"I'll try to leave you here," I promised her, "and take the troopers back with me. I don't know if it can be done, but I'll try." I shut my eyes, gathering the thoughts that had fled my mind soon after we arrived. "Whose bones were they?"

"You know. They were your friends. I doubt that you want to talk about it."

Blindly, I sat down again upon the bed that been hers and mine. I hated Green then as I have hated it so often, the whorl of teeming unclean life, of violent death and universal decay. In my heart I rejected it, I hope once and for all. "Were they the Neighbors'?" I asked. "The Vanished People's?"

Perhaps she nodded. "I think that when we'd destroyed them everywhere else, they held the tablelands against us. As places of final refuge, they must have built these towers in the cliffs, with windows like this one so that-"

She was gone.

I had recalled my body as she spoke, with all its well-remembered knobs and insufficiencies, the sagging face behind my beard and the ankle that ached in rainy weather, and ached abominably in any weather whenever I had to walk far… And realized with a sort of shock that I was no longer sitting on the bed, but lying in it. I opened my eyes and saw the smoke-blackened timbers that supported the roof of the inn.

"Master Incanto? Awake you are?"

It was Azijin; I asked him who had told him to call me that.

"Your son, mysire. Where he was, and you, of Master Incanto they speak, he says. About dreams you know? That also he says, Mysire Horn."

"Much less than he believes." I sat up, very conscious that Jahlee lay beside me still sound asleep.

Vlug sat up too. "Wah! Good Mysire Pas!"

I got out of bed and went to the fire. "I know what you must be thinking, Sergeant, seeing my daughter in bed with me. I can only say that nothing of the kind took place. She became frightened, as women sometimes do at night in strange places, and sought reassurance from her father."

Azijin joined me at the fire. He sleeps naked and was naked still, hairy and muscular. "Such things I never think, mysire. But me it was that the door barred. If anyone the bar took down, I would hear, I thought."

"We tried not to wake you, Sergeant. I suggest that we try not to wake my daughter as well."

"Right, mysire. Loud I will not speak."

Vlug came over wrapped in a blanket, and Azijin told him to get something for us to sit on. There are no chairs, but he carried over the mattress from his bed. He is a tall, fresh-faced boy with unhappy hair that is neither truly red nor truly yellow but brighter than either. "Morning now it is, I think," he said. "The pig who this inn keeps we wake, Sergeant?"

"Not yet," Azijin told him. "For Mysire Horn to unriddle a dream I wish."

"I too!"

"Always in my dreams I am awake, Master Horn," Azijin began. "Not like that it is, this dream of last night. Like real it is," he tapped the hearth before him. "Most real. Not like a dream at all it is."

"With me, the same it is!" Vlug exclaimed.

"In this dream asleep I am, in my bed lying. You and your daughter not sleeping like me are, but walking past, talking and talking while on I sleep. Wake I must, I think. What if you escape? Hard with me it will go when Judge Hamer hears! To wake I try, but I cannot. My eyes open. The room bright is, sunshine everywhere there is, and my bed on the wall like a picture hangs. There I sleep and do not fall, so all right it is. Here no one but me there is, so all right too that is. Only in a dream it is that the old magician, and the strange girl his daughter, and the boy who calls him Father I must guard. No one to escape there is."

He looked at me beseechingly. "Never before such a dream, mysire. For me this dream you will explain?"

Vlug started to speak, but Azijin silenced him.

"Boy talk," Oreb suggested from his high perch.

"I think Oreb's right," I told Azijin. "Vlug's dream may well illuminate yours-or yours illuminate his, as frequently happens. Vlug, tell us your dream before you forget it."

"This I never forget, Mysire Horn," Vlug began. "Never! When white my beard is, each smallest part I remember."

Momentarily he fell silent, his hands outspread with the palms down, and his wide eyes the color of blue china; but he was a born relater of tales, whose pauses and intonations came to him as its song does to a young thrush.

"As my sergeant says it is. I sleep, but asleep I am not. Up and down, up and down, a man and woman walk. Wise and kind he is, but stern. Unhappy, discontent she is. His counsel she wishes, and it he gives. No, no, not what he suggests she will do. Herself she will kill. Soon. Very soon."

Vlug spoke to Azijin. "Jahlee and her father perhaps it was, but why?

"Mysire, once around me I too looked. Your daughter before me stood. So beautiful!" He raised his pale eyebrows in tribute to her, when my old friend Inclito would have kissed his fingers.

"A great light behind her there was. A great wind also. A cloak she wore, very big and black. This cloak the wind blew." His hands suggested its fluttering motion. "Her hair also. So long her knees without such a wind it must reach. To lay hold of me with Scylla's hundred arms-"

Oreb squawked and fluttered, perturbed.

"At me it blows. So long really it is, mysire?"

I shook my head.

"In my dream it is." He shut his eyes, trying to recapture it. "So beautiful she is. A dream? So beautiful. Her lips, her eyes, her teeth. My spirit flamed. An angry goddess, your daughter Jahlee is, mysire, in my dream."

I asked whether he could recall how she had been dressed, other than the cloak.

"Not…" He glanced at Azijin. "Her gown I don't remember, mysire. No hat, or only a very small cap, it could be."

"Good girl." Oreb dropped from his perch to my shoulder.

"Really, Oreb? Usually you call her a bad thing."

"Good girl!" he insisted.

"Although you can't remember her gown, Legerman Vlug, she was in fact dressed?"

He glanced at Azijin, as before. "Oh, yes, mysire."

Azijin held up a stiff right forefinger, tapped it with his left, and said, "Young he is, mysire." I doubt that he is thirty himself.

"Silk talk," Oreb declared in a decided tone.

"I suppose he means that it is high time for me to interpret your dreams, and no doubt it is. A little additional thought might further the interpretation, however, and so might bacon and coffee. What do you say we rouse my son and your other troopers, and find out what this inn can offer in the way of breakfast? Jahlee has been tired and ill-no doubt you've noticed it. With your leave, I'll throw a few more sticks on the fire before we go, and give her a couple of extra blankets. If she wakes up before breakfast is ready, she can join us. If she doesn't, sleep may help her."

We got dressed and collected Hide and his guards, whom Azijin abused roundly for having allowed Jahlee to leave their room unnoticed, and went downstairs. Everything was dark and silent, but we opened the shutters-finding that it had snowed heavily during the night-and lit every candle in the place from the smoldering remains of the parlor fire. Azijin took it upon himself to wake up the innkeeper and his wife, but returned rubbing his knuckles and looking disgusted. "Sick they are, this they say. So it may be, I think. Our breakfast Vlug will prepare. If their food he wastes, on their own heads they brought it. You can cook, Vlug?"

Vlug swore that he could not.

"Then you I teach. A legerman must cook, and shoot too. Zwaar, Leeuw, to the horses you must see. Well do it! When we have eaten, I will inspect."

Hide said, "I'll take care of ours, Father. My father's a fine cook, Sergeant. I'm sure he'll help you in the kitchen, if you ask him."

I did, of course, warming a pastry of nuts and apples, approving the cheese (these people seem to relish cheese with every meal) and contriving hearth cakes while the sausages and a ground pork and cornmeal mixture were frying.