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When we were children, Allira and I could reach one another’s minds like this. Not always andnot often, but if one of us was in danger the other would know; when the wild bird pack had hercut off on the island, I knew and I brought help. She was fourteen then, and I was only eight. Icannot have lost that power, or Storn could not have reached me tonight. But if all my mind isgiving off is fear, Allira wouldn’t know if she did hear me; she’d think it was just part of her ownpanic.

She had had almost no training. Storn, being blind and thus debarred from the usual pursuits of men ofhis caste, had explored the old telepathic ways. But to his brother and sisters, these had been dreams,fantasies, games and tricks—pleasant perhaps for pastime, but not worthy of serious study. There wastoo much else that was real and present and necessary to the moment. Melitta spent a moment beratingherself for not spending more time with Storn learning about the old speech of mind to mind, but commonsense came to her rescue. She reminded herself of the old proverb,
 
Foresight could make wise men of Durraman’s donkeys
 
! She might as well blame herself for Allira’s not having been married to a stronghusband with eighty fighting men to defend them.

She put her hand out to rap on the glass sharply, and again the clear picture of Brynat looking out intothe storm came to her; it was so instant and compelling that she physically shrank back and pressedherself against the railing, folding herself up into her cloak. It was just in time; a browned hand drew thetapestry aside, and Brynat’s scarred visage turned from side to side, trying to penetrate the darkness.

Melitta shrank against the railing and tried to make herself invisible. After a minute that seemed endless, Brynat turned away and the lamp went out. The tapestry dropped back into place. Melitta dropped,gasping, to the stones, and lay there trying not to breathe.

Time dragged. The moon set, and the shivering girl grew colder and colder. After hours, so long that she

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began to wonder if the sun would come up and find her there, a thin fine rain began to fall, and this spurred her; she realized that whatever she risked, she must be gone by sunrise; she must be somewhere that she could lie hidden by day. Even if she must chip the glass of the doors and cut Brynat’s throat while he slept, she must make some move!

As she poised her muscles for action, a faint light glimmered again between the tapestries. Melittagathered herself to spring against the bolts; then a fine hand moved through the gap, the bolt shuddered inthe wood and her sister Allira, wrapped in a long woolen shift, her hair disheveled, thrust the dooroutward and, her eyes great and staring, looked straight into Melitta’s face.

Melitta raised a hand to her mouth, frightened of Allira’s nerves and a sudden outcry, but Allira onlyclasped her hands to her heart with a gasp of relief. She whispered, “I
 
knew
 
you were there, and Icouldn’t believe—Melitta, how did you come here?”

Melitta replied only with a jerk of her head toward the rocks and a whispered “No time now! Brynat—”

“Asleep,” Allira said laconically, “He sleeps with one eye, like a cat, but just now—never mind that.

Melitta—are you armed?”

“Not with a weapon I could kill him with, without outcry,” Melitta said flatly. “And you’d still have his men to deal with, and they would be worse.” Watching Allira flinch, she knew that her sister had already considered and rejected that escape.

“The secret passage through the old cliff-town; have any of Brynat’s men discovered it?”

“No—Melitta, you cannot go that way; you’ll be lost in the caves, you’d die in the mountains if you ever

found your way out—and where would you go?”

“Carthon,” Melitta said briefly, “wherever that is. I don’t suppose you know?”

“I know only that it’s a city beyond the passes, which was great in the days of the Seven Domains.

Melitta, are you really going to dare this?”

“It’s this or die here,” Melitta said bluntly. “You seem able to stand it here, though—”

“I don’t want to die.”

Allira was almost sobbing and Melitta hushed her roughly. It was not Allira’s fault that she was so timid. Perhaps even such protection as Brynat could give seemed better than a desperate trek through strangecrags, passes and mountains.
 
Maybe I ought to be like that too
 
, Melitta thought,
 
maybe that’s awoman’s proper attitude, but I suppose there’s something wrong with me
 
—
 
and I’m glad. I’drather die taking the chance of doing something to help Storn
.

But the brief moment of censure for her sister passed. After all, Allira had already faced, or so it seemedto Allira herself, the worst that could happen to her; what more had she to fear? By escaping now, shewould only lose the life she had saved at such cost.

“You must go, then, before sunrise,” Ailira said with quick resolution. “Quick, while Brynat sleeps and before the guards come in”—a brief flicker of something like her old smile—“as they do each night, to make sure I have not killed him while he sleeps.”

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The wind blew briefly into the room and was barred out again as the two girls slipped inside. Brynat laysprawled and ugly in the great bed, breathing stertorously. After one blazing look of hate, Melitta avertedher eyes, creeping past him silently, holding her breath and trying not to think, as if her very hate mightwake their enemy. She breathed more freely when they were in the ornate reception room of the suite,but her hands were still clenched with tension and terror.

There were the carven chests, the hangings and the strange beasts around the elaborate false fireplace. She pressed the hilt of the marble sword there and the stone slid away, revealing the old stair. Sheclutched Allira’s hands, wanting to say something but falling silent in desperation. She went forward. Whatever happened, she was safe or dead.

Allira might somehow summon up the courage to come—but the escaping, Melitta knew with a practicalgrimness, was only the beginning. She had a long way to go, and she could not encumber herself withanyone who did not share her own desperate resolve; at this point, even if Allira had begged to comewith her, she would have refused.

