"I'm not certain I believe you."

"I would not lie to a young woman named after the sea. The sea god is my family's patron, and the sea itself has become very precious to me these days. From one corner of my room in the tower, if I bend down just so, I can see it at the edge of a window. Of such things are hearts made strong enough to last." He tipped his head, almost a bow. "And, the truth is, you remind me of my own daughter, who also has a weakness for old dogs and useless strays, although I think you are a few years younger." Now his face became a little strange, as though a sudden pain had bitten at him but he was determined not to show it. "But children change so quickly-here and then gone. Everything changes." For a moment whatever pained him seemed to take his breath away. It was a long time before he spoke again. "And how many years have you, Lady Pelaya?"

"I am twelve. I will be married next year or the year after, they say, after my sister Teloni is married."

I wish you much happiness, now and later. Your friends look as though they are about to call for the lord protector to come rescue you. Perhaps you should go."

She began to turn, then stopped. "When I said you were King Olin of Southmarch, why did you say I was only half right? Isn't that who you are? Everyone knows about you."

"1 am Olin of Southniarch, but no man is king when he is another man's prisoner." Even the sad, tired smile did not make an appearance this time. "Go on, young Pelaya of the Ocean. The others are waiting. The grace of Zoria on you-it has been a pleasure to speak with you."

Leaving the courtyard garden, the other girls surrounded Pelaya as though she were a deserter being dragged back to justice. She stole one look back but the man was staring at nothing again-watching clouds, per¬haps, or the endless procession of waves in the strait: there was little else he could see from the high-walled garden.

"You should not have spoken to him," Teloni said. "He is a prisoner-a foreigner! Father will be furious."

"Yes." Pelaya felt sad, but also different-strange, as though she had learned something talking to the prisoner, something that had changed her, although she could not imagine what that might be. "Yes, I expect he will."

Crooked and his Great-Grandmother

The great family of Twilight was already mighty when the ancestors

of our people first came to the land, and the newcomers were drawn to

one or the other of the twin tribes, the children of Breeze or the children

of Moisture, who were always contesting.

One day Lord Silvergleam of the Breeze clan was out riding, and caught

sight of Pale Daughter, the child of Thunder, son of Moisture, as lovely as

a white stone. She also saw him, so tall and hopeful, and their hearts

found a shared melody that will never be lost until the world ends.

Thus began the Long Defeat.

— from One Hundred Considerations out of the Qar's Book of Regret

BARRICK EDDON WOKE UP in the grip of utter terror, feeling i as though his heart might crack like an egg. He could smell some¬thing burning, but the world was cold and astonishingly dark. For long moments he had no idea of where he was. Out of doors, yes-the rus¬tle and creak of trees in the wind was unmistakable… He was behind the Shadowline, of course.

Barrick felt as though he had just awakened from a long, bizarre dream-a feeling he knew all too well-but the waking was not much more reassuring than the dream. The endless twilight of these lands had actually ended, but only because the sky had turned black and not |usl night dark, but empty of stars, too, as though some angry god had thrown a cloak over all of creation. Had it not been for the last of the coals still glowing in the stone fire circle, the darkness would have been complete. And that terrible, acrid smell…

Smoke. Gyir said it was the smoke from some huge fire, filling the sky, killing the light. Barrick's eyes had stung for most of a day, he remembered now, and they had been forced to stop riding because he and Vansen the guard captain had trouble breathing.

Barrick crawled to the fire and poked the embers. Vansen was asleep with his mouth open, wearing his arming-cap against the chill. Why was the man still here? Why hadn't he turned and ridden back to Southmarch as any sane person would have done? Instead, here he lay beside his new friend, that ugly, splotch-feathered raven (which was sleeping too, appar-endy, its head under its wing). Barrick disliked the raven intensely, although he could not say why.

When he looked at Gyir Barrick's heart sped again, even as his stomach seemed to twist inside him. By all the gods, the fairy was a horror! He dimly remembered a feeling of friendship, of kinship even, between himself and this faceless abomination that had led an army of other monsters into the lands of real people, to burn and to kill. How could such madness be? And now he was virtually this creature's prisoner, being led toward the gods only knew what kind of horrible fate!

Barrick looked to the place the horses stood, mostly in shadow, Vansen's slumbering mount and the restless bulk of the Twilight horse which had somehow become Barrick's own, although he did not remember it hap¬pening. / could be in the saddle and riding away in an instant, he realized. Should he wake Vansen? Did he dare risk the time? Barrick's hand slid across the ground until it closed on the pommel of his falchion. Even bet¬ter: he could have the long, sharp edge on the Gyir-reature's throat just as quickly.

But even as the fingers of Barrick's good hand closed around the corded hilt, Gyir's eyes flickered open and fixed on him just as if the fairy-man had smelled something of the prince's murderous thoughts. Gyir stared hard and knowingly at him for a moment, his pupils round and black in the dim light, but then he closed his eyes again as if to say, Do what you will.

Barrick hesitated. The loathing itself now seemed alien, just another un¬likely feeling to grip him. My blood, my thoughts-they turn and change like

the wind! He had always been moody and had often feared lor his sanity, but now he felt a terror that he might lose his very self. Father said own malady was better once he left the castle. For a while mine seemed the same, but now it is back and stronger than ever.

Barrick tried to order his thoughts as his father had taught him, and could not help wishing he had spent more time listening and less sulking when the king spoke. He was trapped in a place where errors could kill him. How could he decide what was real and what was not? Only hours before he had thought of the faceless man as an ally, perhaps even a friend. Moments ago he had seemed an utter monster instead. Was Gyir really such a threat, or was he simply a warrior who served a foreign master?

Not master-mistress, Barrick reminded himself. And suddenly, as though everything had been tilting and threatening to tumble because of a single missing support, he saw the warrior-woman again in his mind's eye and his thoughts grew more stable. Gyir the Storm Lantern was not a monster, but not his friend, either. Barrick could not afford to trust so much. The Qar woman, the Lady Yasammez, had held him with her bottomless stare and had told him amazing things, although he could remember very few of them now. What had she said that had sent him so boldly across the Shadowline? Or had it been something else, not ideas but a spell to enslave him? She told me of great lands I had never seen, the lands of the People, as she called them-of mountains taller than the clouds, and the black sea, and forests older than Time, and… and…

But there had been more, and it was the more that he knew had been im¬portant. She said she was sending me as a… a gift? A gift? How could he be a gift, unless the Qar ate humans? She sent me to… Saqri, he remembered, that was the name. Someone of importance and power named Saqri, who had been sleeping but would awaken soon into a world that had moved far¬ther into defeat. Whatever that might mean. Like any dream, it had begun to fade. Except for the fairy-woman's eyes, her predatory eyes, watchful and knowing, bright as a hunting hawk's, but with ageless depths-what he might have imagined the eyes of a goddess to look like, when he had still believed in such things.