Jill walked round the hut in her usual quiet way, raising a shriek from the pair - one of the kitchen maids and the elderly jailor, who was holding a cl.u.s.ter of thongs and amulets much like the ones Jahdo wore.

'And what have you there?' Jill said.

'Naught, naught.' The jailor started to shove them into his pocket, then paused, caught by her stare. 'Er, well, now, don't you be putting the evil eye on me!'

'I'm doing naught of the sort. All I did was ask you a question.'

He licked dry lips and looked this way and that. The kitchen maid began to move backwards, one cautious step at a time.

'Well?' Jill said.

'Er, I found them, like, in the straw in the cell where that hairy creature and his lad were kept, and I've been wondering what they were, like, for days now. You can't say I stole'm, can you now? They left'em there, threw them away, and you can't say I stole'm!'

'I never said you did. I merely asked you what they are.'

'Take'm, then, take'm! They creep my flesh, anyway.'

He tossed the thongs her way, then turned and bolted with the kitchen maid right behind. Jill caught them in one hand. As soon as she got a good look at them, she realized that they were Gel da'Thae work.

When she glanced at the sky, she realized that it was about the time of the afternoon when Meer took his nap and that, therefore, Jahdo was likely to be outside somewhere.

She eventually found the boy out behind the stables, rubbing down his mule with a brush braided from straw. She made sure that they were alone before she took the thongs and charms out of her pocket.

'Oh, Thavrae's amulets,' he announced. 'Where did you find them''

'The jailor just gave them to me, I suppose you could say. Had he stolen them from you?'

'He hadn't. I did cut them off- well, we found Thavrae dead, you see.' The boy's voice shook badly. 'I did cut the thongs so I could get them free from - well, anyway, I did think Meer would be wanting them.

But he said Thavrac were no brother of his and did throw them against the wall. When we were in the cell, I mean. So I guess the old man found them there.'

'I see. The old man could have kept them, then. Meer certainly didn't want them.' Jill glanced round, but there was no sign of the jailor. Though I don't know, if any of these have real dweomers laid on them, he shouldn't be carrying them about, for his own sake, like.' She began to look through the handful of charms and immediately spotted a pewter disk with a sigil she recognized.

Now that's odd! Jill thought to herself. The Gel da'Thae dweomer-masters would never use the same sigils and suchlike as we do, would they? But here's sigil of the Lord of the Fire of Air, plain as plain.

'Jahdo, do you have a talisman with this kind of picture on it?'

'I don't. But I've seen one like it before.' All at once the boy's eyes seemed to cloud over.

'Somewhere. I don't remember.'

Jill hesitated, wondering if she should test him for ensorcelment then and there, but the ward was as usual full of people coming and going on their various errands.

'Well, it doesn't matter.' With a deliberately casual gesture, because she wanted to spare Jahdo worry, she shoved the handful into her brigga pocket. 'I might ask Meer later, if I remember it.'

What she did instead was go to Meer's chamber, wake him up, and ask him there and then. Although just describing the sigil told him nothing, when he felt it with a fingertip he could form, or so he said, a good idea of its shape.

'I can tell you this,' he rumbled. 'It's naught that he received from his mother or from one of the priestesses of the Gel da'Thae. I've never come across this mark before, and as a loremaster, you learn a good bit about the sacred symbols. Beyond that, I have no idea of what it might be. As for the rest of these holy marks and symbols, ask me not, because those secrets, mazrak, I will not betray.'

'Very well, then. Well, my thanks, good bard, for what you've seen fit to tell me.'

Jill left him, then stood hesitating by the staircase, considering what she needed to do next. All at once she felt the touch of Dallandra's mind on hers, a sign that the el veil dweomerrn aster was back on the physical plane. When Jill went up to her chamber, she indeed found Dallandra there, sitting at her table and leafing through the book of elven chronicles that Jill had brought back from the Southern Isles.

'My gnome found you, then?' Jill said.

'He did.' Dallandra looked up with a smile. 'Have you been waiting long?'

'Two days,'

Dallandra made a small irritated sound and shut the book.

'It seemed but a few moments to me.'

'Oh, I know. I'm not blaming you or suchlike.'

'I need to come back to this world, don't I? I simply can't keep travelling back and forth, trying to skip along the river of Time the way a child skips a rock on water. A delay like this could be a disaster, if you needed me badly.'

'Just so, but what about your own work? What about Evandar's people?'

'Well, I could stay here months, and it would be but a single day in his world, wouldn't it?'

Jill laughed, in relief, not merriment, 'Of course. I'd quite forgot that the differences run both ways. I'm getting worried, Dalla. Alshandra's already sent one pack of her worshippers here, trying to kill Carra and the child. Now that they've failed, she's bound to raise another. She's determined to get Elessario back.'

'So she is. Naught can make her understand the truth, Jill. She honestly believes that I've stolen her daughter, and that if she kills Elessario's new body, then her daughter will be free of some sort of trap and come back to her.'

'In a way you have to pity her, but I keep thinking of those other women, the ones her dogs of war killed, and their men, too, dying trying to defend them.'

