She blushed and tugged thoughtlessly at Luin's reins. The mare nickered and bowed her head in protest.

"This time was the most glorious of festivals," Mara said dreamily. "I remember his eyes-Cyren's, that is. He stepped from the coracle, steadied himself on the soft banks of the Thon-Thalas, and with scarcely a pause, he entered the Dance of Dreams, the fifth and greatest dance of the festival evening. You could tell by his dancing that he was highborn Qualinesti, but I studied his eyes as the cellos sounded. Brown they were, and as deep as the woods, his gaze so direct you would think that he never closed his eyes, never even blinked when he stared into the midday sun. Though I have seen them only three times since, I remember them as clearly as I do the lights in the forest or the tilting stars of Mishakal-the stars that I watched for months, waiting for the one night in five years…"

Sturm winced. The road to the Darkwoods looked longer and longer as Mara spoke.

"But enough of that," Mara declared. "You asked how we came to last night and this pass."

Sturm shifted the bundle again. The eggs of spiders? Rocks? Houses? What was bound in the blankets and leaves and webbing?

"Immediately Lord Cyren took a liking to me," Mara said. "He paid court with his eyes in the altering light, in the song of the harp and the deep cello. But I was a servingmaid, my family a trophy of war. And though Cyren was handsome, I set aside thoughts of those eyes and those songs, for ours was a match too farfetched to imagine. And more than that, he was a strange and exotic one-almost without history, he was, from the far reaches of the forest, and of his many cousins, none had met him and few had heard of him."

She traveled on in silence, and it was a while before she spoke again.

"Notes he sent me in the days that followed-notes borne on small leaf-boats such as a child makes as a plaything. He floated his messages downstream on the slow-moving Thon-Thalas as I stood in the current, thigh-deep in water, washing the clothing of my mistress. His words would scorn and tease and inveigle, luring me away with him.

"There was a bridge, wrote Cyren, at the westernmost edge of the forest. If I were to consent to go away with him, I should meet him at the bridge by moonlight, and we would ride away together out of Silvanesti, over the Plains of Dust to a land where Kagonesti and Silvanesti are indistinguishable, where folk couldn't tell High Elf from Wild Elf."

"There are such lands," Sturm offered. "I do believe Solamnia is one of them."

"Even the Knights can tell elf from spider," Mara retorted bitterly. "But that comes later in the story.

"Let it be said now that Cyren Calamon of the House Royal sent his green fleet down the Thon-Thalas daily, and each night I would return to my mistress's tower, leaving his notes unanswered. It is improper for a maiden to be so… forward. He persisted and persisted, until I knew that, had his intentions been dishonorable, he would have left off long ago. It was then I consented to meet with him-not at his bridge where the wood ended and the lands beyond our borders beckoned in freedom and wildness, but at a safer place, at the ferry west of Silvanost. It was a place out of sight from the marble fastness of the great encampment, where King Lorac and his daughter Alhana live in the Tower of Stars, and yet it was a place less… venturesome and hidden than the ones my new friend proposed to me.

"We were foolish in our eagerness. Though our meetings were cautious, even proper, someone saw and someone disapproved. Perhaps," she added ominously, "someone was jealous. And someone spread the story of our tryst through the House Royal. My duties were changed, the quarters of my mistress moved to the high chambers of the Tower of Stars. 'Twas an honor for her-an emptyheaded little fluff who thought her stature raised with her altitude, never quite aware that her newfound position at court had anything to do with her servantry. But it was torment for me.

"So we suffered the months, both of us lonely, both of us yearning for escape and reunion, for a midnight flight to a place where lineage and ancestry mattered not at all."

"There is no such place!" Sturm exclaimed, then fell silent immediately, surprised at his vehemence. Mara didn't seem to notice, her mind on the rest of her story.

'The tale turns even darker here, Solamnic. For Cyren was barred from the Tower, and the high windows were beyond his reach unless he had the wings of a bird or could climb…"

"Like a spider?" Sturm asked.

"Like a spider indeed," Mara said with a nod. "You see the plan, do you not? Well, know it for what it was-a foolhardy risk. As it has done for thousands of years, love sent the unwise heart to sorcerers. To Master Calotte went Cyren, in the darkest part of the forest, where Waylorn's Tower lies gray and windowless, its shadow mingling with the shades of willow and aspen until all light, whether moon or sun, is blocked by leaf and branch and turret. They say the butterflies are black there, and that the squirrels have gone blind because it is so dark that they steer by smell and hearing alone, their eyes grown useless through the generations."

Sturm hid a smile. It sounded fanciful to him, this dark place of the mage. But he listened as Mara unfolded the sad end of the story.

Under the guise of helpfulness, it seems, Master Calotte had hidden his own passion for Mara. An old elf, and to hear the girl tell it, unspeakably hideous, he held no more hope of winning her than she had in the sincerity of Cyren's courtship. Nor would enchantment avail for old Calotte, for the House of Mystics had ways to tell when a creature was charmed or drawn or otherwise magicked, and the Silvanesti refused to honor a conjured marriage. But all things seemed possible if the old mage were crafty and circumspect.

"It was simple," Mara explained angrily as she and Sturm settled for the afternoon on a rocky knoll in the midst of the grasslands. "Simple to fool a trusting Cyren, who came to him in desperation. Simple, when someone is ready and willing, to transform him into any creature the mind can fancy or memory bring forth. Simple for Cyren it was to clamber up the side of the Tower of Stars, to the window where I sat waiting."

Mara smiled, stretching her legs on the hard ground. Sturm stood above her, staring out over the Solamnic plains, where deep in the eastern distances, he thought he saw the haze and shimmer of water. Were they near the Vingaard, or were these the mirages travelers reported from Thelgaard Keep to the City of Lost Names?

"I was startled at first. If a spider twice your size perched on your windowsill, gibbering and beckoning you outside, you would be cautious, too."

Sturm nodded. "Cautious" hadn't been the word that occurred to him.

"But quickly Cyren made it known to me that he was no ordinary spider, but my true love transformed."

"How did he do that?" Sturm asked with a muffled smile, imagining the creature serenading in its shrill, inhuman voice, or weaving Mara's name into the strands of its web.

"Spun a ladder of sorts, he did. A scaffolding web, the druids call it, for upon it, the creatures raise web from tree to tree, the intricate spokes and spirals that draw down their quarry from the air. But it was only a ladder, this scaffolding. It dropped down the side of the tower sixty, seventy feet, from my window down into the dark of the branches below it.

"By Branchala, I was frightened!" she laughed. "The moons were dark that night, so I could descend unseen, but it made me unseeing as well. Set one foot below the next as if I was wading into vipers, I did, but the next thing I know, my feet touch the grass of the forest floor and Cyren is rushing west toward Waylorn's Tower, and stopping, and turning about, and spinning a strand of web behind him that I take up and follow like… like your mare following the rein.