"We've seen a lot of your city. It's a miracle that the rest of us didn't get smeared. Dammit, we tried." Alouzon's words sounded hollow even to her own ears, for she was defending actions of which she herself was uncertain. Dindrane called her people murderers: once, Suzanne Helling had flung the same word at the soldiers returning from Vietnam. They had tried, too.

"Enough," said Pellam softly. "What would you do, priestess?"

Dindrane gripped her healer's staff as though to steady herself. "I would send them back to Gryylth. Their boat lies beached near the ruins ..." She glared at Alouzon accusingly. "... the ruins of Daelin. They could be away by nightfall."

"I am not satisfied," said the king, "that Lachrae would have survived unscathed even if the Dragon-master and her people had not acted. Such knowledge lies within the mind of the Goddess and the God."

Alouzon kept her eyes on the floor.

Helwych spoke. He alone of Alouzon's company seemed little affected by lack of sleep, though he had worked as hard as anyone. At first, Alouzon had put it down to his youth. But no: Manda and Wykla were supporting one another like half-toppled columns while the sorcerer stood straight and fresh-faced.

"I mean no disrespect to the King of Vaylle," he said, his courtesy as unnerving as his endurance. "But I think that it would be better for my people to withdraw."

Helwych, you son of a bitch . . .

He glanced at Alouzon as though reading her mind, but he went on. "We have caused enough trouble here already, and this only confirms my belief that we cannot fight the incursions from Broceliande directly.''

Marrget turned on him, seething. "What would you have us do? Wait in our homes for the end of all?"

Helwych examined her ironically, his face betraying his opinion that the best place for Marrget was, indeed, at home. "Lachrae has been decimated, mother.''

Marrget went white. Alouzon lashed out. "It wouldn't have been if you'd blasted those planes before they hit." The company murmured agreement. Only Kyria, who stood a little apart from the rest-eyes downcast, white hand upon pale staff- refrained.

"You forget, Dragonmaster." Helwych's eyes were no less ironic when he faced Alouzon, and she wondered whether this smug complacency was supposed to be an improvement over his sullen fits of temper. "I am but an apprentice. I did what I could."

"You slew the hounds," said Manda. "You could not do that before."

"I may improve myself at times, little maid. But you must be aware of my limitations as I am aware . . ." He smiled, glanced at Wykla. ". . . of your infirmities."

The light in Manda's eyes flared. Fatigue had shortened tempers, and only Wykla's gentle hand kept Manda from striding forward and knocking the lad to the ground.

Helwych paid no attention. "We should go home."

Dindrane nodded. " 'Tis glad I am to see sense among you."

Pellam looked uneasy, as though his priestess had decided to walk barefoot across a floor strewn with vipers.

"If it please the king and my company ..." Although she had worked beside the healers of Lachrae the last three days, Kyria's voice was soft and sweet, and when she lifted her head and shook back her hair, her face was calm, tranquil.

She had come to her senses quickly after her collapse, but the woman who had opened her eyes and reached for her staff had born little resemblance to the one who, raging and cursing, had stopped the destruction of Lachrae. Her alternate personality seemed now firmly entrenched, but though her every word and action bespoke gentleness and nurture, each sight of her was a new pang of guilt for Alouzon, for Kyria had not chosen the persona freely.

When I get back, she had said, I'm going to take you apart.

Now Kyria stepped forward softly. ' 'We erred grievously," she said. "There is nothing that we can do that will rebuild Lachrae, or restore the dead to life. But if we can, through our actions, end the ceaseless attacks that have turned Vaylle into a hell, then I might think that adequate recompense."

"There is nothing that can be done," said Helwych.

"There is much." Kyria smiled at him. "But perhaps a mere apprentice should not be expected to know such things."

Alouzon blinked. Sweet though Kyria was, she had teeth.

"And what do you expect to do?" said Baares. His tone was uneasy: half horrified at the potential for violence, half eager for a chance to do his part. Alouzon had seen him at work these last days, bending his mind and music to aid his healer wife, his entire being taut and focused on the work at hand. But he had also, when he thought no one was looking, shaken his fist at the mountains of the Cordillera, his face declaring the earnestness of the gesture.