Dallandra shuddered.

'I do have to return to make my farewells and to make sure Evandar realizes that we're going to need his help and most likely soon. But I'll be back as soon as I can, and this time I'll stay until this matter's settled, and the child is born.' Dallandra rose and picked up the chair in both hands. 'We have to stay on guard if we're going to protect Carra from Alshandra, and you do have to sleep,'

'Every now and again, truly. My thanks. And I've got a lot of information for you, too, that we'll need to sort out.'

Jill was on the verge of asking her fellow dweomermaster just what she might be doing with that chair - she had a brief wondering if Dallandra was so distracted that she'd forgotten she was carrying the thing - but Dalla put it down in front of the window.

'Stone and air and the antagonism between them,' Dalla remarked. 'Gates are where yon find them, you see.'

She stepped upon the chair, stepped up onto the windowsill, stepped again, and disappeared. Jill rushed to the window, half expecting to sec her sprawled on the cobbles beneath, hut she was quite simply gone.

Jill let out breath in a sharp sigh - she hadn't really realized that she'd been holding it. For all her own great power, there were some magicks she found hard to get used to.

When first Dallandra had learned the dweomer of the roads, she'd been forced to depend on the obvious sites of possible gates between worlds, such as the meeting of three streams or a thicket where hazel and rowan grew mingled together, but now after so much practice she could sense the fine edges where planes of energy met and rebounded from each other again, leaving a short-lived gap twixt one world and another. She slipped through this particular gate just as it was closing and found herself on the hill overlooking the astral river.

From behind her she heard singing and turned to see women walking back and forth in her formal garden. Wearing long dresses of fine cloth, red and white and gold, they strolled among the roses and cl.u.s.tered round the fountain, blonde heads, dark heads bent together as they talked. At times it seemed that perhaps a mere dozen souls walked among the green; at others, a huge throng swarmed there, just as a fire will flare up and flames multiply, only to fall back again when the draught that fanned it dies. As she hurried to join them, she heard them mention Elessario's name.

'You could join her, you know,' she called out.

All attention they flocked round her, chattering and laugh ing, but the laughter vanished and the chatter turned to sighs when she repeated her oft-given message about the world of matter and Time. The woman she always called the night princess, who had modelled herself on the dark-skinned folk of Bardek, shook her head with a rustle of black curls.

'Why did she go there? I don't understand.'

'To know life. What you have here is only a semblance of life, coloured shadows thrown upon a wall.'

They considered, looking at each other, looking at her, dark eyes, yellow eyes narrow and puzzled.

With a shrug the night princess turned away.

'Dancing,' she cried. 'Let us go to the lilac arbour and have dancing!'

Their laughter turned to cries and chatter as they themselves mutated into a flock of bright-coloured birds, parrot and c.o.c.katoo, gold and red and pink with here and there a flash of turquoise feather, and one black macaw with pink-trimmed wings and golden beak. On a wave of calls and rushing wings they flew away, circling once overhead, then flying steadily off toward the west. Dallandra said something foul in Elvish. Would she ever get them to understand?

Shaking her head she walked back over the hill to the astral river, which like quicksilver oozed through the dark green reeds and sparkled in the noontime sun. Nearby in the meadow the golden pavilion stood empty and silent. When she called Evandar's name, only his page came running.

'He's still gone,' the boy said. 'Riding the border still with the warriors. Do you want mead?'

'None, my thanks. But fetch me some bread, will you?'

The boy darted off again into the pavilion. Dallandra was just wondering whether to join him inside when she heard him scream. Without thinking she rushed for the pavilion entrance, but before she could reach it warriors sprang into being all round her, warriors in mail and helms of black, wolf faces leering, bear faces grinning, paws and claws reaching out to grab her. She flung up her hands to summon fire, but a familiar voice stopped her.

'Hold!' the fox warrior called out. 'Or I'll kill this child.'

He came strolling out of the pavilion carrying the page, trussed and sobbing, slung upside down over one mailed shoulder., the boy's head dangerously close to the sharp wedge of bronze knife that the warrior held in one gauntlet. Dallandra let her arms drop.

'What do you want of me?'

'Hah! I knew it would work.' He was looking round at his men, if such you could call them. 'She's weak, this woman. She pities things.'

They howled and pressed close round her. She could smell bear and wolf, too, grease and blood and musk, mingling with an all too human sweat. Fur poked through their mail in tufts.

'You come with me,' the leader said. 'And you work no magic, or I'll fray and tear every weaving of this lad's body, and his spirit will spill and die.'

The page wept the louder.

'Hush, child, I won't let them hurt you..'

'Hah! She takes our bargain.' The fox warrior pulled back dark lips in a fanged grin.

'What do you want of me?'

'Of you, naught. Of Evandar, everything. He's weak, too, giving me the whistle when he didn't have to.

Losing a woman brings pain, he said, and so I got my idea. Ransom you arc and ransom you'll be, until he saves my dying country.'

Dallandra spat on the ground.

'You have the soul of a maggot, not a fox.'

