Copyright 1994 by Elizabeth Willey. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

And that one would be instantly derided as inaccurate. For, look! This man has no baggage but the saddlebags on his horse; he is alone, without a single servant to attend him; moreover he is on horseback rather than in a carriage with the fine horse ridden by his lackey; and furthermore, he is plainly galloping, as may be seen from the billowing of his cape and the elevation of his horse's hooves, and his hair is blown about and his clothing disordered by the exercise. Lastly and most tellingly, it is night-time in the picture, as the swollen moon breasting the horizon and a few stars show, long after sundown, a time when any true gentleman would long since have been snugly established in his chosen inn for the night with a good dinner and a bottle of wine.

Thus do many antiquated proverbs suffer derision when they venture into the harsh environment of the modern world. Can he truly be a gentleman, though he ride swiftly, at night, away from the security of the city, alone and armed?

Only the rider knows. He is quite secure about his own estate, and perhaps is now observing to himself that he is the very picture of that proverb mainly quoted nowadays by gouty earls at the fireside deriding the softness of the younger generation, who travel with everything but a wine-cellar and purchase and consume one as they go. (The earls suffer amnesia regarding their own pasts and curse the present gout whilst recalling fondly wines of bygone days.)

He has no question in his own mind as to what he is, and if you were to ask him, he might tell you without hesitation.

You could not ask him. He was already gone by the time it occurred to you; his horse swift and his purpose clear, he went left at the crossroads on the hill where the moon cut a black shadow beside a kingstone. His first goal was to pass that crossroads at that time, exactly as the moon was clearing the horizon and casting the kingstone's shadow as a pointer down the road he took. When he turned, he faded from sight, as if he rode into a fog bank when there was no fog there at all.

Chapter 2

``Here, Master!''

``The full moon's rays are requisite for work I plan tonight. Dispel these scudding clouds without harsh wind or undue storm, that the rising lunar light may fall unfiltered on the world.''

``All of it, Master Prospero?'' Ariel asked, dubious.

``This part where I am,'' Prospero clarified, not unkindly. ``Let us say, the eastern region of this continent, including this island. All night.''

``The breath of your order shall be gale, good Master,'' Ariel said, and left with a gust of wind, racing east.

Prospero's black-lined blue cloak flared and rippled with the Sylph's passage; his dark hair stirred; the island's trees soughed and whispered among themselves, then calmed. From his place by the mighty tree that crowned the island's hill, he gazed over the river to the east and saw Ariel's rippling wake pass over the landscape, out of sight, purling and streaking the fat gilt-shouldered clouds. Now he took his silver-wound staff and struck its bright heel on the ground three times.

``Caliban!'' he called.

``Aye,'' grunted a voice beneath his feet. The stone roiled and rose: a torso; a rough head coarse-featured; a square slab-body and hard arms textured like fine-grained unpolished granite. Caliban squinted in the beating midsummer sun.

``Here at this living tower's roots I'll have a basin sculpted in the stone whereof it grips,'' Prospero said, lifting his staff and then setting it down, ``a hollow which is spherical, circularly exact, such that the diameter be measured from here---'' he struck the stone with the heel of the staff and paced---``to here at its broadest point below the surface of the ground, and such that its opening be from here---'' and he paced again---``to here.''

There was a perplexed silence, and then, ``Ah. Like an orange with the top cut off to suck at it.''

``Even so.''

``That will fill with the waters of the Spring that rises here in its middle, Master---''

``Even so.''

``Ah.'' The black stone over which the tree's roots ran and into which they had forced their way rippled as Caliban moved. ``If it's a well you'd have me delve, Master---''

``No well, but a bowl, which shall cup the Spring's unstinting flow for my night's work.''

``The basin shall be scoured as you command, Master.''

``Be finished ere the sun sets,'' Prospero said, ``ere the sun's disk is a fist's width above the long horizon, for it must fill, and I've preparations to complete.''

``Aye, Master.'' Caliban sank into the stone, which hissed and heated with his hasty passage.

Prospero watched a moment as the stone began to move. The rest of his preparations were made; the stage was being set; there remained but one vital piece of business before the hour of his sorcery came. He left the hilltop and its great tree and went down a footpath, winding through the straight trunks of high-crowned trees and along a rocky outcrop, until he came to an end of the cool-shaded wood. A garden lay before him in casual beds and terraces, clumps of fruiting trees and clusters of exuberant blossoms, and at its farthest end he descried a bent back and a mill-wheel of a yellow straw hat radiant in the sun.

