These aren’t the gentle wise creatures of her feverish recollections. No, she sees them now as others of her kind have always seen them: huge frightening glossy-shelled bristle-limbed things with ferocious beaks and great glittering eyes, milling in hordes about her, clicking and clattering in a terrifying way. And behind them she glimpses the immense mass of the Queen in Her resting-place — motionless, gigantic, grotesque. Calling to her, offering her the joys of Nest-bond, offering her the comforts of Queen-love.

Queen-love?

Nest-bond?

What did those things mean? They were empty noises. They were food that carried no nourishment.

Nialli Apuilana trembles and draws back, pressing herself into the farthest corner of the room. She shuts her eyes, but even so she is unable to blot out the sight of the nightmare creatures that crowd up against her, clicking, clicking, clicking.

Get away from me!

Horrid hideous insects. How she loathes them! And yet she knows there was a time once when she had wanted to be one of them. For a time she had actually thought she was.

Or had all that been a dream, just a phantom of the night just past — her sojourn in the Nest, her talks with Nest-thinker, her taste of Nest-truth? Had she really lived gladly among the hjjks, and come to love them and their Queen? Was such a thing possible, to love the hjjks?

Kundalimon. Had she dreamed him too?

Queen-love! Nest-bond! Come to us, Nialli! Come! Come! Come!

Strange. Alien. Horrible.

“Get away from me!” she cries. “All of you, get away!”

They stare reproachfully. Those immense eyes, glittering, cold. You are one of us. You belong to the Nest.

“No! I never was!”

You love the Queen. The Queen loves you.

Was it true? No. No. She couldn’t possibly have believed it, ever. They had put a spell on her while she was in the Nest, that was all. But now she’s free. They’ll never have her again.

She kneels and huddles into herself. Trembling, sobbing, she touches her arms, her breasts, her sensing-organ. Is this hjjk? she asks herself, feeling the thick lustrous fur, the warm flesh beneath.

No. No. No. No.

She presses her forehead to the floor.

“Yissou!” she calls. “Yissou, protect me!” She prays to Mueri to give her ease. She prays to Friit to heal her, to rid her of this spell.

She tries to banish that terrible sound of clicking from her mind.

The gods are with her now, the Five Heavenly Ones. She feels their presence like a shield about her. Once she had told anyone who would listen that they were nothing but silly myths. But since her return from the lakelands they have been with her. They are with her now. They will prevail. The hjjks who have come crowding into her room grow misty and insubstantial. Tears flow down her cheeks as she gives thanks, gives praise, offers blessings.

Then after a time she begins to grow calm.

As mysteriously as it has come, the convulsion that has overtaken her spirit is gone from her, and she is herself once again. The loathing, the disgust, vanishes. I am free, she thinks. But not quite. She can’t see the hjjks any more, but she still feels their pull. She loves them as she did before. Into her mind once more comes an awareness of the sublime harmony of the Nest, of the industriousness, of its inhabitants, of the great throbbing waves of Queen-love that sweep constantly through it. Queen-love throbs also in her heart. Nest-truth remains with her yet.

She doesn’t understand. How can she sway from one pole to the other like this? How can it be possible to have the Five within her, and the Queen also? Is she of the city or of the Nest, of the People or of the hjjks?

Both, perhaps. Or neither.

Who am I? she wonders. What am I?

Another time Kundalimon came to her.

He appeared toward evening. She hadn’t taken the trouble to light the lamps in her little room and the early darkness of the rain-swept city was beginning to settle upon everything. She saw him standing near the wall opposite the door, where the woven-grass star that the hjjks had given her long ago was hanging.

“You?” she whispered.

He made no reply. He merely stood before her, smiling.

There was something shimmering and golden about him. But within that luminous aura he looked just as he had in the final few weeks of his life, slender almost to the point of frailty, yet sturdy enough in his wiry way, with warm radiant eyes. At first Nialli Apuilana was afraid to look too closely at him, fearing that she would see the signs of violence on his body. But then she found the courage to do it, and saw that he was unharmed.

“You aren’t wearing your amulets,” she said.

He smiled and said nothing.

Perhaps he’s given them to someone, she thought. To one of the children with whom he used to speak in the streets. Or he has returned them to the Nest, now that his embassy is over.

“Come closer,” she said to him. “Let me touch you.” He shook his head, smiling all the while. Waves of love continued to stream from him. All right. No need to touch him. She felt a great calmness; she felt total assurance. There was much in the world that she did not understand, and perhaps never would understand. But that didn’t matter. What mattered only was to be calm, and loving, and open, and accepting of whatever might befall.

“Are you with the Queen?” she asked.

He said nothing.

“Do you love me?”

A smile. Only a smile.

“You know that I love you.”

He smiled. He was like a great bower of light.

He stayed with her for hours. Finally she realized that he was beginning to fade and vanish, but it happened so slowly that it was impossible to tell, moment by moment, that he was leaving her. But at last he was altogether gone.

“Will you come back?” she asked, and heard no answer.

He came again, though, always at nightfall, sometimes standing beside her cot, sometimes by the star of grass. He never spoke. But always he smiled; always he filled the room with warmth, and that same profound sense of ease and calmness.

Thu-Kimnibol was almost ready to set out for home now. He looked down at Salaman’s daughter Weiawala and felt the waves of fear and sadness and loss coming from her. Her chestnut-hued fur had lost all sheen. Her sensing-organ rose at a tense angle. She seemed forlorn and desperately frightened. And she looked terribly small, smaller than she had ever seemed to him before; but from his great height all women looked small, and most men.

“So you’re going now, are you?” she asked, her eyes not quite meeting his.

“Yes. Esperasagiot has the xlendis groomed, Dumanka’s got the wagons provisioned.”

“This is goodbye, then.”

“For now.”

“For now, yes.” She sounded bitter. “Your city is calling you. Your queen.”

“Our chieftain, you mean.”

“Whatever she’s called. She says come, and you hop to it. And you’re a prince, they say!”

“Weiawala, I’ve been here for months. My city needs me. I’ve had a direct command from Taniane to return. Prince or not, how can I refuse to obey her?”

“I need you too.”

“I know,” Thu-Kimnibol said.

He studied her, feeling perplexed. It would be no great task to sweep her up in his arms and go to Salaman with her and say, “Cousin, I want your daughter as my mate. Let me take her to Dawinno with me, and in a few months we’ll return and hold the formal ceremony in your palace.” Certainly that was what Salaman had had in mind from the first moment, when he had offered this girl to him “to warm your bed tonight,” as the king in his cheerfully crude way had put it.

It was not as a concubine but as a potential mate that Salaman had given Weiawala to him. Thu-Kimnibol had no doubt of that. The king wanted nothing more than to atone for the old breach between them by linking his family in marriage to the most powerful man in Dawinno. And the prospect had obvious merit for Thu-Kimnibol, too. A king’s son himself, mated to the daughter of that king’s successor — he’d have a strong claim to the throne of Yissou, if that throne became vacant and for some reason no son of Salaman was in a position to take it.