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By Root 1198 0

saw that the luxurious chamber was filled with people in the plaids of the noble-born. Sitting in a chair near Rhodry was a young woman, as slender as a reed and just as fragile-looking, but pretty with her long dark hair and wide dark eyes. Her slender hands were tightly clasped as they lay on her dark-blue dress. With a shock, Jill realized that she was wearing the plaid of Aberwyn for her kirtle. Oh by the hells, Jill thought, is that what they found for him to marry? Yet, when the lass turned her head to look at her half-drunk new husband with a very real terror of this man that the gods and her brother had dumped into her bed, Jill found it in her heart to pity the child. All at once, the side of Jill’s face stung like fire. She tried to rub the pain away, found that she was utterly paralyzed as the pain came again and Nevyn was leaning over her, his hand raised for another slap. Drunkenly Jill looked round and saw the walls of the buried chamber.

“My apologies for hitting you,” Nevyn said. “It was the fastest way to bring you back. What were you scrying? Rhodry?”

“Just that. He must be in Dun Deverry. I saw wyvern blazons all over the furniture and suchlike.”

“Doubtless the King wants to look over this new vassal of his.”

“Oh, no doubt. I saw his wife. She’s naught but a little mouse sent to amuse the cats.”

“Here, listen to you.”

Jill shrugged and looked away. She could feel tears rising in her throat. With a sigh, Nevyn sat down next to her on the bench.

“Child, you have my sympathy.” His voice was oddly gentle. “I know you love your Rhodry.”

Jill nodded miserably in agreement.

“You had to continue your training,” Nevyn went on. “Don’t you see what’s happened? You’ve been using your dweomer, but all in bits and pieces, so you’ve got no control, no true understanding of what you’re doing. You sit here longing for Rhodry, you picture him in your mind, and all at once, you slip into a trance.”

“And truly, I didn’t even know it.” Jill was frightened as she thought things over. “What would have happened to me if I hadn’t come with you?”

“I don’t truly know, but there’s a good chance you’d have gone mad.”

“But you would have let me stay with Rhodry if I wanted.”

“I’d have been there to keep an eye on you, but no matter what the cost, you had to choose freely.”

The fire was burning low. Jill got up and laid on a couple of logs, watched them catch as the Wildfolk fell upon them in a shower of flame. The ghost of a memory haunted her mind, an abstract thing without image or word, of a time when she had not been allowed to choose, when she had been marked for the dweomer but some other thing had gotten in her way. She couldn’t remember what it was, another man, perhaps, that she’d loved as much as she loved Rhodry. All at once she knew that she had to remember, had to see her Wyrd clearly. She sat down in silence while the memory faded, then rose again, a restless spirit from the Otherlands of the soul.

The time when she should have chosen, the time when her Wyrd had been snatched from her. The time when the man sitting beside her should have brought her to her Wyrd.

“Galrion,” Jill said. “That was your name then.”

“It was.” Nevyn spoke very quietly.

Speaking the name brought a memory image with it, of Nevyn as a very young man.

“You’ve never died,” Jill said. “You’ve never died from that day to this.”

“And how could I have died and be here? When a man dies, isn’t that an end to him?”

His voice was humorous. When she realized that she understood the jest, she turned so cold that she got up to warm her hands at the fire.

“It was all a very long time ago,” Jill said.

“It was.”

“And how many lives have I lived since then?”

“So—you know the truth, do you?”

“I do.” Jill turned from the fire to face him. “How many lives has it been?”

“In time you’ll remember them all. Let’s just say that it was too many, and too many years all told.”

Nevyn stared into the fire, and she somehow knew that he, too, was remembering that other life. Jill felt as if she were standing on a mountain top after living in a deep