I’m ruining the feast, he thinks. I’m shaming myself and my whole family before Thu-Kimnibol.

“You must excuse me,” he says to his guest in a hoarse, ragged fragment of a voice. “This wind — I’m not well—”

He looks around the room, half glaring, half apologetic. Dares them all to speak. No one does. His three mates are terrified. Thaloin is ready to fling herself down under the table. Vladirilka looks appalled. Only Sinithista, the calmest and sturdiest of them, seems in any way composed. “You,” he says, beckoning her to his side out of his group of women, and goes sweeping off with her to his bedchamber amidst the screaming of the wind.

In the depths of the night a terrible fantasy overcomes the king. Salaman imagines that he is lying not with his familiar mate Sinithista but with a female of the hjjks, whose hard scaly body is pressed close against him.

Her black-bristled fore-claws caress his cheeks. Her powerful multiple-jointed hind legs are clasped tightly about his thighs, and her mid-limbs hold him by the waist. Her huge gleaming many-faceted eyes, bulging like toadstools, stare passionately into his. She makes harsh rasping sounds of delight. Worst of all, he is pressing himself to her with equal fervor, his fingers running tenderly over the orange breathing-tubes that dangle beside her head, his lips seeking out her fierce sharp beak. And his mating-rod, stiff and immense with lust, is plunged deep into some mysterious orifice of her long rigid thorax.

He cries out in horror, a dreadful wailing bellow of pain and rage that might almost have toppled the city wall itself, and pulls himself free. In a wild bound he springs from the bed, and goes searching madly about the room for a glowberry candle.

“My lord?” Sinithista called, in a small, plaintive voice.

Salaman, standing naked and trembling convulsively beside the window, managed to find the light and uncover it. No hjjk, no. Only Sinithista, sitting up in bed and staring at him in astonishment. She was shivering. Her breasts were heaving, her sexual parts were swollen in arousal. He looked down at his mating-rod, throbbing painfully, still rigid. All a dream, then. He had been coupling with Sinithista in his drunken sleep, and had taken her for — for—

“My lord, what is it that troubles you?” Sinithista asked.

“Nothing. Nothing. An ugly dream.”

“Come back to bed, then!”

“No,” he told her sternly. If he lets himself sleep again this night the dream will seize him anew. Perhaps if he banishes Sinithista from the chamber — no, no, that would be worse, being alone. He does not dare to close his eyes a moment. Behind his eyelids the dreadful image of that monster would burst forth again.

“My lord.” The woman was sobbing now.

He pitied her. He had abandoned her in mid-coupling, after all. He had not been with her in many weeks, not since his fascination with Vladirilka had overwhelmed him, and now he appeared to be spurning her.

But he wasn’t going to return to the bed.

Salaman went to her and touched her lightly on the shoulder, and whispered, “This dream has so disturbed me that I must have some air. I’ll come to you again later, when my mind is clear. Go back to sleep.”

“My lord, your outcry was so frightening—”

“Yes,” he said. He found a robe and threw it on, and went from the room.

There was nothing but darkness in the palace. The air was frigid. A ghastly wind was ripping down out of the east, and white swirls of snow rode on it like angry ghosts. But he couldn’t stay here. The entire building seemed polluted by his monstrous nightmare. He went down and down, and out to the stables. Two grooms looked up sleepily at him as he entered, saw it was the king, and rolled over again. They were accustomed to his moods. If he wanted a xlendi in the depths of the night, well, that was nothing new to them.

He selected a mount and rode out, toward the city wall, to his private pavilion.

The storm raged above him, so strong a wind that it was a wonder it didn’t blow the Moon itself out of the sky. There was more snow with it than he could remember, already enough to encrust the ground with white to a depth of a fingertip or so, and coming down more swiftly all the time. He looked back and by the blurred moonlight he saw that the xlendi’s hooves were leaving a sharply pronounced track in the whiteness.

Tethering his mount below the pavilion, Salaman raced up the staircase to the top. His heart was hammering at his ribs. In the pavilion the king grasped the window-ledge and hung his head outside, heedless of the icy gusts. He needed to cleanse it of every vestige of the dream that had coursed through his sleeping wine-sotted mind.

The landscape beyond the city, fitfully illuminated by such moonlight as could break through the storm’s burden of snow, was white as death. A knife-blade wind scooped up the fallen crystals, swept them onward, whirled them into sinister patterns. The king was unable to get the taste of the hjjk-woman’s beak from his mouth. His mating-rod had subsided now, but it still ached with the pain of unfulfilled desire and it seemed to him that a cool fire burned along its entire shaft, the sign of some corrosive hjjk fluid that he must have come in contact with during that ghastly coupling.

Perhaps I should go out there, Salaman thought, and strip off my robe and roll naked in the snow until I’m clean—

“Father?”

He whirled. “Who’s there?”

“Biterulve, father.” The boy peered in uneasily from the vestibule of the pavilion. His eyes were very wide. “Father, you frighten us. When my mother said you’d arisen and gone rushing madly from your bedchamber — and then you were seen leaving the palace itself—”

“You followed me?” Salaman cried. “You spied on me?”

He lurched forward, seizing the slender boy, pulling him roughly into the pavilion, and slapped him three times with all his strength. Biterulve cried out, as much perhaps in surprise as pain, after the first blow, but was silent thereafter. The king saw his son’s astounded eyes gleaming into his by the light of the Moon and the reflection of that light on the whirling flakes of snow. He released the boy and staggered back toward the window.

“Father,” Biterulve said softly, went to him as though heedless of all risk, holding his arms outstretched.

A great convulsive shiver passed through the king, and Salaman gathered Biterulve in and held the boy in a hug so tight it forced a gust of breath from him. Then he let him go, and said very quietly, “I should not have struck you. But you shouldn’t have followed me here. You know that no one is permitted to come upon me in the night in my pavilion.”

“We were so frightened, father. My mother said you were not in your right mind.”

“Perhaps I wasn’t.”

“Can we help you, my lord?”

“I doubt that very much. Very much indeed.” Salaman reached for the young prince again, collecting him in the curve of his arm and pulling him tight against him. Hollowly he said, “I had a dream tonight, boy, such a dream as I won’t disclose in any way, not to you, not to anyone, except to say that it was a dream that could peel a man’s sanity from him like the skin from a fruit. That dream still afflicts me. I may never wash myself clean of it.”

“Oh, father, father—”

“It’s this beastly season. The black wind beats on my skull. It drives me crazier every year.”

“Shall I leave you by yourself?” Biterulve asked.

“Yes. No. No, stay.” Brooding, the king spun around and stared into the darkness beyond the wall again. He kept the boy at his side. “You know how much I love you, Biterulve.”

“Of course I do.”

“And that when I struck you just now — it was the madness in me that was striking, it wasn’t I myself—”

Biterulve nodded, although he said nothing.

Salaman hugged him to him. Gradually the fury in his soul subsided.