SHE COULD NOT SLEEP, and she coughed, and blood spotted her pillow; and the fever that came and went, and would not leave her alone even as her burns healed and her hair grew, came again that night, and light-headedly she relived the scene in the hall; and she heard the thing laugh, and heard the court say, Witchwoman’s daughter.

Near dawn she dreamed of the tall blond man she had seen once before, while she slept in the dragon’s valley. He did not speak to her, not did he seem to know she watched him. Perhaps he is only a dream, her dreaming self thought; but she looked at the way his blond eyelashes caught the sunlight, at the freckles on the backs of his hands, at the way the little fingers curled under the base of the cup he held, at the steam that rose from the cup. He blinked when it wafted into his eyes.

Where? her dreaming self thought. If he exists, where?

She woke, coughing.

He had said he would help her. How could he help her? He had said he would tell her how she could aid Damar. Damar didn’t seem to like her aiding it. She turned onto her back and stretched till her throat and chest lay flat and straight; sometimes that eased the coughing. She listened to the gurgling rasp of her breathing; no matter how shallowly she breathed, still the air rustled in her lungs. She thought dispassionately, This cough will kill me before too long, and Maur will have slain me after all.

Perhaps the man in my dream could cure my cough.

If she could find him. If he existed. She was so tired; she could not imagine what it was like not to be tired. She fell asleep again, listening to her breath rattle in her chest like dead leaves, and woke tired. She stared into the canopy over her head for several minutes, her eyes tracing the graceful embroidered forms of the galloping horses and their super-naturally long manes and tails, the manes almost like wings, the grass underfoot almost like clouds.

The fever would not let her go. She could not get out of bed that day, nor the next. Tor came to see her, and she would not speak to him; but he came again, and she remembered she had one thing she needed to say to him. “What happened?” he asked her over and over again.

At last she said, “I grew dizzy,” but would not say more; and Tor fell silent, holding her hand in a hand almost as feverish as hers.

It was only luck, she had pleaded with Maur. Was it? Maur’s head had answered her.

“Aerin.” Tor’s voice. What was it she needed to say to him?

“Will you ... take Maur’s head off the wall ... and put it ... somewhere far away ... that no one may see it?”

“Of course,” he said anxiously. “Of course. It shall be done today.”

She remembered little clearly after that; she saw Teka’s face bent over hers, and Tor’s, and her father’s, and others’ whom she dimly remembered as the healers who had done her so little good before. She did not know how many days or weeks she spent this way; and then one night she woke again from an especially vivid dream of the blond man.

“You stupid woman—climb off your deathbed while you still can, and come to me.”

The words still rang in her ears. She sat up slowly. She drew on her boots, and her leggings and tunic; she picked up the red stone on the table by her bed, and thrust it into the breast of her shirt. She looked at her sword—the king’s sword—hanging over her bed, and did not touch it, she fumbled for a cloak, and drew it over her shoulders. She had to sit down on the edge of her bed again and catch her breath. I must tell them where I am going, she thought. But I don’t know where I am going.

She stood up again, and made her way slowly into her sitting-room, to the desk there. The ink was dry; she had to carry a glass from her bed table, filled with water from the pitcher there, into her sitting-room, to wet it; her hand shook, and she spilled most of it on the desk, and the ink would not mix, but stayed pale and uneven. It would have to do. There was nothing to write on. She sat at the desk, staring at its blank top, as if paper or parchment would appear if she waited for it. She did not seem able to collect her thoughts, but her hand reached out of its own accord, and groped in the rear of the small desk cabinet, and drew something out. It was the note Tor had written her, long ago, asking her to see the king’s army off the next morning.

She turned it over, and took up a pen; the ink dripped and ran on the page. “Tor,” she wrote. “I have dreamed of someone who might help me, and I go to look for him. I will come back as I may.”

Stealthily she made her way to the ground floor and outside. The inner corridors were pitch dark, but she found she could see her way; there was a soft silvery light around her—she was glowing, she realized suddenly; and for the first time since Maur’s head had spoken to her she felt a glimmer of hope, and the hope warmed her a little, and steadied her footsteps.

Someone should have seen her as she crossed the open courtyard, particularly as she persisted in glowing like foxfire in a rotting tree; but no one came. She dragged Talat’s small light saddle from its peg opposite his stall, but left the trappings of the king’s breastplate as she had left her sword. Talat’s pale head thrust over the stall half-door at her. His nostrils moved in a silent whicker of welcome, but from his campaigning days he could recognize secrecy when he saw it. She had to wrestle the saddle onto his back, for she was too weak to lift it; but it was on at last, and Talat stepped after his lady as softly and carefully as a lover going to his beloved’s bed.

She was surprised to find that it was high summer, for she had lost all sense of the passing of time within the walls of her illness. “Although lucky for me,” she whispered into Talat’s pointed ears. She ate the fruit from the trees, when she remembered to eat, and at night she slept leaning against Talat’s side, as he rested his nose on the earth near his folded knees. Sometimes he flicked his tail in his sleep, after flies, real or imaginary, and Aerin would come half awake—she was never profoundly asleep in the first place—and feel the silky hairs slip down her face like raindrops.

They traveled west at first, then north, with the mountains on their right and the heavy Airdthmar forests on their left, forests that had never been completely explored, that held creatures no one had ever named. When times were peaceful the kings of Damar had set up expeditions to drive deeper into the forest, for it stood in the way of their kingdom’s free trade and concourse from one town to the next; but the Airdthmar was not kind to the folk who tried to chart it and lay roads through it. Arlbeth claimed to be fond of it. “It is quiet, it causes no courteous passer-by any trouble, it keeps its own counsel,” he said. “Would that all the quarters of the Damarian compass were so civilized.”

Aerin gazed into the trees as she rode, but she saw only blackness looking back at her. She had thought to go west originally because the Airdthmar seemed like the obvious place to look for a mysterious mage who visited dreams; but as they cleared the foothills Talat shied away and veered north, and Aerin half permitted, half agreed with him.

There was no trail for them to follow; they wove their way back into the foothills again, away from the smooth way that Arlbeth and his army had gone to meet with Nyrlol, or that any folk with legitimate business took around the eastern edge of the Airdthmar; Aerin did not want to meet anyone who might take word of her back to the City, nor be overtaken by any party sent in pursuit.

They came at last to a pocket valley in the hills, a small undistinguished valley like many others, well furnished by the thick purple color grass, which did not grow in the City, and with a few trees. The sun was setting as they paused, and Aerin, seeing a rock that would do for a mounting block, thought that this would be a good place to stop for the night; but she made no move to dismount, and Talat remained standing, ears pricked, uninterested in the lush lolor, which generally he preferred to anything else. As the sun disappeared it seemed to Aerin that the light never quite faded; but that might have been the glitter of her fever.