Nylan gently disengaged Weryl's fingers and made his way to his place at the first table.

"Do you want to eat first or second?" he asked Ryba.

"First, if you don't mind."

"No problem." He reached out and eased Dyliess into his lap.

"I can't tell which of you she looks like," offered Ayrlyn, sitting across from Nylan. "When I look at you, Ryba, and then at Dyliess, you look the same, except for the hair. But the same thing is true when I look at Nylan."

Huldran slid into the seat next to Nylan. "Too early to tell, but she seems to favor both. Doesn't matter. She'll be a handsome woman whichever way."

"What do you think of the new blades, Huldran?" Ryba asked after chewing and swallowing a mouthful of meat, sauce, and noodles.

Nylan eased Dyliess to his left knee and sipped the cool tea, then reached for the bread and awkwardly broke off a dark steaming chunk.

"Some ways, I like them better. There's more weight there, and they seem to be just as tough. Maybe we should give the older ones, the first ones, to the smaller guards, or the newer ones."

Her mouth full, Ryba nodded.

"The engineer, he's teaching me how." Huldran shook her head. "Never thought making a single small piece of steel would take so much work. But the new blades, they've "got enough heft to make it easier to stand up to those crowbars- the kind Gerlich liked."

When Ryba did not respond immediately, Ayrlyn asked, "Do we have any idea what he's up to? Gerlich, I mean?"

"He doesn't like the heat. So I can't imagine he's too far down in the lowlands,"

mused Nylan.

"He's trying to gather an army to attack Westwind. I suppose," Ryba added after a pause.

Nylan's stomach sank at the timing of the pause. Ryba wasn't guessing.

"Do you think he'll be successful?" asked Huldran. ' "He took a lot of coin and some old weapons," said Ayrlyn.

"I'd guess we'd see him in late summer, before harvest," speculated Ryba.

"Hired armsmen would be cheaper then."

"He'll try something sneaky. He's that type," said Huldran.

"True," agreed Ryba.

Nylan grabbed Dyliess's wandering hand just in time to keep his mug from being knocked over. "Hold it, little one. You don't drink tea. I do."

Ryba continued to eat, almost silently, her eyes half glazed over. When she was done, she held out her arms, and Nylan ate.

Dyliess began to fuss, and Ryba rose, nodding. "Excuse me, but my young friend here has some plans for me." With a quick smile, the marshal was gone.

"She's preoccupied," Ayrlyn observed.

"Wouldn't you be?" offered Huldran. "She's got a lot to worry about."

So do we all, thought Nylan, without speaking his thoughts. So do we all.

After the evening meal, Nylan walked uphill in the twilight, past the doorless and windowless smithy, and then northward until he came to a small hillock of rocks that overlooked the lander shell still used to store grasses and hay. The drying racks, half filled with grass, stretched across the space between the meadow and the rising rocky hills to the west. One empty rack lay broken and sprawled on the rocky ground.

The brighter stars were appearing in the south, one on each side of the ice- tipped Freyja. As the evening deepened, more points of light appeared, and no star looked that different to Nylan from those he had seen from Heaven. Only the patterns in the sky were different.

The wind had switched, and blew cooler and out of the north. Nylan sat on a smooth boulder and looked at the bulk of Tower Black, and at the dark fields beyond, and the lighter stones of the cairns to the southeast. So many cairns for such a short time, and he had no illusions. The number of cairns would continue to grow.

"Nylan?"

He looked down in the direction of the drying racks.

Ayrlyn stood at the base of the rocks. "Would you mind if I climbed up to talk to you? You look like you need someone to talk to. I do."

Nylan waved her up and waited until she settled on a boulder beside him.

Unlike Nylan, who sat in the dark in a shirt, the healer wore shirt, tunic, and a light ship jacket.

"Neither you and Ryba talk much anymore."

"What is there to talk about? The situation seems impossible, that's all. I feel so awkward. Weryl's my son, and Kyalynn's my daughter, and I've never touched Istril or Siret." He laughed, a soft harsh sound. "Except with a wand in sparring.

Yet I feel that Ryba wants me to ignore them. Even though it wasn't my idea, they are my children."

