"No daughter of mine shall be called poor-dowered," he snapped back, stung enough to finally drop his irritating air of amusement. He composed himself again, and added, "Bank your burning soul in patience, Fiametta, until my great Perseus is cast, and the Duke rewards me as I deserve. And it won't be some poor soldier I'll buy you for a husband, either. Your chattering girlfriends' jaws will stop—most unaccustomedly—and hang open with envy at the wedding procession of Prospero Beneforte s daughter!" He handed her back her ring. "So keep this golden bauble as a lesson to yourself to trust your father before your own ignorance. This little lion will roar at your wedding yet."

I drank your poisoned wine. How much more trust do you require? Fiametta hid her ring deep in a pocket of her gown, and went to get a whisk broom to clean up the clay from the workbench.

Snow slid beneath Thur Ochs's boots as he climbed from the little valley village of Bruinwald toward the lift shed at the mine's mouth. He kicked reflectively at a gray-white mound beside the trail; it flew in sad lumps, not the fine cold powder of a few weeks back, nor yet spring slush. He would have welcomed slush, any hint of the coming warmth. The leaden dawn promised another leaden gray day of a winter that seemed to linger forever. Not that he was going to see much of this daylight. He repositioned his pick over his shoulder, and stuck his free hand into his armpit in a futile attempt to conserve body heat.

A shout halloed from above, and he glanced up and hastily moved to the side of the trail, prudently behind a tree. On a wooden sledge, a boy sitting atop a heavy pigskin sack of ore and whooping like a Tartary horseman skidded past Thur, followed shortly by another, racing each other to the valley floor. There would be broken bones at the bottom if they didn't drag their feet before the next curve. Somehow, they made it around, out of sight, and Thur grinned. Sledding the ore down to the stream had been one of his favorite winter jobs a couple years back, before he'd grown to his present size and everyone spontaneously began assigning the heaviest tasks to him.

He reached the wooden shack sheltering the lift machinery and ventilation bellows, and stepped gratefully out of the chill dawn breeze hissing down from the rocky wastes above. The mine foreman was there before him, measuring the day's oil into their lamps. Thur's workmate Henzi was unblocking the lift pulley and checking the teeth and rundles of the gears. Perhaps next year they could afford to have the machine enlarged, and a hitch of horses or oxen to turn the axle. In the meantime, ore must be raised, so two big men trod a wheel that turned beneath their straining legs. Heavy work, but at least they could see daylight.

"Good morning, Master Entlebuch," Thur said politely to the foreman, rather hoping to be assigned to the wheel today. But Master Entlebuch grunted to his feet and handed him a lamp. Farel the pickman entered, stamping the snow from his boots, and also received an oil-charged lamp, and the baskets and wooden trays for the black copper ore.

"Master Entlebuch, has the priest come to fumigate for the kobold infestation yet?" Farel asked anxiously.

"No," said Master Entlebuch shortly.

"They're getting awfully forward down there. They knocked over two lamps, yesterday. And that broken water-pump chain—that wasn't just rust."

"It was rust," said the foreman grumpily. "From the slapdash job somebody did of oiling it, most likely. And as for the lamps, 'kobold' is but another word for 'clumsy,' in my belief. So get yourselves down there and find some decent ore today, before we all starve. You two start on the upper face."

Thur and Farel packed their tools in the ore lift bucket, and started down the wooden ladder into the mine.

"He's in a foul mood this morning," Farel whispered, above Thur in the plank-lined shaft, as soon as they were out of earshot of the lift shed. "I bet he just won't pay for the priest's incense."

"Can't, more like," sighed Thur. The few veins they were presently working had been growing poorer all year. There was no longer enough washed ore to keep Master Kunz's smelting furnace working more than twice in the month. Or Thur would have been down helping at the forge this very day, cleaning the spent furnaces, stoking the roaring fires, and watching Master Kunz's marvellous transformations of black dirt into pure shimmering liquid metals. He would have been warm as toast, working for Master Kunz. Perhaps he ought to try hiring himself out to the charcoal burners, though with the smeltery at enforced rest there was little market for charcoal, either. The Bergmeister threatened to shut this mine down soon, if its profits did not improve. It was this specter of dearth that made the foreman so short-tempered and jumpy, Thur's uncle had said. As for Thur, well ... he must just keep a careful eye out for kobolds.

They reached the bottom of the vertical shaft, and Henzi lowered their tools. Thur hitched his hood up over his head, to keep the rock dust out of his blond hair and off the back of his neck. The slow silence of the stone pressed on Thur's ears as they made their way down the sloping tunnel by the flickering orange glow of the oil lamps. Some men found the quiet eerie, out Thur had always found it rather comforting, patient and unvarying, enduring as a mother. It was noise, the sudden groan of shifting rock, that terrified.

Some forty paces into the mountain the way split into two crooked forks, each following what had once been a rich vein of copper ore. One sloped steeply downward, and Thur was mildly grateful not to be hauling baskets of ore up it today. Other dark holes led off, veins played out and abandoned and robbed of their supporting timbers. They followed an upper, more level branch till it dead-ended at last in a raw rock wall.

Farel set his lamp down carefully out of the range of flying chips, and hoisted his pick. "Have at it, boy."

Thur positioned himself where his backswing wouldn't strike the other man, and they both began whaling away at the dim discoloration in the rock that was the fading stringer of ore. A half hour's work left them both gasping. "Hasn't that idiot Entlebuch started the bellows yet? Farel wiped sweat from his brow.

"Go yell up," suggested Thur. He shovelled their half-basketful of ore for Farel to take with him, as long as he was going. In the pause, Thur could hear distant echoes of the pounding now going on at the lower tunnel's working face. The rock was hard, the ore was thin, and they'd extended the tunnel barely fifteen feet in the last three months. Thur adjusted the leather knee pads his mother had fashioned, knelt, and attacked the face lower down. He hacked till he was winded and aching from his crouched position, then stood and leaned to rest a moment on his pick.

Farel was not back yet. Thur glanced around, then stepped up to the rock face and leaned against its chipped and scarred surface. He spread his fingers against the discoloration and closed his eyes. The babble of his thoughts faded into an inarticulate silence, at one with the silence of the stone. He was the stone. He could feel the stringer of ore, like a tendon running through his body. Thinning ten feet in, dwindling ... and yet, a few feet farther on, like a swordstroke slanting down: a rich vein, native copper glorying along like a bright frozen river, crying for the light that it might shine.... "The metal calls me," Thur whispered to himself. "I can feel it. I can."

But who would believe him? And how did these visions come? Or were they devil-dreams, false lures? Stussi the tanner had babbled of visions in a fever once, then a long worm had slithered out of his nose, and he'd died. Thur's vision throbbed with a pulse of danger, maddeningly vague, melting away the moment his emptiness was clouded with the very question, What .... His hands clenched, on the stone.