He did not mention it again. Only he looked away from the next Assharran fendel whose pure gold and beautifully minted moontree had formerly delighted him, and some of his pleasure in the land itself was marred. Between what he did and what he made me do and his effect on the men, it is small wonder I grew distracted, and was careless with the weather, as no commander ought to be.

It was the second day in Thangar that I bypassed an over-early halt, then compounded the error by misreading a Thangrian storm. We were in the high cold broken country that lifts sharply to the range crest, and we had watched the storm march from left to right across our front, veiling the black crags and thick emerald rucks of forest about Vallin Taskar, the Horned Gate. Having picked those irregular swaybacked jambs from the skyline I judged we would evade the storm, but I reckoned without the lie of the land. West of Vallin Taskar the waters run back to Kerym Scaur’s fathomless blue pit, and they run with the pace of a bolting horse. The storm was still on our flank when we found a ravine that held a tangle of rent timber, undermined piers, and a brown torrent coming down like a Phaxian cavalry charge, more than wither deep. Worse still, a glance told me the storm had veered. It was going to clinch its attack with a frontal assault.

Too risky to advance, pointless to retreat. The men were muttering. "Kestis’d never’ve done it. . . . Should’ve known. . . . What’d you expect?" I bit my lip. The worst of a parade unit is that you have no chance to blood yourself in with them, and precedent dies very, very hard.

The storm trumpeted in the crags. The one fault worse than negligence is vanity, and I was guilty of that too. At the last change, perhaps in some unadmitted rivalry with the gray mare’s rider, I had let them saddle us with four or five green colts. My own flattened his ears and spun tail to the wind, another began to plunge. The light became the gloom of a storm’s skirmish line, the narrow gorge resounded to its advance, the beetling cliff vanished in a boil of white. Furiously I yelled at the guards, "Shut up and hang on to your horse!"

Our sole mercy was that no one drowned. It was a ferocious storm, bad lightning that struck with shattering, numbing cracks, earsplitting thunder, water coming off the ravine-side knee deep, vision lost in a white murk lit by fitful whiter flashes that showed me horses standing on their heads in rain fit to wash away your skin. When it passed I was wet under my very helmet crown. To make it worse, we were nearly in the dark. The stream was impassable. A bitter wind had got up. We were stuck on the mountain, tentless, rationless, shivering drowned rats.

The sole choice was to make the best of it. "You and you," I said, still too angry to give them names, "go and scout. Cover. Dry wood." It was asking the impossible, and I did not care. "The rest of you get the horses back in the lee of the hill."

By then we were all shivering, horse and man, the gray mare and her rider by far the worst. Probably, I thought, they never had storms in Hethria. In the uproar I had had no time for more than a glimpse of the mare braced head down and quarters humped into the rain with a crouched shape on her back, and halfway through, an odd sense that the colt was easier to handle, which I somehow connected with him. But it was time to pay attention now.

I got off my played-out beast and sloshed over, trying not to sound as mortified as I felt. "I beg your pardon, sir. I’ve not found you much of a camp."

He straightened. Slowly. With surprise I saw his left wrist was shaking under the sodden robe, then identified the note of exhaustion in his voice. But he said quite calmly, "Never mind, Alkir. I’ve guessed worse." I might have known he would divine it all. "Owf!" he shook himself. "I haven’t seen a storm like that since Hethria. And it’s warmer there."

A wet bivouac is everyday to Phaxian veterans, but now I had horrid visions of reporting to the Lady that I had let her gift die of lung-fever from a night of Thangrian cold. "We’ll start a fire," I said hastily, and he nodded as he slid to earth. "Good." He glanced at the mare. "If this one takes a chill I’ll have explaining of my own to do."

The scouts had naturally found neither fuel nor shelter, and were sullenly ready for rebuke. I set them all to collect wet timber, and someone reluctantly ceded tinder and flint, but it was beyond a spark. The heap of sodden boughs sat dourly in our midst, and I could hear the internal grumblings.

