I said, though I'd never felt less
ready to begin anything in my life.
"Then start," Bard Troman said. "We'll guard you."
The master and I had discussed how I was to sing
the unspelling song. I knelt on the grass in front of
the Pillar of the Sun, and rested the lute on my
thighs. I'd told him how many times I'd sung the first
song; he thought I might have to sing this second as
many, or even more. So I tried to get comfortable.
I became aware that Maydellan Ha and Giraud had
moved back from the perimeter of the circle, so that
they flanked me. Remeys held up a hand and I waited
before starting the song.
He walked back to Ha. "We're going to need you
to stand out with us, to fight if we're attacked."
Ha shook his head. "We're the last line of defense."
"But we'll be stronger with you in the circle with us."
Ha looked grim. "Nevertheless, we're standing here
to protect Izza. We won't move from her side until
the song has been sung.
Remeys sighed. "I understand, I suppose. She's
your friend. I just think we could protect her bet-
ter if we were all together."
With a shrug, Ha said, "You're entitled to your
opinion. But we aren't under the orders of the bards,
and we'll do as we please."
Once Remeys had rejoined the circle, I looked
around again to see if there were going to be any
other interruptions. When I could see that there
weren't, I took a deep breath, plucked the first notes
of the unspelling song, and began to sing.
"Unbreak, unweave, unspell,
Remove, return, repair;
To pristine state unwind
The spells I've woven here ..."
I could hear faint voices behind me now. I kept
singing, kept my eyes on the Pillar of the Sun, and
my breath focused and my shields up. And I hoped
that the voices I heard, which echoed up from a
distance, didn't spell trouble for my friends. I couldn't
focus on them. I couldn't help them. In fact, until
the song was sung and the world had returned to the
state it was in before the singing of the "Song of
Belangia," I couldn't do anything more to help myself
than focus some part of my attention on maintain-
ing my shields.

Chapter Seventeen

I sang and played, and as it had before, my voice
seemed to resonate with the Pillar of the Sun. It
echoed through the basin, filling it. While I sang, I
prayed that the scholars—and especially Bard Tro-
man—had done their work well in crafting the spell,
for I was completely at their mercy in singing. If
they'd made mistakes, I would be the first to bear
the brunt of them. I prayed that my friends would
be safe, and that my future colleagues would survive,
too. I prayed to Neithas, because I did not know the
goddess of the bards, and I had no arrangements with
her—and because I knew weaving more than sing-
ing, I prayed that my words would weave a strong
spell, that their fabric would form a pattern that would
set the world aright and protect those I loved.
And my mother sang with me. I could feel her—
and I could feel her love for me in every note I
played. I don't know why she left me and my father,
but I sensed then that she did not do it because she
didn't care about us; that in fact her caring had set
her on a path that would one day protect me. That
leaving had been the hardest thing she'd ever done.
The pain of who she had been and how she had
conducted herself left me as I sang. I can't say that
I understood her. But I knew at last that she'd loved
me more than words could express, and that in that
moment, while the two of us were together and joined
in something that mattered, not just to us but to the
world, she was happy once more—she felt that she
was fulfilling her life's purpose. And in those
moments, I came to love her again, too.
Singing with her, I lost my fear. Joy filled me, and
the music took me outside of myself, as it had never
done before and has only done a few times since. But
if I was lost in the joy of the moment, I was alone.
I stared at the pillar and sang and kept my focus on
what I was doing, but in the back of my mind, I could
hear shouting, and then fighting. I was aware of the
moment when Giraud lunged forward from my side,
and aware that he did not resume his place there. I
knew when Maydellan Ha shouted in anger. I heard
the clash of metal, thuds and screams, the sounds of
fear and pain and anguish. I could not feel them as
I sang—my magic and the magic of the lute erased
my normal feelings for that brief time. I felt as if I'd
drunk a potion that had set me outside of the worlds
pain, knowing that when the potion wore off I would
feel it twice as fiercely.
