I discovered I was good at this. Having spent nigh on twenty years in explaining away my own misdeeds, I could explain for others with the skill of a surgeon.

Brithelm relaxed beside me, rose to his feet. All the lights that were to shine in western Solamnia that evening were shining by now.

Five days it took us to get back to Castle di Caela. For the most part, Ramiro served as our guide, the only one among us who had any idea as to the way back.

He had practiced his leadership until it had become almost glamorous. After all, he had guided forth the hundreds of squinting, cowering Que-Tana, many of whom were seeing the moons and the stars for the first time in their benighted lives, into that shadowy grove in the foothills, where they stayed until Longwalker joined them late that evening. There, as the campfires of the Que-Tana glowed warmly, Ramiro, Brithelm, and I took to the plains, leaving behind us a wandering family reunited, a rudderless people brought to a strong and kindly guidance.

A guidance not only Longwalker's. For Shardos had stayed with the Que-Tana, for reasons we did not yet understand. Brithelm wept openly to say good-bye to the old juggler, and Ramiro and I, though trained to be starched, stone-faced models of Solamnic restraint, left with a catch in our throats as the old man sang a song at our parting, its melody cascading down the hillside after us. From Wayreth Forest it was supposed to have come, and Shardos claimed he had pieced it together from the song of the birds there. I do not remember it all, but I remember one part-"Here there is quiet," it went,

"Here there is quiet, where music turns in upon silence

Here at the world's imagined edge, where clarity

Completes the senses, at long last where we behold

Ripe fruit never falling, streams still and transparent

"Where the tears are dried from our faces, or settle,

Still as a stream in accomplished countries of peace,

And the traveler opens, permitting the voyage of light

As air, as the heart in repose this lasting day."

The very next afternoon we saw them, on a rise behind us, in the distance at the feet of the mountains.

The tall form that walked at the head of the column was no doubt Longwalker's. Silhouetted against the western sky, against the rapidly fading sunlight behind him, he waved at us, lonely and elegant on the horizon's edge.

There, after a moment, a short squat form joined him. Dressed in motley it was, and as it waved to us also, a series of bright lights dappled with all imaginable colors issued from its uplifted hands.

"Bottles!" Brithelm breathed beside me. "Incomparable, brightly colored bottles!"

And suddenly the Plainsmen were gone, vanished in the distance and the falling night.

As we neared home, we traveled further and further into the night, and on occasion, when he was on high ground and you were following below him, you could look up and see Sir Ramiro of the Maw blotting out half the stars on the eastern horizon with his sheer bulk and presence.

My dealings with the big Knight softened considerably on the road home. I guess, as usual, it took an earthquake for him to think kind thoughts about me, but if that was what it took, I would gladly accept it. After all, his guidance was somehow heartening in the highlands and onto the soggy plains, for I remembered trolls and raiding Que-Tana and even more horrible things from the years back.

Under Ramiro's care, the last leg of the journey passed rapidly, almost eventlessly. I learned the Solamnic countryside in better detail than I had ever imagined or hoped I would. Each day we walked as far as our leisure would take us-for after all, our guide Ramiro set the pace of the journey.

The first thing you see of home from the west is the banner that flies atop the Cat Tower.

It was welcome, that banner, even with my dread of how to break the news of Alfric to my father.

But those dreads were lost, or postponed awhile, in the excitement of reunions, for it seemed that Castle di Caela had news of its own to tell.

We rode through the western gate to the sound of trumpet and drum. Raphael had spotted us in the distance during a stroll on the walls, and with his general efficiency and good will had arranged a Solamnic welcome by the time we arrived at the castle.

Things seemed in disarray all over. The vending carts that usually milled in the bailey were scattered and broken, evidence that the quake we felt in the Vingaards had reached this far into Solamnia. Indeed, a most forgiving Raphael told me that the first quake had left an enormous fissure underneath the foundation of the castle-I was not to hear the adventure surrounding it until later-and that the second quake, arising from nowhere little more than a week ago, had closed it again altogether.

It seemed like farfetched geology to me, but I had seen stranger things to the west and was inclined to believe him.

Brandon Rus had been preparing to leave eastward on a pilgrimage to the Blood Sea of Istar. Indeed, he had packed for the next morning, but he postponed his departure another night and day so that he could hear the adventures that had befallen us. It was from his account that I began to piece together what had happened underneath the castle while we were away. I went to Enid and to Bayard later for the rest of the story, and got more than I bargained for.

You see, not only did they grace me with the account of the pendant and the cats and the dangerous dreams and Marigold's shipwrecked hair, but they had exciting news that surpassed even the joy of restoring the castle.

For it seems that on one of those evenings a month or so before I was made Knight in the Great Hall of Castle di Caela, things more quiet and far more momentous were taking place in the upstairs chambers.

It seems as though I was disinherited, or at least pushed a ways down the line of succession.

For the heir of both branches, di Caela and Brightblade, would be welcomed to the world sometime in the early spring. Enid was not altogether as radiant as the mythology surrounding expectant mothers said that she should be. She was sick of a morning and craved pastry all through the day, but to Bayard she was the splendid bright creature he saw from the battlements years ago, and she was more now, here at the start of their greatest adventure together.

Speaking of pastry, Marigold remained a nocturnal factor in the chambers of Castle di Caela. At night, it seemed, her specter haunted the quarters of Sir Robert di Caela, who, having flooded the caverns below the foundation and thereby saved the castle and, by chance, the surrounding continent, was all prepared to dine on the story for years until the ghost took his appetite away. He looked… haunted now, and he jumped at the chance to sleep in the open air again when a band of us gathered to accept Longwalker's invitation to attend the Plainsman Night of Telling in the early fall.

But before the larger and more joyous Telling, there was a telling of my own to go through.

It was the evening after we arrived when I told Father about Alfric.

Of course he knew already. After all, Alfric hadn't returned with us, and when the tale of attack and ambush and underground cave-in unfolded, Sir Andrew concluded the worst. He was resigned when Brithelm and I came to him.

Resigned and expectant.

"I shall save you boys the reliving of this," he said as we entered his chamber, pushing himself away from the desk where, by lamplight, he had been crouched, quill in hand, over a large piece of parchment.