The ringleader muttered, "Oughta ride back to Mallerstang." The stars shone coldly crystal, the ravine rumbled to the flood. A wet branch emptied down my neck. With cold fury I said, "A night out won’t kill you. Get the horses head to tail and make them lie. We’ll shelter behind them."

But a post-horse is not a warhorse. Never a one could we get down. We were still wrestling them when a crisp voice demanded, "What in the Four’s name are you doing with that fire?"

"I’m sorry, sir." I could not help my stiffness. "It’s a little difficult."

There was a growl around me, just under the level of punishable insolence. Someone said, louder, "No flint. ’N the wood’s all wet." Unspoken behind it hung, And what’ll you do about that?

I heard him give a quick sigh. "Stand away," he ordered. In a much kinder tone, "Turn around, girl. Stand away, I said!"

They obeyed that peremptory ring. He drew a breath that seemed endless. Then there was a vivid green flash, a crack, and the entire wood-heap burst into steaming, bubbling, green and blue-shot flame.

"Make two or three more off it and we’ll get between," he said into the hush. "The way Hethox nomads do. Much warmer. Well, man, what are you waiting for?"

They fairly fled. Daring neither comment nor query, I busied myself with my horse, watching from an eye-corner as he used his turban to rough the mare’s wet hide. When four fires were alight we crowded men and beasts between them, and in time grew warmer. But not more comfortable.

"Look," he said, kicking a stick into the fire where he and the mare stood all alone. "That was an art. A, a mind-act. Wreviane. Fire-mastery. You can learn it. I did. If you have the aptitude, it’s no more mysterious than—than water-seeking. Don’t you have diviners over here?"

Nobody replied, but I saw one or two make the horn sign with their offside hands.

"It isn’t witchcraft." He was pleading, I had the sense, with far more than ten sulky frightened men, pleading a case he had lost before. "I am flesh and blood, just like you. I don’t eat babies, or call up demons. It’s just a skill. Would you rather have done without the fire?"

When there was still no reply he turned away, clicking to the mare. She folded herself down in the mud, he scrambled in among her legs with a fine disregard for hooves, curled against her belly, and in ten breaths was asleep. Which, I reflected, as I sent off the first wood-party, had done his case no good at all.

* * * * *

In morning watch I snatched a doze against a leaky tree, and woke to full dawn: a limpid, piercing day, the sky freshly blue, the wet forest silver and emerald, birds rejoicing everywhere. I, on the contrary, was wet, cold, stiff, hungry and sour. Eyeing the muddy square with its charcoal-heap outposts, the limp horses, the limper men, my charge still blissfully slumbering, I wished heartily that I had never set eyes on him. Then two guards bracketed me, and I knew real trouble had arrived.

"Ranks’ prerogative," the first said curtly, with no attempt to salute. It is a euphemism. It means, accept our ultimatum or face a mutiny.

What, I thought, have I done to merit this? With a bitter pang I saw my dismounted troopers battling through the Stirsselian swamps, rotten with fever, riddled with ulcers, rife with dysentery, fighting, dying, abusing me at every turn and deserting me at none. And these fat flawns curled up after a single open bivouac.

The spokesman was still talking. ". . . nothing personal. But either we get rid of this—warlock—or else."

"Else what?" My hand itched for a sword hilt.

"Or else," he repeated, and evaded my eye.

"You fat louse." I kept my voice down, for effect, and not to wake a man who would never have encountered mutiny. "You parade-ground parrot. You creeping belly-ache. Your orders are escort duty to Zyphryr Coryan. There’s no ‘or else’ for you."

He had gone purple. Hopefully, I watched his sword-hand. But he was a guard.

"You’re not fit," I said, "to wash a surcoat, let be dirty one. A soldier wouldn’t wipe his boots on you." Still he did not bite. "Get away from me before you end where you belong. In the mud."

More purple than ever, he persevered manfully, "Is that your last word?"

"No," I snapped. "This is my last word." I wrenched at my sword, he sprang away, and a yell of, " ’Ware backs!" nearly burst my ears.

