"I expect from the look about him," the druidess replied, "that young Sturm has bested himself."

It was hours before Vertumnus spoke. The day had passed into late afternoon, and the larks were already nested. All about the company, the forest was alive with the quarrels of squirrels and the high, skidding sounds of brown doves returning south to roost in the branches of elm and maple.

"He has departed now," Vertumnus announced. Instantly two hundred pairs of eyes fixed on the limb of the vallenwood where he sat, the yellow leaves falling sadly from his beard and tunic. "Back toward the Vingaard, and no doubt on toward the Tower and the rest of his ponderous Order."

"Where you might have gone yourself," Hollis observed, "were it not for the good fortune of a winter's night."

Vertumnus smiled down at her. "And the kindness of the forces who besieged Lord Angriff's castle."

Hollis smiled, handing a steaming cup of yarrow tea up to her perched and leafy husband.

Vertumnus looked fondly at Jack Derry below him, still marveling at the rapid maturing of his and the Lady Hollis's sapling son. After all, to be but five years old and grown to maturity, with a fighter's arm and a ranger's eye and…

And an interest in a certain recently bereaved elf maiden.

Vertumnus smiled, then frowned. There were other things to see to, and some of them were pressing close at hand.

"I understand," Lord Wilderness announced, "that Mara the elf is skilled in the knowledge of the flute and some of the ancient modes."

Mara blushed, but Hollis laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

"I-I have learned a few tunes in my time, Lord Wilderness," she said, her eyes on the leaf-strewn floor of the forest.

"Well and good," Vertumnus said. "And I understand it was love and invention that led you to them."

"I was greatly deceived when I learned them," Mara said bitterly, lifting her face to the Green Man.

"Deceived, perhaps," he agreed, "but not greatly. Love and invention outlast the best of our dreams."

Mara frowned. She had passed, it seemed, from incomprehensible Solamnic rules into this world of leaf and shadow and parable. There was no telling what would come next.

"What do you ask of me? Of my playing?" she questioned.

"Accompaniment," Vertumnus replied, and from the branches of a nearby maple came a vicious, rousing hiss. The dryads poked their heads from behind a cluster of leaves, their little eyes glittering with anger.

"It's not enough," Diona said, "to hitch your wagon to this hag of a druid!"

"You're taking in elves now!" accused Evanthe. 'Tor what sinister purpose, the gods only know."

"Begone with the both of you!" Vertumnus laughed, tossing the teacup at them. He sprang from the vallenwood branch and landed lightly on the ground, scattering a flock of doves. "Else I'll shut you back in the trees where I found you!"

"We don't scare easily!" spat Evanthe, dripping with the lukewarm dregs of the yarrow tea. "You showed your softness when you wouldn't kill that Solamnic or… or… ensorcel him!"

"But you know of no softness in me," Mollis declared flatly. She folded her arms and smiled fiercely at the dryads. "I am the sacker of villages, the razer of castles. And I can ensorcel as well as any."

The dryads cried out as the maple limb upon which they sat burst forth with thick sweet sap. Chagrined and syruped, they made their escape, leaping from branch to branch, leaf and dirt adhering to their sticky garments as they rushed off into the depth of the woods. A wave of laughter followed their departure.

"Would that I had the magic that young Sturm needed," Hollis said, a little more soberly.

"He could choose whether or not to let the thorn be changed to music, and change him in turn," Vertumnus said. "He chose instead to have you remove it, to stay as he was. He chose his sword arm and the Order."

"But the wound will always be with him," Ragnell insisted. "Though the time will come when he does not remember it, the wound will always be there."

"To the last of this and anything," Vertumnus said, drawing forth his flute, "the lad could and can choose. But there is one thing remaining that demands my hand, my ensorceling …"

Vertumnus scowled, and Jack Derry laughed at his father's dramatics.

"My love and invention," the Green Man concluded quietly, his eyes on Mara. "For there is an ambush prepared at the Vingaard Ford. I must protect the lad from an old blood feud, from the burden of his father's quarrel on the shoulders of the son. And for this, I need the accompaniment of another flute, another music."

Mara bowed nervously. "It would be my honor to assist you, sir. And my honor," she added quickly, "to assist Sturm Brightblade."

Vertumnus nodded happily. It was the best of answers. And briefly he instructed the elf in the strange duet. She would play an old Qualinesti winter song, bracing it with the silent music of the tenth mode, the Matherian-the music of meditation and thought, for only a mind resolved and intent could bring about what Lord Wilderness had planned.

He, in turn, would play a song from the Icewall sung by the barbarous Thanoi, and behind it he would place the intricate dazzlements of the fourteenth and highest mode-the mode of Paladine and changes. And then, when four melodies were rising from the two flutes and the two players, well…

Then the changes would come, and winter would return to the Solamnic Plain.

Vertumnus smiled. He would see what he would see.

There were eleven of them now, where at first there had only been three. Crouched by a fire at the banks of the Vingaard they waited, assured by the Solamnics that the lad would soon pass.

There was always safety in numbers. Sturm would be alone.

Tivok, the leader of the band, bundled himself against the brisk spring night. The other eight had joined them without warning, their scales blue and their tails twitching slowly in winter lethargy. He had prepared to undertake the murder with only two henchmen and had devised a clever plan that would see to it that the henchmen did the fighting.

Then the eight surprised him, walking into the campsite after a three-day journey from southern climes, and suddenly the plans had changed.

But that was the way in these times: there were more of his kind-the draconians, born of dragon eggs perverted by a dark and unnamed power-more than Tivok had ever imagined there would be, and he had heard talk that even greater numbers-some of them wielders of magic, some shape-shifters-were traveling north from the hatcheries of the Icewall.

Let that be as it is, the chief assassin thought, turning his lidless eyes to the cloudy sky. None of them need know the amount of gold that the Solamnics placed in my hand. Ten swords will do the work with certainty, where two would have been… more risky. I shall stay on this hill overlooking the ford until the tenth night after the first of spring, like the Solamnic said.

And I shall oversee. Yes, I shall oversee.

And the bounty, if the lad comes? I will keep my half, and divide the rest ten ways instead of two.

He laughed to himself at the shrewd economics, his laughter the sound of wind over dry leaves. If only this infernal cold would pass, if spring would come beyond the signs of the stars and calendars…

The Solamnics had said that the quarry would come, if he came at all, within the ten days following the equinox. He would be equipped with ancient Solamnic armor, more ornamental than functional. His breastplate would be adorned with an ancient family crest: red sword against the yellow sun.