He would have to concentrate on breaking into the Dedicates' Keep in Castle Sylvarresta. He worried at how many guards waited for him.

He sat at the edge of the wood for long hours, while the storm brewed and clouds engulfed the sky. Winds began to send dry leaves skittering from the trees. As evening neared, the clouds hurled bolts of lightning through the heavens. Rain fell thick, unrelenting.

Borenson drew a blanket over his head and wondered about Myrrima, back in Bannisferre. She had three Dedicates--her witless mother and two ugly sisters. They'd given up much to unite the family, to win their fight against poverty. Myrrima had told Borenson, on the trip to her house, how her father had died.

"My mother was raised in a manor, and had endowments of her own," she said. "And my father was a man of wealth, at one time. He sold fine clothes in the market, made winter coats for ladies. But a fire burned his shop, and his coats burned with him. All the family gold must have burned in that fire, too, for we never found any of it."

It was a proud way to say that her father had been murdered, killed in a robbery.

"My grandfather is still alive, but he has taken a young wife who spends more than he brings in."

Borenson had wondered what she was getting at, until she whispered part of an old adage. "Fortune is a boat..." on a stormy sea, which rises and falls with each mountainous wave.

Myrrima, he'd realized, had been telling him that she did not trust fortune. Though their arranged marriage might seem fortunate at the moment, it was only because, for the moment, they crested the wave, and she feared that at any second her little boat would crash down deep in some trough, perhaps be submerged forever.

That was how Borenson felt now, submerged, drowning, hoping to keep afloat. The whole notion of sending one man to storm a Dedicates' Keep was a long shot. In all probability, Borenson would arrive at the keep, find it well guarded, and have to retreat.

But he knew, he knew, that even if he had only a slim chance of breaking into the keep, he'd have to take it.

When the storm passed that evening, he still sat unmoving, listening to the stealthy water dripping from trees, the creaking of branches in the wind. He smelled the leaf mold, the rich soil of the forest, the clean scent of the land. And ashes.

Murdering Dedicates did not sit well with him. Borenson tried to harden his resolve for long hours, imagining how it might be--climbing the walls in the escalade, battling guards.

Borenson imagined riding into the castle, going to the gates of the Dedicates' Keep, and riding down any defenders, then discharging his duty.

Such an attack would seem heroic, would likely get him killed. He wanted to do it, to finish this horrible task. He would112 have gladly made a suicide charge, if not for Myrrima.

If he tried to enter the keep during daylight, he'd jeopardize his mission. What's more, even if he gained entry into the keep and managed to slaughter the Dedicates, he'd then be forced to return to his king and report...what took place between him and Gaborn, and tell why he'd let Sylvarresta live.

Borenson could not stomach the thought. He couldn't lie to King Orden, pretend he hadn't seen Gaborn.

So he watched the sun drop in the west, spreading gold all through the clouds, even as another storm blew in.

He fetched his horse and rode to the hill south of Castle Sylvarresta.

I am not death, he told himself, though he had long trained to be a good soldier. He'd become a fine warrior, in every detail.

Now he would play the assassin.

An image flashed in his mind, five years past, when Queen Orden was murdered in bed with her newborn babe. Borenson had tried to impale the fellow--a huge man who moved like a serpent, a man in black robes, face covered. But the assassin had escaped.

It hurt terribly to remember such things. It hurt worse to know that he would now go the nameless assassin one better.

As he neared, Borenson saw that few guards walked the walls of Castle Sylvarresta tonight. Sylvarresta's loyal soldiers had been decimated; Raj Ahten had left no one to guard the empty shell of a city. Borenson could not spot a single man on the walls of the Dedicates' Keep.

It saddened him. Old friends--Captain Auk, Sir Vonheis, Sir Cheatham--should have been on those walls. But if they lived, now they resided in the Dedicates' Keep. He remembered three years past, when he'd brought molasses to the hunt and had strewn it in a trail through the woods, leading to Derrow's feet, then smeared the captain's boots.

When he'd awakened to find a she-bear licking his feet, Derrow had roused the whole camp with his cry.

Borenson took out the white flask of mist, pulled the stopper, and let the fog begin to flow.

So it was that half an hour later, he laid aside his armor, and went to make a lone escalade. He climbed the Outer Wall on the west side of the city, protected by the fog that crept over with him.

Then he made his way to the inner wall, the King's Wall, and scampered over quickly. Only a single young man had walked that wall, and he'd turned his back for the moment.

Borenson reached the base of the Dedicates' Keep near midnight, warily watched it. He did not trust his eyes, worried that guards might be secreted in the King's towers. So he scaled its wall from the north, coming at it by way of the woods in the tombs, where few prying eyes might spot him.

Rain pelted the keep, making it difficult to find purchase between the stones. Borenson spent long minutes clinging to the wall before he reached the top.

There, he found that the wall-walks really were all unmanned, but as he scurried down the steps into the inner court, he spotted two city guards--young men with few endowments--huddled away from the drenching rain in the protection of the portcullis.