I spun as any fighter would and my feet shot from under me as the second man’s point speared between my right arm and ribs, I rolled and kicked with the spokesman charging my other flank and my frantic whip-lash just cleared his thrust, they closed in, I heard shouts and running feet and prepared to end under the pack of them—then the one who had struck from ambush dropped his sword, clapped both hands to his eyes, and folded gently down beside me in the mud.

I sat up. Retrieved my sword. Got to my feet. Nine whey-faced muddy black posts confronted me, slack-jawed, paralyzed. My charge emerged from behind them in an equally bedraggled blue robe. I took one glance and jerked my head away. He had no face. His eyes obliterated it, a glare of blinding, white-shot green.

"Sorry," he said curtly, "to interfere."

When none of us managed a word he came over to the man in the mud. Bent to feel a wrist. Straightened up.

The changed expression told me before he spoke. "I’m truly sorry." The voice had altered too. "He’s dead, Alkir."

"Sorry?" I was still airborne with rage. "For what?" I rounded on the rest. "Anyone else want to exercise ‘ranks’ prerogative’?"

No one did. Sheathing the sword, I turned to my rescuer. And stopped.

After a moment I said, "Mutiny. Trying to kill an officer. The kindest he could hope for was to lose his head." He did not look round. "One more barrack-rat. The Lady won’t worry. She’s more likely to string me up for negligence."

He sat on his heels over the corpse. I found I had put a hand on his shoulder as with one of my own subordinates. I said, "There was nothing else you could have done."

He might not have heard. He was staring, mute, deaf, as if nothing but the body existed. As if he had never seen a man die before.

I took the hand away. My skin crept. I heard myself say, too quietly, "Could you?"

There was a pause so deep I heard a foot squelch in the mud, drops spatter from the trees. Then, all of a piece, as a sliding boulder moves, he turned and looked at me.

I had taken a step back. But it was not me he saw. Those eyes looked past me, laughter all blown out. Dark and deep as a sunless forest pool. And blind, as if they had been stunned.

Then they shortened focus. That time, all of us stepped back.

"Could I not?" He barely whispered, but it cut like a whip. "Not knock the sword out of his hand? Stun him? Throw him a sarissa-length away? Stop him in his tracks . . . But no. I had to use A’sparre." Suddenly he buried his face in his hand. " ‘A brick-maker stitching silk.’ . . . Oh, Four. Any brick-maker could have bettered that."

With a degree of wounded dignity I said, "You did save my life. Or perhaps you’d rather have saved his?"

He just shook his head to and fro. Then, muffled in his arm, he said, "Fengthira was right."

"About what?"

He ignored that. But something in the bow of his shoulders made me burst out, "Don’t tell me you’re scared of your poxy witch!"

In another moment he looked up. His eyes were still stunned, but the shock was changing. Now he looked nearer to despair. And oddly forlorn, as if I had deserted him.

"You don’t understand," he said. And it was not blame, but grief.

I stared. He looked back to the corpse.

"That . . . he . . . was unique." He said it very softly. The grief remained, as if he were speaking some great hero’s eulogy.

"There never was, there never will be another of him. It took all time, and everything that ever was, to put him here. And I destroyed him. Blew him out, Phut! Not because I had to." His head went back in his arm. "From sheer . . . blind . . . criminal . . . incompetence."

I could not fathom the technical terms, I was uncomfortable at the depth of his remorse, baffled by this extravagant metaphysical breast-beating over a scurvy back-stabber who had got his deserts, and it gave me an odd sense of falling short, of lacking some value I could not even define. That, like all awareness of deficiency, made me angrier.

"He’s still dead," I said brutally. "And that’s all there is to it."

There was a long pause. Then he took his hand down and stood up, and when I saw his face I knew there would never be words I would wish so bitterly to have left unsaid.

"Yes," he said.

* * * * *

I beat a thankful retreat to the practical. The other curs were well to heel. They saddled up with speed, and I had just ordered, "Dakis, Krem, tie that crowbait on with his stirrup leathers," when a voice behind me said, "Alkir, wait."