Kyria regarded him understandingly. "We have business in Broceliande. I trust Alouzon, and I am willing to follow her.''

Alouzon found herself wishing that this alternate Kyria could be her companion forever, but felt disloyal for the desire. Who was Kyria? What did she have to do with Helen Addams?

But Marrget was seconding the sorceress, and Karthin and the rest were not far behind. Only Helwych shook his head. "Fools. You have no idea what she wants, and yet you are willing to throw your lives away.''

"And is your action any more honorable?" said Karthin.

"Are you calling me a coward, hayseed?"

The big man flushed. "One who was greater than you called me that once, stripling. He was mad, and he died of his madness."

Alouzon stepped forward. "That's enough, both of you. What the hell do you want, Helwych? Are you going home, or are you going to wait in Lachrae?"

He considered, but Alouzon sensed that he had already made up his mind and was only enjoying the attention directed at him. "I will stay here in Lachrae," he said at last. "Should you not return from Broceliande, I will then journey to Kingsbury and make my report."

Manda muttered softly: "And a self-congratulatory report it will be, too."

Helwych pretended not to hear.

"King Pellam," said Alouzon, "will you still let us travel in Vaylle?"

Pellam's wise eyes narrowed in as much of a smile as the circumstances would allow. The Fisher King, crippled and holy, his wounded body an emblem of the land he ruled: Alouzon wondered at her temerity. "And if I revoked my permissions," said Pellam, "would my word bind you?"

Alouzon was silent. She was not following the rules of the Grail legends. But she did not want to, could not afford to, and she hoped that Pellam understood that.

Pellam nodded at last. "So be it. Go your ways to Broceliande. Leave as quickly as you may." He turned to Dindrane and Baares. "Chief Priestess and King's Harper: if you are still willing, I ask that you accompany them as far as the mountains. But I ask also that you consummate a Great Rite tomorrow morning, that the Goddess and the God may look with favor upon our ventures."

Dindrane's lips were tight for a moment. "The temple, my king."

"Most of the stones still stand. And the Goddess will understand our straits, I am sure."

Oh, She understands air right, thought Alouzon. More than She really wants to. "We'll get some sleep and be out of your hair by tomorrow afternoon, then. Thanks."

Pellam nodded to her, rose, and left the room. Dindrane took Baares's hand. "You must forgive our lack of hospitality, Dragonmaster," she said without warmth. "We have more wounded to attend to." She would have departed without another word, but Kyria lifted her voice: "I will help."

The priestess stood, head bent, mouth working. "We do not need your help," she whispered.

"I think that you do, child." Kyria's tone was kind, unruffled. "I will attend to my own folk, and then I shall be with you."

Was Kyria an illusion, or was she reality? Alouzon did not know. Dejected, she turned for the corridor that led to their rooms, hoping to find some temporary oblivion in sleep. The others, save for Helwych, followed. Manda looked close to tears with exhaustion and anger, and Birk leaned heavily on Santhe's arm. Karthin and Marrget clung to one another like children.

Kyria took Alouzon's arm. "Will you rest, friend?"

"I'm going to do what I can."

The sorceress's eyes were dark and deep. "I can help. Thoughts and cares can be banished ... for a time."

"I'd like to see Helwych banished."

"Hmmm ..." Kyria cast a glance over her shoulder. "He has turned strange indeed."

Alouzon had worked at Kyria's side for three days, but she still found this new personality unnerving. How did one address someone who was ... so different? Even her eyes had changed. "You got any ideas?"

Kyria was thoughtful. "He has become closed to me. I can see no more in him than I can in a mirror.''

"It's probably better that he stay behind."

"Maybe . . . But I am not sure that we can speak of better or worse anymore. We must do what we can." Kyria's eyes turned inquiring.

Alouzon read the question. "You want to know what the fuck I'm looking for in Broceliande, right?"

