Having come to terms with the girl's father, Varthlokkur began his long and seldom-rewarding effort to light a love-spark in the heart of a unicorn-girl. Occasionally it looked like he was about to break through. More often he appeared destined to inevitable failure. But he had learned patience in his centuries. He had time. Like the eroding waters of a river, he gradually wore the rock of Nepanthe's fear. By the time she was nineteen she looked forward to his increasingly frequent visits, though she saw him more as a kindly philosophy teacher than as a potential lover. There would be no lovers for her, she believed.

He was sure she secretly wanted one. Sadly, she awaited a knight-charming from a jongleur's tale, and in such men her world was painfully lacking.

Which was a pity. A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse. Varthlokkur conceived of his world as being populated only by friends and enemies, without absolutes, with good and evil being strictly relative to his own position.

On Nepanthe's twentieth birthday Varthlokkur proposed. At first she thought he was joking. When he declared he was serious, she fled. He hadn't sown his seeds deeply enough. She refused to see him fora year. She hurt him terribly, but he refused to be daunted.

Though she eventually resumed speaking, she remained defensive and flighty, and tried to keep Valther nearby to protect the virtue she fancied threatened.

Verloya's death caused her to relent. It was Varthlokkur who best comforted her at her father's funeral. But the break in her defenses was in appearance only. She wasn't going to let him get too near.

Then Varthlokkur suffered a loss of his own. Marya passed away during one of his increasingly short stays at Fangdred. He began to suspect that she had known what he was doing and had kept her peace. He honestly grieved at her passing. A better wife a man couldn't have asked. Sometimes he wondered why he couldn't be satisfied with the good things that did touch his life. There was no absolute, compelling force, outside himself, making him pursue the destinies he foresaw in his divinations. If he wished, and wanted to employ the will, he could become a simple farmer or sailmaker... He didn't have the will. He believed that it was his duty to fulfill the destinies he had foreseen.

Nepanthe's resistance remained like steel or adamant, wearing but never breaking. Six years later, when her brothers' through-the-halls war games matured into plans for genuine conquests, she still hadn't surrendered. She accepted him as part of her life. Maybe she even expected an eventual pairing. She had learned to be at ease with him again. But she refused to help the relationship to develop an affectionate scope.

Impatience undid Varthlokkur. One evening he proposed. As usual, Nepanthe put him off. The first of their great angry arguments ensued. Afterwards, frustrated, he returned to Fangdred determined to pursue a course the Old Man had championed for years.

The Old Man. He might have been a mystery to himself. No man could keep in memory all the ages and events he had seen and heard and experienced. He barely felt he belonged to the realm of humankind. Lusts, loves, hatreds, agonies and joys, passions, what were those in the mill of time? Grist. Just grist for the grinding wheel. What remained of parents dead ten thousand years? Not even a memory, other than unspeakably archaic, alien names. Youth? He had never been young. Or so it seemed now. He had few memories of running joy, of a girl, and wildflowers and clover scents in spring (her name sometimes haunted his lonely dreams, and her face frequently came to him in his odd, brief, happy moments). His past was a corridor infinitely long, passing a million doors with memories shut up inside, all in old man's shades of gray. The color had faded from present and future. The past dwindled back to the dark point where he had first encountered the Director. He missed that most, the brights, the scarlets, the greens, the blues, of mighty loves and aches and passions. He was the oldest man in the world.

Except one, though he thought his friend, the Star Rider, the Director, might well be dead. He had heard nothing from the man since the Nawami Crusades, a thousand years ago, though his handiwork appeared, in hints, in the background of the epic tale of the Fall.

Once the Old Man had wanted to live forever. But then he and the world had been young and he had loathed the thought of missing its future ages. Once when magic had been equally young and unbound, and he still had had the capacity for innovation, he had risked his soul and humanity to seize the immortality he owned. It was an irreversible Star Rider gift that exacted its cruel price in alienation and boredom and a debt he might never completely discharge.

There were times when he thought Death might be his own sweet angel of the morning (with a face like that of his love forgotten), a woman he would gladly embrace when She came. She would give him surcease from this world, where his days were undistinguished marchers in endless columns of sameness. Freedom She would be. Mother Night with a soft black womb wherein he could lie forever at peace...

But Her arms could be achieved easily. Why didn't he jump off Fangdred's wall? Because he also feared the Lady he desired. Nor could he yet tolerate the thought of a world without himself in it. That urge, that overwhelming compulsion, that had driven him to immortality, still burned undampened among the fires of his soul. He might miss something. But what, if he had lived all those ages and had become achingly bored by their historic march? If catastrophes and conquests and the finest artistic products of the human mind weren't enough, what would suffice? To what did he look forward?

When he was in a dark mood, snappish, such were the thoughts he thought. He had no idea what he wanted anymore, nor did he search. He was content to wait till it came to him. Meanwhile, the habits of ages swept him onward. He wished for oblivion, and bent every effort to escape it. Ten thousand years had he lived; perhaps he would see ten thousand more.

And he did have his debts and obligations. There was interest to pay on the long life he had been loaned.

A vast map lay on the table in the gloomy room atop the Wind Tower. On its eastern borders were fangy marks representing the Dragon's Teeth. At the top, more fangs: the Kratchnodians, and among them, the name Ravenkrak. Speckled across the middle, and tending south, were the names of cities and kingdoms: Iwa Skolovda, Dvar, Prost Kamenets, Itaskia, Greyfells, Mendalayas, Portsmouth, and a hundred more. Varth-lokkur and the Old Man bent over them, considering the possibilities.

"Here," said the Old Man, finger stabbing the Kratchnodians just above Iwa Skolovda. "The ideal base. The people, bandits all, have a grudge against the city. An able man, unswayed by tribal jealousies, could unite them into an army strong enough to take Iwa Skolovda by surprise, yet not strong enough to hold it. I think that's essentially what you've got in mind. And what you need if they do put Nepanthe on the throne there. We'll get her then, when they lose interest and turn to other conquests."

"Fine, if we can catch her. She's not stupid." Though she tried to hide it, Varthlokkur had discovered in Nepanthe a brilliant intuitive mind. Where she was dullest she had, generally, intentionally blinded herself.

"Settled, then? We hire this bin Yousif and his people, and use them to isolate her at Iwa Skolovda?"

"I guess." A premonition weighed heavily on him. It wouldn't be as simple as the Old Man made it sound.

He ached with the approaching cruelty of his second great destruction. "Somehow, I don't think it'll work. I'll end up fighting her brothers."