Wall of Shiuan

Last of all only the woman Morgaine survived, skilled in qujalin witchcrafts and bearing still that Sword that casts to death. Much of evil she did in Morija and Baien, rivaling all other evils she had committed... but she fled thereafter, taking with her Nhi Vanye i Chya, once of this house, who was ilin to her and therefore bound by his oath.”

–Nhi Erij i Myya, in the Book of Ra-morij

“ Chya Roh i Chya, lord of Ra-koris... followed the witch Morgaine, for his cousin’s sake... but Nhi Erij in his writing avows that Chya Roh perished on that journey, and that the Soul that possessed the likeness of Roh thereafter was qujal , and hostile to every Godly man... ”

–the Book of Baien-an

Chapter One

Seven moons danced across the skies of the world, where there had been one in the days of the ancients. In those days the Wells of the Gods had been open, providing power and abundance to the khal who had governed before the time of the Kings. Now the Wells were sealed, beyond the power of men or khal to alter. Long ago there had been vast lands on all sides of Shiuan and Hiuaj; but the world now was slowly drowning.

These were the things that Mija Jhirun Ela’s-daughter believed for truth.

For all of Jhirun’s young life, she had known the waters encroaching relentlessly on the margin of the world, and she had watched Hiuaj diminish by half and the gray sea grow wider. She was seventeen, and looked to see Hiuaj vanish entirely in her lifetime.

When she had been a child, the village of Chadrih had stood near the Barrow-hills of Hiuaj; and beyond that had stood a great levee and a sea wall, securing fields that gave good crops and pasturage for sheep and goats and cattle. Now there was reed-grown waste. The three parcels of land that had supported Chadrih were gone, entirely underwater save for the boundary posts of stacked stone and the useless remnant of the ancient sea wall. The gray stone buildings of the village had become a ruin, with water trickling even at low tide through what had been its streets, and standing window-high at Hnoth, when the moons combined. The roofless houses had become the nesting places of the white birds that wheeled and cried their lonely pipings over the featureless sea.

The people of Chadrih had moved on, those who survived the collapse of the sea wall and the fever and the famine of that winter. They had sought shelter, some among the marsh dwellers at Aren, a determined few vowing to go beyond into Shiuan itself, seeking the security of holds like fabled Abarais of the Wells, or Ohtij-in, among the halfling lords. The Barrows had heard tidings of those that had reached Aren; but what had befallen the few who had gone the long road to Shiuan, none had ever heard.

The breaking of the sea wall had happened in Jhirun’s tenth year. Now there was little dry land in all Hiuaj, only a maze of islets separated by marsh, redeemed from the killing salt only by the effluence of the wide Aj, that flowed down from Shiuan and spread its dark, sluggish waters toward the gray sea. In storm the Aj boiled brown with silt, the precious earth washed seaward, in flood that covered all but the hills and greater isles. At high tide, when the moons moved together in Hnoth, the sea pressed inland and killed areas of the marsh, where green grass died and standing pools reeked of decay, and great sea fishes prowled the Aj. Now throughout Hiuaj, there remained only sparse pasturage for goats and for the wild marsh ponies. The sea advanced in the face of the Barrows and the widening marsh ate away at their flank, threatening to sever Hiuaj from Shiuan and utterly doom them. Land that had been sweet and green became a tangle of drowned trees, a series of small hummocks of spongy earth, reed-choked passages that were navigable only by the flat-bottomed skiffs used by marsh folk and Barrowers.

And the Barrow-hills became islands in these last years of the world.

It was Men that had reared these hills, just after the days of the Darkness. They were the burials of the kings and princes of the Kingdoms of Men, in those long-ago days just after the Moon was broken, when the khal had declined and Men had driven the khalin halflings into their distant mountains. In those days, Men had had the best of the world, had ruled a wide, rich plain, and there had been great wealth in Hiuaj for human folk.

Men had buried their great ones in such towering mounds, in cists of stone: warrior-kings proud with their gold and their gems and their iron weapons, skillful in war and stern in their rule over the farmer-peasantry. They had sought to restore the ancient magics of the Wells, which even the halfling khal had feared. But the sea rose and destroyed their plains, and the last Kings of Men fell under the power of the halflings of Shiuan. So the proud age of the Barrow-kings passed, leaving only their burial places clustered about the great Well called Anla’s Crown, that had swallowed up their wealth and returned them only misery.

In the end there were only scattered villages of Men, farmer-folk who cursed the memory of the Barrow-kings. The old fortresses and burial places were piously avoided by later generations on the river-plain. Chadrih had been nearer the Barrows than any other village wished to be; but it had perished last of all the villages in Hiuaj, for all that—which gave Chadrih folk a certain arrogance, until their own fate took them. And the Barrow-hills themselves became the last refuge of all; the Barrow-folk had always lived beyond the pale of lowland respectability—tomb-robbers now, sometimes herders and fishermen, accused (while Chadrih stood) of stealing livestock as well as buried gold. But Chadrih died and the despised Barrow-folk lived, southernmost of all Men, in a hold that was a Barrow-king’s ruined fortress atop the last and greatest rock in all Hiuaj, save Anla’s Crown itself.

This was Jhirun’s world. Sunbrowned and warm, she guided her flat skiff with practiced thrusts of the pole against the bottom of the channels that, at this cycle of the tides, were hardly knee deep. She was barefoot, knowing shoes only in winter, and she wore her fringe-hemmed skirt tucked above the knees because there was none to see her. A stoppered jar of bread and cheese and another of beer was nestled in the prow; and there was also a sling and a handful of smooth stones, for she was skillful with the sling to bring down the brown marsh fowl.

There had been rain last night and the Aj was up somewhat, enough to fill some of the shallower channels, making her progress through the hills quicker. There would be rain again before evening, to judge by the gathering of haze in the east, across the apricot sun; but high tide, Hnoth, was some days off. The seven moons danced in order across the watery sky and the force of the Aj was all that sighed against the reeds. The Barrows that were almost entirely awash at Hnoth were bravely evident despite the rains, and the Standing Stone at Junai was out of the water entirely.

It was a holy place, that hewn stone and its little isle. Nearby was a finger of the deep marshes, and marsh-folk came here to Junai’s stone to meet on midcycle days with Barrow-folk to trade—her tall kinsmen with the surly small men of the deep fens. Meat and shell and metals were their trade to the marshes; wood and Ohtija grain out of Shiuan and well-made boats and baskets were what the marshlanders brought them. But more important than the trade itself was the treaty that let the trade happen regularly, this seasonal commerce that brought them together for mutual gain and removed occasion for feuds, so that any Barrower could come and go in Barrows-land in safety. There were outlaws, of course, men either human or halfling, cast out of Ohtij-in or Aren, and such were always to be feared; but none had been known this far south for four years. The marshlanders had hanged the last three on the dead tree near the old khalin ruin at Nia’s Hill, and Barrows-men had given them gold for that good service. Marshlanders served as a barrier to the folk of Barrows-hold against every evil but the sea, and returned them no trouble. Aren was far into the marsh, and marshlanders kept to it; they would not even stand in a Barrows-man’s shadow when they came to trade, but uttered loud prayers and huddled together under the open sky as if they dreaded contamination and feared ambush. They preferred their dying forests and their own observances, that made no mention of Barrow-kings.

Out here on the edge of the world lay Barrows-land, wide and empty, with only the conical hills above the flood and the wide waters beyond, and the flight of the white birds above. Jhirun knew each major isle, each stone’s-throw expanse of undrowned earth, knew them by the names of kings and heroes forgotten outside the lore of Barrows-folk, who claimed the kings for ancestors and could still sing the old words of the chants in an accent no marshlander could comprehend. Some few of these hills were hollow at their crest, caps of stone, earth-covered, that had long ago yielded up their treasure to the plundering of Jhirun’s ancestors. Other mounds still defied efforts to discover the cists buried there, and so protected their dead against the living. And some seemed to be true hills, that had no hollow heart of man-made chambers, with king-treasures and weapons. Such as did give up treasure sustained the life of Barrows-hold, providing gold that Barrows-folk remade into rings and sold anew to marshlanders, who in turn bought grain of Shiuan and sold it at Junai. Barrows-folk had no fear of the angry ghosts, their own ancestors, and hammered off the ancient symbols and melted down the gold, purifying it

And besides the grain the gold bought, they kept goats and hunted, and thus secured a small source of food independent of that trade. Daily Jhirun and her cousins cut grass and loaded it on skiffs or on the back of the black marsh pony that they used in the inner hills. By such means they stored up against the days of Hnoth, and fed their livestock, and had surplus of cheeses and domestic meat that the marshlanders valued as much as the gold.

The little skiff reached a stretch of faster-moving water, that place where the current of the Aj reached into the bordering islets, and Jhirun maneuvered into the shallows, holding that margin with care. Afar off she could see the edge of the world, where the Aj met the devouring sea, and horizon and sky merged in gray haze. Hereabouts, a great rolling expanse above the flood, was the hill of Anla’s Crown.

She did not mean to go near that place, with its ring of Standing Stones. None ever approached that hill save at Midyear’s Day, when the priests came—her grandfather for Barrows-hold, and aged Haz for the folk of Aren. Once even Shiua priests had come to it, down the long road from Ohtij-in: it was that important, one of the two true Wells. But none had come since the sea wall broke. The rites were now only the concern of Hiua, but they were by no means neglected. And even on that day the priests remained fearful and ventured no closer than a stone’s cast, Haz of Aren and her grandfather approaching separately because of their differences. In the old days, Barrow-kings had given men to the Wells there, but that custom had lapsed when the Barrow-kings fell. The sacrifices had not enlivened the Wells nor healed the Moon. The Standing Stones stood stark and empty against the sky, some crazily tilted; and that vast hill that none dared approach save on the appointed day remained a place of power and tainted beauty, no refuge for men or halflings. Each priest spoke a prayer and retreated. It was not a place to be alone; it was such that the senses prickled with unease even when one was coming with many kinsfolk, and the two priests and the chanting—a stillness that underlay the singing and made every noise of man seem a mere echo. Here was the thing the Barrow-kings had sought to master, the center of all the eeriness of the Barrows, and if anything would remain after the waters had risen and covered all Hiuaj, it would be this hill and those strange stones.