In a moment when lightning filled the sky, he rushed them, slaughtered them as thunder shook the keep, so that no one heard their cries.

Even as he killed the young men, Borenson wondered. Not one Invincible? Not one man to guard all these Dedicates?

It felt like a trap. Perhaps the guards hid among the Dedicates.

Borenson turned and looked at the rain-slicked stones in the keep. The lights were out in the great rooms, though a lantern still burned in the kitchens. A wild wind burst through the portcullis, swept through the bailey.

There was an art, a science to killing Dedicates. Some of the Dedicates in there, Borenson knew, would be guards themselves, men like him who had dozens of endowments of their own and long years of practice in weaponry. They might be crippled--deaf or blind, mute or without a sense of smell--but they could be dangerous still.

So, when slaughtering Dedicates, common sense dictated that you avoid such men, kill first those who served as their Dedicates, weakening the more dangerous foes.

Thus, you began by slaughtering the women, and the young. You always sought to kill the weakest first. If you killed a man who had twenty endowments, suddenly you would find that twenty Dedicates would waken, who could sound alarms or fight you themselves.

Though it might be tempting to spare one or two Dedicates, the truth was that if you did, they might call for guards. So you killed them all.

You murdered commoners who had only given endowments, never received. And you started at the bottom of the keep, blocking all exits, and worked your way to the upper stories. Unless, of course, someone in the keep was awake.

I had best begin in the kitchen, Borenson told himself. He took the dead gatekeeper's key and locked the portcullis, so no one could enter the keep or escape, then went to the kitchen. The door stood locked, but he set the prong of a warhammer in its crack. With endowments of brawn from eight men, it was no great feat to pry the door free from its hinges.

When he rushed into the kitchens, he found a lowly girl who'd been left to sweep the floor, long into the night. A young thing, perhaps ten, with straw-blond hair. He recognized the child--the serving girl who'd catered to Princess Iome last Hostenfest. Too young to have given an endowment, he'd have thought. Certainly Sylvarresta would never have taken one from her.

But Raj Ahten has been here, Borenson realized. The girl had given an endowment to him.

When she saw Borenson in the doorway, she opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out.

A mute who had endowed Voice on her lord.

Almost, Borenson did not have the strength to carry his plan through. He felt sickened. But he was a good soldier. Had always been a good soldier. He couldn't let the little thing wriggle through the wet bars of the portcullis and summon help.

Though this child would die, her sacrifice could save thousands of lives in Mystarria.

He rushed, grabbed the broom from the girl's hand. She tried to shriek, tried to yank free from his grasp. She clawed at a table, overturned a bench in her terror.113 "I'm sorry!" Borenson said fiercely, then snapped her neck, not wanting to make the girl suffer.

He gently laid her corpse to the ground, heard a thumping sound in the buttery--back in the shadows thrown by the lamplight. Another young girl stood back there, black eyes shining in the darkness.

In all his heroic imaginings this day, he'd not envisioned this--an unguarded keep, where he would have to slaughter children.

Thus began the most gruesome night of Borenson's life.

Chapter 31.

A TIME FOR QUESTIONS.

As the horses raced through the woods, beneath the black trees, Binnesman held his staff high, shining its dim light for all to see by. Yet the very act seemed tiring, and Binnesman looked drained, old.

The trees whipped past.

Gaborn had a thousand questions, felt as many uncertainties. He wished to speak to Binnesman. But for now he held back his questions. In Mystarria it was considered rude to interrogate a stranger in the way that Gaborn wanted to question Binnesman now. Gaborn had always thought this rule of civility a mere custom, formed without reason, but now he saw that it was more.

By asking questions, one intruded on another's Invisible Domain. At the very least, you took time from him. And information often had its own value, as much value as land or gold, so that in taking it, one robbed another.

To keep from musing about the obalin and the loss of Binnesman's wylde, Gaborn concentrated on this insight, wondering how often courtly manners were rooted in man's need to respect the Domains of others. Certainly, he could see how titles and gestures of respect fit into the larger scheme.

Yet Gaborn's thoughts quickly turned away from such matters, and instead he considered what he'd seen.

Gaborn suspected that Binnesman knew far more about the dark time to come than he would say in front of Raj Ahten, perhaps far more than he could say. The study of wizards was long and arduous, and Gaborn had once heard that certain basic principles could only be understood after weeks or months of intent study.

After long minutes, Gaborn decided that there were some things one should not ask a wizard. What price had Binnesman paid to give life to the wylde? Gaborn wondered.

Now the Earth Warden turned from the road and picked his way among twisted paths here under the shadowed trees. No other scout could have made his way in such maddening darkness. Gaborn left the wizard to his work in silence, in the starlight, for an hour, until they came upon an old road. From there, Binnesman raced the horses north, until suddenly the road dropped down to a ridge overlooking the broad fields outside the village of Trott, twelve miles west of Castle Sylvarresta.

