"Not the last cruelty, dear Mara, but the last save one. For you see, I am not myself but an enchantment cast over the creature who traveled with you these three years in its natural, accustomed form.

"I was a spider by nature, Mara, a spider at my birth and destined to die a spider, I suppose. But there have been… two brief times of otherness: one in Qualinost, three years back, and the other…

"The other is now."

Dumbstruck, Mara rested her head against the bole of the tree. The clearing reeled about her, and she struggled for her senses. Meanwhile, the elf-the spider-in her arms continued, a pitiful account of how the sorcerer Calotte had drawn him from his web in the height of a thick, black-leaved oak and imprisoned him until a time when he could work his terrible magic.

"For you see," Cyren explained, his breathing more shallow, his hair matted and dull, "the enchanter gave me this form to draw you to him. He thought that you would… surrender to him to free me, and then… well, then I should be a spider, and you…"

"Left with the sorcerer Calotte as husband, or cast from the people forever, to make my way alone and unfriended in wilderness and desolation" Mara concluded weakly, recalling the rigid words of Qualinesti law that enforced the proper behavior of maidens. "But why enchant a spider into you? Why not… make himself handsome, so that despite his rotten heart, a maiden's eye might… incline his way?"

"He wanted you, Mara. And he wanted you to come to the ancient, ugly Calotte, knowing full well the creature who stood before you."

"It was a plan spawned in the Abyss!" Mara muttered, her grief turning slowly to anger.

"And yet… it brought me a world of light and connection, no longer ending at the edge of the web, and for a while, days and time and seasons and words sprang into being."

Cyren smiled to think of it, but his eyes seemed to focus on a distant point. His voice grew faint and the words faltered.

Cyren looked at her with surpassing tenderness, and for a moment, the elf maiden recalled the green boats and messages along the River Thon-Thalas.

"Does… does it hurt very much, Cyren?" she asked, meeting his golden gaze. And she held him there as that gaze became glassy and distant, as his almond eyes became round, lidless, and segmented, as he died into the shape he knew best, and she was left in the shadowy clearing holding a crumpled spider, her thoughts halfway between wonderment and sorrow.

The two of them sat on horseback overlooking the Vingaard Ford.

Eight miles south of Vingaard Keep, the ford was the most common passage from the west of Solamnia to the east. The old caravan routes crossed the river at these rocky shallows, and in the oldest Solamnic instructions of geography and survival, it was said that all paths to the mountains, to the castles and towers that guarded the ancient region, passed over the river at this time-honored point.

It was a dated teaching. There were a dozen fords along the Vingaard, some of them veiled, some forbidden by the Measure for reasons lost deep in the Age of Might. Nonetheless, commerce from Kalaman, Nordmaar, and Sanction still crossed the river at the Vingaard Ford, where sharp eyes at the keep stood vigil against bandits and darker things.

They must have blinked, those sharp eyes, or the climbing fog off the river and the special darkness of this moonless night must have obscured all view from the towers of the keep, for the two rode unnoticed down to the banks of the ford, the hooves of their horses wrapped in cloth and muffled.

The smaller of the men leaned forward in the saddle and sneezed, unaccustomed to the long riding and the moist night air.

"Hist!" the taller one warned, reaching for the reins of his companion's horse. "You'll call down a rain of arrows with that racket, Derek Crownguard!"

"I don't understand this, sir," Derek whispered. "Veiled missions far to the east in the middle of a cold night, the servants sworn to silence at our departure, and you've threatened me from the Wings of Habbakuk to this very spot as if we were bound for battle."

"Which we may be," Boniface replied, pushing back his hood. "Which we may be, beyond what you have reckoned."

He was more pale, more furtive than Derek had seen him before, his small eyes haunted and calculating.

It will serve me better not to argue with him, the boy thought, but he kept at it nonetheless.

"You said yourself that he was in the Darkwoods, Uncle. Rotting in a druid prison, you said. That when they tired of keeping him-"

"I know what I said!" Boniface snapped. He rose in the saddle and leaned forward, his breath hot with wine and something animal and fearful.

"But that is not enough, Derek!" he whispered. "We must be safe beyond my imagining. If he were to escape, by wildest circumstance or through some hidden skill it has taken him years and terrible danger to show… why, the roads must be ready for him."

"This road was made ready a fortnight back," Derek protested, knowing his words went unheard.

Boniface pushed back his hair nervously.

"But a fortnight is a year in the memories of… of those we employ," Boniface explained, his voice high, a little too loud.

Derek frowned and leaned away from him, combing the mist for signs of the mercenaries. It had been like this since midmorning, when Boniface had cornered him in the stables.

"Ready two horses," the Knight had growled, his eyes cold and haunted, his grip tightening on the lad's shoulder.

"As… as you wish, sir," Derek had replied, fumbling at once with the tack. He saddled the horses in silence, knowing by instinct that none of his questions would be answered until they were well on the road to whatever destination figured in Boniface's fevered strategies.

The gates of the tower had closed behind them and they were well into the Virkhus Hills before Lord Boniface revealed that destination. Even then, only "Vingaard Ford" had passed his lips. The rest were calls and urgings and cursings as they rode the horses briskly over the plains, through the drowned grass and the unseasonably cold air as mist rose off the flanks of the horses and the tower dipped from sight among the mountains.

Derek shivered. Spring was indeed a long way off, regardless of the calendar and the appointed turn of the season. He would have passed from unkind thoughts to grumbling had he not seen movement by the riverbank, a slight shifting of the shadows.

"Over there, sir!" he whispered, pointing to where the shadows parted from the deep fog about the river. Three squat forms approached them, hooded and crouched, gliding up the banks quickly like gnarled, stunted wraiths.

Boniface breathed deeply. By instinct, his hand moved to the hilt of his sword as the horse twitched nervously under him.

I don't like this, Derek thought, alert for more of them in the tangling mist.

Boniface raised his hand, and one of those approaching-the tallest one, the one in the middle-raised his in response. The other two hung back a moment, half lost in the thickest part of the river fog.

"Lord Grimbane, is it?" the approaching one asked. There was something dry in the voice that hinted at centuries of stone and heat. It seemed out of place in these surroundings, and Derek recoiled from it by instinct, wrestling with the reins to keep his panicking horse from galloping madly away.

Only Boniface held steady. "Grimbane" evidently was the name he had chosen.

"Not so loudly," he whispered. "You are in hostile country."

The assassin-for assassin he was, despite Boniface's softer words for the arrangement-chuckled low and cruelly.