The drums spat thunder.

"What was their desire?" Bevol asked.

Below him, the crowd answered in one voice. "Knowledge!"

The drums rolled.

"And pleased, the Spirit gave them knowledge, which they used to bring them other things. And knowledge became a spirit to them, and the people asked that spirit for providence."

The drums uttered a single word.

"What did they ask of Knowledge?"

The crowed cried: "Give-us-land. Give-us-commerce. Give-us-power!"

The drums issued a long roll.

"And the people gathered those things and set them up as spirits and asked happiness of them and joy of them and wealth of them. And surrounded by these, their made spirits, they could no longer hear the Voice of the Spirit of All."

The drums beat a swift measure of staccato notes, while the crowd wailed a high, ululating cry as if singing for the war-dead. Gwynet had not heard that sound before, though she had heard of it from those who had lost loved ones to the sea missions of the Cynes Ciarda and Colfre. It made her shiver all the way to the marrow of her bones and pray for it to stop.

When it did stop, Bevol spoke again. "The Spirit of the Universe looked upon Its silent creation and said, 'My lovers no longer hear My Voice and they no longer call Me Beloved. But I shall be patient. For someday they will call upon Me.'"

The drums spoke their turn.

"And when the people at last tired of praying to their made spirits for things they had no power to give, when they longed, at last, for their God, they cried out to It and listened for reply, but no longer did their hearts speak the same pure tongue they had spoken at Dawn. They could not hear their God, and the Universe was silent to them."

As silent as it was now, Gwynet thought, for not a person in all that vast assemblage stirred, not a mallet fell, not a pipe sang.

"And out of the silence," said Bevol, "was born the Meri-the Spirit of the Spirit of the Universe, Gate between God and Man, Bridge between Heaven and Earth. And God brought Her forth from the Sea to touch man and teach him again to hear the Voice that speaks in the heart of all things."

There was a great celebratory roar then, from throats and drums and pipes alike, and the little old Osraed, Calach (the Sweet, Gwynet called him), came forward to give the Tell of the First Pilgrimage.

Gwynet knew this part-by heart, she was pleased to discover-and followed along, mouthing the words as Calach told the tale of Ochan-a-Coille and the First Weaving. In the swell of light and soft pipe-song, she could see the young boy wandering storm-lost along the rocky cliffs below the mouth of the Halig-tyne, longing for sight of the Castle Mertuile. She felt his terror as he fell into the sea cave, shared his awe when a strange light revealed that the walls of the cave were studded with crystals and that glittering shards lay scattered like frost upon the rocky floor. Her heart hammered fiercely when the boy took, in his own hands, a blue-white crystal of such clarity and beauty that he was all but blinded by the light that pulsed through it. She cried out aloud with mixed terror and wonder when an Eibhilin Being lifted Itself from the sea pool in the cavern's deep heart and glided to meet Ochan where he stood, crystal in hand, in the star-littered shallows.

Ochan, just fifteen, left the Sea Cave with the Meri's duan singing in his heart and the knowledge of the Runeweave filling his mind to overflowing. Her Kiss glowed upon his brow, Her mission in his soul. He carried his crystal, Osmaer, to the stronghold of Cyne Malcuim and there gave the first Pilgrim's Tell.

Osraed Calach's sweet voice rang off on the breeze and the crowd remained silent. Gwynet felt her cheeks. They were hot, surely putting out as much light as the myriad light-bowls on their tall stands. She told herself, secretly, it was her future she listened to as first Lealbhallain, then Wyth came forward to give his Tell. The people of Nairne applauded the wonderful tales with every ounce of exuberance they possessed. By the time Wyth retired from the Gallery's balustrade, every man, woman and child was bubbling over with the spirit of celebration. It only remained for Ealad-hach to bless them and dismiss them to the Tell Fest.

He came forward to do so, raised his hands high, opened his mouth wide and was pressed to silence by a great commotion at the foot of the Gallery stair. The crowd there gabbled and milled, the musicians parted, and a slight figure in a tapestry riot of color scurried up the steps toward the landing.