"If it would help, Alouzon."

Their steps had brought them to Alouzon's door. "You know," said Alouzon, sidestepping the question, "one of these days you're going to wake up as Helen again, and you're really going to cream me."

Kyria's eyebrows lifted. "But I am Helen."

Alouzon sighed. "Now I know I'm nuts."

"Helen Addams was-is-many things," said the sorceress. She kept her voice low so that the others, who were bidding each other a good sleep, would not hear. "As are you, Goddess."

Alouzon winced. "You figured it out."

"Aye. It is a terrible weight to bear. But you will, I think, bear it."

"You sound like Mernyl sometimes."

"Indeed?" Kyria smiled. "What an interesting man! I shall have to meet him someday." Her face turned serious. "For now, I wish you rest. I must go and comfort Birk."

Alouzon looked over Kyria's shoulder. Santhe was escorting his warrior into the room they shared. Birk had always appeared impassive. He killed when it was necessary, and kept silent whether it was necessary or not. But, with Parl's death, something had gone out of him. His eyes, empty to begin with, were now void. "He's pretty broken up, isn't he?"

The sorceress shrugged. "He and Parl were lovers, Dragonmaster. Scarred by the devastation of the last battles between Gryylth and Corrin, their hearts had grown together."

Birk shuffled into his room. Farther down the corridor, Manda and Wykla were just shutting their door. Karthin was almost carrying Marrget.

Alouzon wanted to scream. Here she was, facing it once again. Kyria had healed Wykla-the girl had even been able to help with the rescue operations-but Parl had died instantly in the detonation of a grenade. Healers could not be everywhere, and luck could not last forever. ' 'Am I just going to get everyone killed?'' Kyria, nurturing and gentle, patted her arm. "Death is always a possibility. It is something we must live with."

Alouzon was still thinking about Kyria's words the next morning. Death. She had spent her adult life fleeing from death, but she might as well have fled from the air, or from food, or from the physical nature of her existence. Death was a fact that could not be escaped, that could only be accepted. If there was an answer to death, it was a shrug of the shoulders, an affirmation of one's willingness to persevere in the face of mortality.

But mortality held within it-like the Grail cupping its nurturing waters-a complimentary upwelling of life that had pursued her throughout the years, rolling at her feet like a puppy begging to be picked up. Unwilling though she had been, she had picked it up again and again, choosing always to live, choosing always to go on in spite of the aborted idealism of the 60s, in spite of the shattered bodies of her classmates, in spite of the emotional wreckage that had been left her after abortion, battle, magic, and death had climaxed a decade of hopelessness.

Silbakor had said it. Fittingly, Silbakor had said it the day that she had first sighted Vaylle, when she did not even have a name for the land she had created. You have both taken life and given it with honor.

In the company of white-clad attendants, watched by much of what was left of the population of Lachrae, Dindrane and Baares led Alouzon and her company into the temple precincts. Ahead, the toppled stones of the sacred circle bore mute testimony to 'the efficiency of the B-52's, but they told Alouzon also that even here in what the Vayllens perceived as an inviolable shrine of life, there was-there had to be-death.

The path to the stones took them past a fountain that had been undisturbed by the bombs. The water still rose and fell with a sound like crystal, and Dindrane and Baares paused to wash their hands. Deliberately and with ceremony, they purified themselves and passed on, leading the others toward the entrance to the circle of stones.

Alouzon, though, remained at the fountain for a moment. She knelt and washed, her leather armor creaking, her steel wrist cuffs glinting as her brown hands scooped the water. Cupped in her hands, the liquid itself mirrored the unspeakably blue sky and the shining sun; and when she lifted her dripping face, she saw what Kyria had seen several days before: two stones that seemed dwarfed by the monoliths behind them, that bore the likenesses of Suzanne Helling and Solomon Braithwaite.

The Goddess and the God.