Jhirun skirted widely away from that place, working out of the current, among other isles. Marks of the Old Ones as well as the Barrow-kings were frequent here, scattered stones upstanding in the water and on the crests of hills. Here was her favorite place when she worked alone, here on the margin of Anla’s Crown, far, far beyond the limit that any marshlander would dare to come save on Midyear’s Day; and out of the convenient limits that her kinsmen cared to work. She enjoyed the silence, the solitude, apart from the brawling chaos of Barrows-hold. Here was nothing but herself and the whisper of reeds, the splash of water, and the lazy song of insects in the morning sun.

The hills glided past, closing in again, and she tended now toward the righthand bank of the winding channel, to the hill called Jiran, after which she was named. It had a Standing Stone at its crest, like others just downstream at water’s edge, and Jiran, like the other hills that clustered here, was green with grass fed by the sweet water of the Aj. She stepped out as the skiff came to ground, her bare feet quick and sure on the damp landing. She seized the mooring rope and hauled the skiff well up on the bank so that no capricious play of current could take it. Then she set to work.

The insect-song stopped for a time when she began to swing her sickle, then began again as the place accepted her presence. Whenever she had done sufficient for a sheaf, she gathered the grasses and bound them with a twist of their own stalks, leaving neat rows behind her. She worked higher and higher on the hill in a wheel-pattern of many spokes, converging at the Standing Stone.

From time to time she stopped and straightened her back and stretched in pain from the work, although she was young and well-accustomed to it. At such times she scanned the whole horizon, with an eye more to the haze gathering in the east than to the earth. From the hilltop, as she neared the end of her work, she could see all the way to Anla’s Crown and make out the ring of stones atop it, all hazy with the distance and the moisture in the air, but she did not like to look toward the south, where the world stopped. When she looked north, narrowing her eyes in the hope—as sometimes happened on the clearest of days—of imagining a mountain in the distant land of Shiuan, all she could see was gray-blue, and a dark smudge of trees against the horizon along the Aj, and that was the marsh.

She came here often. She had worked alone for four years—since her sister Cil had wed—and she cherished the freedom. For now she had her beauty, still was straight and slim and lithe of muscle; she knew that years and a life such as Cil’s would change that. She tempted the gods, venturing to the edge of Anla’s hill; she flaunted her choice of solitude even under the eye of heaven. She had been the youngest—Cil was second-born, and Socha had been eldest—three sisters. Cil was now Ger’s wife and always heavy with child, and began to have that leaden-eyed look that her aunts had. Their mother Ewon had died of birth-fever after Jhirun, and their father had drowned himself, so the men said—and therefore the aunts had reared them, added duty, to bow these grim women down with further self-pity. The three sisters had been close, conspirators against their cousins and against the female tyranny of their aunts. Socha had been the leader, conniving at pranks and ventures constantly. But Cil had changed with marriage, and grew old at twenty-two; only Socha remained, in Jhirun’s memory, unchanged and beautiful. Socha had been swept away that Hnoth when the great sea wall broke; and Jhirun’s last memory of her was of Socha setting out that last morning, standing in that frail, shallow skiff, and the sunlight streaming about her. Jhirun had dreamed ill dreams the night before—Hnoth always gave her nightmares—and she had told her dreams to Socha and wept, in the dark. But Socha had laughed them away, as she laughed at all troubles, and set out the next morning, thus close to Hnoth.

Still happier Socha than Cil, Jhirun thought, when she reckoned Cil’s life, and how few her own months of freedom might be. There was no husband left for her in Barrows-hold but her cousins, and the one that wanted her was Fwar, brother of Cil’s man Ger and of the same stamp. Fwar was becoming anxious; and so Jhirun was the more insistent on working apart from her cousins, all of them, and never where Fwar might find her alone. Sometimes in bitter fancy she thought of running off into the deep marsh, imagining Fwar’s outrage at being robbed of his bride, Ela’s fey daughter, the only unwed woman in Barrows-hold. But she had seen the marshlanders’ women, that came behind their men to Junai, women as grim and miserable as her aunts, as Cil; and there were Chadrih folk among them, that she feared. Most pleasant imagining of all, and most hopeless, she thought of the great north isle, of Shiuan, where the gold went, where halfling lords and their favored servants lived in wealth and splendor while the world drowned.

She thought of Fwar while she attacked the grass with the sickle, putting the strength of hate into her arm, and wished that she had the same courage against him; but she did not, knowing that there was nothing else. She was doomed to discontent. She was different, as all Ewon’s fair children had been, as Ewon herself had been. The aunts said that there was some manner of taint in Ewon’s blood: it came out most strongly in her, making her fey and wild. Ewon had dreamed dreams; so did she. Her grandfather Keln, priest of Barrows-hold, had given her sicha wood and seeds of azael to add to the amulets she wore about her neck, besides the stone Barrow-king’s cross, which were said to be effective against witchery; but it did not stop the dreams. Halfling-taint, her aunt Jinel insisted, against which no amulets had power, being as they only availed for human-kind. It was told how Ewon’s mother had met a halfling lord or worse upon the Road one Midyear’s Eve, when the Road was still open and the world was wider. But Ela’s line was of priests; and grandfather Keln had consoled Jhirun once by whispering that her father as a youth had dreamed wild dreams, assuring her that the curse faded with age.

She wished that this would be so. Some dreams she dreamed waking; that of Shiuan was one, in which she sat in a grand hall, among halflings, claimed by her halfling kindred, and in which Fwar had perished miserably. Those were wish-dreams, remote and far different from the sweat-drenched dreams she suffered of doomed Chadrih and of Socha, drowned faces beneath the waters—Hnoth-dreams that came when the moons moved close and sky and sea and earth heaved in convulsions. The tides seemed to move in her blood as they did in the elements, making her sullen and prone to wild tempers as Hnoth drew near. During the nights of Hnoth’s height, she feared even to sleep by night, with all the moons aloft, and she put azael sprigs under her pillow, lying sleepless so long as she could.

Her cousins, like all the house, feared her speaking of such things, saying that they were ill-wishes as much as they were bad dreams. Only Fwar, who respected nothing, least of all things to which his own vision did not extend, and liked to make mock of what others feared, desired her for a wife. Others had proposed more immediate and less permanent things, but generally she was left alone. She was unlucky.

And this was another matter that held her to Barrows-hold, the dread that the marshlanders, who had taken in the Chadrih folk, might refuse her and leave her outlawed from every refuge, to die in the marsh. One day she might become resolved enough to risk it, but that day was not on her yet She was free and solitary, and it was, save when she had had both Socha and Cil, the best time of her life, when she could roam the isles at will. She was not, whatever the rumors of her gossiping aunts, born of a halfling lord, nor of the little men of Aren, born neither to dine off gold nor to trade in it—but Barrows-born, to dig for it. The sea might have all Hiuaj in her lifetime, drowning the Barrow-hills and all within them; but that was distant and unthreatening on so warm a day.

Perhaps, she thought, with an inward laugh, she was only slightly and sometimes mad, just as mad as living on world’s-edge ought to make one. Perhaps when she dreamed her terrible dreams, she was sane; and on such days as this when she felt at peace, then she was truly mad, like the others. The conceit pleased her.

Her hands kept to their work, swinging the sickle and binding the grasses neatly. She was aware of nothing about her but the song of the insects. At early afternoon she carried all her load down to the bank and rested, there on the slope near the water; and she ate her meal, watching the eddies of the water swirling past the opposing hill. It was a place she knew well.

And the while she gazed she realized that a new and curious shadow lay on that other bank, that indeed there was a gaping wound in that hill, opened just beneath that outcrop of rock. Suddenly she swallowed down a great mouthful of her meal and left everything lying—jars, sickle, sheaves of grass—and gathered up the rope and boat-pole.

Cist. A burial chamber, torn open by last night’s rain. She found her hands sweating with excitement as she pushed the boat out and poled it across the narrow channel.

The other hill was perfectly conical, showing scars about its top as most such suspicious hills did thereabouts, wounds made by earlier Barrow-folk probing to see whether burial had been made there. Those searchers had found nothing, else they would have plundered it and left it gaping open to the sky.

But the waters, searching near the base, had done what men had failed to do and found what men never had: treasure, gold, the purchase of luxuries here at world’s end.

The skiff scraped bottom among the reeds and Jhirun waded ashore up to the knees in water until she could step up on the clay bank. She heaved the skiff onto solid ground, there near the shelf that overshadowed the breach. She trembled with excitement seeing how that apparent rock outcrop was squared on the edge, proving it no work of nature; the rain had exposed it for the first time to light, for she had been here hardly a hand of days ago and had not seen it. She flung herself down by the opening and peered in.

There was a cold chill of depth about that darkness—no cist at all, but one of the great tombs, the rich ones. Jhirun swallowed hard against the tightness in her throat, wiped her hands on her skirt and worked her shoulders in, turning so that she could fit the narrow opening. For a moment she despaired, reckoning such a find too much for her alone, sure that she must go back and fetch her cousins; and those thieving cousins would leave her only the refuse—if it were still intact when she brought them back. She remembered the haze across the east, and the likelihood of rain.