"Osraed!" The voice was as strident as the colors its owner wore. A white hand thrust out of the raucous folds of fabric and pointed heavenward. "Osraed, hear me!" The figure tottered to a point just below where an incredulous Ealad-hach gaped, then turned and addressed the gathering.

"Hearken all, to old Marnie! Hear what I say! These boys are not the only home-comers here. Ask the Osraed Bevol and he may tell you of another."

A clutter of murmurs, hisses and guffaws spilled through the crowd and Osraed Ealad-hach at last lowered his arms. "What are you saying, old woman? Speak clearly."

"Ah, clearly, is it? I'll tell you clearly what I saw. Me, Marnie-o-Loom! In the garden at Gled Manor."

Gwynet felt Taminy stiffen and clutch the hand she held. The older girl made a hissing sound through her teeth. "Ah," she breathed, "so yours are the curious eyes, old one. Sharp, they are."

Marnie's audience heckled her now-gently, tolerantly-and begged her down.

"Leave off, Marnie!" cried Niall Backstere. "Let us get to Fest and I'll give you the fattest cream bonny in my stall."

"Aye, and hot, honeyed cider," added the Spenser.

"I saw the girl, I tell you." Marnie folded her hands before her, smug-meek.

"What girl?" shouted one man.

"Aw, she's drunk!" cried another.

"No, just crazy."

"I'm neither drunk nor crazy," Marnie retorted, pose shifting to the defensive. "Nor am I blind. The night Osraed Bevol came in from Meredydd-a-Lagan's Pilgrimage, he had with him a boy, a little girl, and a young woman. The same young woman I saw in his garden not a day past. Meredydd-a-Lagan doesn't lie in the Sea. She hides at Gled Manor!"

In the uproar that followed, Marnie-o-Loom fed and flourished; turning her flushed face and glittering eyes upward to the Gallery she devoured her reward.

It was Ealad-hach who turned to Osraed Bevol and asked, "Is there any truth to what she says?" And the citizens of Nairne, catching, one by one, the scent of suspense, quieted to hear the answer.

Bevol smiled. "There is a grain of truth to it." The admission fattened Marnie's grin. "I did," he continued, when the crowd had hushed again, "bring home to Nairne a boy. That was Skeet. You all know Skeet. And I brought home a little girl-Gwynet, whom you also know. And ..." He gazed around with gleaming eyes until he found Taminy and Gwynet on their stone perch. The smile deepened. "And I brought home with me a young woman."

Again, Marnie reaped her pandemonium, her own gap-tooth smile growing to cover half her face.

"But it was not Meredydd-a-Lagan."

Disappointment. Gwynet felt it the way one feels river rheum or salt tang. It swelled from the crowd like a midnight mist, and she could only wonder at its cause. Had they loved Meredydd-a-Lagan so? Or was it only the sport they missed of scandal close to home? Looking at Marnie, she could almost imagine the Mam of her once-guardian, Ruhf Airdsgainne, gossip-tongued and mugging-holding out some sinful morsel while the bored dwellers in Blaec-del snapped after it. Could these people from the clean, proud streets of Nairne be at all like those people?

"He lies!" accused Marnie as if the words had been perched on her lips. She let them fly again. "He lies!"

Bevol's expression lost its good humor in a breath. "I do not lie, weaver-woman. The girl at Gled Manor is not my Prentice Meredydd."

"Who then?" asked Ealad-hach and, "Come," said Calach, "stop teasing us and let us meet this young woman."

"Yes," agreed Marnie, nodding vigorously. "If it's not Meredydd, prove it. Show her to us."

Bevol turned to his peers. The Osraed on the Gallery nodded as a man. He returned the nod and looked to where Gwynet and Taminy sat hunkered against the wall. Taminy rose and, drawing Gwynet after her, left the stone steps and crossed to the Gallery. The throng parted before them, eyes probing and curious, eyes hungry and willing to be scandalized. Gwynet glanced up once or twice, then thought better of it.

They passed Marnie on the Great Stair and Taminy paused to greet her eye to eye. "Your sight is sharp, Marnie-o-Loom," Taminy told her, "but your sense of color is failing. Meredydd's eyes are brown."

