As Van came to strip off his armor and claim the blanket, Selatre stepped back to make sure they didn't bump even by accident. She looked away till he was settled. Then, instead of taking Gerin's blanket at once, she said, "Let me walk off into the woods for a moment first."

She didn't go far because of the ghosts (whose wails seemed to Gerin to get worse while she was away), and came back as fast as she'd promised, but Van was snoring by the time she returned. He'd said Selatre snored, too, but the Fox doubted she came anywhere close to the thunderous buzz he produced.

The former Sibyl wrapped herself in Gerin's blanket and wiggled around on the ground, trying to find a comfortable position. She kept squirming for some time, while Gerin walked back and forth waking up. Finally Selatre said, "I can't sleep right now."

"Nothing too out-of-the-way about that, I suppose, not when you lay in your bed through the day and the night and into the next day again," Gerin said.

"I can still hardly believe that." Selatre looked up into the sky. After a moment, Gerin realized she was studying the moons. When she spoke again, her voice held wonder: "Tiwaz is closer to Math than he should be, and has sped farther past golden Nothos. What you say there must be so, which argues for the truth of the rest of your tale."

"Lady, I told you no lies, nor did Van." The Fox was nettled; here he'd risked his life to save her, and she still wondered if he was nothing more than a kidnapper? That irritation came out in the sneer with which he said, "I trust you don't find yourself polluted by mere talk with a man?"

She flinched as if he'd slapped her. "By no means," she answered tonelessly. "However—" She turned her back on him and started to wrap his blanket around her once more.

"I'm sorry," he said, scraping a shallow trench in the ground with the hobnailed sole of his sandal. "I shouldn't have said that. Talk all you care to; I'll listen."

He wondered if she'd pay any attention to him; he would not have blamed her for ignoring him after that gibe. But, slowly, she turned back to him, eyeing him with the same grave attention she'd given the moon not long before. "You will forgive me when I say that (knowing little of men in general and barons in particular) you strike me as unusual?" she asked.

His laugh held little mirth. "Since everyone in the northlands says as much, why should you be any different?"

"I meant no insult," Selatre said. "The word of you that came to Ikos after Biton laid his hand on me and made me Sibyl held no reproach: indeed, you were on the whole well thought of for trying to hold to the standards of the Empire of Elabon even after Elabon abandoned the northlands."

"Nice to know someone somewhere had some notion of what I was about," Gerin said. "More than my vassals do, I think." With a deliberate effort of will, he forced his thoughts from that gloomy track and changed the subject: "How did it happen that Biton chose you through whom to speak?"

"I'd known he might since I became a woman," Selatre answered. "For though I was normal in every other way, my courses never began, which is a sign of the farseeing one's notice in the villages round his shrine. But Biton's mouth on earth had served him so long I never dreamt he might one day call her to himself at last—or that his eye would fall on me to take her place."

"How did you know you were the one he wanted?" Gerin asked.

"He came to me in a dream." Selatre's eyes went far away, looking through the Fox rather than at him. Slowly, she continued, "It was the realest dream, the most lifelike, you can imagine. The god—touched me. I may say no more. I've never felt anything like that dream for realness, save, very much the opposite way, with horror rather than delight, the evil dreams I've had of late."

Gerin nodded. "I've had those myself. They're worse than any I've known before, that's the truth." He wondered if she experienced them even more vividly because of her intimate contact with Biton and things of the spirit generally. Not knowing any way to find an answer to that, he chose a different question: "Did you go and proclaim yourself at the temple, then?"

"No. I would have, but the very next day the priests came to my village instead. Biton had sent some of them dreams of me, and they sought me out."

"Ah," the Fox said. Had the dream come to Selatre alone, he might have thought it sprang from her imagination, but if the priests also knew the farseeing god had chosen her to succeed the ancient Sibyl, not much room was left to doubt Biton had sent it.

Endlessly curious, the Fox found a chance to put a question he'd never expected to be able to ask: "What is it like when Biton speaks through you? What do you feel or think or whatever the word is?"

"It's not—like—anything else I know," Selatre answered. "When the mantic fit takes hold of me, of course, I know nothing at all; I always have to ask the priest, if one is there with me, what my response was. But while the god's power is coming over me, before he takes me fully—" She didn't go on, not with words, but she shivered, and her eyes were full of longing. At last she added, "And now no more, never again. No more."

Her voice wept. Suddenly Gerin believed in his belly that she would sooner have died than be rescued at the cost of losing that link with Biton; it struck him as almost like losing a lover or a husband. But with the temple cast down and monsters loose on the northlands, the link was surely lost anyhow. Had he not believed that, he would have drowned in guilt.

Maybe Selatre conceded the point, however reluctantly, for she said, "And now that it is to be no more, what, lord Gerin, do you see life holding for me at Fox Keep? What would you have me do?"

Gerin had his mouth open to reply before he realized he had no idea what to say. What place had he, had the keep, for Biton's former Sibyl? Serving woman, apt to be pawed by his vassals and his guests? Could she return to peasant life after time spent with the god? He doubted it.

And then, just as he was about to confess ignorance, inspiration struck. "Do you have your letters?" he asked.

"No—Biton spoke to me direct, not through scribblings," she answered. "But I always thought I might like to learn."

"I'd be glad to teach you," he said. "One of the things that goes into keeping up the standards of the Empire of Elabon, as you called it, is having a grasp of time and place that goes farther than what you—or I, or anyone—can keep in your head. The more people who read and write, the more who can get that wide knowledge civilization needs. I teach as many folk as I can."

"As may be," Selatre said. "But what has it to do with whatever my life at Castle Fox would become?"

"I have a fair store of books at the keep," Gerin answered. "Oh, any bibliophile south of the Kirs would laugh himself silly to hear it called such, but I do have several dozen scrolls and codices, and I get new ones—old ones other folk don't care about, most of the time—now and again. I had in mind for you, if you think it would suit, to take charge of them, learn what's in them and where it can be found, make new copies as they're needed or if someone asks for such: not likely, I admit, in the state the northlands are in, but stranger things have happened. What say you?"

She was silent a long time, so long he began to fear he'd somehow insulted her after all, even if he'd just intended to find her a place where she could be useful and one that might keep her from some of what she would surely see as indignities. Then, at last, she said, "I am not ashamed to tell you I must apologize, lord Gerin."

"Why?" he asked, startled. "For what?"

"In spite of everything you've said, you have to understand I had trouble fully crediting your reasons for snatching me from Ikos," she answered. "Once you had me back at Fox Keep, who could guess what you might do with me? In truth, I could guess, and my guesses frightened me." Her laugh came shaky, but it was a laugh. "And instead of putting me in your bed, you'd put me in your library. Do you wonder that I needed a moment before I found a way to answer you?"