He seemed to have recovered a little or, at least, to have begun to think. "This was my fault," he said. "All of it." An echo of that grief ran across his face and I wanted to look away. But he went on at once, "There’d have been no trouble if you weren’t escorting me."

That I could not agree made me no more amiable.

"So . . . he could have drowned yesterday. We could bury him here. And"—he swept a glance round the ten of us—"finish it."

Was I to clap or swear? Conspiring with your men to falsify a death and conceal an aborted mutiny, entrusting your career to a pack of toy-shop heroes’ malice or drunkenness—if they did not read his mercy as weakness and kill us both. Nothing is so rancorous as pardoned crime. Before taking the chance he did I would have struck the mare. But perhaps such gambles, or an insight that makes a surety of them, are the mark of high command.

Before anyone produced a word or, I daresay, a thought, he said in open relief, "Thank the Four." Then he looked surprised and, almost under his breath, amended it to an equally fervent, if more cryptic "Imsar Math."

* * * * *

"In the name of Math," what? I wondered irritably, as with no sound but blundering horses we rode into the ravine; through the girth-deep, neglected ford. Back to the road. Silence held as we dipped and climbed amid a forest wet and glittering as new-polished shields. A Thangrian timber jinker passed, fourteen horses, a giant of a log, skill and power joined. An orchid collector, a pack of rainbow exotica on his back, his tree-boy running ahead. I was still unsure of the guards, he noticed none of it. No one would ask about those moments over the corpse. But finally my confusion marshaled on a single idea.

"I don’t see why it was . . . incompetent."

The forest shook to the roar of a falling giant. I heard the clap of another axe beyond. Still staring between the mare’s ears he said, "It’s not a snub. Will you give me time to think?"

We had reached an inn, breakfasted, and set out again before he said a word. Then, as our horses breasted the first rise, slowly, all but fumblingly, he began to speak.

"You think what I did was justified. Self-defense. For act or worth, he—Gevos—deserved no better." I nodded. "But everyone’s stupid when they’re afraid. Nor was that all his fault. So much for him."

My neck told me the curs had grown six inches extra ear.

"And for me?" A wry smile. "It was about as fair as a mouse against a tiger-cat. I needn’t have killed him. Why I should not is the heart of it."’

He was still staring ahead, almost back in that morning’s somberness.

"Fengthira told me, when I left. Warned me. ‘Tha’st been safe, in Hethria. T’will not be so easy, among the temptations of men.’ "

I did not have to find a prompt. His mouth tightened and he said too quietly, " ‘I’m usually strong enough.’ I actually said that. I’d forgotten—after trees, and rocks, I’d forgotten how fragile it is—flesh and blood." He looked up into the dew-starred forest canopy and added, yet more quietly, "And I’d forgotten Math."

I let the silence ask, Math?

"I follow the Four, I said to you. I thought Math was—an idea. A theory. Fengthira’s business . . . something I just had to hear about. I know now, it’s not."

I just managed not to blurt, "Eh?"

"It isn’t a theory." Now I could hardly hear him at all. "For an aedr. . . . It’s inside you, part of you. When you damage that, or break it. . . ." He made a little sound that was poles from a laugh. "Then you find what it means, to say, This’ll hurt me more than it hurts you."

I must have twitched or somehow else betrayed myself. His eyes came right round and he said it for me. "I’m sorry. You don’t understand. You don’t know anything about Math."

I tried to make it sound neither pressing nor accusing. "No."

He frowned. "I don’t think I can explain this very well, because it’s Math, to begin with. And I’m new to it. And I was never very good with words. But I think . . . ‘Math’ is twofold. The—vision. And the rule. For the vision, Math means, Reality. That-which-is. For the rule . . . Fengthira says, the simplest is, Respect that-which-is. Trees, beasts, men. Because every single one is the sum of Math, and you can alter or destroy them, but to make them is beyond us all. It takes the whole world and all of time, it was never done before, and will never be done again."

