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By Root 1185 0

the party, the woman he loved, the woman he’d lost, somehow, long ago, in Deverry—in Cerrgonney. To that piss-poor excuse for a noble swine Lord Perryn, when they were both fighting in some lord’s blood-feud. He was a silver dagger, then, and he’d been trapped in a siege. First Jill had ridden with the army that relieved it; then they’d gotten separated. How? Why had he left her in Tieryn Graemyn’s dun? Because the King’s herald was coming! He’d ridden out with his hire, Lord Nedd, to greet the herald, and when they’d ridden back, Jill was gone, stolen, or so they said, by Nedd’s cursed ugly cousin. With a toss of his head he laughed aloud, jigging a few steps of a dance right there near the woodshed. He remembered finding Perryn, too, and the exquisite joy of beating him senseless. Then he’d … and then he’d … the fog within his mind rose again and shut away all memory of what had happened after he left Perryn bleeding on the ground by a cowshed wall. No more could he remember anything before he and Jill had ridden up to Lord Nedd’s crumbling roundhouse on a sunny day—how long ago? He had no idea.

“Rhodry!” Vinsima’s bellow cut through his brooding. “Where’s that kindling? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you feel well?”

“A thousand apologies! I’m on my way right now.”

While he worked, he went on brooding about what he’d remembered. Ther e was something especially important about the King’s herald, but try as he might, he couldn’t bring it to mind and eventually gave it up as a bad job. He was going over and over the rest of the precious new memories to fix them in his mind when it occurred to him to wonder why they’d come back to him. Only then did he remember the wizard Krysello announcing that he would remember “everything” when he saw the sun again.

“Oh by the gods, so I did.”

A few at a time Wildfolk materialized around him, two brown and purple gnomes, a delicate pale sprite with needle-sharp teeth, and the gray gnome he’d seen down at the marketplace.

“Jill’s gnome!”

The little creature leapt into the air, danced a few steps in victory, then disappeared, taking its fellows with it. Rhodry began to tremble. All at once, he could smell freedom, and now that he’d seen Jill, freedom had meaning again. He realized then that somehow an entire identity had died along with his memories, that what we call a man’s character is little more, at times, than the sum of his memories. The thought gave him a cold feeling on the edge of panic, and he shied away from it like a horse who sees an adder in the road.

The man who was using the name Pirrallo was short, pale, and pudgy, with a thick neck and full cheeks that would, with age, swell and sag to make him look like a toad. He had a face full of pimples, too, that would, with time, scar and leave dark marks much like the blotching on a toad’s skin. The man known as Gwin was surprised at how much he hated Pirrallo. He had, after all, looked upon many a thing more loathsome in his thirty-two years, but perhaps it was because he knew that Pirrallo was as much a spy as a partner. The knowledge that someone was watching their every move and using magic to report it back to the Hawkmaster would have terrified most initiates of the Hawks; Gwin found it only irritating, because he didn’t care if he lived or died. Another thing that surprised him these days was, in fact, just how little he did care. Although he could have committed suicide at any time, the effort seemed too great for the uncertain reward of being dead, just as the dubious joys of being alive were too little an incentive to make him suck up to the man sent to judge his trustworthiness. He was even willing to make the possibly fatal admission that he’d quite simply failed his assignment back in the farming village of Deblis, rather than whining and making excuses the way most Hawks would have done, but only so long as he admitted it to the Hawkmaster himself, not to a toad like Pirrallo. It was a matter of pride, the small sort of pride that was the only thing he had left in life.

After catching sight of Rhodry, Gwin