"You try so hard. Siret and Istril know that."

"Does trying count? Or is Ryba right, that, in the end, only survival and results count?" He cleared his throat. "Oh, there are all the religions and philosophies about life being worth nothing if it isn't lived well-but all that's written for people who have the time and the resources to read, not for a bunch of high-tech refugees trying to scrape together a future on a cold mountaintop."

"Go on," said Ayrlyn.

"All I do is cobble together infrastructures that most places have years, if not decades, to build-and figure out better low-tech weapons for Ryba to train people to use. Every time someone dies, it hurts."

Ayrlyn nodded.

"But I'm supposed to ignore that, too." He paused. "I'm feeling too sorry for myself. The deaths hurt you, too."

"Death's everywhere, Nylan. We could have died on the Winterlance. Maybe we did. Maybe this is all an elaborate illusion."

"It's no illusion." He glanced up at the cold stars. "There, I didn't feel each death personally."

"This might be better," reflected Ayrlyn. "Death was a sanitary and distant occurrence there. It just happened- light-minutes away at the end of a de- energizer. No more demons. Or no more angels. And we could ignore it. Here we can't."

"Most people can-here or there. We just can't."

Ayrlyn's hand touched his forearm.

"Your fingers are cold." He took her hand in his, then looked up again. The stars above were bright. Bright and unfamiliar. Bright and cold. He squeezed her fingers, gently.

CII.

SILLEK TOSSES THE scroll, wrinkled and smudged, with fragments of wax still clinging to one edge, on the sitting room table. Then he bends over Zeldyan and scoops Nesslek out of his consort's arms.

"You're the best thing I've seen today, except for your mother."

"I'm a thing now?" Zeldyan's voice carries but a faint edge.

"Of course not. That wasn't what I meant." He looks down at his son in his arms and puts his forehead gently against the boy's. "Was it? We didn't mean any insults to your mother." . "Oooooo ..." offers Nesslek.

"That's what he thinks," responds Zeldyan, "for all your fancy words." She smiles fondly at her consort.

"Would you read that abomination I dropped on the table and tell me what you think?"

"A lordly matter? Your mother would not approve, my lord." Zeldyan smiles again, more ironically, as she lifts the scroll. "Why do you want me to read it?"

"You know why," Sillek counters with a laugh, "but I'll tell you anyway. Because you're your father's daughter, and you can think. He's stuck in Rulyarth trying to rebuild that mess the traders left, and I need someone with brains that I can also trust."

"Your mother would definitely not approve of that."

"Of course not. You have brains, and you love me. She didn't approve of our joining after she found out I'd fallen in love with you. 'Love is dangerous for rulers, Sillek.' It gets in the way of honor and patrimony." He walks to the window and stands there, still carrying Nesslek, 'waiting as Zeldyan reads through the scroll.

After a time, he finally asks, "Have you got it?"

"It's a letter from Ildyrom, renouncing all interest in the grasslands. There are many flowery phrases, but that's what it says ... I think."

"Exactly." Sillek bites off the word. "Exactly. It came with a small chest of golds."

"That seems odd," muses Zeldyan. "Last year he built that fort to try to take them from you. I wouldn't trust him."

"I don't, but I think the gesture is real, and it's a danger."

"Not having to fight over the grasslands is a danger?"

"All my holders will know that Ildyrom has sued for peace. Your father holds Rulyarth, and the locals there seem to be pleased with his efforts. We offered a percentage of our trade revenues from Rulyarth to the Suthyan trade council-"

"You did?"

"It was your father's idea-much cheaper for both of us. They couldn't really maintain three ports anyway."

"And we can even if the traders couldn't?"

"If we expand trade, we can. They just wanted quick golds." Sillek shrugs and lifts Nesslek to his shoulder. The infant burps-loudly. "The bay is much better than Armat..."

Zeldyan laughs. "I've heard this before. What about Ildyrom?"

"It's demonish. We have peace with both Suthya and Ildyrom. All our borders are secure-except for those devil women on the Westhorns."

"Oh." The smile fades from Zeldyan's face.

"You see? The chest of golds-that's already known. You can't keep that a secret.