It was almost, I remembered, what he had said over the dead man.

"And the more power you have over that-which-is, the more reluctant you should be to exercise it. A little fire won’t temper a sword-blade, but nor will it turn a master-sculptor’s marble into lime." I nodded. "I am an aedr. I can damage that-which-is more than—just about any living thing. I can misuse power. The way I did this morning. What’s worse, I could come to enjoy misusing it." He looked down at his crippled hand. "When I learnt the arts, Fengthira gave me a lesson on that I’ll never forget. But the temptation lasts. Power can rot you. It can make you"—his voice grew careful—"destroy yourself."

"Go on," I said.

He shot me a glance, and looked away. Perhaps, I thought, he changed what he would have said.

"Um . . . so, the greater the power, the greater the obligation to respect Math. Be good, so to speak, to keep goodness good." I wondered what the ears would make of that. "So when I kill a man by incompetence, I’m not only a bungler at my trade. I am a destroyer of Math. And because my power’s the greater—so much the worse is my default."

"You mean," I was floundering, "if I step on a grasshopper, deliberately, it’s still better than if you do—what you did—by mistake?"

He answered bleakly, "Yes."

I stared. I had never dreamt of such a power, nor one which could so implacably condemn itself under a statute only its own consent could enforce.

"We are all responsible for Math"—he stared ahead of him—"according to our power. I’m an aedr. I used to think I had problems when I was just a king."

His vague and enigmatic Math went straight out of my head. But the somber set of the mouth, the eyes still dark as malachite, warned all too clearly, Don’t ask. Not now.

* * * * *

His mood had not lightened by our midday halt, though he was hardly quieter than the guards. Girthing up again, I wondered what might distract him, when he had ridden unseeing in the trenchant upland air under the mightiest trees in Thangar, past traffic that a day ago would have rotated off his head. Then a bend showed me the closest skyline. I eased my horse back a little behind the mare, and waited on events.

The hoof-noise told me the rest had closed up on us both. The mare flicked her ears, but he paid no heed. Then the light changed, and as you would expect his head came up.

He shot upright on the mare. His mouth fell wide. Then he cried, "Alkir, you louse!" and fairly flew from the mare’s back to the highway edge.

If it is a whim of the Lady or her engineer I cannot say, but whoever built it had a craft to match the sheer audacity of the design. The Horned Gate lies on the very range brink, at the end of a long rising ridge that sweeps round from south to east; but at the bend-head the road diverges to spring clean across that bight of valley almost as deep as the range, rising on the gentlest of gradients to Vallin Taskar’s port, upheld by pylons that elongate in center valley until the trees are green cauliflowers beneath each dizzily perpendicular stone jet, and the crowning span bears you across the sky like a spider on a giant’s thread. While under the parapet the range falls in tiny, defeated folds to eighty miles of Morryan coastland and the knuckle of the Morhyrne and the tenuous, unending, aquamarine circumference of the sea.

There is no warning. Just a last jink of the tree-shuttered road and the bridge fires you out into immensity. Glancing round at nine grins wider than my own, I thought what joy there is in seeing others’ joy take them by surprise.

"You femaere," he said when I dismounted and walked over. "You never said a word."

"You did say," I pointed out, "that you wanted to see it with your eyes."

"So I did." He was still devouring it, too rapt to comment again, even in superlatives.

When he finally moved and sighed, I said, "We call the ocean Gevber. The Eastern Sea. The land is Morrya province. That little hill’s the Morhyrne. Zyphryr Coryan’s on its seaward side. And above Zyphryr Coryan is where the Lady lives."

"Oh, yes." At that moment she could not have mattered less. But at last he turned away, to scan the bridge again, and then remark, "Must be some good in Assharral, when they build something like this just to show off something like that."

When I said, "Thank you," he looked delightfully abashed. Then he said indignantly, "Sneak that under my shield, you can expect a kick in the teeth." And I swung back astride laughing, so relieved to have him himself again, I dismissed questions of kingship along with his baffling Math.