Above me, the sky began to darken. Then I felt
wind against my skin. Nothing touched me, though
I kept expecting that someone would run me through
with a sword at any moment; my shields were up and
as tight as I could make them, but I still had a hard
time believing that a wall I created with my mind and
will would be enough to spare my life if a warrior
wanted to slaughter me.
Finally, I felt my mother's spirit pull away from
mine. I stopped singing, and stood with my shields
still hard around me. And I looked at how the world
had changed while I sang.
The basin had become a killing field. Dead dwarves
lay scattered across what was, once again, rocky
ground. The mountains had returned, and the peak
of Hearthold Mountain towered over me, wreathed
in black clouds. Living dwarves tended the dwarvish
wounded, and, I realized after a moment, to the
wounded and dying bards as well. I looked for people
I knew. Cynta wasn't among the dead . . . but she
wasn't among the wounded, or among those healing
them, either. And Bard Troman was missing, too. I
saw the ondan, though; he worked side by side with
the dwarvish healers. And Remeys, with his head
bandaged and one hand wrapped in bloody cloth,
cleaned up the body of a young woman that I'd never
had the chance to get to know. I feared most for
Giraud—and could not find him. I began to go from
body to body, expecting the worst. Then I realized
that the huddle of dwarves nearest the passageway
that led down into the mountain surrounded not
another dwarf, but my oldest and dearest friend. I
let the lute hang on its strap over my shoulder instead
of putting it in its case, and ran to his side.
He lay on the rocky ground, pale and ash-gray,
while three dwarves tried to stop his bleeding, and
one of the bards whom I didn't know struggled with
a healing spell that wasn't working well. Someone had
hacked off Giraud's left hand just above the wrist. His
left ear hung in tatters at the side of his face, though
it was still barely attached. He'd lost a lot of blood,
and though his eyes were open, he didn't respond to
anyone or make any sounds. I would have thought
he was dead, but his chest rose up and down in deep,
uneven gasps.
The dark sky let loose with a torrent of rain just
as Maydellan Ha finished what he was doing and
came over to join the bardic healer and his fellow
dwarves. "He's in shock," he said to them. "The magic
will only do so much, and not fast enough. We need
to move him into the caves and get him warm, and
get some fluids into him. Then get his feet higher
than his head and cover him with someone's cloak.
Have you stopped the bleeding?"
One of the other dwarves nodded. "We're hold-
ing it now, but we need to be able to sew him soon."
"Fine. If you can't sew, then cauterize. I'll check
on him in a few minutes. I still have other people I
have to look after."
"Maydellan—" I started to say, but he cut me off
with the curt wave of a hand.
"Later. I'm busy now."
He went to the next body on the ground, and I
stood in the center of the basin feeling useless.
Everyone else either lay on the ground in pools of
blood or knelt beside them, trying to save their lives.
I had no healing songs to sing. I knew none of the
unmagical skills that Maydellan Ha so valued. One
of my friends lay dying and I could do nothing for
him, nor could I do anything for the others who'd
bled in the battle that took place while I sang.
A hand settled lightly on my shoulder. "He'll be
fine," Remeys said.
I jumped and turned to look up at him. He smiled
down at me—tall, handsome, distinguished, even with
the bloody strips of rag wrapped around his head.
"What happened?"
"While you were singing, and while the madness was
still upon them, the dwarves attacked us. We thought
that might happen—we'd discussed the possibility, and
believed we were adequately prepared. But we dared
not use bardic magic to fight them, for fear our spells
would interfere with yours and somehow alter it. We
fought them hand to hand, then—the ondan saved
more of us than anyone else but you."
"Me?"
"I wish you could have seen. As your spell took
hold, the madness washed out of them. One by one
they disengaged from the fighting, backed away, and
put down their weapons. But more attacked than we
had anticipated, and we'd already taken heavy losses
when that happened."
"So the spell worked? The madness is over?"
Remeys shrugged. "I would think so, but we won't
know for sure until we go down into the villages and
see what has become of the people who are there.
As soon as our survivors are fit to travel, we need
to head to the nearest village."
The nearest village was Blackwarren. I didn't want
to go back there. "You should be able to tell from
here, shouldn't you? The dwarves here are fine, aren't
they?"
