Then the surviving Khnauronts were throwing down their weapons and speaking or weeping with dry, birdlike clicks. They didn’t seem to be surrendering so much as despairing. These had no lifetaker wands. The Khnauronts with wands fought to the death, or until their wands were broken.

Now the battle had ended, but the chaos continued to swirl in Aloê’s mind and heart. She was wounded, she saw: twice in the left side, once in the left arm. She had lost her knife somewhere. She felt frail and crunchy, like a dry cicada husk.

Moonslit moments, separated by moonless dark. She saw Rynyrth and a band of weidhkyrren forcing the defeated Khnauronts to kneel. She saw Deor, his dark eyes fierce, his face unwontedly grim. He didn’t seem to see her, and somehow she could not speak to him.

She heard someone speaking, almost whispering, nearby her. “They will make that crooked man king someday. At least in the North.”

She turned toward the voice. It was Lernaion’s, and he wasn’t speaking to her. He was speaking in Earno’s ear, a dozen paces away, but somehow she could hear it, as if this were a dream. And she heard Summoner Earno’s curt response as clearly: “Shut your lying mouth.”

She looked around for Thea. There were Guardians gathering by the two summoners, but she was not among them. She saw the Gray Folk and the Dwarves mingling on the lower slope, talking in their harsh language—like rocks breaking, she often thought. She saw Morlock and Naevros at the bottom of the slope, leaning on each other in their weariness. She would have gone to them if she had the strength, but which one should she go to? Thea would know. She would at least have an opinion.

Aloê looked over her shoulder. At last she saw her friend, where she had fallen in the line, a pale shriveled form on the dark summit of the star-crowned hill.

There must have been other things, but she never remembered them later, and I will not tell them now.

PART TWO

Rites of Spring

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,

And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.”

—Tennyson, “Maud”

CHAPTER ONE

What Really Happened

The price of victory is work. The defeated need only flee or die, but those who win the battle must tend the battlefield like a bloody garden, and even take care of their late enemies, living or dead.

The price of fighting a war at all is forgetfulness. In the thick of fighting, few if any have the leisure to ask how it started or why.

In her time, Noreê had fought with sword and knife and naked fist to maintain the Guard. She would do so again. But, as she and her thains-attendant rewove the maze in the Gap of Lone, she had leisure to think of many things.

One was how to make a stronger defense of the Maze. This was mostly a matter of geometry, redrawing the shifting lines of talic force in the Maze so that they tended to reinforce each other rather than work against each other. She developed the necessary pattern in part of an afternoon and taught it to her assistants that evening.

The rest of the time she thought about this strange enemy. Had the Khnauronts, those mindless cannibals, the Strength and the Sight to shatter the Wardlands’ immemorial protections? It seemed unlikely.

Were the Khnauronts merely shock troops, sent to pave the way for a more formidable strike force? That was Noreê’s secret fear, and to forestall it she drove herself and her attendant-thains night and day to refashion the Wards over and above the Gap of Lone.

But as days passed, and the Maze was remade, and no new enemy came, Noreê was compelled to entertain another hypothesis.

The attack of the Khnauronts was a distraction. Something else, someone else, had entered the Wardlands while the Maze was broken down.

She left her thains-attendant to complete the new Maze by themselves. They were delighted by the trust she showed in them, and even more, she realized, by the prospect of her absence. Unlike Jordel, she was not the type of vocate who drew the affection and loyalty of younger Guardians—and, in fact, she rather despised the type.

She walked at random east and south as her mood took her. As she walked, she let her mind drift away from her body in light rapture. She looked for nothing. She watched everything.

The snows of winter were slowly receding, but the greens of spring had not yet appeared. It was oddly like a warm stretch of days in late autumn. Perhaps in this year would come the last of all autumns. She could feel the weight of the death in the world, the hunger of many who would never eat again. It spoke in the silence of her dreams, whether she waked or slept.

She walked much, ate little, and dreamed all the time. Her course, if plotted on a map, would have looked aimless, but it had an aim in view.

Her thinking was this: Whatever or whoever had entered the Wardlands secretly had come too long ago for conventional methods of trailing. But they had come here for some purpose. The nearer they got to their purpose, the more of a shadow it would cast in the future. That talic shadow would fall, with increasing clarity, on the present. All her unlooking was to look for that. All her indifference was to highlight that difference.

Not many seers could feel the cold drift of talic change rebounding from a future event that might never in fact happen. But she was one, and she was here; the task was hers to do. She never shrank from such tasks, however repugnant they were.

So she walked and dreamed and slept and dreamed and sat and dreamed and waited.

The answer came straight to her one morning as she sat in meditation beneath a leafless maple tree. She looked up to see a man standing awkwardly in front of her. He wore a flat black cap to cover his baldness, and from the way he hid his right hand behind him she suspected he had murdered a close relative, possibly his father. He spoke hesitantly, “I’m sorry to interrupt your thought, Vocate.”

“You haven’t.” She felt the chill breeze of the future in this sweaty, fidgety man.

“But you are the Vocate Noreê?”

“I am.”

“There is—I don’t want you to think I’m a mere informer. I don’t expect to be paid, or anything.”

“Be sure that I will not pay you. I rarely touch money. I have none with me now.”

“Oh.” The man stood still, the fidget struck out of him at the thought of someone with no money.

“You were going to say?” she reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah. There’s. In the town there’s a stranger, and I don’t think he’s one of the Guarded. He hardly speaks Wardic.”

The future-chill in her mind transferred itself to this stranger. “What is his name? Can you describe him?”

“He says his name is Kelat, but I think he’s hiding something. He doesn’t even seem to know where he’s from.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He is taller than I am—skin paler than mine, or most people’s—hair yellowish. He is staying at Big Rock House.”

“At the southern edge of town,” she predicted. That was what her insight told her, and the man said, “Yes.”

“Thank you,” she said and stood, ignoring his belated offer of a hand up. She walked away.

“And you have no money at all?” the man said plaintively.

“Is that why you killed—for money?” Noreê said to shut him up. And it worked: she never heard him speak again.

Insight, as Noreê knew better than most, arises from the interplay between the mind and the world of talic impressions below the level of consciousness. It was dangerous to be guided by it because it arose from the unconscious without the benefit of reason. So do actions of prejudice, of madness, of folly. To walk in the way of insight was to risk slavery to these kinds of blindness. It was one of the risks she often took for the Guarded, and she knew that they often had to suffer from her mistakes—her prejudice, madness, folly.