But as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she could see that there was light breaking in from some higher aperture; the top of the tomb must have been breached too, the dome broken. She could not see the interior from this tunnel, but she knew that it must surely be a whole, unrobbed tomb; no ancient robber would have entered a dome-tomb from the top, not without winning himself a broken neck. The probing of some earlier searcher seeking only a cist atop the hill had likely fallen through, creating the wash at the lower level. And that chance had given her such a prize as generations of Barrowers dreamed in vain of finding, a tale to be told over and over in the warm security of Barrows-hold so long as the world lasted.

She clutched the amulets on the cord about her neck, protection against the ghosts. With them, she did not fear the dark of such places, for she had been in and about the tombs from childhood. The dangers she did fear were a weak ceiling or an access tunnel collapsing. She knew better than to climb that slope outside, weakened as it was. She had heard a score of times how great-uncle Lar had fallen to his death among the bones in the opening of the king-hill called Ashrun. She expelled her breath and began to wriggle through where she was, dragging her body through, uncaring for the tender skin of her arms in her eagerness.

Then she lay in what had been the approach to the tomb, a stone-paved access that seemed to slant up and up to a towering door, the opening of which was faintly discernible in the dim light. She rose and felt with her hands the stones she knew would be about her. The first joining was as high as her head, and she could not reach the top of the next block. By this she became certain that it was a tomb of one of the First Kings after the Darkness, for no other men ever built with such ambition or buried in such wealth.

Such a hill this was, without even the name of a King. It was old and forgotten, among the first to be reared near Anla’s hill, in that tradition that ringed the Kings’ burials nearest the forces they had wished to master, from which legend said they had come and to which they always sought to return. A forgotten name: but he had been a great one, and powerful, and surely, Jhirun thought with a pounding of her heart, very, very rich.

She walked the access, feeling her way in the dark, and another fear occurred to her, that the opening might have given some wild thing a lair. She did not think such was the case, for the air held no such taint; but all the same she wished that she had brought the boat-pole, or better yet the sickle; and most of all that she had a lamp.

Then she came into the area of the dome, where sunlight shafted down, outlining the edges of things on the floor, the ray itself an outline in golden dust. It fell on stone and mouldering ruin. Her least stirring echoed fearsomely in the soaring height above her head.

Many a tomb had she seen, the little cists often hardly larger than the king buried there, and two great dome-tombs, that of Ashrun and that of Anla, and those long-robbed, Ashrun a mere shell open to the sky. She had been at the opening of one cist-tomb, watching her uncles work, but she had never been alone, the very first to breach the silence and the dark.

The stone-fall from the dome had missed the bier, and the slanting light showed what must have been the king himself, only rags and bones. Against the arching wall were other huddled masses that must once have been his court, bright ladies and brave lords of Men: in her imaginings she saw them as they must have been the day that they followed their king into this place to die, all bedight in their finest clothing, young and beautiful, and the dome rang with their voices. In another place would be the mouldering bones of their horses, great tall beasts that had stamped and whinnied in fear of such a place, less mad than their doomed masters—beasts that had run plains that now were sea; she saw the glint of gilded harness in the dust.

She knew the tales. The fables and the songs in the old language were the life and livelihood of the Barrows, their golden substance the source of the bread she ate, the fabric of her happier dreams. She knew the names of kings who had been her ancestors, the proud Mija, knew their manners, though she could not read the runes; she knew their very faces from the vase paintings, and loved the beauty of the golden art they had prized. She was sorry when these precious things must be hammered and melted down; she had wept much over seeing it when she was a child, not understanding how such beautiful objects were reckoned unholy and unlucky by marshlanders, and that without that purifying, the gold was useless in trade. The fables were necessary for the house to teach the children, but there was no value for beauty in the existence of the Barrows, only for gold and the value that others set on having it.

She moved, and in doing so, nudged an object beside the doorway. It fell and shattered, a pottery sound, loud in that vast emptiness. The nape of her neck prickled, and she was overwhelmingly aware of the silence after the echo, and of the impudence of Jhirun Ela’s-daughter, who had come to steal from a king.

She thrust herself out from the security of the wall and into the main area, where the light streamed down to the bier of the king and gleamed on dusty metal.

She saw the body of the king, his clothes in spidery tatters over his age-dark bones. His skeletal hands were folded on his breast, on mail of rusted rings, and over his face was a mask of gold such as she had heard was the custom of the earliest age. She brushed at the dust that covered it, and saw a fine face, a strong face. The eyes were portrayed shut, the high cheekbones and delicate moulding of the lips more khalin than man. The long-dead artist had graven even the fine lines of the hair of brows and lashes, had made the lips and nostrils so delicate it was as if they might suddenly draw breath. It was a young man’s face, the stern beauty of him to haunt her thereafter, she knew, when she slept beside Fwar. Cruel, cruel, that she had come to rob him, to strip away the mask and reveal the grisly ruin of him.

At that thought she drew back her hand, and shivered, touching the amulets at her throat; and retreated from him, turning to the other hapless dead that lay along the wall. She plundered them, rummaging fearlessly among their bones for golden trinkets, callously mingling their bones to be sure the ghosts were equally muddled and incapable of vengeance on Midyear’s Eve.

Something skittered among them and frightened her so that she almost dropped her treasure, but it was only a rat, such as sheltered in the isles and fed on wreckage and drowned animals, and sometimes housed in opened tombs.

Cousin, she saluted him in wry humor, her heart still fluttering from panic. His nose twitched in reciprocal anxiety, and when she moved, he fled. She made haste, filling her skirts with as much as she could carry, then returning to the access and laboriously bringing bit after bit down that narrow tunnel and out into daylight She crawled out after, and loaded the pieces in the skiff, looking all about the while to be sure that she was atone: wealth made her suspect watchers, even where such were impossible. She covered over everything with grass in the skiff’s bottom and hurried again to the entrance, pausing to cast a nervous glance at the sky.

Clouds filled the east. She knew well how swiftly they could come with the wind behind them, and she hurried now doubly, feeling the threat of storm, of flood that would cover the entrance of the tomb.

She wriggled through into the dark again, and felt her way along until her eyes reaccustomed themselves to the dark. She sought this time the bones of the horses, wrenching bits of gold from leather that went to powder in her hands. Their bones she did not disturb, for they were only animals, and she was sorry for them, thinking of the Barrows-hold’s pony. If they would haunt anyone, it would be harmless, and she wished them joy of their undersea plains.

What she gained there she took as far as the access and piled in a bit of broken pottery, then returned to the bones of the courtiers. She worked there, gathering up tiny objects while the thunder rumbled in the distance, filling her skirt as she worked slowly around the wall among the bones, into a shadow that grew deeper and colder.

Cold air breathed out of an unseen recess in that shadow, and she stopped with the gold in her lap, peering into that blind dark. She sensed the presence of another, deeper chamber, black and vast.

It fretted at her, luring her. She remembered how at Ashrun’s tomb there had been a treasure chamber that yielded more wealth than any buried with king or court. Long moments she hesitated, fingering the amulets that promised her safety. Then she cursed her cowardice and convinced herself; the thunder walked above the hills, reminding her that there was only this one chance, forever.

With a whispered invocation to Arzad, who protected from ghosts, she edged forward, kneeling, cast a seal-gem into that dark. It struck metal; and thus encouraged, she leaned forward and reached into that darkness.

Her fingers met mouldering cloth, and she recoiled, but in doing so her hand hit metal, and things spilled in a clatter that woke the echoes and almost stopped her heart. Cascading about her knees were dusty gems and plates and cups of gold, treasure that made the objects in her lap seem mere trinkets.

She cursed in anguish for the shortness of the time. She gathered what she could carry and returned to the tunnel to push each piece out into the daylight. Drops of rain spattered the dust as she finally worked her own body out, touched her with chill as she carried the heavy objects to the boat, her steps weaving with exhaustion.

Looking up, she saw the clouds black and boiling. The air had gone cold, and wind sighed noisily through the grasses. Once that storm broke, then the water would rise swiftly; and she had a horror of being shut in that place, water rising over the entrance, to drown her in the dark.

But one piece she had left, a bowl filled with gold objects, itself heavy and solid.

With feverish anxiety she lay down and crawled back into the dark, feeling her way until her eyes cleared and she walked again into the main chamber, where the king lay on his bier.

It was useless to have spared him. She resolved suddenly to make good her theft, for the water would have all in the end, the mask as well. She went to the bier—the only place that the declining light shone, and that dimmed by clouds. A few drops of rain fell on the mask like tears, puddling the dust there, and the wind skirled violently through the double openings, tugging at her skirts, bidding her make urgent haste. But she saw again how fair he had been, and alone now, robbed, his companion ghosts all destroyed, here at the end of time. He had seen the fields wide and green, had ruled holds and villages beside which Chadrih was nothing. To have enjoyed power and never felt hunger, and to have lain down to die amidst all these good things, she thought, was a happy fate.

But at the end he was robbed by a Barrows-girl, his descendant, whose fondest wish was to have a warm cloak and enough to eat; and once to see the green mountains of Shiuan.

Her hand stayed a second time from the mask that him; and a curious object in his skeletal fingers caught her eye. She moved the bones aside and took it: a bird, such as she knew today over the marshes—not a lucky symbol to have been worn by a warrior, who often risked death, nor had it been part of his armor. She thought rather of some grieving woman who had laid it there, a death-gift.