A neat gravelled path led him to the gardener.

``What cheer, daughter?''

She sat back on her heels, grubby and smiling, dark curling tendrils falling from under the hat to nourish themselves on her damp neck. ``I suppose you want strawberries,'' she said.

``Were they less sweet and thy care of them less fruitful, I'd have none,'' he replied, smiling, ``so 'tis a tribute to thy own hand that I have devour'd so many; they are the very heart of summer and their goodness nourished of thine, therefore must I love them as I love thee. But nay, 'tis thee I'll have. The heat's great, the day wears long; thy labor's never done, and as well ceased now as ever. I bid thee lunch with me.''

``It's early,'' she said.

``Not untimely so,'' Prospero disagreed mildly. ``Go thou, bathe and dress; I'll look to the meal, and we'll meet on the green where the table is. Take our ease as the wise beasts o' the wood do when the sun is fiercest on the flesh.''

``It is hot. Yes. We must have strawberries, though---they'll rot if we don't eat them, and the idea of cooking even more jam . . .'' Her voice trailed away.

``Well enough. Hast thy basket?''

Prospero picked the strawberries with her, though they both ate any number of the winey-ripe ones as well, and carried them off while she ran ahead to fetch clean clothes and a towel. He had already made some preparation of the meal, and now he finished and laid a cold roast pheasant, poached fish, a salad of peas and tiny vegetables dressed with vinegar and mint, a dish of hot-spiced grain with raisins, and a pyramid of fruits out invitingly on his huge dark table, its single-slab top upheld by the wings of two carven birds of prey which clutched lesser earthbound creatures in their brass claws. The table, as was their summer custom, stood outside beneath a spreading tree on the little lawn before the small scarp wherein lay his cave, its thick door open to the soft air.

He was just opening a cool bottle of sweet white wine when his daughter came up the path that led to the river, bathed and fresh-gowned in gauzy green. Prospero set the bottle down and watched her approach, approving and appreciative. Her tailoring skills were simple, thus all her dresses were little more than smocks, ribboned and laced to fit: indecent in civilized society, but charming here in the wilderness.

``In such heat,'' she said, ``the forest is a better place to be. Tomorrow, will you hunt with me?''

``What of thy garden?''

``Oh, well, as you say, 'tis never done.''

``No ground to shirk,'' he chided her gently, and poured wine for her.

She curtsied slightly, as he had taught her, and took the cup. ``Thank you, Papa. It was you who tempted me from work with swimming and a lovely luncheon; you can hardly blame me for wanting a holiday.''

``I blame thee not at all. Come, all's ready, and my appetite as well.''

``This breeze is good,'' said she. ``It is nearly cool here, in the shade.''

They ate side-by-side, looking down the slope below their tree and table, which she had planted with flowers and small trees. When the cold fish and meat were gone and the fruits being picked at leisurely, Prospero turned the conversation abruptly from the flowers.

``I have in mind to make some alterations in our life,'' he said. She set down her wineglass and tilted her head to one side, puzzled. ``Alterations?''

Prospero leaned back. ``Long ago I told thee, Freia,'' he began, ``that I am a Prince in my own realm, far-distant Landuc---a Prince, and should be King, but that my brothers conspired against me and denied me my rightful place.''

``I remember,'' she said.

``Dost remember? 'Twas many winters past, and we've not spoken of 't since. For it displeaseth me to chew it over.''

``I do remember,'' she said, ``for you told me of your friends there, and of beautiful Lady Miranda, and of the great city and the Palace gardens.''

``Thou rememb'rest, then, that my pompous brother inflated himself from King to Emperor 'pon his accession to the stolen throne.''

She nodded.

``Thou rememb'rest that I told thee 'twas not finished.'' His eyes were like high grey clouds with the sun behind them.

She nodded again, wary of his intensity.

``Time's come,'' Prospero said, ``for me to make my move 'gainst that false popinjay and knock him down. I've labored long here and elsewhere, setting my plans in slow motion, and now the hour is nigh for swifter action.''

``What are you going to do?''

He seemed not to hear her. ``To move that action shall require changes here. I warn thee now; I've spoken of some to thee ere this, and I saw them little please thee. Yet change cannot be denied.''

Freia tensed, straightened. ``Why not? Why shouldn't we live as we have, here, you and me and your sorcery and my garden and things? I like this. Don't you?''

