Bayard looked at me skeptically. Slowly the faintest hint of a smile spread across his face, widening and widening until he could contain his amusement no longer. My protector began to laugh, and the further I explained, the deeper and more uncontrolled his amusement became. He leaned against the closet, struggling for breath and balance, shaking his head in wonderment as I concluded my account of the Plainsmen, of Brithelm, and of the strange visitation.

"So… so they wanted you to follow them into the brooch?" he gasped.

Sullenly I nodded.

"Oh, this smacks of the old days!" he exclaimed. "One dodge after another, to avoid duty and danger and chores and-"

"Very well, then!" I exclaimed angrily, taking an aggressive step toward Bayard before my better judgment reminded me he was stronger, quicker, and wiser in the ways of combat. "Call it sleep and be done with it! Done with me, for that matter!"

"And what am I supposed to think?" Bayard answered, his laughter fading. He took up the laces on my greaves once more.

From the bed, the black eyes of the brooch stared up at me.

"That I must be losing my mind, sir?" I asked mournfully.

In the brief silence that followed, I gathered the whistle and the brooch into my hand and clicked them together for noise-any noise.

My old companion smiled once again, though this time his eyes were troubled. He tugged at the laces of the breastplate. The air rushed out of me, and I reeled for a moment, my hand on the bedpost.

I turned and faced the window. Outside, the banners cracked and fluttered on the parapets, catching the last red shower of sunlight as the day went down behind the mountains. I suddenly felt silly. No matter what I said, my past was the translator. It sounded as though I would stop at nothing to avoid knighthood. Even hallucinations.

"Never mind," I said quietly, tossing the items back onto the bed. "It was just a trick of the light in the corridor."

Again the wind was rising. It promised to be a hazardous night.

"There will be time for 'tricks of light' after you are knighted," Bayard maintained, stepping away from me and leaning against the mantel of the fireplace, his shadow long and dark against the window. "Time, no doubt, for other tricks, seeing as how you've spent the Night of Reflections. But now we are about other business, when the food has been prepared, the musicians hired, and the guests seated for nearly an hour."

"Somehow I do not think that you have things in their… order of importance, sir," I protested, picking up the dog whistle and turning it over in my hand.

"Brithelm's, this was," I breathed.

"I know, lad," Bayard said softly. He stood and put his hand on my shoulder. For a moment, we paused, our thoughts on my brother's little camp high in the storm-imperiled Vingaard Mountains.

Outside, the wind died down, and below us I could hear the musicians start up again, a kender trail song that showed they had been stretched to the end of all musical taste and knowledge.

"Remember, Galen," Bayard whispered, "that Brithelm is the Pathwarden with visions. You're as sane as anyone in this bedlam of a castle-as sane as Robert or Brandon or your father, and they're Solamnic Knights of the first order. Like it or not, you will be a Solamnic Knight of the Crown by tomorrow, Galen Pathwarden Brightblade."

"But-"

"And I do not care if you have some kind of problem with honor or decency or sanity or any other thing Solamnic. You will put on the armor, and then… well, we shall see what happens. I trust that the armor will do its job."

It did not sound all that foresighted to me. And yet Bayard's words were bolstering, as if he believed that something would come to pass when I put on the armor. Instantly I thought of legends: of Arden Greenhand, whose magical armor would change into a cloud at his bidding, or of Sir Lysander of Hylo, whose breastplate bore a map of the world that could transport him across the continent to any body of land he touched upon that map.

And yet, despite our tugging and tying, the armor I wore was secondhand, far too loose for me, and far too ordinary. Not only was it scarcely the stuff of legends, it was not a bit magical or fanciful or even all that attractive to begin with.

"The armor's job here seems to be to weigh me down and net me in its laces, sir," I argued. "But I am sure you have a deeper insight into this mystery."

"Luskinian ethics," Bayard said proudly.

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"Surely you know the luskin, Galen? Surely Gileandos taught you that much."

"My education has been uneven, sir, guided by Gileandos's gin and whim, it seems. I obviously don't know what you want me to know about the luskin. A little gray bird, as I recall. A sometime singer who relies on the other birds to raise its young."

"Who in their youth behave as sparrows or starlings," Bayard added. "Or wrens or whatever, depending on whose nest their mother chooses to leave them in."

"All well and good, Bayard, and masterful natural history. But I don't see-"

"Luskinian ethics. 'If you look like one and are treated like one, the time will come when you act like one.' "

"This is not a great insight, sir."

"Nonetheless. Finish with the armor."

As I assembled myself quietly, giving last attention to the polish of the helmet, its crest, and its foolish feather, which looked as though a bird-a luskin, I hoped devoutly-had plunged to its death atop my head, Raphael returned bearing a sword the likes of which I dreaded he would bring back-a big, two-handed appliance as long as I was tall and heavy enough to set me unbalanced as I walked. I lifted it over my head with a grunt, then painfully slipped it into the scabbard at my waist, where it rested awkwardly, a good six inches of its blade still uncovered.

"I fear I have cracked through my eggshell into an eagle's nest," I complained to Bayard, who chuckled again and shook his head.

I shivered, and not with the wind that was rising higher and higher again, rattling the windows and coursing underneath the sill, where it staggered the flame of a candle and lifted a paper from my desk. Raphael moved quickly to shut the window more tightly as Bayard stepped to the door and, opening it, turned and beckoned to me.

It was an ominous image, as though again I was called into the heart of the stones.

Yet this ceremony was what I had trained and waited for, the moment I had achieved despite the predictions of almost everyone in Castle di Caela. Gathering whistle and gloves, I stuffed them into the pocket of my tunic and, my hands clammy but unshaking, pinned my cape about my shoulders with the opal brooch.

'Tonight you could almost pass for chivalrous, Galen," Bayard conceded as I followed him into the corridor and, in a swim of candles and music, descended the stairwell into the Great Hall.

I remember that night only fitfully. The torchlight from the sconces in the Great Hall of Castle di Caela shone brightly and deeply on the dark tables and the flushed faces of visitors-for after all, I had delayed matters, and wine had passed freely in the meantime.

It shone on the faces of my Pathwarden kin: my father, proud, rising to his feet in spite of himself with some of his old military firmness as Bayard handed me the sword. The others, noticing the old man's gesture and mistaking it for something we did at such times in Coastlund, stood also.

Nobody ever knew it was Father's private way of thanking the gods that one of his sons-even if it was the least promising of the three-had finally put on Solamnic armor. But Sir Robert stood, and Ramiro, and Brandon after them, and then even those self-important bluestockings Elazar and Fernando.