And it was strange to think that so homely a creature as a gull could be common to his age and hers, that he also had seen the birds above some more distant shore, not knowing them the heirs of all he possessed. She hesitated at it, for the white sea birds were a figure of death, that came and went beyond the world’s edge; but, Barrows-bred that she was, she carried even among the amulets a white gull feather, and reckoned it lucky, for a Barrows-girl, whose livelihood was from the dead. The figure was golden, delicate: it warmed in her hands as it had not done in centuries. She touched the fine detail of the wings—and thrust it into her bodice when she saw the dusty jewels beside the king. But they proved only seal-gems, worthless, for the symbols on them could not be polished away, and the marshlanders thought them unlucky.

The rain struck her face, and spotted the dusty bones and washed upon the mask. Jhirun shivered in the cold wind and knew by the sound of the water rushing outside that she had waited dangerously long. Thunder crashed above the hill.

In sudden panic she fled, gathered up what she had come to fetch, and ran to the exit, wriggled through the tunnel pushing her treasure out ahead of her, out into the dim light and the pelting rain. The water in the channel had risen, beginning to lift and pull the boat from its safety on the bank.

Jhirun looked at that swirling, silt-laden water—dared not burden the boat more. In anguish she set aside her heavy bowl of trinkets, to wait high upon the bank. Then fearfully she loosed the mooring rope and climbed aboard, seized up the pole. The water snatched at the boat, turned it; it wanted all her skill and strength to drive it where she would, across the roaring channel to Jiran’s Hill—and there she fought it aground, poured rain-washed treasure into her skirts and struggled uphill, not to lose a trinket on that slope that poured with water. She spilled her skirt-full of gold at the foot of the Standing Stone, made trip after trip to heap up there what she had won, by a sure marker, where it would be safe.

Then she tried to launch the skiff again toward the Barrow, the rain driving along the battered face of the waters in blowing sheets, torn by the wind. The boat almost pulled from her hands, dragging at the rope; she could not board it—and with a desperate curse, she hauled back on the rope, dragging the boat back to land, higher and higher, legs mudstreaked and scratched and her skirts a sodden weight about them. She reached a level place, sprawled backward with the rain driving down into her face, the blaze of lightnings blinding her. The boat was saved: that, at the moment, was more than gold.

And driven at last by misery, she gathered herself and began to seek relief from the cold. There was a short paddle and an oiled-leather cover in the skiff. She wrestled the little boat completely over, heaved the bow up with her shoulder and wedged the paddle under, making a shelter, however slight She crawled within and wrapped her shivering limbs in the leather, much regretting now the meal she had not finished, the jars the flood had already claimed.

The rain beat down on the upturned bottom of the boat with great violence, and Jhirun clenched her chattering teeth, enduring, while water crept higher up the banks of the hills, flooded the access of the tomb, covered the treasure she had been forced to abandon on that other hill.

Of a sudden, a blink of her eyes in the gray-green light of storm, and the fore part of the Barrow began to slide into the channel, washed through, the bones and dust of the king gone sluicing down the flood to a watery rest. She clutched her amulets and muttered frantic prayers to the six favorable powers, watching the rum widen, remembering the stern, sleeping face of the mask. Tales were told how ghosts went abroad on Hnoth and Midyear’s Eve, how the kings of the sunken plain hosted drowned souls of Barrow-folk and villagers in the ghostly courts, and lights could be seen above the marsh-lights that marked their passage. She reckoned that she had killed some few ghosts by breaking the spells that held them to earth. They might go where they were doomed to go hereafter, no longer bound to their king, with storm to bear them hence.

But about her neck she wore the joined brass links of Bajen and Sojan the twin kings, that were for prosperity; and Anla’s silver ring, for piety; the bit of shell that was for Sith the sea lord, a charm against drowning; the Dir-stone for warding off fevers; the Barrow-king’s cross, that was for safety; and the iron ring of Arzad, favorable mate to the unfavorable seventh power... to Morgen-Angharan of the white gull feather, a charm that Barrowers wore, though marshlanders used it only to defend their windows and doorways. By these things Jhirun knew herself protected against the evils that might be abroad on the winds; she clung to them and tried to take her mind from her situation.

She waited while the day waned from murky twilight to starless night, when it became easier to take any fears to heart. The rain beat down ceaselessly, and she was still stranded, the waters too violent for the light boat.

Somewhere across the hills, she knew, her cousins and uncles would be doing the same, sheltering on some high place, probably in greater comfort. They had gone to gather wood at the forest’s edge, and likely sat by a warm fire at the ruins on Nia’s Hill, not stirring until the rain should cease. No one would come searching for her; she was a Barrower, and should have sense enough to do precisely what she had done. They would reckon correctly that if she had drowned she was beyond help, and that if she had taken proper precautions she would not drown.

But it was lonely, and she was afraid, with the thunder rolling overhead from pole to pole. Finally she collapsed the shelter entirely, to keep out the prying wind, wrapped in her leather covering and with the rain beating down above her with a sound to drive one mad.

Chapter Two

At last the rain ceased, and there was only the rush of water. Jhirun wakened from a brief sleep, numb in her feet, like to smother in the dark. She sneezed violently and heaved up the shelter of her boat and looked about, finding that the clouds had passed, leaving a clear sky and the moons Sith and Anli to light the night.

She turned the boat onto its bottom and staggered to her feet, brushed back her sodden hair. The waters were still running high, and there was still lightning in the north—ominous, for rains came back sometimes, hurled back from the unseen mountains of Shiuan to spread again over Hiuaj.

But there was peace for the moment, satisfaction simply in having survived. Jhirun clenched her gelid hands and warmed them under her arms, and sneezed again. Something pricked her breast, and she felt after it, remembering the gull as her fingers touched warm metal. She drew it forth. The fine traceries of it glittered in the moonlight, immaculate and lovely, reminding her of the beauty that she had not been able to save. She fingered it lovingly and tucked it again into her bodice, grieving over the lost treasure, thinking of all that she had not been able to save. This one piece was hers: her cousins should not take this from her, this beautiful thing, this reward of a night of misery. She felt it lucky for her. She had a collection of such things, pictures on broken pottery, useless seal-gems, things no one wanted, but a gold piece—that she had never dared. They had their right, and she was wrong, she knew, for all the hold had good of the gold that was traded.

But not the gull, never the gull.

There would be a beating instead of a reward, if her kinsmen ever suspected how much of the gold she had failed to rescue from the flood, if ever she breathed to them the tale of the king in the golden mask, that she had let the water have. She knew that she had not done as well as she might, but—

–But, she thought, if she shaped her story so that she seemed to have saved everything there was, then for a few days nothing would be too good for Jhirun Ela’s-daughter. Folk might even soften their attitudes toward her, who had been cursed for ill luck and ill-wishing things. At the least she would be due the pick of the next trading at Junai; and she would have—her imagination leaped to the finest thing she had ever desired—a fine leather cloak from Aren in the marshes, a cloak bordered in embroideries and fur, a cloak to wear in hall and about the home island, and never out in the weather, a cloak in which to pretend Barrows-hold was Ohtij-in, and in which she could play the lady. It would be a grand thing, when she must marry, to sit in finery among her aunts at the hearth, with a secret bit of gold next her heart, the memory of a king.

And there would be Fwar.

Jhirun cursed bitterly and wrenched her mind from that dream. The cloak she might well gain, but Fwar spoiled it, spoiled all her dreams. Sharing her bed, he would find the gull and take it, melt it into a ring for trade—and beat her for having concealed it. She did not want to think on it. She sneezed a third time, a quiet, stifled sneeze, for the night was lonely, and she knew that her lot would be fever if she must spend the night sitting still.

She walked, and moved her limbs as much as she could, and finally decided that she might warm herself by gathering up her gold on the hilltop and bringing it down to the boat. She climbed the hill with much slipping on the wet grass, using the tufts of it to pull herself up the steepest part, and found things safe by the Standing Stone.

She flung back her head and scanned all her surroundings under the two moons, the place where the other hill had stood and hardly a third remained. She gazed at the widespread waters dancing under the moonlight, the lightning in the south.

And Anla’s Crown.

It glowed, a blaze of light like the dead-lights that hovered sometimes over the marsh. She rubbed her eyes, and gazed on it with a cold fear settling into her stomach.

Nothing was atop Anla’s hill but the stones and the grass, nothing that the lightning might have set ablaze, and there was no ruddiness of living fire about it. It was ghostly, cold, a play of witchfires about the stones of the Crown.

Almost she had no courage to delay atop the hill, not even for the precious gold. She felt naked and exposed, the Standing Stone that was the sister-stone to those of Anla’s Crown looming above her like some watching presence.

But she knelt and gathered up the gold that she could carry, and slid down to the skiff, loaded it aboard, went back for more, again and again. And each time that she looked toward Anla’s hill the lights still hovered there.

Jiran’s Hill was no longer a refuge from whatever was happening at Anla’s Crown: it was altogether too close, on the verge of what strangeness passed there. She dared not wait until morning; the sun itself would seem no comfort, but a glaring eye to mark her presence here too near to Anla.

Better the danger of the currents: against the waters she had some skill, and of them she had less fear. She eased the loaded boat downslope, the long pole and the paddle laid accessible within. Carefully she let it into the edge of the current and felt the pull, judged that she might possibly manage it.

She climbed in; the current seized the skiff, whirled it like a leaf on the flood for an instant before she could bring the pole to bear and take control. She fended herself from impact with the rocks, spun dizzyingly round again, found bottom and almost lost the pole.

It did not hold. She saved the pole and shipped a little water doing it and suddenly the skiff whipped round the bend of a hill and out, toward the great rolling Aj, toward a current she could in no wise fight.

There was no bottom here. She used the paddle now, desperately, went with the rush and worked to its edge, broke into the shallows again and managed to fight it into the lesser channel between Anla’s height and the Barrows. She averted her eyes from the unnatural glow that hovered, that danced upon the waters—used paddle and pole alternately, knowing that she must go this way, that the channels near Anla’s great rise would be shallowest, where once the ancient Road had run. The current pulled, trying to take her to the Aj, and thence to the sea, where Socha had died, lost, drowned. But here, while she held to the newly flooded margins, where the skiff whispered over reeds, the waters were almost calm.