* * * * *

The byplay had touched the guards too, though it was hardly perceptible. Just a minute sense of atmosphere grown indefinably easier, as we passed Vallin Taskar and the road began its zigzag down a vertical cliff into the forest depths.

Lisdrinos’ trees are mammoth, its undergrowth impassable. Bird and beast flourish in that wet green labyrinth, but you catch only rare glimpses, like the spell-cast vistas from a road shoulder: half a waterfall in the fern, a segment of Morrya past a vine-hung cliff. If you are lucky, the frigid quiet may yield one syllable of a ferrathil’s slow, chiming call. It was in there, soon after we left next morning, that one of the horses chose to cast a shoe.

"Take him back, Wenver," I told his rider, "with my nastiest compliments, and get another one." I felt the cold war had eased to such small levities. "The rest fall out, but sit on the road, unless you want to banquet the whole family Leech." I had been through such forests before. Then, thinking there could not be too much danger, I lay down with my head on the curb and my feet in the sun, and promptly fell fast asleep.

<Alkir,> said my charge, <wake up.>

I came upright inside out clawing my sword as I spun to meet a mass assassination attempt. He was nowhere in sight. Eight amazed faces stared uphill at me. "What—where—" I had just begun to yell when he broke in, sounding oddly flat.

<Fifty paces uphill. An earthfall across the right ditch, a big brown tree-fall five paces beyond. You’ll see us there.>

Then how in the Lady’s name, I almost shouted as I ran, could you talk to me down here?

<Quieter,> he commanded. I tiptoed. Shadow and creeper resolved into a crouching blue back and a guard’s wide black rump. <Don’t talk,> he countermanded himself. <Just do a stalk up here. And then think what you see.>

As if after a Phaxian sentry I slithered up to the father of logs that was their ambuscade, with sour thoughts of leeches nestled to its spongy bark, inched my head up to gauge his line of sight. And forgot everything else.

Ten paces away a tiny glade of bracken ferns was caught in a shaft of blue-white sun, dazzling as liquid thillian in the greenish gloom. The light framed a tall earth mound. I had vaguely heard a racket suggesting a whole barrack-room of birds. Now, as sight slowly became perception, I knew there would be only one.

At first it looked like a filmy white helmet crest shaken out just above the ground. Then the two long bronze and gold-spatched outer feathers came into focus, framing the white plumes in their open-heart curve, two finer ones rising to repeat the heart above. A black flash of foot beneath the silver arch. A shine of bright black eye. And it had assembled, facing me, tail arched forward high over its head as it performed the mating dance. A heart-tail bird, a clythkemmon, or as some say, a terrepher, a silver dancer, or a tingan as others call it, a many-tongue, because it can mimic any sound on earth.

The silver fan quivered. Slid gracefully to the left. On the final hop I had a glimpse of wings. It sidled back. The calls had passed from a ferrathil’s chime to a gerperra’s whipcrack cry to the salvoes of a gweldryx flock. Now, quite distinctly, came the clop of hooves and the very timbre of my commands. Hearing my charge’s breath of a laugh I nearly thumped his shoulder, for they are the shyest of all birds.

But it was all right. The sun flamed on the trembling silver curtain, the gold and bronze feather bars glowed, distinct as beads, the dance went on. Advance, halt, retreat. The hen must be somewhere close, I thought.

A crying child, a windlass’s squeak. A rovperra’s splutter of raucous man-like laughter and the fan swept shut. A dull brown bird with an ungainly tail edged coyly up to a stump, saying, "Choo . . . choo." Another patch of dowdy brown fluttered down to it, and then the forest had drunk them both.

After a long time the three of us sighed in near-perfect unison, and sat back. I glanced at my charge. He was on my right, still staring into the gloom, turban fallen round his neck, which let me study his undamaged profile: as I took in the long jaw, springing nose, black-lashed green almond of eye, sweet-tempered mouth that belied the bone structure of command, it struck me that women must once have found him a more than handsome man.