'She sees things, this woman! Maybe I'll trick Evandar and keep her forever!'

His soldiers growled and roared. A clawed hand cuffed her cheek and left her dizzy.

'Scoop her up, bind her, carry her off! We'll slip out the way we came in.'

Ropes as rough and abrasive as straw circled her round, yet at the same time she felt as if she were falling, fainting, swooping nearer and nearer the ground yet never hitting against it. As her head cleared she saw round her huge flies and beetles, all shiny black bodies and green wings, with mandibles and mirrored red eyes - and realized that this insect horde was a normal size, but that she herself had shrunk to match them. Two ma.s.sive black wasp-like creatures with golden wings held her sling of ropes in their mandibles. With a buzz and drone of wings they flew, a horrible grating sound that combined with the pain in her head to drive her half-mad. She thrashed and kicked, but nothing she could do freed her from the web that dragged her along after them through the air.

On and on they flew over a huge green confusion, a swelling of trees that filled the world and reached up brown claws as if to grab them as they sped past. By twisting round and straining her back to look up she could just see the white clothes of the page, who dangled ahead of her like a crumb of bread in the grasp of an enormous and glittering blue-black fly, but a crumb that kicked and fought on occasion. At least Evandar's brother had had the sense to keep his hostage's hostage alive. All at once the green below started to rush up to meet them, or so it seemed to her, rushed and swelled and spun round and round. She would have screamed but it seemed that her tongue and mouth had fused together, that her throat swelled, that her body bloated and puffed up till pain seemed to burst out through her skin.

The ground smacked her hard. Light spun round her. The last sound she heard was the screaming of the page.

For a long time it seemed to her that she lay dead. Although she could not move nor hear nor see, her mind did exist, a floating point of consciousness on a black sea. She waited calmly for the light to rise and float her onward while she thought over the fall. It must have disrupted her etheric double, she supposed, and killed her that way, being as she had no body at the time. She felt profoundly sorry for Evandar, much more than she was worried about herself. In time she would be reborn, and she planned on begging that her rebirth take place as soon as possible, so that she could return to her work - if, of course, she could keep the memories of her work alive long enough to remember to beg.

All at once she realized two things. First, she was thinking too coldly, too calmly, to be actually dead.

Second, she ached all over, a mere distant throb now that she'd noticed it, then a rather present throb, then an ache, and finally a burning like fire. Light like fire danced before her eyes; it seemed that she swam through fire, upward to a distant, cooler light. When she opened her eyes she found the vulpine face of Evandar's brother leaning close to hers.

'Good,' he grunted. 'You live. Dead you'd have been of no use to me.'

She tried to speak and mock him, but the pain overwhelmed her. Once more she sank away from consciousness, but this time her last thought was that at least she was still alive - for at least a while.

Since Jill was of course used to the warped seams of Time between the physical world and Evandar's country, she thought nothing of it when Dallandra failed to return straightaway. Over the next few nights she spent long hours scrying, ranging as far from the dun as she dared, whether in the falcon form or the body of light, in the hopes of bringing the gwerbret some advance warning of an attack. Every morning she would join Cadmar at breakfast to make her report. Since Lord Gwinardd had taken his men and gone back to his own dun, the great hall echoed half-empty and strangely silent.

On the far side of the hall, the warband would strain to hear what she might be saying to their lord.

Rumours had spread, as they always do, and every man there knew that war was on the way. The only question was when.

After her meal Jill would walk to the dwarven inn to tend Rhodry's wound and ask him about his dreams. Never again did he see the eyes, watching him, but she a.s.sumed that the enemy, who or whatever it might have been, was continuing to scry, merely more deftly. She was faced with an evil choice. She could easily have put astral seals over Rhodry - over the entire town and dun, for that matter - that would have prevented any dweomerworker, no matter how skilled, from scrying out a single detail.

If she did so, though, she might as well have hung out huge banners announcing the presence of a master sorcerer. Since she had no reason to a.s.sume that their enemies knew either who she was or that she was in the dun, she preferred to keep them wondering about Cengarn's strength.

After her visit she would return to her chamber and sleep for a few hours, waking before sunset to eat a meagre meal before resuming her night watch. On the fourth afternoon of this routine, Jahdo came to her chamber just as she was finishing a chunk of bread and cheese. One sharp glance at the boy told her that something was badly wrong. She ushered him in, then called upon the Wildfolk of Aethyr, who materialized in a flicker of silver light.

'Are you ill, lad?'

'I'm not, my lady. I did hear that Rhodry would be leaving Cengarn with his small friends and that none did know when he would return.'

'Where did you hear that?'

'From Yraen. He did tell me not to tell others, and I have not, only you, being as I were sure you knew this well already.'

'Just so. Well, now, are you going to miss Rhodry? Is that the trouble?'

'I do want to go along with him.'

Yet his voice had such a false ring that Jill gave him a sharp looking-over. She found agony in his eyes.

'Jahdo, are you sure you don't feel ill? Fevers give us strange thoughts at time.'

'I be well, truly.' He began to tremble. 'I just did want to ask if I could go with Rhodry and the dwarves.'