She was going home.

Jhirun rested from time to time, drawing up on the shoulder of a Barrow, driving herself further as soon as she had drawn breath. The horror that she had seen at Anla’s Crown seemed impossible now, irretrievable to the memory as the interior of the tomb, a thing of the night and the edge of realities. The fear still prickled at the nape of her neck, but more present, more urgent, was the cloud in the north, the fitful flash of lightning.

She feared the hills themselves, that became refuges for small creatures with which she did not care to share the night—rats that skittered shadow-wise over the banks as she passed, serpents that disturbed the grasses as she rested.

And the flood had opened new channels, places not at all familiar, the flooding making even known hills look different. She guided herself by the currents that she fought, by the stars that began to be obscured by clouds. She felt herself carried south, riverward, and ceased to be sure where she was.

But at last before her rose jagged shapes in the water, the ruined buildings of Chadrih. Her heart leaped with joy, for she knew the way from here beyond a doubt, through shallow channels.

The murmur of the water, the frantic song of the frogs and the other creatures of the tall grasses, made counterpoint to the movement of the boat, the slap of water against the bow, the whispers of reeds under the bottom. Jhirun gathered herself to her feet in the skiff, bravely confident now, balanced evenly on her bare feet. The pole touched the sunken stones that she remembered.

Chadrih: she remembered being nine and being thrust out of a house of Chadrih, folk making gestures to avert the evil of a Barrows-child who was known to be fey, to dream dreams. She remembered a sinful satisfaction to see that house deserted, and the windows all naked and empty. The Halmo men had stayed on last, they that had most hated and despised Barrows-folk; and they had drowned when she was twelve. The water had taken them and she could not even remember now what they had looked like.

She swayed her weight and pushed with the pole and sent the skiff down that narrow channel that had once been a cobbled street. The jagged, roofless buildings like eyeless brooding beasts shape-shifted past her. The ruins rustled with wings, the nesting birds disturbed by her passage; and the frogs kept up their mad chorus in the reeds. When she reached the edge of Chadrih she could see the first of the northern Barrows against the lightning-lit sky, and beyond it would lie Barrows-hold and home.

Hills began to pass her again on one side and the other, great conical mounds, shadows that momentarily enfolded her and gave her up again to the clouding sky. And there, just where she knew to look, she first saw the light that would be Barrows-hold tower, a flickering behind wind-tossed trees, a star-like gleam in the murk.

The water was calm here and shallow. Jhirun ventured a glance back between the hills, and could see only empty darkness. She made herself forget that, and looked forward again, keeping her eyes fixed on that friendly beacon, slipping the boat in and out among the hills.

The light flickered the harder, and suddenly the wind began to rise, whipping at her skirts and ruffling the water. There were little whisperings in the reeds and in the brush that overgrew these marshward Barrows. The storm was almost on her, and lightning danced on the black waters. Jhirun drew an aching breath and worked harder as the first heavy drops hit her, unwilling to yield and shelter miserably so close to home.

And alternate with the strokes she made she heard a rippling and splash of water, like a man striding, perhaps just the other side of the hill she was passing.

She stopped for a moment, drifting free, and the sound continued.

Perhaps a stray animal out of the marsh, storm-driven; there were wild ponies there, and occasional deer left. She let the boat glide where it would and listened to the sound, trying to judge just where it was, whether it went four-footed or two, and cold sweat prickled on her ribs.

So close, so close to home: perhaps it was one of her kinsmen, seeking home. But it moved so relentlessly, unregarding of the noise her boat had made, and no voice hailed her. She felt the hair rise on her neck as she thought of outlaws and beasts that came seldom out of the deep fens—things such as might be stirred out of lairs by flood and storm.

A cry came, thin and distorted by the air and the hills.

And then she knew it for the bleating of a silly goat; she was that near home. She felt a wild urge to laugh; some of their own livestock, surely. She hoped so. The boat had begun to move with more rapidity than she liked and she feared the noise she might make using the pole to restrain it. She had let it slip into the main current, where the water curled round the hills; she must stop it. She used the pole carefully, making a rippling despite her efforts to move noiselessly. She was fearfully conscious of the gold that glittered under the lightning, scattered at her feet—treasure to tempt any outlaw, ghost-things and unhallowed as they were. Here in the dark, not alone, she was acutely aware whence the objects had come, and aware too of the gull amulet between her breasts, that made a sharp pain at every push she made, this thing that had last lain between the fingers of a dead king.

She misjudged the channel in her preoccupation; the pole missed purchase and she drifted, helpless, balancing and waiting for the current to take her where she could find bottom again. The skiff whipped round in an eddy and slowed as it rounded the curve of an isle.

And she spun face to face with a rider, a shadowy horseman whose mount went belly-deep in the water—and that rider glittered here and there with linked mail. She thrust for bottom desperately, borne toward him. Strength deserted her hands and she could not hold. The rider loomed close at hand, the face of a young man, pale, beneath the peaked helm. His black horse shied aside, eyes rolling in the lightning flash.

She could not cry out. He reached and shouted at her, a thin voice, lost on the wind as the current pulled her on.

Then she remembered the pole in her nerveless hands and leaned on it, driving the boat to another channel, seeking a way out of this maze.

Water splashed behind her, the black horse—she felt it without looking back. She moved now with more frenzy than skill, her hair blinding her when at last she had to look and know. Through its strands she saw his shape black on the lightning-lit waters behind her.

She whipped her head round again as the skiff passed between two hills, and there, there ahead was the light of Barrows-hold tower, the safety of doors and lights and her own kinsmen ahead. She exerted all her strength and skill, put out of her mind what followed her—the black king under the hill, the king in the mask, whose bones she had let lie undisturbed. She was cold, feeling not her hands nor the balance of her feet, nor anything but her own heart crashing against her ribs and the raw edge of pain on which she breathed.

Barrows-hold filled all her vision, the slope of the landing before her. She drove for it, felt the skiff go aground on mud and reeds, then glide through. She leaped out on shore, turned to look, saw the black rider still distant; and even then she thought of the gold and the precious boat that was their livelihood. She hurled the pole to the ground and gathered up the rope and pulled and heaved the skiff aground, she skidding and sliding in the mud; a last look at the advancing rider, the water curling white about the horse’s breast as it came, and she heaped pieces of gold into her skirts.

Then she turned and began to run, bare feet seeking tufts of grass to aid her climbing. Above her loomed the house, the cracks of its shuttered windows agleam with light, and the old tower lit to guide the Barrows’ scattered children home. She dropped a piece of treasure, gathered it again, stumbling. Rain was falling, the wind hurling the drops into her eyes with stinging force, and thunder cracked. She heard the suck of water behind her, the heave of a large body, and looking back, she saw the black horse and the rider. Lightning glittered coldly off ring-mail, illumined a pale face. The dogs began barking frantically.

She touched her luck amulets with one hand and held the knotted burden in her skirts with the other and ran, hearing the rider coming after. The grass was slick. She spilled a piece of her gold and this time did not stop. Her feet skidded again on the slick stone paving before the door. She recovered, hurled herself at the closed door.

“Grandfather!” she cried, pounding at the insensate wood. “Hurry!”

She heard the rider behind her, the wet sound of the animal struggling on the slope, the ring of metal and the panting whuffs of his breathing.

She cast a look over her shoulder and saw the rider alight to aid his horse in the climb. His leg gave with him. He caught his balance and struggled up the slope, holding out his hand to her. She saw him in the jerking flashes of the lightning.

“Grandfather!” she screamed.

The door came open. She fled into the light and warmth and turned, expecting the rider to have vanished, as all such things should. He had not; he was almost at the door. She seized the door from her grandfather’s indecisive hand and slammed it, helped him drop the bar into place, the gold scattering. Plates and cups clanged against the stones and rattled to a stop.

Jhirun turned and looked at the others, awe-stricken female faces ringed about the room, women and children, boys too young to be with the men. There were Cil and aunt Jinel and aunt Zai; but there was no man at all but grandfather Keln.

And she cast a look at him, desperate, fearing that for once her grandfather had no answer. Sprigs of azael and Angharan’s white feathers hung above doorways of house and stable, above the windows of both floors, wherever there was an access. They jested about them, but they renewed them annually, they that robbed the dead; there were laws, and it was taken for granted that the dead obeyed them.

“The signal,” her grandfather breathed; his hands shook more than usual as he waved the women toward the stairs. “Zai, go! All the house, upstairs, and hide.”

Plump Zai turned and fled stableward, by the west door, toward the tower—hers to care for the signal-beacons. The others began to herd frightened children toward the stairs to the loft. Some were crying. The dogs were barking furiously; they were shut in the yard, useless.

Old Jinel stayed, her sharp chin set; Cil stayed, her belly swollen with her third child, her other children at her skirts. Cil took off her warm brown shawl and cast it about Jhirun’s shoulders, hugged her. Jhirun hugged her back, almost giving way to tears.

Outside came the ring of hooves on stone, circling back and forth before the door, back and forth, to the window. The shutters rattled, ceased.

Then for a long time there was nothing but the shaking of harness and the breathing of the animal outside at the window.

“Ohtija outlaw?” Grandfather asked, looking at Jhirun. “Where did he start trailing you?”

“Out there,” she managed to say, clenching her teeth against the impulse to chatter. She tried to gather an explanation.

Steps reached the door, and there was a splintering impact The children screamed and clung to Cil.

“Go,” said Grandfather. “Hurry. Take the children upstairs.”