"They're too close. The spell might have only a
local effect, and we have to know whether it has trav-
eled and undone the evil in the outlying regions. But
you don't need to worry. If the spell went out as it
should have, we'll be traveling behind a spreading
wave of normalcy all the way back to the keep. If
we have to modify the spell, you'll have to come back
here to sing again."
I closed my eyes and took a deep, steadying breath.
My gut was screaming at me—that something was
wrong, that I was in terrible danger, that I needed
to get to safety. My gut, as usual, had no specific sug-
gestions to offer about what the danger was or where
I should go who how I should get there. I opened
my eyes again and asked Remeys, "Where are Cynta
and Bard Troman? I haven't seen them."
Remeys's expression went bleak. "I think I know,
but I am afraid to say it, for fear that it might be
true. Perhaps they have some good, logical explana-
tion for their disappearance. If not, though, then we're
in danger."
My gut twisted tighter. "The Black Heron," I whis-
pered. "Bard Troman must have been the Black
Heron." And I'd been his fool—telling him about my
suspicions regarding the ondan, and working with him
alone to get the spell just right. He had been the
main designer of the spell I'd just sung; the spell that
was supposed to have undone all the wrong the first
spell had worked. That was to have set the world
right. "Oh, Neithas, what have I done?"
"What have we all done?" Remeys said. "Isbetta,
you can't take the blame for this. We all believed that
the one bard we could trust no matter what was
Troman."
"Where could he have gone, though?"
"I don't know," Remeys admitted. "Though he
stands to gain a great deal if he acts quickly, and if
he can elude us."
"How?"
"Imagine that he claims he is the one who unsang
the 'Song of Belangia.' Imagine that he says he undid
all the evil that was done; if he goes to the new queen
and tells her this, how can she refrain from making
him Queen's Bard? And if he becomes Queen's Bard,
what part of our lives will he not eventually control?"
"But he can't say he unsang the 'Song of Belan-
gia,'" I said. "I'm the one who did that—and I'm
alive, and I have the lute."
He nodded. "A point I guarantee you the Black
Heron has not overlooked. Your job is to make sure
that you stay alive until we get you to the queen."
I swallowed hard and nodded. "Well, then, sing us
a doorway to the queen's court, and we'll get there
before Bard Troman and tell her the truth about what
happened."
Remeys shook his head. "I can't. At least not until
we know for sure that the spell did what it was sup-
posed to. Remember, Troman created that spell almost
by himself, then trained you to sing it—we think we
know what it was supposed to do, but we could be
wrong. We have to be sure before we go marching
into the queen's chambers and say we fixed everything
and . . . well ..." He looked at me and sighed. "You
see what I mean."
I nodded.
"But you're right that we need to travel fast. If he
didn't create a song gate right away, but did what
we're doing, we'll still have a chance to get to the
queen first."
"Let me tell Maydellan Ha what's happening so that
he can tell Giraud when he wakes up . . ." Remeys
was shaking his head at me. "What? Why not?"
"He's busy, and we need to go now."
He was right, of course. I wiped the rain out of
my eyes and said, "Let's go."
Remeys waved to the ondan, who trotted over.
"We're going to Blackwarren, and then on to Greffon.
We need someone else to go with us, to vouch for us."
The ondan looked back at the dwarves who were
dragging the last of the wounded and dead into the
tunnels. When he looked back at us, his lips thinned
and his brows lowered. "Yes. Someone needs to tell
the queen what has happened here today. For us to
be betrayed by . . ." He glanced at me. "She knows
the truth?"
"She knows about Troman and his little helper
Cynta."
"Good."
I felt queasy standing next to the ondan while we
waited for Remeys to create a gate for us. I still
couldn't understand why he'd apprenticed me to the
master bard. After that, I didn't trust him anymore,
even though I knew I ought to. He'd probably had
some logical reason for what he'd done—perhaps he'd
even suspected that Bard Troman was our enemy.
