"Honeywell, you served me ably as lieutenant when I was Captain of the Guard. Will you ride with me again?"

Honeywell bowed deeply. "I would be honored, sir."

Mauritane recounted the Chamberlain's offer for the eighth time that night, barely listening to himself speak. Honeywell's mouth was an "0" of wonder throughout.

"This is such an honor, sir," said Honeywell. "I don't know how to thank you enough."

"You can thank me by surviving until we reach the City Emerald. I was responsible for your imprisonment; I'd hate to be responsible for your death as well." Mauritane rubbed his chin.

"I know we've agreed to disagree on that one point, sir. But for Lord Silverdun's benefit, I must say that I am here by my own leave, and it wasn't anyone convinced me to be here other than me."

Silverdun forced a smile. "It is ... good of you to say so."

"Thank you, milord."

"Just cut the 'milord' crap. I only require it of the guards because it annoys them so. You may call me Silverdun."

Honeywell bowed low, his outstretched wrist nearly scraping the floor.

Though it was still hours from First Watch, the sounds of prison morning life were beginning to seep in from all directions. Somewhere nearby the kitchen staff were lighting their fires, clattering their heavy skillets and pots. Elsewhere the laundry vats rumbled to life, their gears turned by the pale white slaves from Edan.

"Only one more, then Arcadia," said Silverdun, resting his chin in his cupped hands, once Honeywell had managed to bow his way out of the room.

"We ride for Hawthorne in three hours," said Mauritane. "Don't tell me you're going to fail me before we reach the gates."

Silverdun smiled ruefully. "No, I'll have a witch in Hawthorne spell me some awake time. That'll keep me until we camp tonight. Which reminds me. Should we stop in Colthorn," he asked, turning to the maps. "Or do we press on and make camp in the hills to the south?"

"We'll bed at inns until we cross the border. No reason to deplete ourselves before then."

"You'll get no argument from me."

They passed the next few moments in silence, then Raieve was brought in.

She was less enthusiastic than Honeywell.

"Do you think me mad?" she laughed. "It's not enough that I rot in your prisons, but you want me to follow you on some twisted errand of fealty to your bitch queen?"

Mauritane held his tongue so he would not speak without thinking. Her words made him furious, but Silverdun was right. She was beautiful. Her long, metal-tipped braids framed an angular face, blue eyes inlaid over high cheekbones, arched eyebrows in a permanent slant of anger. There was something wild about her.

"You may hold what opinions you wish," he said. "But in my presence you will refer to the Queen as Her Majesty or Regina Titania. If not out of respect for her, then out of respect for me."

Raieve had been standing, pacing across the floor as Mauritane delivered his pitch. Now she sat, pulling her braids forward and peering down at them. "As you wish."

"You have the offer, parole in exchange for your services. How do you answer?"

Raieve pursed her lips. "The only thing you could offer me is guaranteed transport back to Avalon when this is finished and the arms that I came here to purchase. Then I might accept."

"I can probably guarantee your return to Avalon, but beyond that I make no promises," said Mauritane.

"You can promise to do your level best. I would accept that." She glared at him.

"I've watched you since your arrival here," said Mauritane. "I believe you can be of great value to me. I'll do what I can to help you when our task is complete, but it may not be possible."

"You said it yourself," she said. "The alternative is dying here. I don't hate your queen enough to punish myself for spite. You have my word; I will fight by your side. I'll take what you can offer."

"I'm pleased," said Mauritane. "Perhaps when this is done you will not think so badly of us."

"I hardly see how it matters either way," she said.

Mauritane started to say something else but stopped. "Fine. The guard at the door will take you for provisions. Move quickly; we leave in an hour."

Mauritane watched her leave, feeling the curve of her legs with his eyes as she left. He forced himself to remember his wife, the Lady Anne, and put Raieve out of his mind for the moment.

He opened his mouth to speak to Silverdun and heard the scream again, even louder this time, definitely from the south. Could it be one of the Edani? They usually had lower voices and did not often allow their young to be taken captive. Raieve was one of four female inmates. The other three were locked in their cells on the other side of the prison.

"I'll be right back," said Mauritane. Silverdun nodded wearily, reviewing the list of provisions for the fourth time in an hour.

He picked up one of the guards at the door. "Where are we going, sir?" the guard said.

"Do you hear that sound?" said Mauritane. The girl's cries were insistent, pleading. Mauritane wondered for a moment that a woman's cries of pleasure and pain could sound so similar. Raieve's face flashed unbidden across his mind. He frowned.

"I don't hear anything," said the guard.

"Come with me," Mauritane said.

They passed from the North Tower into the main yard, where a trio from the night watch warmed their hands in the guardhouse. Snow continued to fall in its angled sweep, casting irregular diagonal lines across the faces of the guards.

"No!" the girl's voice cried. The sound emanated from the South Tower.

"Come," said Mauritane, taking his guard by the shoulder. "Don't you hear this?" They approached the tower's interior gate. Here, the wind caught the falling snow in an updraft and it swirled in tight ovals in the portico.