“Hurry,” Jhirun echoed, pushing at Cil, who tried to make her come with her, clinging to her. But there was no leaving her grandfather, fragile as he was. Jinel stayed too. Cil fled, her children beside her, for the stairs.

The battering at the door assumed a rhythm, and white wood broke through on the edge of an axe. Jhirun felt her grandfather’s arm go about her, and she held to him, trembling, watching the door riven into ruin. It was never meant to withstand attack; no outlaws had ever assaulted the hold.

An entire plank gave way: the door hung ajar, and a man’s armored arm reached through, trying to move the bar inside.

“No!” Jhirun cried, tore from her grandfather and ran to seize the great butchering knife from the scullery, her mind only then thinking of tangible defenses; but there was a crash behind her, the bar hitting the floor. She whirled in mid-step, saw the door crash open.

There in the rain stood the warrior-king. He had an axe in his band and a bow slung at his back, the hilt of a sword riding at his shoulder. The rain sheeted down and made his face look like the drowned dead. He stood there with the black horse behind him and looked about the room as if he were seeking something.

“Take the gold,” her grandfather offered him, his old voice stern as it was when he served as priest; but the stranger seemed disinterested in that—reached for the reins and led the tall animal forward, such a horse as had not been seen in Hiuaj since the sea wall broke. It shied at the strange doorway, then came with a rush, and its hindquarters swung round and broke the ruined door farther from its hinges. A golden cup was crushed under its hooves, spurned like a valueless stone.

None of them moved, and the warrior made no move at them. He towered in the center of their little hall and looked about him, he and the horse dripping muddy water onto the stones of the floor; and mingled with that water was blood that flowed from a wound on his leg.

Children were crying upstairs; he looked at the stairs and up toward the loft, while Jhirun’s heart pounded. Then he turned his eyes instead to the fireplace. He drew on the reins of the horse and led it forward, toward warmth, himself limping and leaving a trail of blood and water.

And there, his back to that blazing fire, he turned and gazed at them, his eyes wild and anguished. They were dark, those eyes, and dark his hair, when every lord of the north she had heard of was fair. He was tall, armored in plain and ancient style; there was fineness about him that for all his misery made their little hold seem shabby.

She knew what he was; she knew. The gull lay like guilt against her breast, and she longed to thrust it into his hands and bid him go, leave, become what he was. She met his eyes without wanting to, a chill running through her. Here was no wisp of cobweb to fade in firelight: he cast tall shadows across the floor, left tracks of blood and water. Rain dripped from his hair and made him blink, long hair, in a warrior’s knot, such as the ancient Kings had worn. His chest rose and fell strongly in ragged breathing; he drew a great breath, and his sigh was audible.

“A woman,” he said, his voice nearly gone with hoarseness; and it was a lilting accent she had never heard—save in the songs. “A woman, a rider all—all white—”

“No,” Jhirun said at once, touching at the white feather amulet. “No.” She did not want him to go on speaking. In her desperation she opened her mouth to bid him gone as she might some trespassing marshlander; but he was not that, he was far from that, and she felt herself coarse and powerless in the face of him. There was no move from her grandfather, a priest, whose warding charms had failed; no word from Jinel, who had never lacked words before. Outside the hall the thunder rolled and the rain sheeted past the ruined door, a surety that the men would be held from returning, barred by risen water.

The visitor stared at them with a strange, lost expression, as if he wanted something; and then with awkwardness and evident pain he turned, and with the axe blade, hooked the kettle that hung over the fire and swung it outward. Steam rolled up from it, fragrant with one of Zai’s stews. There was a stack of wooden bowls on the mantel. He filled one with the ladle and sank down where he was, braced his back against the stones. The black horse shook itself of a sudden, spattering the whole room and everyone in it with muddy water.

“Get out!” Grandfather Keln cried, his thin voice cracking with outrage.

The stranger looked at him, no answering rage, only a tired, perplexed look. He did not move, save to lift the steaming bowl to his lips to sip at the broth, still staring at them warily. His hand shook so that he spilled some of it. Even the black horse looked sorrowful, head hanging, legs scored by the passage through the flood. Jhirun hugged her dry shawl about her and forced herself to stop shivering, deciding that they were not all to be murdered forthwith.

Suddenly she moved, went to the shelves across the room and pulled down one of the coarse blankets they used for rain chill and rough usage. She took it to the invader of their home, where he sat on their hearthside; and when he, seeing her intention, leaned forward somewhat, she wrapped it about him, weapons and all. He looked up, the bowl in one hand, gathering the blanket with the other. He gestured with the bowl at the kettle, at her, at all the house, as if graciously bidding them be free of their own food.

“Thank you,” she said, struggling to keep her voice from shaking. She was hungry, miserably so, and cold. And to show that she was braver than she was, she pulled the kettle over to herself and took another bowl, dipped up a generous helping. “Has everyone else eaten?” she asked in a perfectly ordinary voice.

“Yes,” said Jinel.

She saw by the grease mark on the black iron that this was so; enough remained for the men. It occurred to her that the stranger might suspect others yet unfed, might take note by that how many there were in the house. She pulled the kettle as far out of his view as she could, sat down on the opposite side of the hearth and ate, forcing the food down despite the terror that still knotted her stomach.

Azael sprigs and white feathers: she suspected them nothing, her grandfather’s power nothing. She had been where she should not; and came this where he ought not. It was on her he looked, as if no one else existed for him, as if he cared nothing for an old man and an old woman who owned the food and the fire he used.

“I wish you would leave our house,” Jhirun declared suddenly, speaking to him as if he were the outlaw her grandfather called him, wishing that this would prove true.

His pale, beard-shadowed face showed no sign of offense. He looked at her with such weariness in his eyes it seemed he could hardly keep them open, and the bowl started to tumble from his hand. He caught it and set it down. “Peace,” he murmured, “peace on this house.” And then he leaned his head against the stone and blinked several times. “A woman,” he said, taking up that mad illusion of his own, “a woman on a gray horse. Have you seen her?”

“No,” said Grandfather sternly. “None such. Nothing.”

The stranger’s eyes strayed toward him, to the shattered door, with such a look that Jhirun followed the direction of his gaze half expecting to see such a woman there. But there was only the rain, a cold wind blowing through the open doorway, a puddle spreading across the stones.

He turned his attention then to the other door, that in the west wall.

“Where does that go?”

“The stable,” Grandfather said; and then, carefully: “The horse would be better there.”

But the stranger said nothing, and gradually his eyes grew heavy, and he rested his head against the stones of the fireplace, nodding with the weariness that pressed upon him.

Grandfather quietly gathered up the reins of the black horse, the stranger not protesting: he led it toward that door, and aunt Jinel bestirred herself to open it. The beast hesitated, with the goats bleating alarm inside; but perhaps the warm stable smell drew it; it eased its way into that dark place, and Grandfather pulled the door shut after.

And Jinel sat down on a bench amid her abused house and clenched her thin hands and set her jaw and wept. The stranger watched her, a troubled gaze, and Jhirun for once felt pity for her aunt, who was braver than she had known.

A time passed. The stranger’s head bowed upon his breast; his eyes closed. Jhirun sat by him, afraid to move. She set her bowl aside, marked suddenly that Jinel rose, walked quietly across the room. Grandfather, who had been by Jinel, went to the center of the room and watched the stranger; and there was a creaking on the stairs.

Jinel reached up to the wall for that great knife they used for butchering, tucked it up in a fold of her skirts. She came back to Grandfather.

A board creaked. Cil was on the stairs; Jhirun could see her now. Her heart beat painfully; the supper lay like a stone in her belly. They were no match for the warrior-king; they could not be. And Cil, brave Cil, a loyal sister, heavy with child: it was for her sake that Cil ventured downstairs.

Jhirun moved suddenly to her knees, touched the stranger. His eyes opened in panic and he clutched the axe that lay across his lap. Behind her in the room she sensed that things had stopped, her house with its furtive movements frozen where matters stood. “I am sorry,” Jhirun said, holding his eyes with her own. “The wound—will you let me treat it?”

He looked confused for a moment, his eyes ranging beyond her. Perhaps, she thought in terror, he saw what had been proceeding.

Then he bowed his head in consent, and moved his injured leg to straighten it, moved the blanket aside so that she could see how the leather was rent and the flesh deeply cut. He drew the bone-handled dagger from his belt and cut the leather further so that she could reach the wound. The sight of it made her weak at the stomach.

She gathered herself up and crossed the room to the shelves, sought clean linen. Jinel met her there and tried to snatch the cloth from her fingers.

“Let me go,” Jhirun hissed.

“Slut,” Jinel said, her nails deep in her wrist

Jhirun tore free and turned, dipped clean water from the urn in the corner and went back to the stranger. Her hands were shaking and her eyes blurred as she started to work, but they soon steadied. She washed the cut, then forced a large square of cloth through the opening and tied it tightly from the outside, careful not to pain him. She was intensely aware of her grandfather and Cil and Jinel watching her, their eyes on her back—herself touching a strange man.

He laid his hand on hers when she had done; his hands were fine, long-fingered. She had never imagined that a man could have such hands. There were scars on them, a fine tracery of lines. She thought of the sword he carried and reckoned that he had never wielded tools... hands that knew killing, perhaps, but their touch was like a child’s for gentleness; his eyes were likewise. “Thank you,” he said, and showed no inclination to let her go. His head went back against the wall. His eyes began to close, exhaustion claiming him. They opened; he fought against the impulse.

“Your name,” he asked.

One should never give a name; it was power to curse. But she feared not to answer. “Mija Jhirun Ela’s-daughter,” she said; and daring much: “What is yours?”

But he did not answer, and unease crept the more upon her.

