"Does… does that lie in the depths of me?" Sturm asked.

Ragnell set her hand on his shoulder. Her reflection appeared in the water, bent and greatly ancient above his kneeling arboreal image.

"That and much more, Sturm Brightblade," she said. "A great wisdom beneath Measure and Oath. Yours is the choice, however. I can remove the thorn, or… I can change it to music."

"To music?"

The druidess nodded. "An inner music that will pierce and unite your divided heart like a tailor's needle, stitching it together to a wholeness past damage. The music will stay with you for the rest of your life, and it will change you utterly. Or I can remove the thorn."

She leaned forward and stirred the waters of the pool. "Either way, the choice is yours," she urged.

Sturm swallowed.

"Choose," the druidess urged. She pointed to the wound in his shoulder. While she had spoken, the thorn had worked its way still deeper into Sturm's flesh. It lay between muscle and bone now; Sturm could barely move his arm. It was green to the elbow now, and the color spread slowly upward.

" 'Twill go deeper and do deadly work," Ragnell announced. "Fear hot the music. Soon, Sturm Brightblade, you will be part of the woods and the great green of midsummer."

"No!" Sturm shouted. Around him, he heard the sharp, startled shrieks of rousted birds. "Remove the thorn, Ragnell!"

"If I do," the druidess threatened, "you will never see your father." She turned away from him and walked toward the edge of the clearing.

She is lying, Sturm thought, following her. She is lying, just as Caramon and Raistlin were not at the Tower of High Sorcery, and Vertumnus was not at the walls of the Knight's Spur. She is a dream, and she is lying, and all this reading of dreams is only foolishness, and what I should do is…

"Ragnell!" he shouted. Beyond her, deep in the thick blue aeterna, something scurried and rushed away. "Remove this thorn from my shoulder I"

"No." Her reply was soft, uncertain.

"I can choose," Sturm said triumphantly. The words passed through him surely and swiftly, and they were so certain that for a moment, he thought they were not his own. "To the last of this and anything," he said, "I can choose."

"So you can, Sturm Brightblade," the druidess agreed after a long pause. The flute song gave way to the lonely sound of a solitary lark, and in a moment, that music, too, had faded. "Take your sword then, and your Oath and Measure."

She turned to him, and with a strangely sorrowful look, reached to his shoulder and removed the thorn.

"The strength will return at once," she declared as all of them-thorn and druidess, pool and clearing-began to fade before the lad's astonished eyes.

"And you will never have to choose again."

Mara carried the body of the spider to a little knoll at the edge of the forest, where the trees gave way to grass and stone and moonlight, and where, if you looked west through the rapidly thinning foliage, you could see the village fires of Dun Ringhill.

For such a large and spindle-shanked creature, Cyren was surprisingly light. It was as though the spider's departing life had left a thin, papery husk behind it, like a broken cocoon or a locust shell.

Already his legs were dry and brittle.

Mara scarcely knew where she carried him, and even less why she did so. Around her, the forest was loud and menacing, a dark landscape of grunts and whistles and snapping underbrush. She climbed over a felled maple, then through a thicket of briars that scratched her and clung to her clothing.

Once in a great while, there was moonlight through the branches, and Mara could look up to unobstructed sky, to the deepening violet of the heavens above her, and the neighborless stars.

It was as though the forest had turned against her, and everything in her elven blood was fearful and poised. Time and again, there were harsh, unfamiliar rumblings in the underbrush, something gobbling and wounded and angry. Then soon after would come a brief silvery outburst of a flute nearby, so beautiful and ominous she thought she had imagined the song. More than once, she longed to leave dead Cyren behind her, to rush toward the open and light and cool breezes, to scale a vallenwood and clamber to the top of the forest, where the sky would reveal itself.

Through all of this, she wept.

"Enchantments!" she muttered bitterly, tugging the creature around a squat outcropping of rocks. "It is not supposed to be this way. Princes and kings are trapped in the guise of frog or bird, or they are turned to stone or doomed to a century of sleep. The old stories lied to us, for a stone or frog or bird can become a prince as well, it seems. I was in love with Calotte's enchantments."

Suddenly the whole thing struck her as funny. Laughing bleakly, she seated herself on one of the stones, looked long into the dull, multiple eyes of the spider, and laughed until the tears fell again.

Then, by incredible chance, she caught a whiff of wood-smoke from somewhere to her right, so faint that she might well have imagined it, and again she hoisted Cyren's body, growing heavier the longer she traveled, and plodded off in the direction of the smell.

The spider hoisted over her shoulders, she scrambled up a rise, pulling herself the last few steep yards by bracing her feet against the thin trunk of a sapling willow. Then it was light, fresh air, and the windswept clearing above the dwindling forest.

Tenderly she set the spider down. She knelt on the top of the hill and drew forth her knife. Intently, almost reverently, she began to dig a grave in the rocky soil. As she did, she sang a mourning song from the west, learned in her travels with the creature she buried.

So she dug and sang the song again, until a horse nickered behind her and a shadow passed over her. Jack Derry approached and knelt beside her. Silently, with that healthy confidence she had grown to trust in their travels together, and also with an unaccustomed seriousness, the gardener drew forth his knife and joined in the digging.

By midnight, the creature had been placed solemnly in a bed of leaves, then covered over by Jack as Mara played an ancient elven air, sweet and elegiac in the purple night. She played, and slowly, incredibly, the red moon Lunitari rose from behind a stand of poplars and joined white Solinari overhead.

Astonished, Mara looked beyond the surprising intersection of the moons to the high and cloudless sky above Lemish. There the bright helix of Mishakal shone, blue and white in the earliest morning. Jack smiled.