``I like it well, wench, but a man cannot sup on strawberries all the days of his life,'' Prospero said. ``'Twill change, I tell thee, and we'll change too. My idleness ill-fits my nature, and it must end and this idyll withal.''

She shook her head, contrary. ``This is perfect, just as it is, and there's plenty to do and I'm not idle. What are you going to change? What is lacking? Why shouldn't we stay the same?''

``Freia, Freia. Think'st thou that I was always as I am today? Wert thou? Nay; I've bettered thee, hast said it thyself. What thou art today, is what I've made of thee; my daughter, a lady, and soon a princess: bettered again.'' He had taken her hands in his and held them as he held her gaze.

``I don't want to be a Lady or a Princess! Why do you want to be a Prince, or a King? Aren't you happy here?''

``Freia, 'tis more than a thing I wish to be. 'Tis what I am. This place is comfortable enough, were I but a sorcerer, but I am not. I did not choose this place to be comfortable in, but to labor, and my labor here draws near completion; the fruits of my patience come ripe, e'en as thy garden beginneth with hard work and small shoots, then groweth to savorous maturity. And thou, thou didst not choose this place; 'tis all thy world, I know, and though thou'rt content enough here solitary 'mongst thy fruits and flowers, I know the little discontents that shall fret thee to aversion in morrow-days. Better to remember thy garden-isle fondly later than to hate it.''

``I love this place, I always shall, I love it as it is,'' she said, heart-wringingly. ``Please don't change it. Please. What are you going to do, Papa?''

``We must have a city, Freia, walled and strong---''

``No!''

``---and bridges o'er the river, therefore great numbers of strong men to build---''

``No!''

They stared at one another. Freia's expression of stubborn determination mirrored Prospero's, and Prospero's hands tightened around hers balled into stone-hard fists. ``Darest thou contradict me?'' he snapped. ``I'll not countenance it; the world moveth forward, be thou retrograde as thou wilt. It must happen, Freia, and it shall, and thou'lt see: 'Twill like thee better than thou think'st.''

The Prince of Madana, Heir of Landuc, lay on his bed fully clothed and stared at the white-and-blue scrolled ceiling.

Something had happened to him last night. It was something unpleasant. He was dressed, and that was wrong; he never slept in his clothes---he would sooner go naked to dinner. His head ached. Shreds of dreams still clung to his thoughts: suffocating dreams, drowning dreams, entangled dreams of nets and sticky webs.

``Sir?'' someone said.

The Prince turned his head and saw the concerned faces of five people who stood at his bedside. They were all leaning toward him, eyes wide, and the same expression of relief and rejoicing washed over all five.

``Doctor Hem,'' said the Prince, wondering what was wrong with him.

``Tell the Emperor and Empress,'' said Doctor Hem to the footman beside him, who hurried out. ``Yes, Your Highness,'' he added to the Prince, smiling, bowing.

``What's that stink?'' The Prince frowned, swallowing and beginning to sit up.

``No, no! Do not rise, Your Highness, the crisis is only just past; do not rise, lest the balance of humors be disrupted again,'' cried the Doctor, and made him lie down again.

``What the blazes is going on? What's the matter?'' demanded the Prince, grabbing the Doctor's arm.

The door banged and the footman cried hurriedly, ``His Majesty Emperor Avril---''

``Silence,'' said the Emperor impatiently, entering, and glared at the others as he did. ``You. What are you doing here? Nothing? Out! We know you, yo'ure Hem's boy. Out.''

They got out, all but the Doctor and the Emperor. The Emperor glowered at his son from the side of the bed.

The Prince thought he'd much preferred the gratifying audience now departed. He played a filial note, cautiously. ``Father, am I ill?''

``Perhaps you can tell us. You've been asleep like this since we don't know when.''

``What?''

``What have you been smoking? Drinking, perhaps?'' demanded the Emperor furiously. ``With whom? Some bastard you dragged in off the street---''

``Your Majesty,'' said Doctor Hem hurriedly, ``still the balance of humors is very delicate and it would best not to---''

``Silence. Well? What have you to say for yourself?''

The Prince stared at his father, confused, and shook his head a little, and sat up again. Hem started forward to stop him and retreated at the Emperor's look.

``Tell us,'' said the Emperor, arms folded, glowering at his son, his eyes like coal.

``I don't remember,'' the Prince said, shaking his head again.

``Don't remember?''

The Prince rubbed his temples.

