When he made his reply, Toikella looked not at Korinaam but at Harpirias, and his response was brief and sardonic in tone, edged with unmistakable ferocity:

"I give you my thanks. I am grateful for your mercy."

Harpirias had no difficulty in understanding the king’s words, or the meaning that they carried beneath their surface. Toikella fully recognized that his power would continue only by sufferance of the lords of Majipoor; and that was not an easy thing for him to accept.

Still Harpirias felt the need to offer some expression of sympathy and reassurance.

"Your majesty— my good royal friend—"

Toikella replied with a growl. "Go, now. Go, leave this room, leave this land. And may none of you ever return to this place — you, or any of your kind."

Korinaam volunteered a translation. But Harpirias waved him to silence. He had no doubt of the meaning of what the king had said.

Harpirias held out his hand to him. Toikella peered at it as though it were a soiled thing. An icy aura of offended royal dignity, as chilly as the darkest day of the Othinor winter, emanated from him.

"We are not afraid," Toikella said loftily. "Let the empire do its worst — we will be ready. Even if you send an army of two hundred men against us! Three hundred!"

There was nothing Harpirias could say in return. Best to leave things as they were, he thought. Toikella’s pride, at least, was still intact. And perhaps the wounds of this visit would heal after a while, and in his old age he would boast of how he had forced the Coronal of Majipoor to come crawling to him once upon a time to gain the release of his explorers, and how he had extracted from the Coronal a child of royal blood in payment for the hostages he had taken.

So be it, Harpirias thought. Korinaam had been right after all: nothing would have been gained by forcing the truth down Toikella’s throat, and much would have been lost.

He bade the king a formal farewell, which Toikella received stonily, with great hauteur; and then he turned to Ivla Yevikenik for one last fond and weepy moment with his Othinor princess. But what could he say to her? What, indeed, could he say? For all his Castle Mount eloquence, nothing came to him now. She stared solemnly at him; he smiled; she managed a smile of sorts as well; her tears glistened; she blotted them with the back of her hand. He could not kiss her goodbye. Kissing was not the custom here. In the end Harpirias took her hand and held it a time, and let it go. She took his, and put it lightly to her belly, and kept it captive there for a moment, resting on her, as though to let him feel the new life that was quickening there. Then she released him and turned away. Harpirias gathered his troops and beckoned to the freed hostages to follow him, and went out of the feasting-hall.

From the look of the star-speckled darkness overhead, dawn was still some hours off. But it took the rest of the night to load the waiting floaters and make them ready for the homeward journey. The sky was already streaked with pink before all the final tasks were finished.

Harpirias stood for a moment just outside the high wall of stone that surrounded the hidden kingdom of the Othinor. Home, now! Home to the waiting warmth of civilized Majipoor — and, perhaps, the resurrection of his own interrupted career on Castle Mount. He had actually accomplished the task he had been sent here to do; more than that, he had had his great adventure and he had gained a lifetime’s worth of stories to tell, stories that the Coronal would listen to eagerly, and everyone else as well. And now home to tell those stones; home to a decent bath, and a dinner of real food, oysters and spiced fish and breast of sekkimaund or haunch of bilantoon, and the thick strong wine of Muldemar or the bright crimson wine of Bannikanniklole or the golden wine of Piliplok or the fine silvery-gray wine of Amblemorn, maybe all four in quick succession — with some clear-eyed beauty with high cheekbones and delicate brows as his companion for the night, yes, or — why not? — two or three -

But Harpirias knew that the land of the Othinor had imprinted itself upon his soul forever. Beyond any doubt he would dream time and again of the land of the Othinor, when finally he was home once more. Images of the ice-world would steal into his mind, and of King Toikella’s smoky banquet-hall, and of the jeering, capering Eililylal of the heights: that he knew. And the glossy-haired girl with a sliver of carved bone through her upper lip who had slipped into his room to keep him warm on so many frosty nights: she too would come to him in his sleep.

Yes. Yes. All that and much more: Harpirias was certain of that. He would never forget this place.

"Everything is stowed, prince," Eskenazo Marabaud called to him. "Sun’s about to come up. Shall we get going?"

"In a moment," Harpirias said.

He stepped back through the narrow wedge-shaped crack in the mountain wall that afforded the only access to King Toikella’s land. The ice-village gleamed faintly in the pearly light of dawn. Harpirias let his eyes rove the shining fanciful facades, the glittering icy filigrees.

A small figure was standing in front of the lodge where his quarters had been. At this distance, it was hard for him to see her clearly, but Harpirias could envision her well enough in the eye of his mind, a ragged smudgy figure in carelessly arrayed furs, a girl who perhaps was bearing his Othinor child. Waving to him, hesitantly at first, then more eagerly, a gesture of obvious love and longing.

He stared at her for a time. Then he waved back at her, and turned and walked away, passing through the crevice in the mountain wall and heading for his floater to begin his long journey home.