It even means I can hire mercenaries. More women have left the holdings.

Genglois had three petitions waiting for me-demanding I do something." Sillek lowers Nesslek and wipes his mouth gently.

"What will you do?"

"Stall." Sillek lowers his voice. "Make obvious preparations. Send dispatches to your father. Stall and hope. Hope for an early winter, or the need to do something urgent in Rulyarth or the grasslands."

"And neither Ildyrom nor the traders will offer the slightest pretext while your stodgy traditional holders bombard you with demands to reclaim the Roof of the World."

"That's the way I see it." Sillek sighs. "But I have a little time. Not much, but a little. I can hope."

A frown crosses Zeldyan's forehead, but she forces a smile.

CIII.

"WE DON'T TALK much anymore," Ryba said quietly. "I miss that."

"I'm sorry. I guess I don't much feel like talking a lot of the time," Nylan said quietly, as he rocked the cradle and watched his daughter's face through the darkness.

"Could I ask why?" The marshal's voice was calm, soft. "Is it just me? You go off and talk to Ayrlyn."

"I worry, and I worry about things that seem set in stone. I feel like, when I talk to you, we talk in circles." When Ryba did not answer, he continued, his eyes still on Dyliess. "We go back and forth saying the same things. If you try to avoid using force, people die. If I don't build towers and weapons and what amounts to a low-tech military infrastructure, people will die. If you don't play tyrant and I won't play stud, our children won't have any future." His voice dropped into silence.

Again, Ryba was silent, and he continued to rock the cradle and to watch the sleeping Dyliess. In time, he spoke. "Even as each killing hurts more, I become better at making weapons and using them. I can't walk away from you, or Istril, or Siret, or little Dephnay who won't know her mother or her father-not now-but I keep asking myself how long I can continue doing this." He gave a rueful grin he doubted Ryba could see through the darkness. "How long before I'm so blind in a battle that I get spitted? And if I don't kill my allotted one or two, who else will get killed?"

"You think I like it?" asked Ryba, her voice still calm. "I can't ask anything without the threat of some sort offeree. I can't get anyone to see what I see. If I try to use reason, even you fight me. If I use coercion and trickery, then what does that make me? But I have to, if I want a daughter, and if I want her to have a future. There aren't any choices for me, Nylan. And there aren't many for you."

Nylan looked back at Dyliess's peaceful and innocent face, asking himself, Were we like that once? Does life force us into the use of force and violence, just to survive?

"You have visions of what must be, and when you don't follow those, people suffer and die," Nylan finally said. "You've told me that, and I see that. I see it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it."

"All I want is for us to be free, for the guards, me, Dyliess, not to be trapped in a culture in which some horses are treated better than women. That's not asking a lot."

"It doesn't seem so," agreed Nylan. "But for us to be free seems to require more recruits and more and more weapons. More recruits makes the locals madder, and that means we have to defend ourselves, which leads to more deaths, and more plunder. That allows us to get stronger, but only if we keep our deaths few, which means better training and more weapons. Better training means less food- growing and hunting, and that means a military culture, probably eventually hiring out to the powers that be." Nylan cleared his throat. "Is that what you see?

Is that what you want?"

"I wish I could see a more peaceful way, but I don't. Westwind will have to hire out some guards, but from what little I do see, we will be able to prosper by building better trade roads, by levying tariffs on them, and by protecting them."

Ryba paused. "I don't see this as the clear and unified picture you paint, either. I catch an image here, or there, and I have to try to visualize how it fits. I always worry that I won't put the pieces of this puzzle together right, and that I'll fail and someone else will die who shouldn't."

Nylan slowly eased the cradle to a stop. Dyliess gave the smallest of snores, then sighed. He slipped under the light and thin blanket that was all he needed in the summer evening.

"Would you hold me?" asked Ryba. "I know you've been forced, tricked, and coerced, and I'm not proud of it. But it's lonely. I'm not asking for love. Just hold me."

In the darkness Nylan slipped from his couch to hers, where, uncertain as he was, Nylan put his arms around her, his eyes open to the rough planking overhead, wondering how long he could hold her, yet knowing she had no one else.