"Let me take care of her, Eliar," Bheid suggested. "Let's get her calmed down a bit."

"I can do it, Bheid," Eliar protested. "She can't really hurt me, you know."

"Maybe not, but the sight of you might be hurting her. I'm sure she'll come around, but it might be best if you stayed clear of her for a while."

"He's probably right, Eliar," Althalus agreed. "The girl's a little emotional."

"A little?" Eliar said. Then he sighed a bit regretfully. "Maybe you're right, though. I'll stay away from her for a few days."

Althalus and Bheid reseated Andine by the fire, and Emmy leaped up into the girl's lap again.

"Where are we?" Andine asked in her vibrant voice.

"Perquaine, your Highness," Althalus replied.

"Perquaine? That's impossible!"

"I wouldn't be too quick to start throwing that word around, your Highness," Bheid advised her. "Althalus here can do almost anything, and Emmy can do even more."

"I don't believe I know you," she said.

"My name is Bheid," he introduced himself. "I'm a priest. Well . . . I was until Althalus called me."

"Just what's going on here, Master Althalus?" the girl demanded. "I thought you were taking the slaves you bought from me to the salt mines of Ansu."

"I sort of lied about that, your Highness," he admitted blandly. "Eliar was the only one I really needed. I told the rest of them to go home."

"You thief!" Her voice rose, soaring dramatically.

"That's a fairly accurate description, yes," he agreed. "Let's clear the air here just a bit. You've just entered the service of Deiwos, the Sky God."

"That's absurd!"

"Andine," he said firmly. "What was the word you read on the Knife?"

"It said, 'obey,'" she replied.

"Exactly. Now hush. Don't interrupt me when I'm explaining things to you. I'm the teacher; you're the student. I'm supposed to teach. You're supposed to sit there and look stupid."

"How dare you!"

"Shush, Andine!"

Her eyes went very wide. She struggled, fighting the compulsion he'd just laid upon her, but no sound came from her mouth.

"I have a feeling that might prove to be useful from time to time," Bheid murmured as if to himself.

"That'll do, Bheid," Althalus told him.

"Sorry."

Althalus patiently explained the situation to his reluctant pupil. "It gets easier to accept after a while," he assured her after he'd finished. "I thought I'd gone insane when Emmy first got her paws on me, but that passed-eventually. She has her little ways, as you probably already know."

"What do you mean?" the girl asked.

"Wake up, Andine. Would you have really sold Eliar to me unless something very powerful had gotten its little paws on your heart? Killing him was the only thing on your mind that day when I walked into your palace. Then Emmy jumped up into your lap and started purring at you.

After about a half hour of that, you'd have given me the entire city of Osthos for her, now wouldn't you?"

"Well . . ." Andine looked helplessly at the cat in her lap. "She's so adorable," the girl said, catching Emmy up in her arms and snuggling her face up to the furry captor of her heart.

"You noticed," Althalus said drily. "Don't try to fight her, because she always wins. Just give her all your love and do as she tells you to do. You might as well, because she'll cheat to get what she wants if she has to."

'I think that's about enough, Althalus.' Emmy's voice crackled crisply in his mind.

'Yes, dear,' he replied. 'Did you happen to read the Knife when Eliar showed it to Andine?'

'Of course.'

'Where do we go next?'

'Hule.'

'Hule's a big place, Em. You didn't by any chance happen to pick up the name of the one we want, did you?'

'We don't need the name of this one, pet. He'll find you.'

"You two are talking to each other again, aren't you?" Eliar asked a bit wistfully.

"She was just giving me our instructions. We have to go to Hule."

Eliar's eyes brightened. "We'll be passing through Arum then, won't we? Do you think I might have time to stop and say hello to my mother? She worries about me a lot."

"I think we can arrange that," Althalus agreed. "I don't think you should tell her what we're doing, though."

Eliar grinned. "I'm pretty good at that. There were a lot of things I did when I was just a boy that I didn't tell her about. I didn't come right out and lie to her, of course. A boy should never lie to his mother, but now and then things sort of slipped my mind. You know how that can happen."

"Oh, yes." Althalus laughed. "Things have been slipping my mind for as long as I can remember."

"I'm sort of hungry, Althalus," Eliar said. "I've been so busy taking care of her Highness here that I seem to have missed a few meals. I'm absolutely starving."

"You'd better feed him, Althalus," Bheid suggested. "We don't want him wasting away on us."

"You might ask her Highness if she'd like something, too," Eliar added. "I couldn't get her to eat very much at all at lunchtime."

Andine was staring at them.

"You missed all that, didn't you, Andine?" Bheid said a bit slyly. "After Emmy put you to sleep, Eliar looked after you like a mother hen with only one chick. He spent more time feeding you than he spent feeding himself, and food's very important to young Eliar just now. If you watch him closely, you can almost see him grow."

"What are you talking about? He's a grown man."

"No, he's only a boy," Bheid corrected her. "He's probably not much older than you are."

"He's bigger than any man in Osthos."

"Arums are bigger than Treboreans," Althalus told her. "The farther north you go, the taller people get-maybe so that they're tall enough to see over all the snow that piles up in the north."