Ondan Shanxi, I reminded myself, was the one sav-
ing the lives of the wounded while Troman fled for
the capital and the queen to try to further his own
ambition. Ondan Shanxi stood and fought beside me
in some bad spots.
When I had the chance, I would ask him why he'd
chosen to speak for me with the master bard instead
of letting me speak for myself.
Meanwhile . . .
I clutched the black lute close and set up a light
shield around myself—one that I could strengthen in
an instant if the danger I sensed became apparent.
I don't know why I did, other than that I was heading
back to a place I'd left in a hurry, and with reason,
and the lute was the only real weapon I had.
We'll go in quickly, I thought. We'll see that every-
thing is fine, or else that it isn't, and either way, when
we've seen what we need, we'll leave. I won't have
to run into anyone I know ... if anyone is even left.
We'll go on to Greffon, and I'll never have to go near
Blackwarren again.
Then the gate opened, and Ondan Shanxi stepped
through it into shimmering nonexistence, and I fol-
lowed, black lute pressed tight to my chest. And Bard
Remeys stepped in behind me.
We stepped out almost simultaneously into the
Blackwarren I remembered, onto the very street where
I'd lived. Thatch-roofed wattle-and-daub houses leaned
in toward me; the mud street under my feet sucked
at my boots; the bog stink filled the air. No more stone
houses, no more glass windows. Blackwarren lay quiet,
though—far too quiet for an afternoon. Women should
have filled the street, carrying laundry or wicker reeds
or chickens; children should have run between the
houses; old men should have sat against the walls
smoking and telling lies. But I saw no one, and heard
no one. I smelled the sweet, sharp odor of peat burn-
ing, but only thinly; before, the air had always been
thick with it. A few people had survived the nightmare,
then. But which few?
I began to hum softly, strengthening my shields. I
admit the place scared me too, and that I wished I
were elsewhere. "It looks normal," I said. "So let's go."
Remeys was at my right side, and the ondan at my
left. "Not yet," Remeys said. "We haven't seen any-
one."
I muttered, "It's better if we don't," but Remeys
moved closer to me while the ondan walked toward
Birdie's house. "Not there," I whispered after him,
but he didn't hear me. He knocked on Birdie's door.
"We're with you," Remeys said. "Don't worry so
much."
I hummed and focused more intently. Shield up,
I'm safe and grounded, nothing can touch me, nothing
can hurt me. Over and over—and my shield pushed
Remeys's hand away.
"Calm down," he told me. "Drop the shield. We're
not going to let anything happen to you."
Birdie poked her head out the door. She had a new
scar on one cheek, and she looked thinner, but she'd
survived the madness. I shouldn't have been surprised.
She would have been one of the hunters, not one of
the hunted. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the
ondan, and she said, "What do you want?"
I knew she held a nail-tipped club behind her. I
wanted to shout out to the ondan that he was in dan-
ger, but I didn't. I felt something ... a faint voice
in my head that said "Be still." I kept humming, and
touched the fingers of my left hand to the strings of
the lute, and resting my right hand over the rosette.
Waiting.
Birdie stared at the ondan, also waiting. I shivered.
The aura of evil hung around her like a storm cloud.
"Birdreece dar Kinla," the ondan said.
"Get your damned shields down," Remeys whis-
pered. "You're going to blow this,"
And my gut screamed trouble! The ondan knew
Birdie's name. He hadn't stopped at her house by
accident. He probably hadn't met me on the road
by accident. I glanced at Remeys, found his face
twisted by fury, realized he had his guitar in hand
and was beginning to sing at me. I sang my shields
harder.
The ondan, oblivious to me, said to Birdie, "Once
a black heron gave you the egg of a white heron, and
told you to destroy it."
Birdie's face went white as death.
The ondan glanced back at me, saw what I was
doing, didn't look at all perturbed. He turned back
to Birdie. "You see the egg before you now, grown
to a creature who has nearly ruined what was once
a perfect plan."
Birdie shifted behind the door, and the terror in her
eyes deepened into something approaching madness.
"You knew what would happen to you if ever you
crossed the Black Heron," the ondan said, and beside
me Remeys sang at me, and I felt the pressure of
his rage even through the shield I sang. I felt the
compulsion to silence, to surrender. I fought it.