Silently, as behoves beauty unindebted to men, we filed back to the road. As we started down, he said, "I’m glad you called me, Sivar. The captain says it was a clythkemmon. Or a tingan. Or a terrepher. By any name, it makes Assharral a lucky place."

More thought-reading, I deduced resignedly. And then, galvanized: How did he do that? How did he get any of them to speak to him, let be follow him up there alone?

<He thought the noises were ‘odd.’ Wanted to raise the alarm. And,> blandly, <the only other officer was asleep.>

I did not pull a face at him. I knew Sivar had picked up "the captain says," too.

That first implicit praise had made him preen as well as mumble. Now his eye-whites were showing. I waited for him to run. A word, a bare glance from the menace would have been enough. But my charge ignored him, making steadily on downhill.

Another three strides, crunching on the road’s damp stone. The others were watching, not yet in earshot. I caught Sivar’s indrawn breath. Then the half-cleared throat, and, with more than natural awkwardness, the word.

"Sir . . . ?"

My charge made an encouraging noise.

"Sir . . . but . . . Fylg . . . ah, the captain—never said anything."

Does he know, I thought, that this is an overture from the shyest of all birds? Does he guess how much rides on this?

But of course he had.

"Not aloud," he answered matter-of-factly, not looking round. "But we couldn’t talk up there. So I had to read his thoughts. It’s just another art."

At Sivar’s, "Oh," my heart sank.

Then other concerns yielded to my own query. "Apart from picking my mind, just how did you get me up there?"

"Oh, dear." He stopped, and scrubbed at his hair. Sivar, I noted hopefully, had stopped too, showing more inquisitiveness than fear.

"You see," he smiled disarmingly, "about the first art we learn is Mindspeech. Lathare. And I couldn’t shout for you." The smile broadened. "Though if I’d yelled as loud aloud as I did in Lathare I’d have brought the whole of Assharral. You have a great talent for sleep."

As Sivar gleefully joined the laugh curiosity bested my own wariness. "Can anybody hear—and talk—like that?"

Sivar broke in with a jealousy quick as his about-turn to interest, "C’n I, sir? Or is it just officers?"

"You have to be taught," he answered thoughtfully, "to speak. But many people can hear. It’s like an ear for music. Doesn’t seem to matter who you are."

"Ah," said Sivar, and he returned, <You see?> and laughed so infectiously Sivar forgot his fright.

I had already thought of something else. "How did you know I could?"

His eye glinted. "You jumped round quick enough the other day when I told you to ‘ ’ware backs’."

Sivar’s thought had followed mine. A question, a puzzle, a struggle for courage fermented in his heavy face.

"Sir," he was still painfully timid. "Gevos. Just what—did you do?"

My charge’s face shadowed all over again. He answered quietly. "The Arts use several of what we call direct Commands. The main one is Chake." He pronounced it "Sha-kay." "If you’re strong enough, you can stand someone on his head with that. But the only real difference is the scale of power. Knock somebody over, knock them out, blind them, kill them. That’s A’sparre. I meant to knock him out. But I hit too hard."

For a moment he could have been back kneeling over the corpse. I could find nothing useful to say. But Sivar was also hunting consolation, and, I should think, a quite unwonted tact. What he achieved was an outright herald’s staff.

"Well, sir, everybody’s gotta make mistakes. My old man used to say you gotta be toes-up before you don’t." He withdrew hastily on camp. "Sir, permission to check me horse. . . ."

Watching him scuttle away, my charge said slowly, "You know, I think that’s the kindest thing anyone ever said to me."

I found myself gagged by my own base, ridiculous jealousy. He went on, thinking aloud.

"Fengthira was right. ‘Th’art never Round but Through.’ I thought he’d never get it out. I wanted to jump in and answer before he said it, like I can with you." My gag dissolved. "But if I had . . . it would have tipped the scales, sure enough." He looked absurdly pleased with himself. "I think I’m getting the hang of Math."