They continued on then, while the old gossip sputtered like a guttering flame, reaching the end of the climb. There, in the Osraed Gallery, with every wakeful eye of Nairne and the surrounding Gyldan-holt watching, Taminy turned to the Court, dropped her cowl and pulled off her scarf. Wheat-pale hair covered her shoulders in a flood and made banners in the light breeze. But among all the people, only Osraed Ealad-hach and Marnie-o-Loom showed anything more than mild surprise.

It was a deep irony, she thought, that once-dear God, a hundred years ago-she had dreamed of standing upon this great stone platform and of opening her mouth to sing the Meri's duan. But she would give no Tell tonight to ears unwilling and unready to hear it. Osraed Bevol spoke instead, giving a name that rippled quickly across a sea of lips and was gone: Taminy. Only Taminy. Like Gwynet, a refugee found in the course of Meredydd's Pilgrimage.

The crowd, relieved to be able to laugh at Marnie's red-faced discomfiture and eager to be celebrating, accepted it and went about their business.

So, she thought. So, I'm to be allowed to fade back and away.

But she wasn't, quite. The white-haired old Osraed's eyes bored awl-like and the tall young one's shyly prodded. She glanced from one to the other, then hurried down the steps and into the teeming courtyard where mothers weighed her and sons admired her and daughters feigned indifference. She was dancing before she knew it, marveling at how little the steps had changed.

It was during a break in the dancing, as she searched for Skeet and Gwynet near a stall selling hot, sweet cider, that she saw the tall young Osraed again, standing gawpishly to one side and trying not to stare too rudely. He moved toward her when their eyes met, his face a patchwork of bemusement and uncertainty. He stopped before her, opened his mouth to speak, then glanced away.

She took pity. "You'd be Wyth," she said and drew his eyes back.

"How do you know me?"

She smiled. "Oh, someone must have mentioned you ... pointed you out."

A moment passed, filled only with eddies of babble and song from the happy mob. Wyth glanced down at his hands, clasped over his crystal pendant. He let go of the crystal and put his hands behind him.

"You're going to think this odd," he said. "But I feel ... as if I know you ... or ought to."

"You're Osraed now. There are a good many things you know ... or ought to. The Meri has surely lifted the bar on your senses. They must thrill to have the doors and windows of your mind thrown open so." And nothing looks or sounds or feels the same, does it?

He was shaking his head. "Even the night is different," he said, the words pouring from his mouth as if a bar had been lifted there too. "The darkness, the firelight, the breezes.

"Darkness has layers, did you know that? Layers of absence. And light-" He paused to glance at the lanterns bobbing about the cider booth. "-light peels back the layers and-" The words ended in a blush that spread from his nose to the corners of his eyes. "I'm-I'm sorry. I'm babbling. You'd not care about any of this."

"And the laughter," she said, "has colors. The blues of sorrow, the reds of anger, the gold and silver of true joy."

Gawping again, he shook his head. "How do you know these things?"

"I live with an Osraed. My father ... was a Cirke-master. I've always been drawn to the Meri's doings."

"You're no mimic." The gangly gawper was gone, replaced by an astute Osraed. "You speak as one who knows. You see the laughter with your own eyes, not Osraed Bevol's."

She shrugged. "I have been accused," she said carefully, "of being fey. Once, some called me Wicke and charged me to prove I was not."

"And did you?"

"I was unable. I tried, but the Meri's will out. She decided my course. It brought me here."

"You're not Wicke," he said as if his own certitude would make that true for all.

She laughed. "No, I'm not. But you won't convince Marnie-o-Loom of that." Her eyes travelled to the shadowed side of the bright booth where a pinched face trained glitters of jet on them.

Wyth shivered. "And she calls those eyes." He held out his arm. "Will you have a cider, Taminy-a-Gled?"

"Aye. If you will have a dance."

He agreed with minimum awkwardness and she took his arm and let him squire her about before all eyes. They ate, they drank, they danced, they strolled the battlements. And when he looked at her oddly time and again, she knew it was only because he had just realized, time and again, that she was not Meredydd-a-Lagan.