Birdie shrieked, "You can't blame me I was going
to kill her get away from me the others wanted money
for her!" all in one breath, and the ondan raised his
hand, and murmured something, and Birdie burst out
of her house with the club already arcing over her
head, and light shot from the ondan's fingertips at the
same moment that the spiked head of the club bur-
ied itself in the ondan's skull.
He didn't fall, but Birdie did. I was hoping . . .
praying . . . that he would topple to the ground, leav-
ing me to deal with just Remeys, but he lifted the
club out of his skull, and I watched, sickened, as the
crushed place closed itself up. He turned to me and
smiled. "The other two are dead already—I stepped
through a gate Remeys made for me a few days ago
to be sure. And you can stop that odious singing now.
I need to talk to you."
I kept playing. The pressure of Remeys's magic
against my shields almost buckled my knees, but I
pretended that he wasn't pitching anything worse at
me than rocks and fruit. I had nothing with which
to beat them—no songs I could sing to attack or
destroy. The best I could manage was a holding
action; I could keep my shields up and keep the two
of them away from me (maybe, the doubtful voice
at the back of my mind whispered) until someone
came to help me, but that would at last be futile.
Because I could only sing for so long before exhaus-
tion slowed me, and help wasn't coming.
"Exactly," the ondan said. "Help isn't coming. So
stop your singing and drop your shields. I own you,
girl. Have owned your life since your father tried to
ruin my plans years ago."
He could read my thoughts, I realized. He'd been
responsible for my father's death, and indirectly for
my mother's as well. He was the Black Heron.
The ondan shook his head. "Not precisely. Remeys
and I together are the Black Heron. He worked
inside the keep, I worked outside. Together we
intend to rule Terosalle, and someday all the world.
You, however, by surviving, and putting yourself in
the way of our work, and by adding your own
inflections to the 'Song of Belangia,' spoiled what
would have been a perfect little two-part spell to
throw everyone in these parts into slavery to us. That
little element of hope and idealism you put in soft-
ened the part you sang, and your damnable reso-
nance with the Pillar of the Sun sent it out much
further than it was ever intended to go. Now that
the damage has been undone, we're going to have
to recast the damned thing ourselves. And for that,
Remeys is going to need your lute."
I kept singing, and my shields kept holding . . .
but Remeys was a strong bard with experience I
couldn't begin to imagine, and he was determined to
break through my defenses. I was equally determined
that he wasn't going to get through. They weren't
going to touch the lute.
"We will, though," Ondan Shanxi said. "We'll have
it, and you will be our hostage so that it will agree
to work for us. As long as the lute does what we say,
you won't be hurt."
They were lying. Once they had what they wanted,
I'd be dead or as good as dead. I couldn't understand
why they would want to destroy the world—they'd
seen the pain their spell had caused before.
"It's not about destruction," the ondan said, and
at the same instant I felt a sharp stab of fire in my
side. A weak spot in my shield had allowed some of
whatever Remeys aimed at me to get through. "It's
about unimaginable riches. We will hold the world
at our feet. We will command everything. Everyone.
No one will keep anything back from us. We will be
gods in Terosalle—we will take whatever we desire."
He smiled at me, his eyes narrowing. "And what we
most desire right now ... is the lute. You have no
weapons to use against us. We will get what we want.
But if you fight us much longer, you won't enjoy what
happens to you when we get it."
Remeys changed his song, and the ondan raised
his finger, and his smile grew bigger. I couldn't hold
off both of them at once.
And then, from nowhere, I recalled a song my
mother used to sing to me when I was tiny, before
she'd left my father and me to do whatever it was she'd
had to do. She'd sung that lullaby to me every night
while she sat by my bed. My idea was stupid . . . but
I remembered Ha and Giraud and the lovesong, and
all the bards in Bard Troman's study when I sang
"Raider's Pride."
Stupid idea, but . . .
I kept my shields up, and started to sing.
