The shadows over the red lake were lengthening now as the sun proceeded on in its journey toward Zimroel. Restlessness began to grow in Furvain with the coming of the day’s end. Eventually a servant appeared, an expressionless puffy-faced Hjort with great staring batrachian eyes, who set before him a tray of food and departed without saying a word. Furvain inspected his meal: a flask of pink wine, a plate of some pallid soft meat, a bowl filled with what looked like unopened flower buds. Simple fare for rustic folk, he thought. But the wine was supple and pleasant, the meat was tender and bathed in a subtle aromatic sauce, and the flower buds, if that was what they were, released an agreeable sweetness when he bit into them, and left an interesting subtaste of sharp spiciness behind.

Not long after he was done, the door opened again and a small, almost elfin man of about fifty, gray-eyed and thin-lipped, garbed in a green leather jerkin and yellow tights, came in. From his swagger and stance it was plain that he was a person of consequence. He affected a clipped mustache and a short, pointed beard and wore his long hair, which was a deep black liberally streaked with strands of white, pulled tightly back and knotted behind. There was a look of slyness about him, of a playful slipperiness, that Furvain found pleasing and appealing.

“I am Kasinibon,” he announced. His voice was soft and light but had the ring of authority to it nevertheless. “I apologize for any deficiencies in our hospitality thus far.”

“I have noticed none,” said Furvain coolly. “Thus far.”

“But surely you must be accustomed to finer fare than I’m able to offer here. My men tell me you are the son of Lord Sangamor.” Kasinibon offered Furvain a quick cool flicker of a smile, but nothing that could be interpreted as any sort of gesture of respect, let alone obeisance. “Or did they misunderstand something you said?”

“There was no misunderstanding. I’m indeed one of Sangamor’s sons. The youngest one. I am called Aithin Furvain. If you’d like to see my papers—”

“That’s scarcely necessary. Your bearing alone reveals you for whom and what you are.”

“And if I may ask—” Furvain began.

But Kasinibon spoke right over Furvain’s words, doing it so smoothly that it seemed almost not to be discourteous. “Do you, then, have an important role in His Majesty’s government?”

“I have no role at all. You are aware, I think, that high office is never awarded on the basis of one’s ancestry. A Coronal’s sons do the best they can for themselves, but nothing is guaranteed to them. As I was growing up I discovered that my brothers had already taken advantage of most of the available opportunities. I live on my pension. A modest one,” Furvain added, because it was beginning to occur to him that Kasinibon might have a ransom in mind.

“You hold no official post whatever, is that what you’re saying?”

“None.”

“What is it that you do, then? Nothing?”

“Nothing that could be considered work, I suppose. I spend my days as companion to my friend, the Duke of Dundilmir. My role is to provide amusement for the Duke and his court circle. I have a certain minor gift for poetry.”

“Poetry!” Kasinibon exclaimed. “You are a poet? How splendid!” A new light came into his eyes, a look of eager interest that had the unexpected effect of transforming his features in such a way as to strip him of all his slyness for a moment, leaving him looking strangely youthful and vulnerable. “Poetry is my great passion,” Kasinibon said, in an almost confessional tone. “My comfort and my joy, living out here as I do on the edge of nowhere, so far from civilized pursuits. Tuminok Laskil! Vornifon! Dammiunde! Do you know how much of their work I’ve committed to memory?” And he struck a schoolboy pose and began to recite something of Dammiunde’s, one of his most turgid pieces, a deadly earnest piece of romantic fustian about star-crossed lovers that Furvain, even as a boy, had always found wildly ludicrous. He struggled now to maintain a straight face as Kasinibon quoted an extract from one of its most preposterous sequences, the wild chase through the swamps of Kajith Kabulon. Perhaps Kasinibon came to suspect, in time, that his guest did not have the highest respect for Dammiunde’s famous work, because a glow of embarrassment spread across his cheeks, and he broke the recitation off abruptly, saying, “A little old-fashioned, perhaps. But I’ve loved it since my boyhood.”

“It’s not one of my favorites,” Furvain conceded. “But Tuminok Laskil, now—”

“Ah, yes. Tuminok Laskil!” At once Kasinibon treated Furvain to one of Laskil’s soppiest lyrics, a work of the Ni-moyan poet’s extreme youth for which Furvain could not even pretend to hide his contempt, and then, reddening once again and again leaving the poem unfinished, switched hastily to a much later verse, the third of the dark Sonnets of Reconciliation, which he spoke with surprising eloquence and depth of emotion. Furvain knew the poem well and cherished it, and recited it silently along with Kasinibon to the finish, and found himself unexpectedly moved at the end, not only by the poem itself but by the force of Kasinibon’s admiration for it and the deftness of his reading.

“That one is much more to my taste than the first two,” said Furvain after a moment, feeling that something had to be said to break the awkward stillness that the poem’s beauty had created in the room.

Kasinibon seemed pleased. “I see: You prefer the deeper, more somber work, is that it? Perhaps those first two misled you, then. Let me not do that: please understand that for me as it is for you, late Laskil is much to be preferred. I won’t deny that I have a hearty appreciation for plenty of simple stuff, but I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I turn to poetry for wisdom, for consolation, for instruction, even, far more often than I do for light entertainment. — Your own work, I take it, is of the serious kind? A man of your obvious intelligence must be well worth reading. How strange that I don’t know your name.”

“I said I had a minor gift,” Furvain replied, “and minor is what it is, and my verse as well. Light entertainment is the best I can do. And I’ve published none of it. My friends think that I should, but such trifling pieces as I produce hardly seem worth the trouble.”

“Would you favor me by quoting one?”

This seemed entirely absurd, to be standing here discussing the art of poetry with a bandit chieftain whose minions had seized him without warrant and who now had locked him up in this grim frontier fortress, for what Furvain just now was beginning to suspect might be an extended imprisonment. And at the moment nothing would come to mind, anyway, except some of his silliest piffle, the trivial lyrics of a trivial-minded courtier. He could not bear, suddenly, to reveal himself to this strange man as the empty, dissolute spinner of idle verse that he knew he was. And so he begged off, claiming that the fatigue of his day’s adventures had left him too weary to be able to do a proper recitation.

“Tomorrow, then, I hope,” Kasinibon said. “And it would give me much pleasure not only if you would allow me to hear some of your finest work, but also for you to compose some memorable new poems during your stay under my roof.”

“Ah,” said Furvain. He gave Kasinibon a long, piercing look. “And just how long, do you think, is that stay likely to be?”

“That will depend,” Kasinibon said, and the slippery glint of slyness, not so pleasing now, was back in his eyes, “on the generosity of your family and friends. But we can talk more about that tomorrow, Prince Aithin.” Then he gestured toward the window. Moonlight now glittered on the breast of the scarlet lake, carving a long ruby track running off toward the east. “That view, Prince Aithin: it certainly must be inspiring to a man of your poetic nature.” Furvain did not reply. Kasinibon, undeterred, spoke briefly of the origin of the lake, the multitude of small organisms whose decaying shells had given it its extraordinary color, like any proud host explaining a famed local wonder to an interested guest. But Furvain had little interest, just now, in the beauty of the lake or the role its inhabitants had played in its appearance.