Ah, but a part of you wants me to be that.

"What did you say?"

She glanced up at him. He was a layer of darkness, the Meri's Kiss glowing from his brow, a silhouette against the gleaming, moonlit peaks of the Gyldan-baenn. She had been watching them, though they had neither moved nor changed for perhaps a million years, and he had been watching her, whose changes were more recent. She had let him watch her, let him see that even under layers of darkness, she was not Meredydd.

"You have sharp ears, Osraed," she told him. "I didn't speak." And a rare man, it is, who hears words that are not spoken.

"You tease me. I can't hear your thoughts."

"You feel what others feel. You see the color of their laughter, the shadings of their words."

"Shadings only. But you spoke. There were words."

"There were words. But I thought them."

"Why? Why should I hear your thoughts and no others?"

I told you I was fey. She could feel his eyes holding her moonlit face, his other senses straining through layers of darkness the moonlight could not penetrate. He had heard her. He had not seen her lips move.

"Bevol has brought you here for a reason. Why has he brought you here? Who are you? Why do I know you? How do I know you?"

"Perhaps," she said aloud. "Perhaps you have seen me in a vision, as I have seen you through someone else's vision."

The Kiss between his brows puckered with thought.

Taminy laughed and laid a hand on his arm. "Don't glower so, Osraed Wyth. You must learn to laugh more and frown less."

Perhaps it was the words or the gentle, laughing voice that delivered them or the moonlight on pale hair. Perhaps it was all those things that set up, in Wyth Arundel's head, a sudden whirlpool of thought and sensation. A second of disorientation was followed by the sharp, clear memory of Master Bevol's aislinn chamber, of a pool of darkness that would not be still, of a Being of Light and a girl on a beach. No, two girls-one entering the water, one leaving it; one familiar and beloved, the other- "Osraed Bevol," said the moonlit lips, "I have not breathed for a hundred years."

The whirl stopped so suddenly, he was nearly dashed from his feet. Like a man plunged in cold water, he trembled, while just beneath his skin, blood pulsed in fitful heat, scalding him. His face burned. He raised his hands to cover it.

Taminy. Taminy-a-Cuinn. Gifted in the Art, decried as Wicke, condemned to a fugitive Pilgrimage, drowned in the sacred Western Sea. Taminy, whose father returned alone and empty-handed, a seemingly broken man, to give up his duties at Nairne-Cirke and move his household to Ochanshrine at Creiddylad. One hundred years ago. One hundred years.

"They spent the rest of their days in worship and service," said the moonlit girl. "They wanted to be as close to me as they could. They wanted to serve the Meri's Cause."

He couldn't reply. He had no words to speak, no mind to invent them. Overwhelmed, he stumbled away into thicker darkness, leaving her behind him-a silky, silver shadow against the Gyldan-baenn and a star-filled sky.

Leaving the barrage of light and life above and behind, Osraed Ealad-hach took refuge in the darkness of his aislinn chamber. Beneath the soft glow of several tiny lightglobes, he sat, pondering the impenetrable black core of the room, the crystal that would light it cupped in trembling hands.

He hadn't been here since the dreams began-since Meredydd-a-Lagan had had thrust them into his nights. He had been afraid to come. Afraid to call out the ghosts and the visions he knew were there. Now, his fear had slid headlong into terror. Now, less than ever did he want to call up the visions; now, more than ever, he knew he must.

Because of that girl.

He raised a hand from his lap, cradling the crystal toward the heart of the chamber. The hand shook and his soul shook with it. Whimpering, he pulled the hand back. Already images formed, but in his head, behind his eyes; the girl, dropping her cowl, pulling off her scarf; the girl, dancing on the cobbles, her beautiful, cwenly face alight with pleasure and excitement; the girl, walking the battlements with Osraed Wyth, her hair pale gold in the light of moon and stars.

Ealad-hach moaned sickly, pressing his temples as if his hands could shove the images into retreat. And her name-Taminy!

Why Taminy? Why that wretched, cursed, wicked name?