She said briefly, “The guards outside my room think I’m still in there. Try anything you can to keep themfrom finding out how I’ve gone. You saw nothing; you heard nothing.”

Allira clutched at her, a frightened hug and kiss. “Shall I—shall I get you Brynat’s knife? He wouldsearch me for it, but when he didn’t find it, he’d only think he lost it.”

Melitta nodded, a tardy spasm of admiration for her frightened sister touching her. She stood frozen, notdaring to move, as Allira crept back into the bedroom, and then returned with a long, unsheathed knife inher hand. Allira thrust it into the top of Melitta’s boot. Allira had something else in her hand, waddedtogether in a torn linen coif. Melitta glanced hastily at the soggy mess; it was a torn half-loaf of bread,some cut slices of roast meat, and a large double handful of sticky sweets. Uncritically, she wrapped it upagain and put it into her deepest pocket.

“Thank you, Lira. It will keep me going for a day or two, and if I don’t find any help by then, it’s no use anyhow. I must go; it will be light in three hours.” She dared not frame a goodbye in words; it would have loosened the floodgates of her fear. “Give me your gold chain, unless you think Brynat will miss it; I can hide it in a pocket and the links will pass current, though it’s not as good as a copper one would have been.”

Allira smiled a wavering smile. “The amulet didn’t protect me, did it? Maybe it will do better for you.
 
Lucky charms protect you only if you have your own luck
 
.” She pulled off the long chain, looping ittwice and put it over Melitta’s head. Melitta clutched at the small amulet, suddenly touched—Allira hadworn it since she was three years old; it had been their mother’s and grandmother’s.

She said quietly, “I’ll bring it back,” gave Allira a quick kiss, and without another word, plunged into thelong deep stairwell. She heard Allira sob softly, as above her the passage darkened and the light wentout.

She was alone in the depths of the castle.

V

«^»

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WE SHOULD reach Armida by nightfall.” Colryn drew his horse to a walk in the neck of the narrowpass, waiting for the others to draw abreast of them, and looked across at Barron with a brief smile. “Tired of travelling?”

Barron shook his head without answering. “Good thing, because, although the Comyn Lord may want usto break our journey there for a day or two, after that we start into the hills.”

Barron chuckled to himself. If, according to Colryn, they started into the
 
hills
 
tomorrow, he wonderedwhat they had been travelling for these past four days. Every day since they had left the plains where the Terran Trade City lay, they had been winding down the side of one mountain and up along the side ofanother, till he had lost count of the peaks and slopes.

And yet he was not tired. He was hardened now to riding, and sat his horse easily; and, although hewould not have known how to say so, every inch of the road had held him in a sort of spell he did notunderstand and could not explain.

He had expected to travel this road filled with bitterness, resentment and grim resignation—he had leftbehind him everything he knew: his work, such friends as he had, the whole familiar world made by themen who had spanned great giant steps across the Galaxy. He had been going into exile and strangeness.

Yet—how could he explain it even to himself?— the long road had held him almost in a dream. It hadbeen like learning a language once known but long forgotten. He had felt the strange world reach out andgrip him fast and say “Stranger, come; you are coming home.” It gave him a sensation, of riding through adream, or under water, with everything that happened insulated by a curtain of unreality.

Now and then, as if surfacing from a very long dive, the old self he had been, during those years when hesat at the dispatcher’s board in the Terran Trade City would come to the surface and sit there blinking. He tried, once, to make it clear to himself.

Are you falling in love with this world, or something
? He would breathe the cold, strangely scentedair, and listen to the slow fall of his horse’s hooves on the hard-frozen road, and think,
 
What’s wrong? You’ve never been here before, why does it all seem so familiar
 
? But familiar was the wrong word, itwas as if, in another life, he had ridden through hills like these, breathed the cold air and smelled theincense that his companions burned in their campfires in the chilly fog of evening before they slept. For itwas new to his eyes, and yet—
 
it’s as if I were a blind man, newly seeing, and everything strangeand beautiful and yet just the way I knew it would be
…

During these brief interludes when the old Barron came to life in his mind, he realized that this sense of
déjà vu
 
, of living in a dream, must be some new form of the same hallucinated madness that had costhim his job and his reputation. But these interludes were brief. The rest of the time he rode in the strangedream and enjoyed the sense of suspension between his two worlds and the two selves which he knewhe was becoming.

Now the journey would break, and he wondered briefly if the spell would break with it. “What is

Armida?”

Colryn said, “The estate of the lord Valdir Alton, the Comyn lord who sent for you. He will be pleasedthat you speak our language fluently, and he will explain to you just what he wishes.” He looked downinto the valley, shading his eyes with his hand against the dimming sunlight, and pointed. “Down there.”

The thick trees, heavy, gray-blue conifers that cast dark spice-smelling small cones on the ground,

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thinned as they rode downward, and here and there in the underbrush some small bird called with perpetual plaintiveness. Thin curls of mist were beginning to take shape in the lowlands, and Barron realized that he was glad they would be indoors before the nightly rain began. He was tired of sleeping on the ground under tarpaulins, though he knew that the climate was mild at this season and that they were lucky it was only rain and not snow. He was tired, too, of food cooked over open fires. He would be glad to sleep under a roof again.