"Sleep, child, sleep,
Trust that morn will come,
Rest your head and close your eyes
And wait for the new dawn,
Still, child, still,
For I am near your side,
Hush and rest your sleepy head
And sleep the whole long night."
I had no weapons. No spells to kill or maim. All
I had was that lullaby, that one gift from my mother.
I sang it, and she sang it with me, and we sang it
again and again, ringing the notes clearly on strings,
echoing them back from lute to voice, from voice to
lute, adding depth and strength born of our passion,
and of my memories, and of love, which is the stron-
gest magic of all. Together, we bound the song to the
ondan, and to Remeys.
"Sleep, child, sleep,
Trust that morn will come ..."
Their eyes closed. Remeys stopped singing. The
ondan's hand lowered.
"Rest your head and close your eyes
And wait for the new dawn."
They dropped to the ground, softly. Snored. I kept
singing, taking no chances. I spun the song around
them tighter, and then I added a new last verse.
"Sleep, monsters, sleep,
Sleep for a thousand years.
When you wake forget your hate
Give no more cause for tears."
It wasn't good poetry, but it seemed to work as a
spell. They curled on the ground, not moving at all.
When I stopped singing, they didn't budge. When I
tied their hands and feet, they didn't twitch. When
I found a couple of horses and managed, with much
difficulty and swearing, to drag them up an incline
and onto the horses' backs, and when I tied their
hands and feet under the horses' bellies so they
wouldn't fall off, they kept snoring. Gentle snores,
with no threat in them.
They didn't wake when I walked them back up into
the mountains, which were mountains once again.
They didn't wake when the dwarves untied them and
locked them away in a cell built into Hearthold
Mountain to keep them.
They do not wake today.

Chapter Eighteen

I discovered when I got back to Hearthold Moun-
tain that Bard Troman was dead—that he'd been
stabbed in the back and shoved over the lip of the
basin, and that his body had been discovered at the
same time that the dwarves had discovered Cynta's.
Her body bore signs of having fought—the dwarves
thought she'd seen either the ondan or Remeys kill
the master, and had tried to save him.
I wept for the master, and for Cynta, who had been
a friend, and who would have been a friend through-
out my life, I think, if she had lived.
Giraud healed slowly, but he healed. He met a bard
in the keep when we returned to Watchowl, and even-
tually he married her. He is the keep's historian now,
and still a dear friend. He gave up his family name
and title, and became Giraud dar Ven, which of
course means Giraud the Writer. As such, he is safe
from Varelle dar Kothia Surdosti. For all she knows,
all the dar Falcannes are dead.
Maydellan Ha is completing his medical studies
now with the Ko. He will, I am sure, be a fine doctor.
He is ever gruff and surly, but there is a kindness
about him that I dearly love. We remain friends, and
I hope we always shall.
And what about me? I could have taken several
different paths. With the black lute, I was one of the
most powerful bards in the country, and I could have
easily become Queen's Bard after freeing my people
from the "Song of Belangia."
Or I could have, I'm sure, worked my way into the
position of Master Bard of Watchowl Keep.
But either of those paths would have been a
betrayal of my mother. She had given her life to ward
off the evil that she saw coming . . . and though she
hadn't always been there for me when I needed her,
she was there when I needed her most. I couldn't
use the sacrifice she'd made to further my own
position. She needed to be released from the lute—
it had served its purpose, but its purpose was past.
I wouldn't let her hang in limbo, soulbound to a box
of wood and string, when she needed to return to
the Wheel, to rest and some day find a new life for
herself. A happier one, I hoped.
So I went out one moonlit night with Maydellan
Ha and Giraud, and the three of us built a fire out
of aged ash. When the fire leapt high and the coals
at its base burned white hot, I hugged what was left
of my mother and told her good-bye, and felt her
thanks for my releasing her. Then I gently laid the
black lute in the fire and watched until it burned to
ashes.
I took the third path, the path I had earned on
my own. I went back into the keep and continued
my training as a bard. I'm a bard now. Not a pow-
erful one, not a famous one. But I've found what I
love, and I live it daily. And I'll have a song to sing
for the rest of my life.