“Where were you going?” she asked. “Were you only following me? What were you looking for?”

‘To live,” he said, with such simple desperation it seized at her heart. “To stay alive.” And he almost slipped from his senses, the others waiting for his sleep, the whole house poised and waiting, nearly fifty women and an old man. She edged closer to him, put her shoulder against him, drew his head against her. “The woman,” she heard him murmur, “the woman that follows me—”

He was fevered. She felt of his brow, listened to his raving, that carried the same mad thread throughout. He slipped away, his head against her heart, his eyes closed.

She stared beyond him, meeting Cil’s troubled gaze, none others.

A time to sleep, a little time for him, and then a chance to escape. He had done nothing to them, nothing of real hurt; and to end slaughtered by a house of women and children, with kitchen knives—she did not want that nightmare to haunt Barrows-hold. She could not live her life and sit by the fire and sew, work at the kitchen making bread, see her children playing by such a hearth. She would always see the blood on those stones.

No wraith, the stranger: his warmth burned fever-hot against her; his weight bruised her shoulder. She had lost herself, lost all sense where her mad dreams ended, no longer tried to reason. She saw the others lose their courage, settle, waiting; she also waited, not knowing for what. She remembered Anla’s Crown, and knew that she had passed that edge where human folk ought to stop, had broken ancient warding-spells with as blithe a disdain as the stranger had passed the bits of feather at the door, innocent of fear that would have been wise to feel.

If there had been opportunity she would have begged her grandfather to explain; but he was helpless, his warding spells broken, his authority disregarded. For the first time she doubted the power of her grandfather as a priest—of all priests. She had seen a thing her grandfather had never seen—still could not see; had been where no foot had trod since the Kings.

The hold seemed suddenly a tiny and fragile place amid all the wild waste of Hiuaj, a place where the illusion of law persisted like a light set in the wind. But the reality was the dark, that lay heavy and breathing against her shoulder.

They should not destroy him, they in their mad trust in law and their own sanity. She began to wonder if they even questioned what he was, if they saw only an exhausted and wounded outlaw, and never doubted their conclusion. They were blind, that could not see the manner of him, the ancient armor and the tall black horse, that had no place in this age of the world, let alone in Hiuaj.

Perhaps they did not want to see, for then they would have to realize how fragile their safety was.

And perhaps he would not go away. Perhaps he had come to rum that peace of theirs—to take Barrows-hold down to the same ruin as Chadrih, to ride one last course across the drowning world, one last glory of the Hiua kings, who had tried to master the Wells and failed, as the halfling Shiua had failed before them.

She had no haste to wake him. She sat frozen in dread while the storm fell away to silence, while the fire began to die in the hearth and none dared approach to tend it.

Chapter Three

Toward dawn came a stirring outside, soft scuffing on the pavement. Jhirun looked up, waking from half-sleep, her shoulder numb with the stranger’s weight.

Came Zai, shivering and wet, stout Zai, who had run to set the beacon. She entered blue-lipped with chill and dripping about the hem of her skirts, and moved as silently as she could.

And behind Zai crept others, out of the mist that had followed the rain: the men came, one after the other, armed with skinning knives and their boat-poles. None spoke. They moved inside, their eyes hard and wary and their weapons ready. Jhirun watched and her heart pounded against her ribs; her lips shaped silent entreaty to them, her cousins, her uncles.

Uncle Naram was first to venture toward the hearth; and Lev after him, with Fwar and Ger beside him. Cil rose up of a sudden from the bench by the door; but Jinel was by her and seized her arm, cautioning her to silence. Jhirun cast a wild look at her grandfather, who stood helplessly at the stable door, and looked back at the men who edged toward her with drawn weapons.

Perhaps her arms tightened the least bit; perhaps there was some warning sound her numbed hearing did not receive; but the stranger wakened of a sudden, and she cried out to feel the push of his arms hurling her at them.

He was on his feet in the same instant, staggering against the mantel, and they rushed on him, rushing over her, who sprawled on the floor. And Fwar, more eager to lay hands on her than on the enemy, seized her and cruelly twisted her arm in hauling her to her feet. In the loft a baby cried, swiftly hushed.

Jhirun looked, dazed by the pain of Fwar’s grip, on the stranger who had backed to the corner. She saw his move, quicker than the beat of a bird’s wing, that sent his dagger into his hand.

That gave them pause; and in that pause he ripped at the harness at his side and that great sword at his back slid to his hip. He unhooked the sheath of it one-handed.

They panicked, rushed for him in a mass, and of a sudden the sheath flashed across the room loose, and the bright blade was in his two hands, a wheeling arc that scattered blood and hurled her kinsmen back with shrieks of pain and terror.

And he leaned there in his corner a moment, hard-breathing; but the fresh wounds were on his enemies and none had they set on him. The stranger moved, and Fwar gave back, wrenching Jhirun’s arm so hard that she cried out, Cil’s scream echoing upon her own.

The stranger edged round the room, gathered up his fallen sheath, still with an eye to them; and her kinsmen gave back still further, none of them willing to rush that glittering blade a second time. In the loft were frightened stirrings, back into shadows.

“What will you?” Jhirun heard her grandfather’s voice ask from behind her. “Name it and go.”

“My horse,” he said. “You, old man, fetch all my gear—all of it. I shall kill you otherwise.”

And not a muscle did he move, staring at them with the great sword in his hands; nor did they move. Only her grandfather sidled carefully to the stable door and opened it, going to do the stranger’s bidding.

“Let her go,” the stranger said then to Fwar.

Fwar thrust her free, and she turned and spat at Fwar, shaking with hate. Fwar did nothing, his baleful eyes fixed on the stranger in silent rage, and she walked from him, never so glad to walk away from anything—went from him and to the side of the stranger, who had touched her gently, who had never done her hurt.

She turned there to face them all, these brute, ugly cousins, with thick hands and crass wit and no courage when it was likely to cost them. Her grandfather had been a different man once; but now he had none to rely on but these: brigands, no different at heart than the bandits they paid the marshlanders to catch and hang—save that the bandits preyed on the living.

Jhirun drew a deep breath and tossed her tangled hair from her face and looked on Fwar, hating, seeing the promise of later vengeance for his shame—on her, whom he reckoned already his property. She hated with a depth that left her shaking and short of breath, knowing her hopelessness. She was no more than they; the stranger had taken her part because of his own pride, because it was what a king should have done, but it was not because she was more than her cousins.

He had dropped his dagger to use the sword. She bent, slowly, picked it up, he none objecting; and she walked slowly to the other corner and slashed the strings by which sausages and white cheeses were hung. Jinel squealed with outrage, provoking a child’s outcry from the loft; Jinel stifled her cry behind bony hands.

And such prizes Jhirun gathered off the floor and brought back to him. “Here,” she said, dropping them at his side on the hearthstones. “Take whatever you can.”

This she said to spite them all.

The stableward door opened, and Grandfather Keln led the black horse back in, the beast apprehensive of the room and the men. The warrior gathered the reins into his left hand and tugged at the saddle, testing the girth, but he never stopped watching the men. “I will take the blanket, if you will,” he said to Jhirun quietly. ‘Tie the food into that and tie it on.”

She bent down and did this, under her kinsmen’s outraged eyes, rolled it all into a neat kit bound with some of the cheese strings and bound it behind the saddle as he showed her. She had to reach high to do this, and she feared the tall horse, but she was glad enough to do this for him.

And then she stood aside while he tugged on the reins and led the black horse through their midst to the open door, none daring to stop him. He paused outside, still on the paving, already greyed by the mist that whitened the morning outside. She saw him rise to the saddle, turn, and the mist took him, and swiftly muffled even the sound of the hooves.

There was nothing left of him, and it was as she had known it would be. She shivered, and shut her eyes, and realized in her hand was still one relic of their meeting, one memory of ancient magics: the hilt of a bone-handled dagger, such as the old Kings had borne to their burials.

She looked on her kinsmen, who were bleeding with wounds and ragged and ill-smelling, which he had never been, though he came from the flood, hard-riding; and there was hate in their faces, which he had not given her, though he was set upon and almost killed. She regarded Cil, sallow-faced, with her strength wasted; and Jinel, from whose face all liveliness and love had long since departed.

“Come here,” said Fwar, and reached out to jerk her by the arm, his courage regained.

She whipped the knife across his face, struck flesh and heard him scream, blood across his mouth; and she whirled and ran, slashed this way and that among them, saw Cil’s face a mask of horror at her madness, her grandfather drawing Cil back for protection. She held her hand then, and ran, free, through their midst, out into the cold and the fog.

The shawl slipped from her shoulders to trail by a corner; she caught it and ran again, through the black brush that appeared out of the mist. The dogs barked madly. She found the corner of the rough stone shelter on the west corner of the hold, and there in the brush she sank down, clutching the knife in bloody fingers and bending over, near to being sick. Her stomach heaved at the memory of Cil’s horrified face. Her eyes stung with tears that blurred nothing, for there was only blank mist about her. She heard shouting through the distorting fog, her cousins seeking her, cursing her.

And Cil’s voice, full of love and anguish.

Then she did weep, hot tears coursing down her face. She remembered the Cil that had been, when they were three sisters and the world was wider; then Cil could have understood—but Cil had made her choice, for safety, for her children. She was a faithful wife to Ger; and Jhirun knew Ger, who was faithful to nothing, who had laid hands on Jhirun herself in the drunkenness of Midyear, careless of his wife’s feelings. Jhirun still had nightmares of that escape; and Ger had a scar to remember it.

And Fwar; she knew she had scarred him badly. He would have revenge for it. She had taken the petty measure of him before them all, and he could not live without revenge for that. She sat trembling in the cold white blankness and clutched against her breast the gull-token of the dead king, and the bloody dagger with it

“Jhirun!”