"If he's only a boy, what was he doing in a war?"

"He comes from a warrior culture. They start earlier than civilized people do. It was his first war, and it was supposed to be a quiet one. The half-wit who sits on the throne in Kanthon got carried away, though, so he ordered the soldiers he'd hired from Eliar's Clan Chief to invade your father's territory. It was a stupid thing to do, and it wasn't supposed to happen. It was his fault that your father got killed, not Eliar's. Eliar was only following orders. The whole business was the result of a series of stupid mistakes, but that's what most wars are all about, I guess. Nobody ever really wins a war, when you get right down to it. Do you think you could eat something? You don't really have to, but Eliar's worried about how little he was able to get you to eat on our way here from Osthos."

"Why should he care?"

"He feels responsible for you, and Eliar takes his responsibilities very seriously."

"You put me in the care of that monster?" Her voice soared. "I'm lucky he didn't kill me!"

"He wouldn't do that, Andine-quite the opposite, actually. If somebody had threatened you along the way, Eliar would have killed him, not you, or he'd have died trying."

"You're lying!"

"Go ask him."

"I wouldn't talk to him if my life depended on it."

"Someday it might, Andine, so don't lock yourself in stone on this issue."

'Let it lie, Althalus,' Emmy's voice told him. 'She isn't ready for this yet. Keep those two apart for now. Turn her over to Bheid for a while. I'll stay with her and try to get her past this.'

'Should I buy her a horse?'

'Let's get her settled down a little first.'

'You think she might try to run away?'

'The Knife won't let her do that, pet, but she doesn't want to face the truth about what Eliar really is, so she might try to override the compulsion, and that could cause her a great deal of pain. Let Bheid know what's going on and have him help her along. You stay with Eliar and keep him away from Andine. Let's sort of tiptoe around the children until they settle down.'

They rode north through the drought-ravaged fields of Perquaine, and Althalus and Bheid rather carefully kept some distance between Eliar and Andine. Althalus soon realized that the auburn-haired young priest was very intelligent, and once he'd been cured of the notion that astrology really had any significance, he was able to apply his intellect more usefully. "Is it my imagination, Althalus," he asked one evening when they were alone, "or is there something brewing between the children? They never look each other in the face, but their eyes are always sort of straying back to each other, for some reason."

"They're at that age, Bheid," Althalus replied.

"I don't quite follow."

"That age. They're both adolescents-with all that's implied in the word 'adolescent.' This is a very trying time for them-and even more trying for you and me, I'm afraid."

"Yes," Bheid agreed. "I sort of noticed that myself."

"They're both having urges right now. The simplest way to deal with that would be for you to perform a wedding ceremony. We could give them a week or so to explore the differences between boys and girls, and then we could get back to business."

Bheid laughed. "We might have a little difficulty persuading Andine to go along with that notion. She's like a little teapot, isn't she? Always right on the verge of blowing off her lid."

"Nicely put, Bheid," Althalus noted. "Eliar's an uncomplicated little boy and Andine's just the opposite. I rather imagine that Emmy has plans for them, though."

"Has she said anything to you about that?"

"She doesn't really have to. Emmy and I have been together for long enough for me to get occasional hints about her intentions. It's part of her nature to bring boys and girls together. You might want to keep that in mind, Bheid. She's probably already shopping around to see if she can find a wife for you."

"I'm a priest, Althalus. The men in my order don't marry. It's one of the vows we take."

"You might want to give some thought to joining another order, then. If Emmy decides to marry you off, she will marry you off, whether you like the idea or not."

It was when they were approaching Maghu that Emmy spoke quite sharply to Althalus, her silent voice echoing in his mind. 'Up ahead!' she said urgently.

'What is it?'

'That man standing off to the left side of the road. It's Koman, Althalus. Put your guard up. He'll try to get inside your mind.'

'Another of Ghend's underlings?'

'Yes-and probably the most dangerous one of all. Get between him and Eliar. The boy's not equipped to deal with him.'

'And I am? What do I do?'

Put yourself between him and the others. Look him in the face and count trees.

'Again with the counting trees, Em?'

'Not quite. Skip numbers.'

'You missed me there, Em.'

'Jump from six to eight. Then go back to three. Scramble the numbers the way you'd scramble eggs.'

'What's that supposed to do?'

'It'll distract his mind from what he's attempting. He'll try to creep inside your mind. If you're throwing out-of-sequence numbers at him, he won't be able to concentrate-on you or on any of the others. He'll be looking for information, and we don't want him to get any. Block him out, Althalus.'

'I hope you know what you're doing, Em. And please don't tell me to trust you again.'

The man at the side of the road had a harsh-looking face and a short white beard. His eyes, Althalus noticed, burned in almost the same way Ghend's eyes had that night in Nabjor's camp. Althalus reined his horse in slightly and looked directly at the harsh-faced man.

Althalus began to count silently. One, two, three, four, nine hundred and forty-two, eight, nine, twelve.

The man at the side of the road blinked. Then he shook his head as if trying to clear it.