Foolish. Foolish. Let her pass through Spirit Gate so she can rest. But he cannot let her go any more than he can unbind the harness that ties him to Scar. The Ox's heart seeks in the heavens that soul which fulfills it. He has romanced, enjoyed, liked, and parted with many women-probably too many-in the second half of his life, but he has never loved any of them.

The mist boils as though churned by a vast intelligence. Here the dream twists into nightmare. As the mist parts, he will see her in the unattainable distance, walking along a slope of grass or climbing a rocky escarpment, a place he can and must never reach because he has a duty to those on earth whom he has sworn to serve.

The door opened.

Out of the darkness a woman's figure emerges into what is not light but a supernatural glamour. Marit pauses on the threshold. She is so close to him! She is dressed in an undyed linen wide-sleeved jacket whose front panels overlap and are tied off along one side seam. Her trousers are of the kind that herdsmen wear, loose and comfortable, stained at the knees. Her hands and feet are bare, yet as if it is cold, she wears a death-white cape flung back from her broad shoulders. Her gorgeous black hair is braided into a single widow's spine almost as thick as his arm.

It hurts to look at her.

She does not move forward. She cannot. She cannot speak or act, because she is only a spirit that he dreams as part of his torment. She is not even a ghost, only a shadow to mark his desire.

"Be warned, sweetheart," she says. "You are in danger. Beware the third blow."

His heart lurches. It is her voice, her very own, never forgotten! He tries to sit up, but he is paralyzed in truth, sleeping and awake at the same time, unable to shift his limbs.

"Marit!"

"I have broken my oath once already to warn you. Wake now!"

He jolted awake, jarringly alert even though only his eyes opened as the barest sound scuffed the matted floor. He grabbed his sword and sat up so fast that the shadow froze.

"Who's there?" he said in a low voice.

A cough gave him distance and placement, two strides forward from the door and one to the side.

"I had to come see." She was taller than Marit. "If it was true what you said."

"What did I say?" He eased the sword onto his thighs, hilt toward the room and point toward the wall, holding it underhanded in his left hand.

"That you were slow only when you wanted to be. A woman can look a long time before she finds a man who can really take his time."

Her voice had that drawling tone that teases a man and causes him all manner of comfortable distress. She changed position, and he saw suddenly that she was naked from the waist up, wearing only that short kilted wrap around her hips. She was all suggestive curves. He felt a stirring through skin and flesh, and in that instant of distraction, because men can be so easily distracted, she struck.

She was fast, but he was wide awake and ready. He ducked under her lunge and extended his arm in one stroke, catching her under the arm with a sharp blow from the hilt. That was enough to stagger her, and he looped his lower arm around and over and slapped her hard on the side of the head, catching her cheek with the flat of the blade.

She collapsed onto the floor with a grunt. Her weapon rattled against the pallet and rolled onto her body. He scooped it up by the handle, rolled it in his fingers, tried its weight. It was light, slender, deadly, an assassin's knife. He knew it as surely as he breathed.

He fished for the chain at his neck and drew up the two treasures that hung there. His fingers brushed the whistle, and for an instant he considered blowing it, to alert Scar, but the pitch would wake other eagles as well. Now was not the time.

Instead, he untied the tiny bag in which he carried his flint. Striking and nursing a spark with the flint, he lit the lamp. Her body was sweetly formed, enticing him. Her braid was wrapped tight and pinned atop her head. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing shallowly, full breasts rising and falling… He forced himself to look away, to examine the knife. A sigil was carved into the handle, the four-petaled mark of Ushara, the Merciless One, the Devourer, mistress of life, death, and desire. They had found a similar tattoo on the body of that Devouring girl, twenty years ago.

The Devourer eats women and men both, and both women and men serve her, but only women served in her innermost sanctum. There, it was rumored, assassins might be bought who had trained in Ushara's courtyards, equally adept at seduction or murder, but even a reeve of long standing like Joss had never been able to fix the blame for any mysterious killing on the Merciless One's secretive hierodules. He had never been able to prove anything.

He sawed off a length of her wrap, rolled up the knife in the cloth, and shoved it into his kit bag. Quickly, he pulled on his boots, strapped on his gear, and left Argent Hall's guest rooms behind. Scar was already awake and alert, strangely calm, as though he had been warned. Quickly, and in silence, Joss readied the eagle, then shoved open the great door and walked him outside into the empty courtyard. A single lantern burned at the night watch's tower, overlooking the land side of the compound.

Joss was shaking as he gestured Scar up on the launching post and fastened himself into the harness. A shout rang out from the tower. A second lamp flashed. Scar raised wings and tail and thrust with his legs. No male eagle had a more powerful downstroke than Scar, and he was lifting and moving forward with such strength that he was past the compound's wall before the sentry got his eagle off the watch-tower. Joss got a glimpse of him as they flew past, gaining altitude, seeking an up-draft. It was the young man with the scar. He set his eagle after anyway, rising into the night and stroking after Joss.

Sweat poured freely down Joss's neck and forehead, although the night's wind off the sea was cool. The heavens were clear, and the stars blazed. Far to the east, the Peacock rose. He turned Scar south-southeast toward Olossi.

As a youth, he had served his year's apprenticeship with Ilu the Herald. He had a seeking mind that did not veer away from the unknown or inexplicable. Now his heart hammered and his thoughts skipped. He could not think through the troubling things he had seen and experienced at Argent Hall. He could make no sense of the day at all, or even the impossible dream of Marit stepping out of the mist where she had long wandered in the unreachable distance. Of Marit speaking. He ought to think of her, but he could not because he kept seeing that dead Devouring girl from twenty years ago. Although pierced to the heart, she had lost little blood, and her face had worn a rictus grin that had disturbed him ever after. So might the Merciless One smile when she suffers death's consummatory kiss.

This night, such a knife had been meant for him.

Sweat stung his eyes, and he wiped his forehead and tilted his face to let the wind pour over eyes and nose and mouth. Scar found an updraft, and they rose and rose and rose as the land fell away below them, as dark and still as a sleeping beast. The sea gleamed, reflecting stars.

The reeve from Argent Hall was still pacing him, neither falling behind nor trying to catch up. Eagles were creatures of day, and flew at night only under duress. Scar was already angry, kekking and making his displeasure known with little stabbing motions of that huge beak. Joss didn't want to put down, but he had enough of a head start out of Argent Hall that he figured it was better to risk the stop rather than let the other man follow.

He and Scar circled down in an open field of rice stubble not yet turned under, a pale expanse where it was unlikely they'd stumble onto any unexpected holes or rills or ditches. It was a risk, but one that paid off as the other reeve landed at the far end of the field, a gap carefully judged to allow an approach without seeming threatening.