That was her grandfather’s voice, frantic and angry. Even to him she could not explain what she had done, why she had turned a knife on her own cousins, or what set her shuddering when she looked on her own sister. Fey, he must say, which others had always believed; and he would sign holy signs over her, and cleanse the house and renew the broken warding spells.

It was without meaning, she thought suddenly, the chanting and the spells. They lived all their lives in the shadow of world’s end; and her children to Fwar or any man would be born to a worse age; and their children to the end of the world. They tried to live as if it were unimportant that the sea was eating away at the marsh and the quakes shaking the stones of the hold. They lived as if gold could buy them years as it bought them grain. They sought safety and warmth and comfort as if it would last, and saw nothing that was real.

There was no peace. The Barrow-king had swept through their lives like a wind out of the dark; and peace was at an end, but they saw nothing.

To accept Fwar, until she had no spirit left; or until she killed him or he killed her, that was the choice she was given.

She drew a great mouthful of air, like one drowning, and stared into the white nothingness and knew that she was not going back. She gathered her limbs under her, and rose and moved quietly through the mist.

Her kinsmen were down by the bank, calling to each other, seeking whether she had left in the boat. Soon they found the gold that was left there, abandoned in the night. Their voices exclaimed in profane greed. Already they were fighting over the prizes she had brought.

She cared nothing for this. She had no more desire for gold or for anything that they valued. She moved quietly round by the stable’s outside door, cracked it so that she could see in without being seen. The goats bleated and the birds stirred in the loft, so that her heart froze in her and she knew that the houseward door would be flung open and her presence in the outer stable discovered upon the instant. But there was no stir from the house. She could still hear the shouting down by the boat, distant and angry voices. There would be no better chance than this.

She slipped inside, went to the pony’s stall and eased the gate open. Then she took the halter from its peg and slipped it on him, backed him out. He did not want to leave his stable when she reached the outside door, laid back his ears at the weather, but he came when she tugged on the rope—stolid, thick-necked little pony that bore their burdens and amused the children. She grasped the clipped mane and rolled up onto his back, her legs finding pleasant the warmth of his fat sides, and she nudged him with her bare heels and set him moving downslope, having to fight him at first: he thought he knew the trail she wanted, and was mistaken, and had to be persuaded otherwise.

The water had sunk away in the channel this morning, and kept to center. The pony’s hooves made deep gouges in the mire, betrayal when the sun should clear the mist away, and the pony had careful work to find a way up the next bank: marshbred, the little beast, that knew his way among the flooded isles, far sturdier for such travelling than the slender-legged horse of the stranger-king. Jhirun patted his neck as they came up safely on the next hill, her legs wet to the knees; and the pony tossed his head and blew a puff of excitement, moving quickly, sensing by now that things were not ordinary this morning, that it was not a workday.

In and out among the Barrow-hills they travelled, in places so treacherous she must often dismount and lead the pony. Her bare feet were muddy and numb with cold, and the mist clung as it could on chill days. She felt the aches of her flight of the night before, the weariness of a night without sleep, but she had no desire to rest. Fwar would find the tracks; Fwar would pursue, if none of the others would. The thought of him coming on her alone, without his father and brother to restrain him, made her sick with fear.

Eventually in the mist she found the way she sought, the stones of the old Road, and solid footing for the pony. She climbed astride again, absorbing the warmth of the pony’s sides, her damp shawl wrapped about her. She congratulated herself on having eluded pursuit, began for the first time to believe she might make it away clear. Even the pony moved gladly, his unshod hooves sounding hollowly on the stones and echoing back off unseen hills.

It was the only Road left in all Hiuaj, khal–made and more ancient than the Kings. Any who followed her must find her if she delayed; but they must come afoot, and she had the pony’s strength under her.

Somewhere ahead, she believed, rode the stranger-king, for a northward track had brought him to Barrows-hold, and there was no way but this for a rider to take. She had no hope of overtaking him on that fine long-legged horse, not once they had both reached the Road itself; but in her deepest hopes she thought he might expect her, wait for her—that he would become her guide through the terror of the wide marsh.

But already he faded in her mind, a vision that belonged to the dark; and now things were white and gray. Only the gull-image at her heart and the bone-handled dagger in the waistband of her skirt proved that he had ever existed, and that she was most coldly sane, more than all her kinsmen.

In her common sense she knew that she was bound for grief, that she was casting herself into the hands of marshlanders or worse, who would learn, as her cousins knew, that she dreamed dreams, and hate her, as Chadrih-folk hated her, Ewon’s fey daughter. But all the terror her nightmares had ever held seemed this morning at her back, hovering about Barrows-hold with a thickness that made it impossible to breathe. Death was there; she felt it, close, close and waiting. Away from Barrows-hold was relief from that pressure; it grew less and less as she rode away... not to Aren, to hope for that drab misery, within constant reach of Fwar. She chose to believe that she travelled to Shiuan, where holds sat rich and secure, where folk possessed Hiua gold. It was not so important to reach it as it was to go, now, now, now: the urgency beat in her blood like the heat of fever, beyond all reason.

Socha had smiled the morning she parted from them; Jhirun recalled her wrapped in sunlight, the boat gliding from the landing as it parted into that golden light: Socha had taken such a leave, at Hnoth, when madness swelled as the waters swelled in their channels. Jhirun let herself wonder the darker thoughts that she had always chased from her mind, whether Socha had lived long, swept out into the great gray sea—what night might have been for her, adrift in so much water, what horrid plunging of great monsters sporting near the shell of a boat; and in what mind Socha had come to the end, whether she had wept for Barrows-hold and a life such as Cil had accepted. Jhirun did not think so.

She drew the gull amulet from between her breasts, safe to see it now in daylight, safe where no one would take it from her; and she thought of the king under the hill, and the stranger—himself driven by a nightmare as her own drove her.

The white rider, the fair rider, the woman behind him: day and white mist, as he was of the dark. In the night she had shuddered at his ravings, thinking of white feathers and of what lay against her heart, that seventh and unfavorable power—that once had prisoned him, before a Barrows-girl had come where she ought not.

The gull glittered coldly in her hand, wings spread, a thing of ancient and sinister beauty, emblem of the blankness at the edge of the world, out of which only the white gulls came, like lost souls: Morgen-Angharan, that the marshlanders cursed, that the Kings had followed to their ruin—the white Queen, who was Death. A nagging fear urged her to throw the amulet far into the marsh. Hnoth was coming, as it had come for Socha, when earth and sea and sky went mad and the dreams came, driving her where no sane person would go. But her hand closed firmly about it, possessing it, and in time she slipped it back into her bodice to stay.

She could not see what lay about her in the mist. The pony’s hooves rang sometimes on bare stone, sometimes splashed through water or trod on slick mud. The dim shapes of the hills loomed in the thick air and passed her slowly like humps of some vast serpent, submerged in the marsh, now on this side of the Road and now on the other.

Something tall and thin stood beside the roadway. The pony clopped on toward it, and Jhirun’s heart beat faster, her fingers clenched upon the rein, the while she assured herself that the pony would not so blithely approach any dangerous beast. Then it took shape clearly, one of the Standing Stones, edgewise. She knew it now, and had not realized how far she had ridden in the mist.

More and more of such stones were about her now. She well knew where she was: the ruined khalin hold of Nia’s Hill was nearby, stones which had stood before the Moon was broken. She rode now on the border of the marshlands.

The little pony walked stolidly on his way, small hooves ringing on stone and now muffled by earth; and all that she could see in the gray world were the nearest stones and the small patch of earth on which the pony trod, as if creation itself were unravelled before and behind, and only where she rode remained solid. So it might be if one rode beyond the edge of the world.

And riding over soft ground, she looked down and saw the prints of larger hooves.

The Road rose again from that point, so that earth no longer covered it, and the ancient stone surface lay bare. Three Standing Stones made a gathering of shadows in the mist just off the Road. Distantly came an echo off the Stones, slow and doubling the sound of the pony’s hooves. Jhirun little liked the place, that was old before the Barrows were reared. Her hands clenched on the pony’s short mane as well as on the rein, for he walked warily now, his head lifted and with the least uncertainty in his gait. The echoes continued; and of a sudden came the ring of metal on stone, a shod horse.

Jhirun drove her heels into the pony’s fat sides, gathering her courage, forcing the unwilling animal ahead.

The black horse took shape before her, horse and rider, awaiting her. The pony balked. Jhirun gave him her heels again and made him go, and the warrior stayed for her, a dark shadow in the fog. His face came clear; he wore a peaked helm, a white scarf about it now. She stopped the pony.

“I came to find you,” she said, and his lack of welcome was already sending uncertainties winding about her heart, a sense of something utterly changed.

“Who are you?” he asked, which totally confounded her; and when she stared at him: “Where do you come from? From that hold atop the hill?”

She began to reckon that she was in truth going mad, and pressed her chilled hands to her face and shivered, her shaggy pony standing dwarfed by that tall black horse.

With a gentle ripple of water, a ring of shod hooves on stone, a gray horse appeared out of the mist. Astride him was a woman in a white cloak, and her hair as pale as the day, as white as hoarfrost.

A woman, the warrior had breathed in his nightmare, a rider all white, the woman that follows me—

But she came to a halt beside him, white queen and dark king together, and Jhirun reined aside her pony to flee the sight of them.

The black horse overrushed her, the warrior’s hand tearing the rein from her fingers. The pony shied off from such treatment, and the short mane failed her exhausted fingers. His body twisted under her and she tumbled down his slick back, seeing blind fog about her, up or down she knew not until she fell on her back and the Dark went over her.