Spoken like a madman, Sturm thought, and he fell from the dream into an unsettling blackness. Sturm would never know how long he slept.

"Well enough," the druidess announced.

The afternoon had passed into evening. In the distance, the forest was loud with the call and response of nocturnal animals, and above the clearing, the first stars were shining, green in the harp of Branchala, and red Sirrion floated like a burning galleon into the vault of the sky.

Hollis looked up at Vertumnus, her face even younger than when the healing had begun. "He has survived the first two dreams. The third is easy, if he has the will and the stomach for it."

"None of them is easy, Hollis," Vertumnus replied with a curious smile. "You are not Solamnic, so the Dream of Choosing seems simpler than the others. It is actually the most painful."

In the distance, the lark lifted its voice. Hollis nodded serenely and touched Sturm's eyelids with a double-bloomed rose-one blossom red, the other as green as a leaf. Vertumnus began to play his flute, and as he did, silver Solinari drifted over the clearing, spangling the leaves of the vallenwood and of the oak, the holly in the hair of the druidess, and the green locks of Lord Wilderness.

The birdsong was shrill and insistent about him -jay and sparrow, the tilting sound of the robin, and loud above all the larksong that haunted his ears when he moved and the singing died.

Sturm sat up and looked around. He was where they had carted him, as best he could reconstruct from his fevered, fitful moments of waking. The pool was there, and the oak, and the grassy, sunstruck clearing, but Vertumnus and his party were all gone-no Jack Derry nor dryad nor druidess. Sturm lay alone at the foot of the oak, his armor and sword beside him, neatly arranged, so that it seemed like a husk or abandoned cocoon.

He reached over and touched the breastplate. The bronze kingfisher was unnaturally warm, green with verdigris and neglect, as though the armor had lain there for some time. Pensive, Sturm pulled the shield toward him, blinking at the dust-muted sun on its dented boss.

Suddenly someone coughed behind him. He started at the noise, spinning about.

Ragnell stood at the edge of the clearing, her dark eyes fixed on him.

"Y-You!" Sturm exclaimed, reaching for his sword. He checked himself at once. She was, after all, an old woman, and the Measure forbade-

"My intentions are peaceful," Ragnell announced. "Peaceful but instructive."

"I… I must have been wounded," Sturm explained as the light hurt his eyes and the clearing swam and rocked. "I must have… must have been…"

Ragnell nodded. "Seven nights," she said. "A week you have slumbered. And there were dreams, I trust. Momentous dreams of things to come, which you might call prophecy but I should call augury…"

Her words confused him, but her voice was slow and insinuating. It twined into Sturm's thoughts with the subtlety of weeds and overgrowth, until he wasn't sure whether he was thinking the words or she was saying them. He shook his head, trying to dislodge her voice, and when that failed, he tried to stand.

"I'm wounded still," he said, his voice dry and breathless.

"Of course you are, Sturm Brightblade," the druidess replied, her tanned and wrinkled face expressionless. "The thorn is still with you, deep in your shoulder, next to your heart." Ragnell watched him intently. "Look at your hands," she commanded.

Sturm did as she said, and he gasped at the sight. Green raced through his veins. His fingernails, too, were green. His hands were dark and leathery, like those of Lord Wilderness.

"What…" he began, but Ragnell's voice rose irresistibly from the back of his head, spreading over his thoughts like thick, entangling vines.

"He awoke…" the voice began, and the clearing dissolved in mist, leaving nothing but the woman and the shimmering water and the night. Suddenly the white moon rose behind her, its light a thin corona about her green, billowing robes, reflecting like fox fire over the surface of the pool. Sturm reeled in dismay, knowing at last that he still dreamt.

The wound in his shoulder stained his tunic green, then violet, then a deep and abiding black as the sap streamed and settled. Speechless, he looked at his hands. Instead of paling with the loss of blood or sap or whatever flowed from his shoulder, they now burned with a bright green that passed into iridescence.

Ragnell's countenance changed as she approached him steadily. From a wizened old woman, villainous and sly, she became a creature of great beauty-dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes in a dazzlement of darkness, and she smiled with such gentleness that his heart was touched. He fell to his knees, yearning to be with her, whether to be loved as a child or a man he was not sure.

This is a temptation, he thought, looking at the soft lines of her breasts through the green robes. Sent from the Green Man, it is. A trap. I am supposed to… to…

I do not know what I am supposed to do, except deny her.

The air smelled of cedar, and somewhere beyond the night and moonlight and reflections, there returned the sound of the flute.

Perhaps this is the last allurement, Sturm thought. Perhaps Vertumnus waits beyond this dream, and at last the search will be over.

The woman stopped and drew back her hand. She folded her arms upon her breasts and her lips moved, mouthing words that passed through Sturm's thoughts and imaginings. But he couldn't say that he heard them, nor was it Ragnell's voice that spoke them, but a deeper voice now, a voice familiar and yet just beyond the grasp of his memory.

A man's voice, it was, and it conjured something to do with snow and midnight and urgent departures.

Sturm opened his tunic and looked at the wound in his shoulder. The thorn had worked its way near his breastbone, deep and barbed and ugly. He saw with a start that it was moving even further. It would soon sink beyond sight and retrieval into his darkest interior, where it would do its last, irreparable damage.

Ragnell leaned forward and touched the gash. Sturm cried out and pushed her hand away.

"No!" he cried out. "This forest has wounded me enough! You have done great damage-to me, to the Order, and to my father in the siege of Castle Brightblade!"

The druidess shook her head slowly and smiled. "Many were the Knights of Solamnia who fell in that… 'rebellion,' as you call it. But your father was a decent man and not one of the ones I killed."

"Then… then…" Sturm tried to answer, but the clearing swam away from him, and he staggered and fell to his knees.

Vaguely Ragnell clutched at the lad's tunic, but he tore himself from her grasp.

Ragnell smiled beautifully, incredulously. "Well, then," she said softly, casting her hand across the roiling waters. "If I am a temptation, let us see the terms of tempting."

At her touch, the pool stilled, and framed in the white moonlight, Sturm saw his reflection strangely transformed to a dark lad all in green, leafed and vined, his hair entangled with dew and crowned with holly and laurel.

"By Huma!" he swore. "It's Jack Derry!"

"Not Jack Derry but you," the druidess proclaimed. " 'Tis your own self translated, Sturm Brightblade. Beyond Oath and Measure, into the depths of your being."

"Another druidic dream!" Sturm replied scornfully, turning his head from the reflection.

The pool still lay in front of him, and his face was still looking back-serene, sylvan, unchanged. He knelt before the tranquil pool, and the reflection knelt to face him.