"What's that?" Michael asked.

"The mage hasn't guessed?" She mocked surprise. She was getting testier as her time narrowed to days.

"Your mother. She's keeping mum, but she's a nervous wreck, and John looks absolutely terrified."

"So what is it?" Michael asked.

"Somebody's joining us for dinner. Somebody not human, I'd say. You're usually the one responsible for nonhuman guests, but not this time, I take it?"

Michael shook his head, all innocence.

"Who does your mother know that isn't human?"

Michael's eyes widened. "She's never met her in person, but - my great-great-grandmother," he said.

Salafrance Underhill arrived at seven in the evening, her long red hair tied back in a prim bun, dressed in a cloak the color of autumn leaves. Ruth answered the door herself, turning down Michael's offer flatly.

"She's my problem, really," Ruth said. "When she called, I invited her here. I'll greet her at my own front door."

For a moment, the two women faced each other over the threshold, and Michael saw his great-great-grandmother for the first time. Side by side, Ruth and Salafrance Underhill looked remarkably alike, but there was no denying Salafrance was a pure Sidhe and Ruth was largely human.

"Great-granddaughter," Salafrance said, her voice even more beautiful than Ulath's, almost as entrancing as the voice of the Ban of Hours. "You have dreamed of me. I've felt your dreams, even across the world and beyond."

"Hello," Ruth said, struggling with remarkable success to control her shivering.

"Is it customary that I should wait out here?"

"No," Ruth said smoothly. "Come in."

Salafrance drifted through the door, seeming as tall and slender as a tree, her long face and cold eyes difficult to read as she looked from person to person, lingering on Kristine and her improbably wide belly and then turning her full attention to Michael, who stood by the couch in the living room, feeling awkward and young all over again.

"I did not know my love for men would lead to this," she said. "I followed the way of Elme for five hundred years, but out of an inner perversity, not by plan. Granddaughter, this is your husband?" She indicated John with a nod of her long chin.

"His name is-" Ruth began.

"Yes. I have been watching you all for some time. I hope that does not upset you."

Ruth swallowed hard but shook her head.

"I have much to apologize for. I did not prepare my children adequately. I am afraid they issued foolish edicts and did not understand who or what they were, and how they must choose mates wisely. You suffered for this, Great-granddaughter."

Michael could read his mother's emotions, barely held in check - half an urge to order Salafrance from her house, and half simply to weep. She did neither. Salafrance sat in the living room at Ruth's invitation and gestured for Kristine to sit beside her.

"Does he read your child for you?" she asked.

"Michael?" Kristine asked, embarrassed. "Yes. He does"

"And is it a maker, as well?"

"We don't know," Michael said.

"Male or female?"

"Female," Kristine said. "The doctors confirmed it."

Salafrance smiled ironically. Her almond eyes could have been regarding anybody in the room at any given moment, without the slightest impression of darting about. "Power is carried by the female... Great granddaughter," she said, focusing her full attention now on Ruth.

"Yes?"

"I am proud of you, most proud."

Ruth smiled. Michael knew then that his mother would never come to love or even be comfortable around Salafrance Underhill, but she could now be comfortable within herself.

She had not failed her heritage.

At dinner, as Salafrance picked at rice and vegetables, she asked, "Where is the nectar of mages?"

"I gave it back to my father," Michael said.

"It's in my wine-cellar. Closet, actually," John said.

"It has waited long enough, don't you think?"

"Sidhe don't drink, Grandmother," Michael said quietly.

"Do you know the rule - always forbidden, on occasion mandatory?"

Michael nodded.

"This is such an occasion," Salafrance decreed.

"I'll bring it," John said, pushing his chair back from the table.

"I am told, and I have felt, that you are in control of this world now, of its making and its song," she said to Michael. "This is so?"

"It is so," Michael said.

"And what sort of mage are you?"

Michael smiled. "That's a broad question."

"Are you an obvious one, dancing with the song at all times, watching the steps of all who dance with you?"

"He doesn't meddle," Kristine said defensively. "Hardly anybody knows what he does or who he is."

Michael patted her hand.

"I... don't want to control everybody or act as a policeman," he said. "I don't think I should have any real authority over how people behave or make moral judgments. I won't impose my will on others. I'm a poet, not a master. I may tune the instruments, but I don't lay down every note of the song."

"And if it comes about that the races try to destroy the balance again?"

"I'll write that bridge when I come to it," he said, irritated that she should see so quickly what worried him most about the future.

"You are a very young mage," Salafrance said. John returned with the opaque, time-darkened bottle of wine.

"What is its provenance?" Salafrance asked.

John was puzzled, uncertain how to answer. "Arno Waltiri gave it to us."

"The human who shared his body with the Cledar mage...?"

"The same," Michael said. "He had it from David Clarkham. I've heard Clarkham stole it from Adonna."

"We should all drink..." Salafrance said. "Except for Kristine, who bears perhaps another maker, one who will drink this wine in her own due course."

"I don't think I could stomach it anyway," Kristine said.

The bottle was sealed with a thick slug of wax impressed with a tiny sharp design, two triangles nested like a Star of David. When John cleared out the wax plug from the bottle's neck, working carefully to avoid breaking the ancient glass, an almost palpable aroma filled the room, richer by far than Clarkham's wines, beyond a bouquet and into the realm of a summer-heated fruit garden.

