I nodded and sat beside Shardos, who still had not moved.

"The Ogre Wars," Longwalker continued, "back in the Age of Might, made that happier time but a memory. All of the crowns were either destroyed or damaged or vanished, suffering the loss of most or all of their stones. The last Telling, four hundred years before the Rending-what you call the Cataclysm-was a time of great sorrow. Terrible gaps lay in the years, for even the wisest of Namers could not remember the stories without the crowns and stones to guide them. So the People were cut off from their fathers, from the memories."

"It could not end that way," Shardos whispered quietly and urgently. The firelight played over his dark, grizzled face, his vacant eyes. "Your people could not let the wars steal their memory."

"And, of course, the duty fell to the Que-Nara," Longwalker said.

"I have heard little of the Que-Nara," I said, "except that yours are the most priestly and visionary of the Plainsmen."

"Or the luckiest, perhaps," Longwalker added, his face breaking into an enormous, jagged grin. "Ours was the only crown that survived undamaged, so ours was the task of rescuing memory.

"Half of us went below the earth, into the dark of many voices, there among the swimming lights and the great snake that bears all Solamnia upon its back…"

I hid a smile at the creaking poetry of the old legends, but Longwalker was watching nothing but the flames.

"They wandered under the earth through a passage known only to the Namer and passed down from one to the next, as the young Namer adorned his hair and put on the crown, and the old one passed into silence. Once the Que-Nara were there in the darkness, they hunted the stones in the veins of the ground."

"To replace the ones that were missing?" I asked. But Longwalker kept at the telling.

"The rest of us stayed above, as guardians, and to assure that the Que-Nara would survive rockfall and tremor and flood and the changes of the earth. And for the lives of six chieftains, the Que-Nara below spoke to the Que-Nara above, for six of the stones were in the keeping of the Que-Nara below, and six of them we kept with us."

Longwalker paused. He looked up at me and extended his hand, his fingers as long and knotted as branches. I knew without words that he wanted to hold the opals. Silently, with only the slightest doubt and reluctance, I handed him the brooch.

He stared into it deeply, as though he looked beyond it into something murky and imponderable. As though he had found the bottom of the stones.

"Now is the time to tell of the one who awaits you," he said, handing the brooch back to me. 'Tell me what you see in the godseyes, Solamnic."

Instantly my suspicions returned.

"You're not… up to some Plainsman hypnosis, are you? I mean, is there some kind of trick your tribe has to lull enemies to sleep?"

"Most certainly there is," Longwalker admitted, "but this is not that trick. Look into the opals, Solamnic."

I did so reluctantly. Like black pools they were, reflecting the light of the fire, of the rising red moon, and yet underneath the reflection, something was moving. I leaned forward, squinting against the firelight. The stones began to glow as they had last night in the clearing, and I shuddered, remembering where the glow had led me and where I had led Alfric in turn.

Suddenly I saw figures shimmering and moving in the depths of the stones. It was as though I watched them through a crystal, as though in a core of fire there was a window or door through which they walked, faint shapes in the rippling blackness. The world inside the stones was a world long vanished, and I watched the vision and knew I was looking back through the years, into the depths of the past.

There were twenty of them easily, perhaps two dozen. The cloud in the stones obscured the shapes, made counting difficult. But the feathers and the symbols they wore were Que-Nara.

The country around them was forest-an unbearably bright forest that shimmered sea-blue. Perhaps it was the woods or southern Hylo, doomed by the Cataclysm that would follow in the years to come. For I knew without being told that this was an older time, before the Kingpriest's decrees and the Rending, though for the life of me, I cannot tell you how I knew such a thing.

As I watched, the Que-Nara established camp in a woodland clearing. Quickly and with great skill, the old ones and the children gathered the wood, kindled a slow, smokeless fire that shone gold on green, and the stones in which I watched this scene glimmered at the edges with a borrowed light.

One of them, a young man, leather diamonds and bone stars woven into the thick web of his hair, crouched some distance from the fire, his attentions on something cupped in his hands. For a moment, I disregarded him, my thoughts on the campfires and the families huddled about them, but the stones would not show me those fires and families, fixing my sight instead on the young man at the edge of the light.

I did not know his name. Why I should expect to know it, I could not tell you, but the stones were firm in this, and the first thought that rose to my mind as I watched him about his obscure business was that I did not know his name.

The second thought was that the young man was the one who spoke to me in the vision-the one who claimed to have kidnapped my brother Brithelm.

I had spoken to this one not four nights ago, and yet this scene was two centuries, three centuries old. It was like the light from distant Chemosh, which the astronomers say reaches the eye decades after it rises from the surface of the star.

I felt Longwalker watching me as 1 thought this. His presence was of little concern: My thoughts were fixed on the young man I saw in the stone, on the past unfolding, as though a mural in the halls of Castle di Caela sprang suddenly to life, and history moved in my marveling sight.

The nameless youth held a crown in his hands-a crown of woven silver, into which four, five, six opals were set. It was difficult to tell how many.

I shook my head, and the stones I was watching directed my eyes to the stones in the crown. Stones within stones within stones, like mirrors facing each other at the ends of a long hall, in which the eye is swallowed forever into something like eternity.

My eye plunged downward into the dark of the opals, and the scene before me was swallowed up in darkness, and darkness was all around me…

"Wait," Longwalker said, and I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. "Follow no further. That is how Firebrand lost himself, in sounding the bottom of the stones."

Sounding the bottom of the stones? It was all mystery, all Plainsman hocus-pocus. And yet there was something in those depths that called me further, so that it took everything I had to resist it, and yet I was not sure I had resisted it, not sure…

The pressure at my shoulder increased.

"Good," Longwalker said. "Now you will see what happened."

Again the young man was in view, the crown on his head and a faint, fanatical smile on his lips. The children of the Plainsmen shied from him, adults turned from him in the councils, until his only companion, his only confidant, was the crown he talked to by the fire's edge.

His people looked on in suspicion, drawing signs of warding on the ground before they lay down to sleep.

Soon he traveled a mile behind them. They would not permit him to venture any closer. A voice traveled with him, cold and obscure and insinuating. I could hear it talking to him, could hear it saying…

So it always is with the gifted, with the god-ordained. For your eyes see into the time to come, and if you look long enough, my friend, you will see a time in which all the Que-Nara understand your gifts and hearken to the words of your prophecies.