"Can you unlock this door?" said Mauritane.

"Um, sir, we're not to go in there. Only Jem Alan goes to monitor the sealamps."

"Do you have the rune or don't you?"

"Yes, but ..."

"But nothing!" Mauritane gripped the guard at both shoulders. "Did Jem Alan tell you to give me full run of the place, or didn't he?"

"Uh, yes, but ..."

"But nothing! Don't say 'but' again. You have your orders. Open the door."

Cowering, the guard took a set of runes from his belt and fitted one into the enormous metal door's latch with a shaky hand.

"I'll wait here," he said.

"Fine." Mauritane took a torch from the inside wall and lit it from the grate that burned there.

The door opened onto a wide hall with a curved stairway on the left, or east, side and a number of doors on the north wall. A dusty iron chandelier hung overhead, its candles burnt to tiny stumps, blackened and sooty. Besides the torch, the only other illumination was the dim green witchlight from irregularly placed globes along the stairwell. Their light glimmered on the damp gray stones of the walls.

"No! No! Father, help me!" It was the girl's voice again, coming from above. Mauritane leapt for the stairs, noticing the curious antiquity of the girl's accent, similar to that of the oldest men and women in his village, those who'd been raised centuries before his own time.

Darting up the stairs, Mauritane reflected that it could not have been possible for the girl's voice, not much louder now than it had been in Jem Alan's office, to have been audible at all from the North Tower. He grew more wary with each step, and by the time he reached the first landing, he was walking, his blade drawn and held at the ready.

At the first landing, the spellturning of the structure became noticeable. The stairs above were faintly doubled, one set of steps was superimposed on the other, as though seen through thick glass. From the landing, a pair of boardedup doors let onto the second floor, their locks rusted and worn with age.

"Father! Somebody! Help me!" The girl's cries became shrieks, still coming from farther up the stairs. Mauritane began to run again, taking the stairs two at a time, his eyes moving in every direction for potential threats. He stopped again at the second landing and listened again. The shrieks were muffled here, but they were not from above this time. Two more doors faced Mauritane, identical to the ones below. They, too, were boarded up, though Mauritane could see that the boards on the nearer one were fairly loose. Pulling a dagger, he wedged the blade beneath the board and strained against it, feeling the homemade nails slowly give way.

Mauritane's muscles hummed from the exertion, and it felt strangely good to be in action again, regardless of the circumstances. His face reddening, he pried first one board, then another from the door and examined the lock. It was a simple keyed affair, one easily picked with the tools he'd liberated from the prison armory. As he knelt, the screams grew more and more muffled and eventually faded.

"Damn," he said, finally managing the lock. The door swung open with effort, hanging from hinges that were nearly rusted shut. The passage beyond was dark, but there was a light some distance away. Before Mauritane's eyes, the light became two lights, then four, then eight, then one light again, depending on how he turned his head. It was a disorienting sensation.

He stepped lightly over the transom and into chaos. The floor gave way beneath him and he stumbled forward to right himself, only to discover that he was suddenly sitting up on the frame of the door through which he'd just passed. When he'd crossed into the hallway, his sense of direction had pinwheeled backward over his head in a quarter circle, so now the wall had become the floor, and the floor was now the wall in front of him. The light source was now above his head.

Mauritane began to feel queasy. Looking back through the doorway, he saw the stairway exactly where it had been, only now the stairs appeared to be sideways, their steps clinging to the wall beneath him.

"Salutations," said a voice above him. Mauritane jumped and looked up. Standing on the ceiling was a man in ancient costume, wearing a long white wig and a frock coat that hung upwards to fall at his feet.

"I am the Prince Crete Sulace, Lord of Twin Birch Torn," said the man, speaking in an ancient dialect Mauritane struggled to comprehend. "And you are trespassing in my home."

an abduction.

Mauritane attempted to stand, but the room shifted again around him, and he landed at the other man's feet, his thigh resting painfully on his sword hilt.

"Perhaps I should leave the way I came," said Mauritane.

"That would be unwise," said the man, drawing his rapier and holding the point to Mauritane's neck. "You are an intruder in my home and I intend to know your business before I have you flogged."

Mauritane sat up slowly, feeling the pressure at his neck give a bit. "If you are indeed the Prince Crere Sulace," said Mauritane, speaking in Elvish, "then I am more surprised than you. For your home has been a prison these many years and you have been thought dead for centuries."

"Centuries! You are mad!" said the man. "Perhaps you are better off on a Foolship than in my dungeon." He jerked Mauritane roughly to his feet with a strength not suggested by his narrow frame. "Now come out of this room before we both drop out of it. It's been spellturned recently and, I fear, quite badly."

Mauritane let himself be guided from the room by Crere Sulace's sword. He was led down the dark hallway's wall and around a bend where, without warning, his orientation shifted again and he found himself propelled toward the stone floor. Twisting his body, he managed to land on his back without much pain, but the continual shifts in perspective were nauseating.