The sanctity of the temple was profound, diminished neither by the toppled stones nor by the sight of the ruined buildings of the city. Alouzon might have been looking through a veil of brightness that, falling through the air, wrapped its aura of holiness about temple and worshipers alike, lending an air of grace and goodness even to destruction. And as though her eyes conspired with her thoughts so as to impel her along a path that seemed now so unmistakably marked out before her, she noticed that the figure of Suzanne Helling carried a sword.

She bent her head. "Yeah . . . that's it. I'll be damned if I can understand it, but that's it."

An attendant had stayed with her. "My lady?"

The gilt threads of the girl's livery sparkled in the light, and the insignia of the king of Vaylle shone out of the pale cloth: silver cup, golden knife, red and black thorns. Ecstasy and pain, life and death. Both present. Both essential. Merely two extremes of existence.

"That's just the way it is," said Alouzon. "People are going to live and die whether we love them or not. But it's easier if we love them, isn't it?"

The attendant looked confused. Alouzon rose and followed after the company as though she were stepping once again on the thick grass of Blanket Hill, approaching the pagoda at the side of Taylor Hall to confront the lifted M-1s.

The sun had barely climbed out of morning and into afternoon when the company gathered their horses, checked their provisions, and set off down the West Road that pointed like a bomb-mangled finger straight at the distant, elfin pinnacles of the Cordillera.

Just at the edge of the city were the manors that had been destroyed three nights before. The ruins had stopped smoking, and the dead had been buried, but the charred and cratered remains blackened the landscape like a blight, and the pools of phosphor from the hounds still reeked like so much ammonia and lye.

Dindrane and Baares, who led the way, stopped for a moment, looked, then nudged their horses and continued on. Alouzon waved the company by and stayed a while longer, her lean face growing leaner. Alone save for Kyria, she confronted the uncompromising waste of life.

"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it," she said softly. And then she tugged at Jia's reins and went on.

Floating as she was between one world and another-between, in fact, one life and another-Kyria felt strange. Alouzon was quoting the words of a military officer of the Vietnam War. Kyria knew about the war, but the mind and personality in which she now lived grappled with the knowledge only at arm's length. Vietnam was . . . somewhere else. She knew Gryylth, and Vaylle, and magic. And yet a part of her knew Los Angeles, and the lesbian bars on the outskirts of the San Fernando Valley, and the intimacies of Solomon Braithwaite's bed.

Softly, she shook her head and felt her long hair rustle across the back of her robe. In creating Vaylle, Alouzon had obviously incorporated a great deal of the despair and violence that had pocked the late 1960s. That was both understandable and forgivable. Alouzon could not control all the intricacies of her own mind. For that matter, neither could Kyria herself.

When I get back . . .

Yes, Helen was still there: lurking in the corners of her unconscious, waiting for a chance to return. The knowledge made Kyria uncomfortable, but she was a sorceress, and would have to become accustomed to knowing uncomfortable things.

Beside her, Alouzon rode with shoulders hunched as though supporting the weight of guilt that Dindrane had heaped upon her. And, not content with the priestess's accusations, she had added to it herself. Alouzon was convinced that Vaylle was both her responsibility and her fault. Totally. Completely.

But the vision of Solomon in his grave, and the direct attack on a house in Bel Air: Alouzon, Kyria knew, could have had nothing to do with such occurrences. Some other component was obviously in action there, and though for Alouzon there was no question about ultimate blame or responsibility, Kyria was beginning to question, and she was doing so as deeply and as earnestly as had the Dragonmaster when, alone in a strange world, she had fought with the secret of Gryylth's existence.

When I get back . . .

The half-alien thought traced a thin line of blood across her mind. Shrugging the pain aside, Kyria patted Grayflank to distract herself. "Good friend," she said, "I hope that I have not been cruel to you in the past.''

The horse plodded on. Alouzon came out of her study. "Actually, you've been pretty good to her," she said.

"It is well." Kyria smiled at Alouzon, the sky, the flowers. There was terror and hard work ahead, but it was a beautiful world. The price was, perhaps, appropriate. "Did you sleep?"

Alouzon shrugged. "A little. I have bad dreams sometimes."

"About . . . Vietnam?"