"Yes," he said. "I can fix this sword, m'lady, and would gladly do so."

"Thank you," Mara said quietly. Now she had to figure how to get the blade to the prisoner. With a quick bow, she backed from the room, turned and raced back toward the stable. Among the contents of her bundle, wrapped and placed upon Sturm's back for most of their journey, she had hidden a bow and arrows.

The pack lay open over two bales of hay. For the life of her, Mara could have sworn that it had been tightly bound and gathered when she had taken the sword from the stable. But the building was dark, and her duties had been rushed and urgent. No doubt she remembered cloudily, if she really remembered at all.

Whatever the case, it was open now. Spilling into the faint moonlight were her belongings: a bronze harp and three penny whistles, two robes and a pouch wherein lay her childhood collection of shells, Cyren's brooch, his ring with the green dragon seal of Family Calamon…

The bow was nowhere to be found. She knelt above the blanket, above her treasures and the baled hay, a rising uneasiness plaguing her thoughts.

"Is this what you're looking for, m'lady?" a rough voice asked from behind her.

Mara wheeled about. Captain Duir stood over her, holding her bow and the quiver of arrows. Beside the captain stood the enormous Guardsman Oron, a dim look of disappointment on his face.

"Oh, we are sorry to have found this arsenal," the captain proclaimed with a crooked smile. "And we are even more sorry that, bearing the trust and goodwill of the Druidess Ragnell, you have come back to retrieve your weapons. I suppose that your next intention was… to depart?"

"No," Mara replied, and the captain's eyes narrowed.

"Well… if you intended to bear arms in our gentle village, then to what purpose?"

"I… I…" Mara began, but she knew that Duir had trapped her.

"I see no choice," the captain said slowly, as Oron walked toward her, his big hand extended, "but to prepare your quarters as well in the roundhouse. The freedom of Dun Ringhill was a privilege gladly granted by herself, but you have shown to be more Solamnic than Kagonesti."

They escorted her by the smithy. Weyland filled the doorway, blocking the light of the forge behind him. He watched them take her back toward the green, toward the roundhouse and the cell beside that of the captured Solamnic.

Weyland shook his head, his thoughts opaque and distant. Then he turned to the forge, closing the door behind him, but not before he picked up the long blade lying on his bench, shining silver and red by the light of the fire.

Had he not been working the bellows, he might have heard yet another party pass as the night turned and the village folk retired to their circular huts and beds of straw. For outside the smithy, something scurried by, stepping lightly and carefully through a nearby alley, whirring softly like a cricket. Yet somewhere within its strange, inhuman language lay human words and human fears and mourning.

For three days, Sturm sat alone in his vaulted cell.

The cubicle in which they placed him was little more than a windowless stall. Its side walls were flush with the ceiling, which sloped to the back of the room, where an old straw mattress lay. The front wall was a dozen feet high, over which he could see only ceiling and the gaping hole above the building's central fire. By night, an occasional star shone through the opening, and very early one morning, Sturm thought he saw the silver edge of Solinari at its border. For the most part, the opening was featureless, though, like the walls that surrounded him, gated and guarded by a pair of burly militiamen.

The soldiers spoke only Lemish and regarded their Solamnic captive with suspicion. Twice daily one of them would stick his head in the door, shove a dirty clay bowl at Sturm, then shut the door rapidly, leaving him alone with his porridge and his thoughts.

The whole Jack Derry business troubled him no end. It seemed passing strange that none of the village folk, from the druidess herself down to the cell guards, knew aught of the gardener.

More urgent than this was the question of Mara. Sturm assumed she was safe, but at night, once or twice, he thought he heard her voice from somewhere nearby. On the second night, he could have sworn he heard a thin, plaintive flute song rising from the room adjoining his.

On the third night of his captivity, he heard once more the sound of the flute. Then, as once before on the plains, he heard the old elven hymn, and clearly and mournfully the words filled the air of the lodge, riding the smoke out into the spangled night.

Sturm closed his eyes and listened deeply, his thoughts and senses free from all distraction. Mara had spoken of the song concealed in the silences, of the magic wrought by the white mode hidden from most ears. Could some message lie beneath the words she was singing?

He listened long and hard to the sounds and the silences and to the rests between verses. But he could uncover nothing in the quiet. "Nothing," he murmured, and he turned on his mattress of straw. "Only wishful thinking and elven poetry."

As the night progressed, the melody slipped to the back of his thoughts. A third time, in the small hours of the morning when he hovered in that strange, expectant state between sleep and waking, he heard Mara begin the song again.

And on the third time, he heard something: wishful thinking, perhaps, or poetry, but something nonetheless that crept into the last verses of the song.