A chill crept up Sir Chance Headsman’s spine, the kind that warns a man that he is about to fall.

In the next week snow fell often, but no one believed this was a last assault of winter for the sun shone brightly and warm between the gray times, and snow didn’t last long on the roads or in the clear places. The songs of birds changed from winter-weary dirges to brighter airs. Spring came behind the snow, the changing scent of the breezes said so, and Kerian began to think of her brother. She hadn’t seen him or heard word of Ayen-sha or even Bueren Rose since they’d left the outlaw camp long ago. The time had come to go and speak with Dar, to let him know that some things had changed in the kingdom and with her. She would ask him to consider a request of hers, a bold demand made in behalf of a bold plan, but first, something else had to be done and said.

“Jeratt,” she said, sitting back on her heels, “I’m going to take a small trip.”

He sat closer to the fire, so the light sent shadows curling around him from behind. She couldn’t read his expression, but she knew him now, and well. This was news to him.

“I must see the king,” she said.

He sat silent.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, Jeratt.”

He shook his head. “No. You tell me if you’re coming back.”

“I’m coming hack.”

Simply, he said, “Then you don’t need to know what I’m thinking.”

Wind soughed around the top of the rocky howl. Camp-fires glowed pale in the thin winter sunlight. Elder slept near the hottest, highest one, and when Kerian looked at her an image ran though her mind-no, behind her eyes- of a huge misshapen beast running. Ice crackled up her spine, and her heart lurched as it did before battle. Voices and the rattle of stone distracted her. She wrenched her gaze away from Elder and saw two hunters coming down the stony slope, one with a small roe deer over his shoulder, another with a brace of quail and one of hares on his hip. She looked behind her and saw Briar going to relieve the watch at the entrance to the falls.

Jeratt said drily, “Give the king my regards.”

She laughed, but the image of a loping beast still haunted her eyes, and her laughter sounded shaky in her own ears. “I’ll see you at the rising of the moon. Here.”

Two weeks. He nodded and reached out a hand. She took it in the hard warrior’s clasp, and she got up and pulled together a kit for traveling-thick woolen trews, a woolen shirt and fine boots looted from a young Knight. Then she went into the forest. Ear to the ground, nose to the wind, she learned of the whereabouts of her lover before she came within sight of Qualinost. He and a contingent of servants, his lady mother, and a covey of senators had removed to his forest lodge, Wide Spreading, for two weeks of hunting. It was there she found Gilthas, and she did so by slipping past his nominal guard, his servants, his mother and her people, and into his bedchamber by starlight.

Kerian stood in the center of a bright square of starlight, silver shafting down from a high window in the ceiling of the royal bedchamber at Wide Spreading. The waking breath of one who had been deep asleep came softly. When the king’s eyes opened and he saw her, he did not start.

“Kerian.” Gilthas sat. “I dreamed of you coming here. I dreamed I heard your footsteps.”

“You didn’t dream, my lord king.”

He opened his arms in invitation, Kerian covered the distance between his window and his bed with swift strides.

“Kerian,” he said, whispering against the tangled gold of her hair. “Kerian, is it really you?”

“You dreamed,” she said, almost laughing. “Now you doubt?”

As though to answer, the king wrapped her up in his arms. He smelled of soap, and clothing taken from scented drawers, and closets hung with sachets of shaved sandal-wood. He shone, a king well tended, and held her as though the marks she left upon his faultless bed clothing- soot and grime and sweat stains-were not more than the faintest imprint of a perfumed body.

“Come,” Gilthas said shortly, slipping out of bed. His night robe moved in silken grace around his body. “You look hungry, love, and thirsty. I’ll find you something-”

Kerian shook her head, a gesture used to still men and women lately grown accustomed to heeding her. The brusque gesture surprised him, and she did not apologize.

“My lord king, I’m feeling suddenly in need of a bath.”

He laughed, quietly for the sake of this secret arrival. “All this way for a bath? Well, then, let it be. I will summon Planchet. He will see that you have one and all else you wish. Sit. Here on the bed. It will be brought.”

There were kettles of steaming water to warm the marble tub kept in the bathing apartment off the bedchamber. With starlight glittering in through wide, tall windows, Kerian bathed long, and later she showed her king how much she had missed him. Afterward, by fading starlight, in her lover’s arms, she looked carefully at him, his face in repose, and she touched the downy cheek inherited from tiie mysterious human who had fathered his own father, Tanis Half-Elven. He stirred to her touch, and she hushed him.

“I’m sorry to have waked you.”

“I’m not sorry you did,” the king said.

He reached for her, but she stopped him, a hand on his chest. “You think I have come home.”

The bluntness of her statement startled him. Gilthas nodded.

“I haven’t. You said I couldn’t, my king. You said if I went away, I could not come home again. I went, and I have been to many places and done …many things I never thought I could or would. You were right: I am back now but not home. Let me tell you, love, how it has been with me.”

She spoke past his doubts, she told the tale of her outlawry, of the first killing at the Hare and Hound, of the burning of the Waycross. She told of finding her brother and losing him. She did not-and this surprised her- speak of Elder, but she spoke well of the half-elf Jeratt, of his band of outlaws and young Ander whose silence on her behalf had made him one of them. She told the king of the elves of the dales, of Felan and his widowed wife, the child orphaned before it was born. She told him all this and more.

“We are outlaws all, my love, and yet, in truth, we should stop calling ourselves that. We must stop naming ourselves outlaws, for though others say so, we are not. We are more.”

Gilthas sat forward, eager to hear what caught his imagination.

“We are some of us outlawed.” Her smile twisted wryly. “All the gone gods know that I am, but many of us are Kagonesti, shunned for being who they are. Others are old soldiers, Gil, forgotten warriors of Silvanesti and of your own kingdom, who once served your Uncle Por-thios.”

Outside his chamber, Planchet spoke with a servant, and they heard footfalls come near and retreat as though a message had been given and sped.

“My lord king,” she said, pride shining in her voice, “we are the ones who through the summer and autumn harried Lord Thagol’s force of Knights in the western part of your kingdom, and we have fought not as brigands and outlaws. We have fought as warriors.”

Planchet had long ago taken away her worn clothing to be washed and mended, but he had not touched her weapons, her bow and quiver, the dagger and the sword she had taken from a Knight after she’d killed him. She now slipped the blade from its sheath. The steel gleamed in the moonlight, sliver running on the edges.

“This sword, my king, I have brought you. This, and the fealty of my heart and the loyalty of men and women who have not forgotten the days when they were free.”

His eyes shone, his poet’s soul leaped with fire as he took her meaning. Outside the window, the sky grayed with the coming day. Gilthas let his glance dwell there for a time, and then, his kindling glance darkened.