That had been enough to keep the students gossiping for days. But before she reached the door, she heard all the conversations fall silent, and Ansset's voice rose above the fading chatter to sing a wordless song that she, alone of all the students, knew was a song of hope and friendship and honest good wishes. She closed her mind to the boy's Songhouse tricks and left the room, where she could wait outside in silence with the guards until the guide came to lead them all away.

The buses, all fleskets from the Institute, took them home to Princeton with only one stop, in the ancient city of Philadelphia, where one of the older men students was kidnapped and found, mutilated terribly, near the Delaware River. He was the fifteenth in a wave of kidnap murders that had terrorized Philadelphia and many other cities in the area. The rest of the students returned in utter gloom to Princeton and resumed their studies. But Kya-Kya did not forget Ansset. Could not forget him. Death was in the air, and while Mikal could not be responsible for the mad killings in Philadelphia, she could not help but believe that he, too, would die mutilated. But the mutilation had been going on for years, and she thought of Ansset, and how he, too, might be twisted and deformed, and for all that she cared nothing for the Songhouse and even less for Mikal's Songbird, she could not help but hope that somehow the beautiful boy who had remembered her after all these years could emerge unsullied from Susquehanna and go home to the Songhouse clean.

And she fretted, because she was in school and the world was passing on quickly toward great events that she would not be part of unless she hurried or the world waited just a little bit for her. She was twenty years old and brilliant and impatient and frustrated as hell. She cried for the Songhouse one night when she went to bed especially tired.

5

Ansset walked m the garden by the river. In the Songhouse, the garden had been a patch of flowers in the courtyard, or the vegetables in the farmland behind the last chamber. Here, the garden was a vast stretch of grass and shrubs and tall trees that stretched along the two forks of the Susquehanna to where they joined. On the other side of both rivers was dense, lush forest, and the birds and animals often emerged from the trees to drink or eat from the river. The Chamberlain had pleaded with Ansset not to wander in the garden. The space was too large, kilometers in every direction, and the wilderness too dense to do any decent patrolling.

But in the two years he had lived in Mikal's palace, Ansset had tested the limits of his life and found they were broader than the Chamberlain would have liked. There were things Ansset could not do, not because of rules and schedules but because it would displease Mikal, and displeasing Mikal was never something Ansset desired. He could not follow Mikal into meetings unless he was specifically invited. There were times when Mikal needed to be alone-Ansset never had to be told, he noticed the mood come over Mikal and left him.

There were other things, however, that Ansset had learned he could do. He could enter Mikal's private room without asking permission. He discovered, by trial and error, that only a few doors in the palace would not open to his fingers. He had wandered the labyrinth of the palace and knew it better than anyone; it was a way he often amused himself, to stand near a messenger when he was being sent on an errand, and then plan a route that would get him to the destination long before the messengers. It unnerved them, of course, but soon they got into the spirit of the game and raced him, occasionally reaching the end before Ansset.

And Ansset could walk in the garden when he wanted to. The Chamberlain had argued over it with Mikal, but Mikal had looked Ansset in the eye and asked, Does it matter to you, to walk in the garden?

It does, Father Mikal.

And you have to walk alone?

If I can.

Then you will. And that was the end of the argument. Of course, the Chamberlain had men watching from a distance, and occasionally a flit passed overhead, but usually Ansset had the feeling of being alone.

Except for the animals. It was something he hadn't had that much experience with at the Songhouse. Occasional trips to the open country, to the lake, to the desert. But there had not been so many creatures, and there had not been so many songs. The chatter of squirrels, the cries of geese and jays and crows, the splash of leaping fish. How could men have borne to leave this world? Ansset could not fathom the impulse that would have forced his ancient ancestors into the cold ships and out to planets that, as often as not, killed them. In the peace of birdsong and rushing water it was impossible to imagine wanting to leave this place, if it was your home.

But it was not Ansset's home. Though he loved Mikal as he had loved no one but Esste, and though he understood the reasons why he had been sent to be Mikal's Songbird, he nevertheless turned his back on the river and looked at the palace with its dead false stone and longed to be home again.

And as he faced the palace, he heard a sound in the river behind him, and the sound chilled him like a cold wind, and he would have turned to face the danger except that the gas reached him first, and he fell, and remembered nothing of the kidnapping.

6

There were no recriminations. The Chamberlain didn't dare say I told you so, and Mikal, though he hid his grief well, was too grieved and worried to bother with blaming anyone except himself.

Find .him, he said. And that was all. Said it to the Captain of the guard, to the Chamberlain, and to the man with death in his voice who was Mikal's ferret. Find him.

And they searched. The news spread quickly, of course, that Mikal's Songbird had been kidnapped, and the people who read and cared at all about the court worried also that the beautiful Songbird might have been a victim of the mutilator who still went uncaught in Philadelphia and Manam and Hisper. Yet the mutilator's victims were found every day with their bodies torn to pieces, and never was one of the bodies Ansset's.

All the ports were closed, and the fleet circled Earth with orders to take any ship that tried to leave the planet and stop any ship that tried to land. Travel between districts and precincts was forbidden on Earth, and thousands of flits and flecks and fleskets were stopped and searched. But there was no sign of Ansset. And while Mikal went about his business, there was no hiding the circles under his eyes and the way he bent a little as he walked and the fact that the spring was gone from his step. Some thought that Ansset had been stolen for profit, or had been kidnapped by the mutilator and the body simply had not been found. But those who saw what the kidnapping did to Mikal knew that if someone had wanted to weaken Mikal, hurt him as deeply as he could be hurt, there could have been no better way than to take the Songbird.

7

The doorknob turned. That would be dinner.

Ansset rolled over on the hard bed, his muscles aching. As always, he tried to ignore the burning feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach. As always, he tried to remember what had happened during the day, for the last heat of day always gave way to the chill of night soon after he awoke. And, as always, he could neither explain the guilt nor remember the day.

It was not Husk with food on a tray. This time it was the man called Master, though Ansset believed that was not his name. Master was always near anger and fearsomely strong, one of the few men Ansset had met in his life who could make him feel as helpless as the eleven-year-old child his body said he was.

Get up, Songbird.