* * * * *

Whatever Sivar told the rest worked faster than any herald’s staff. By nightfall they were all trying to ride in earshot. Next day in the inn-yard both Zyr and Ost, the second file-leader, dared an outright glance at him and a mumbled, "Morning, sir." At the midday halt Sivar hovered, then sidled up to hazard, "Where did you come from, sir? Before Assharral?" In a couple more days the lot were all but climbing in bed with him.

With the wall down they wanted to know how he had learnt and how it felt, to have their thoughts read and be taught to "speak," with explanations of the rest and demonstrations thrown in. They never tired of dropping things and saying plaintively, "Sir, do you think . . ." or piling wood for noonday mint-tea and asking, "Sir, would you start . . ." or pleading, "Sir, couldn’t you just tell this horse. . . ." I had to forbid boasting at post-houses and restrain collectors of everything from bulls to butterflies and curtail a flood of talk on all the minutiae of Assharral.

Against imposition he was his own defense. He would bear with them as long as he chose. Then he would smile, raise his brows and say pleasantly but firmly, "Well, now," and they would subside, mild as milk. At times I wondered if I was leading an escort or a harvest festival.

We reached Zyphryr Coryan in late afternoon, riding from farmland into the virgin forest belt that girdles the city like an outer wall, the road swinging in a wide curve about the Morhyrne’s base, with glimpses of black rock cone through the silver-green, sparse, long-fingered foliage and close-packed slender white trunks of Morrya’s helliens. The boughs were clamorous with birds. Big gray coastal lydwyr hopped leisurely from our path, making him exclaim. "We only have lydyrs in Hethria." He glanced at me and half-smiled. "Little hoppers. Nothing like that."

Then we rounded the long curve onto the cliff above Rastyr, and all Tyr Coryan opened at our feet, a shining labyrinth of apple-green and azure wound among silver-gray wooded spits, edged with bayside villages’ dabs of white and ochre above the trelliswork of naked masts. Up from the quays on the left flank rose the spur that backbones Zyphryr Coryan, a stepped chine of white, brown, rose, gold, granite gray and steely blue, the green of street and park trees laced along its side, the city wall showing in discreet black patches at its base. And above, where the Morhyrne’s shoulders rear into the rock cone, lay the sinuous varicolored necklace of Ker Morrya, lapped in its gardens’ green.

We had all reined in, watching his face. He gazed a long time, occasionally sniffing the tang of city and salt, at first with frank pleasure in his look. "Smells like Hazghend," he remarked. "A country I know." Gradually the pleasure became interest, then assessment. Then his eyes lifted a little, and grew quite blank.

At last Sivar broke out, "Not a bad little village, is she, sir?" As a local, he did have the right of disparagement.

"It’s a fine city," he agreed. Sivar looked pleased. He could not have caught the hint of trouble in the voice.

By the time we hurdled over the harbor hills it was sunset, and traffic had dwindled to a few tardy pedestrians, the lull before wagons began to pour in from the farms and up from the harbor for the markets’ opening at dawn. He dutifully admired the tall double city gate between its bastions, and ran a soldier’s eye over the city guard in their green surcoats, which Sivar and company viewed with disdain. He studied the big squares lined with courtiers’ and nobles’ mansions, the sightseers’ rally points of temple, tower, public garden and colonnade, the government buildings, the observatory, the beetling outer wall of the treasury. When we reached the military quarter the light was nearly gone, and a fresh problem confronted me.

We left our horses at the post-house. I said, "Dismiss." He said, "Wasn’t such a bad road, was it?" And before that smile could elicit drinking invitations I said firmly, "Sir, I doubt the Lady will expect you at this hour." There were tales of how she spent her nights, tales which had perturbed Callissa when I was promoted, despite all assurances that I was hardly pretty enough to make a favorite. "Would you care to lodge the night with me?"

The guards clattered away with a volley of parting remembrances. He nodded. "Yes, Captain," he said. "I’d be pleased."

FiveStar Books

Copyright © 2007 by Sylvia Kelso