On the plain below lay hundreds of multicolored pavilions from the hordes of Southern traders who had journeyed north for Hostenfest but who had been forced to vacate the fields near Castle Sylvarresta when Raj Ahten's troops laid siege.

Binnesman called the horses to stop, gazed down over the dark fields. The grass had been burned white by the late-summer sun, so that even by starlight reflecting off the grass one could see.

"Look!" Iome whispered. Gaborn followed her pointing finger, saw something dark creeping across the fields, toward the pavilions with their horses and mules for the caravans.

Nomen were down there, eighty or a hundred, creeping toward the tents on their bellies to hunt for food. To the east, along the ridge, he saw several large boulders move, realized that a trio of Frowth giants were also prowling the edge of the forest.

Hungry. They merely hungered for meat. Raj Ahten had marched the giants and the nomen all this way, and they'd survived the battle at dawn, but now they would be hungry.

"We'll have to take care," Gaborn said. "These horses need to graze and to rest. But until it's safe, maybe we should ride in the open fields, where we can't be surprised." Gaborn turned his mount east, to head back toward Castle Sylvarresta. From there he could take the Durkin Hills Road south. "No, we should go west from here," Iome said. "West?" Gaborn asked.

"The bridge at Hayworth is out. We can't run the horses through the forest, so we can't go near Boar's Ford. Besides, we don't want to run into Raj Ahten's army in the dark."

"She's right," Binnesman said. "Let Iome lead you." His voice sounded tired. Gaborn wondered how much his spell-casting had drained him.

"West is the only way--over the Trummock Hills Road," Iome said. "It's safe. The forest does not encroach on the road. My father's men cut it back."

Binnesman let the horses rest a few moments. As one, the group dismounted, stretched their legs, adjusted the girths on their mounts.

"Come," Binnesman said all too soon. "We have a few hours until Raj Ahten awakens. Let us make good use of them." He urged them downhill, into the plains. Though the horses were hungry and the grass here grew high, it was also dry and without seed, worthless fodder.

They rode slowly along a dirt road for half an hour, and here at last they felt at ease enough to talk, to make plans.

"My horse will be the fastest over these roads," Binnesman said. "If you do not mind, I will ride ahead. I will be needed at Longmont, and I hope to find my wylde there."

"Do you think it is there?" Iome asked.

"I really can't be sure," Binnesman answered, and seemed to want to say no more.

The company soon reached a weathered farmhouse beside a winding stream. The farm had a small orchard behind it, and a sloping barn for a few pigs. It looked as if the peasant who lived here feared attack, for a lantern had been set in a plum tree out front, another out by the door to the pig shed.

The farmer should be afraid, Gaborn realized. This hut was isolated, without benefit of neighbors for a mile. And giants and nomen were prowling the fields tonight.114 Iome's father rode his steed up to the lantern, sat staring at it, mesmerized, as if he'd never seen one before.

Then Gaborn realized that the King probably never had seen one, at least not that he remembered. The whole world would seem new to him, like a vivid and fascinating dream, something he lived through but never comprehended.

Gaborn also rode up beneath the lantern, so his face could easily be seen, then called to the door. In a moment, an old turnip of a woman cracked the door enough to frown at him. She seemed frightened by so many riders.

"May we have some water and feed for the horses?" Gaborn asked. "And some food for ourselves?"

"At this time of night?" the old woman grumbled. "Not if you was the King!" She slammed the door.

Gaborn felt surprised at this, looked at Iome for a reaction. Binnesman smiled, Iome laughed softly, went up to the plum tree, then picked half a dozen of the large violet fruits. Gaborn saw movement inside the house as the woman tried to peer out the window, but she had no fine window of glass, only a piece of scraped hide, which let her see nothing but shadows.

"Leave them plums!" she shouted from inside.

"How about if we take all the plums we can carry, and leave a gold coin instead?" Gaborn called out.

Quick as a flash, the old woman was at the door again. "You have money?"

Gaborn reached into the pouch at his waist, pulled out a coin, tossed it to the woman. Her hand darted from the doorpost to catch the coin. She closed the door while she bit the coin, then cracked the door again to shout, more cordially, "There's grain in the pig shed. Good oats. Take as much as you want. And the plums."

"A blessing on you and your tree," Binnesman called out, "three years' good harvest."

"Thank you," Gaborn shouted, bowing low. He and Binnesman led the horses round back while Iome fed her father plums from the tree.

Gaborn opened the shed, found a burlap bag of oats, and began to dump them in a worn wooden trough to feed the horses.

As he did, he was painfully aware that the wizard sat quietly on his horse, watching Gaborn.

"You have questions for me," Binnesman said.

Gaborn dared not ask the most pressing questions first. So he said easily, "Your robes have gone red."

"As I told you they would," Binnesman answered. "In the spring of his youth, an Earth Warden must grow in his power, tend it and nurture it. In the green summer of his life, he matures and ripens. But I am in the autumn of my life, and now must bring forth my harvest."

Gaborn asked, "And what happens in the winter?"