"Who took this bottle, and when, I do not know, but I know whence it comes," Salafrance said. "The sigil tells me. It was once in the collection of Aske and Elme themselves. It may be the last bottle of its kind, and it carries special virtue. It is fitting that the first human maker and mage in untold ages should drink of it and be confirmed by the experience. That is what Elme would have wished, and Aske would have been proud beyond his time."

"You knew them?" Ruth asked, awe-struck.

"I am not that old, Great-granddaughter," Salafrance said, and Michael sensed the depths of her humor. "I have met those who knew them. So has Michael." Her look was potent with meaning. Michael almost shivered.

"Now that both Councils have dissolved, and new orders are found, and new songs to which we dance, let us toast the new mage in humble surroundings, toast a humble creator who vows not to enslave for order's sake but to do what he must, and that alone: tend a garden fit for all God's creatures and weave a lace pleasing to all."

Not once, in all his time with Sidhe, had Michael ever heard them refer to a god beyond Adonna or Adonna's Yah-weh.

"Which god is this, Grandmother?" Michael asked.

"You feel this God in your blood, do you not?" she asked. She held up her glass, and the others followed suit. "The God that requires only our remembrance in extremis. The gentle, the mature, the ever-young, that demands nothing but our participation and growth. The composer of the Song of Earth and all worlds.

Invoke this God, Michael, and be a maker and mage."

Michael examined the color of the wine in his glass: both golden and brown, all wines become one wine, and said, "To all of us, of all races, and the matter we are made of, and the ground beneath our feet, and the worlds over our head. To strife and passage and death and life." He held his glass higher. "To horror, and awe, and all strong emotions, and most of all, to love."

Salafrance drank, and the others drank as well.

When they were finished, John put down his glass and said, "I think it must be an acquired taste."

"It's wonderful," Ruth said.

Michael frowned, drawing the flavors back and forth. He honestly did not have an opinion. In a few decades, perhaps he would appreciate what he was tasting now.

"What's it like?" Kristine asked.

He shook his head. "I don't know," he said.

"All that suspense, and you don't know?" she chided.

The rest of the evening went well, with Salafrance telling her own story and Ruth listening closely. There was much about life in the hills and alleged witchcraft and conflict between the early farmers and the clannish Sidhe. Salafrance told of a lonely and rebellious young Sidhe female - herself - coming down out of the hills into the communities of humans, enchanting and being enchanted in turn by a strong young human male and being taken to his cabin to bear children. In time, Salafrance could not stay apart from her kind; the love was strained by forces neither could control, and they parted, Salafrance leaving their children with the man, who found his house filled with witches and warlocks: his own offspring.

Kristine slept in the crook of Michael's arm as the hour passed midnight. Salafrance said near dawn that she must leave, and Ruth escorted her to the door, where they had a few words alone.

Then Salafrance extended her arms and took her great-granddaughter into them, hugging her close.

"Humans have always taught us how to love," she said.

She departed into the dawn, and Ruth returned to the kitchen, her face wet with tears. John sealed the bottle again and placed it in the wine closet. Michael took Kristine home in the Waltiris' old Saab.

The birth was late. Three days later, on a bright spring morning after a long-awaited night's rain, the sidewalks dappled with moisture and the grass still beaded, Michael opened the front door to retrieve the newspaper. Something feather-touched his aura, and he paused, listening.

"Man-child," came a voice above his head. He looked up and saw Coom staring down at him from the roof, her long fingers tightly gripping the tile.

"You still have much to learn."

He turned. Nare stood on one leg on the lawn to the left, wriggling her long fingers before her flat chest.

"Even a Lace-Maker and Gardener needs a few tens of years to mature and reach his potential," said Spart, sitting cross-legged on the lawn to his right, smiling at him with her head cocked to one side. "May we teach?"

Michael's chest swelled with gladness, and he laughed. "Only if you'll teach our child, too."

"Man-childs," Coom said. "Our specialty!"

So it was that Michael Perrin came into his time, and the Earth found its youth once more.

Afterword.

I have led a dull life, disliking chaos and favoring calm and work and family. Pardon my airs for even thinking of such, but any biography of me will likely be a boring read. Still, there have been a few moments of high interest. One involved the first version of the book you have just read. (Unless, like me, you are in the habit of reading all extraneous matter before sitting down to the main bulk.) This experience haunted me for years. It happened at a critical period, late adolescence, in the winter and spring of 1970-1971; I was a late bloomer socially and a hider of deep emotions, what I have since characterized as a "warm hearted iceberg," and so it was inevitable that I should fall hard for the first young woman who consented to go out on a date with me.

Actually, I fell for Kristine even before the date. She was tall and slender and coltish, wide-hipped and long-legged, hair close-cut in a shag, a style worn by Jane Fonda at the time, unaffectedly bohemian; quite my opposite. We were at San Diego State College and had happened into the same beginning drama class. I asked her to accompany me to the showing of a documentary of Fellini's Satyricon (or more properly, Fellini Satyricon) at the late, lamented Unicorn Theater in La Jolla. Kristine consented.

I got lost and arrived late at her rented house on Ingraham avenue, near the beach, and we got even more lost making our way to La Jolla, but we made it in time to listen to a pretentious question and answer session with the documentary's director. After, we went out for a late night coffee and talk.

I was smitten. Not once did I say any such thing to Kristine; but indications must have been plentiful. I asked her to pose for a painting I was planning, a surrealist, adolescent bit of memento mori called "The Madonna of Probability." I had sketched a rough of this picture a short while before our date, always with her in mind...