Crere Sulace stood above him, having anticipated the shift. "Get up," he ordered. He led Mauritane farther along the hallway until it widened into a large sitting room with floor-to-ceiling windows across the south wall. The windows were open to let in the full light of day, despite the fact that day light, by Mauritane's reckoning, was still at least two hours away. Deep green velvet curtains hung partly drawn over the casements, casting the room in an odd emerald hue. A stunningly beautiful woman, of roughly the same age as Crere Sulace, sat knitting on a divan by the window. She looked up quizzically as Mauritane was marched into the room.

When Mauritane saw her there was a brief flash of recognition, although he could not say from where. Her ears were long and delicately pointed, and a gem-encrusted tiara nestled in her tightly woven blonde hair.

"Husband," she said, looking back at her knitting. "You should clean your blade. You appear to have something on it."

Crere Sulace chuckled. "It is an intruder I found in the courtyard passageway. I was just leading it to the dungeon."

Sulace's wife looked up again. "An intruder? How delightful. Do you suppose he's come to ravish me?"

"Again you overestimate your charms, wife. No, this one is a madman; he claims to have come from the future." He tickled Mauritane's neck with the point of his blade.

"Ah, an intruder from the future! Now, that is novel. Must you dispose of him so readily, husband? Perhaps he can tell us who will win the Unseelie war or what the price of tulips shall be in Firstcome!"

"To which Unseelie war do you refer?" asked Mauritane.

"You mean there will have been more than one? Those nasty devils! One ought to teach them their place." The Lady of Twin Birch Torn smiled affably.

"If you're referring to the first Unseelie War, from the fortieth year of Hornet in Ram, it is the Unseelie who will claim victory, having defeated the Queen's forces at Selafae and Unel."

Crere Sulace wheeled Mauritane around. "The Unseelie prevail at Selafae? Hardly likely, since the Seelie Army numbers in the thousands there and is well reinforced. You are mad."

Mauritane lifted an eyebrow. "The Unseelie will take Selafae in a sneak attack at midnight on the first of Swan. It will be revealed that a colonel in the Seelie army is a traitor and has given away the position of Seelie forces across the length of the Ebe."

"He speaks well for a madman," said the Princess. "But he begins to bore me. Please escort him away."

"Come along," said Crere Sulace. "I've a rack that's become lonely of late."

Mauritane stood firm. "I appreciate your position, sire, but I am committed to an errand. I must refuse."

"Then I must slay you where you stand."

"If that is your will, you may attempt it."

"I've no wish to kill an unarmed man. Draw your blade and have at you." The Prince lowered his rapier and stepped back, en garde.

Mauritane reached for his sword and drew it in a smooth, silent motion. The two men faced off, but before either could proceed, they heard a scream from elsewhere in the tower.

"No! Father! Help me!" called the now-familiar voice.

"Laura!" shouted Crere Sulace. He shoved Mauritane into a column and ran from the room, his blade drawn and ready. Mauritane followed, sparing a look back for the Princess, who still sat at her knitting, a bemused expression on her face.

Crere Sulace led the way up a flight of stairs and across a wide gallery that overlooked a library. Bright yellow witchlit sconces filled the room with their warm glow. From the gallery, Sulace took another flight of steps and stopped at a narrow landing. Mauritane rounded the curve of the stairs just in time to see the Prince stride through a doorway, shouting, his face red.

"Who goes there?" shouted Crere Sulace. "Unhand my daughter!"

Mauritane hurried up the steps and entered a large bedroom, many floors above the castle grounds. From the windows, Mauritane saw the courtyard and the buildings he'd come to know all too well over the past two years. From here, though, the courtyard appeared as a carefully manicured hedge maze, evenly coated with a pure white glaze of snow. That was all Mauritane could take in from the windows before turning to evaluate the scene before him. Crere Sulace stood with his back to the near wall, to defend against both Mauritane's entrance and the men who occupied the center of the room. There were four of them, dressed in what Mauritane recognized as the uniform of the Royal Guard from the age of the Unseelie Wars, roughly six hundred years before his own time. They were armed and appeared to be in the process of apprehending a teenage girl, clad only in a silk dressing gown. Her long, girlish legs hung kicking beneath her, supported as she was by her elbows. She appeared to have just woken and was only now beginning to struggle.

"Father, what is happening?" she asked, eyes wide.

"Princess Laura of Twin Birch Torn, you are hereby placed under the custody of the Royal Guard by order of Her Majesty Regina Titania," said one of the men, who wore the colors of a lieutenant. The others, two of whom held the Princess, wore the stripes of sergeants-at-arms.

"Leave this place, rogues!" shouted the Prince. "My own guards will be along shortly, and they are loyal to me, not the Queen."

"Our orders are clear, sire," said the lieutenant. He was a seasoned officer, with a craggy face and a deep scar running along his left ear. "We are to take the Princess to the City Emerald."