The Emperor hissed through his teeth with impatience. ``You came in at the tenth hour yesterday with someone your chamberboy identified as Harrel Brightwater---''

``Brightwater,'' the Prince said. ``Yes. That was . . .. We met at the armorer's. Bellamy's.''

``Not for the first time, in all likelihood,'' his father said sarcastically, and noticed the Doctor again. ``Get out. We'll call you if you're needed.''

Doctor Hem left, bowing. He had served the Palace for long enough to know how his service might best be extended.

When the door had closed on him, the Emperor went on with the beginnings of a fine rage in his voice. ``Josquin, we have had enough of---''

``We dined here,'' the Prince said, ignoring him, rubbing his temples. ``I remember that. Chess first, dinner. Talked about fencing. Horses. We had one bottle, didn't even finish it, the new stuff.''

``It is surprising that you remember that much. What else did you have?''

``Nothing. Nothing. Just . . .. We sat after dinner with the chess-board again . . .. Let me think. Nothing. Didn't smoke anything. Hm,'' he muttered, still rubbing his head. ``It's---he threw something.''

The Emperor, who had listened with mounting anger, said, ``Threw something!''

``I didn't see what it was.''

``Threw you, more likely---''

``Father. He . . .. Where is he?''

``He left, in your coach. Your standard treatment for your catamites after you---''

``Father.'' Josquin's headache was worse than ever. He ground his teeth and pressed his palms to his temples. ``Throwing,'' he said, ``I was standing . . .. He followed me in. I set the candles down. He--- I turned around and he threw something.''

``Threw what?'' asked a new voice. They both glanced at the door, where the Empress stood; a pair of attendants hovered behind her straight, slender back at a discreet distance, listening for all they were worth.

``'Cora, don't---'' began the Emperor.

``Jos, what happened?'' She joined them, quick but graceful, and sat on the edge of the bed.

``I don't know. He---he threw something. I remember . . .. I felt dizzy,'' whispered Josquin hoarsely.

``What did he throw?'' the Empress asked softly.

``Nothing. He had nothing in his hands. Nothing. But he threw something. It . . ..'' Josquin put his hand over his face. ``Like that.''

``How could he throw nothing?'' she wondered, frowning.

``How . . .?'' the Emperor began, and stopped. ``Nothing,'' he repeated.

``Yes.''

``He shall be arrested and questioned,'' decided the Emperor, and opened the door. A few words to his ever-handy secretary Cremmin, and he returned.

``My head is splitting,'' Josquin said to his mother.

``Poor dear. Doctor Hem will have a powder for it.''

``It may unbalance me further,'' Josquin muttered. He disliked Doctor Hem intensely.

``If he has none, my maid Mellicent will,'' said the Empress, stroking his forehead. ``Who was this man who threw something at you, Jos?''

``Glencora, leave it for now.''

``No. I am very puzzled as to how throwing nothing could make Josquin sick.''

``Having nothing thrown at him.''

``Exactly. How could it make him sick?''

``Was I sick?''

``You wouldn't wake up,'' she said gravely, and pressed his hand.

``Oh,'' said Josquin.

``Who was he?'' the Empress asked.

``A . . . friend.''

``One of his good-for-nothing prancing prick-ups---''

``Father, he---''

``What is his name?'' the Empress interrupted.

``Brightwater. Harrel Brightwater.''

``One of the Anburggan Brightwaters? I don't remember any Harrel among them,'' she said doubtfully.

``Doubtless some bastard,'' growled the Emperor. ``What do you know of his family?''

Josquin thought and shrugged. ``Don't know, really. He seemed a gentleman. We never discussed it. That's women's business,'' he added in a tone tinged with contempt.

``What did you discuss?'' the Emperor asked through clenched teeth.

``Cards. Horses. Swords. He has an eye for good weapons. Ask Bellamy. He bought a sword from Bellamy yesterday; I fenced with him in Bellamy's yard and he beat me. As good as the best of uncle Gaston's students.''

``If he has studied with Gaston---''

Josquin shook his head. ``No, I asked him about that. I don't think he has. He would have admitted it, I think.''

``Hm. So you know nothing of his origin.''

Josquin began to contradict him and stopped. ``No. Come to think . . .. No.''

``Were you ever in his rooms?''

``No.''

``Hm. We shall have to investigate further into his movements and associates. In the meantime you are confined to the Palace and grounds.''

``What! Why?''

``Because you display abominably bad judgment in your activities outside them.'' The Emperor left; his absence made the stifling room seem cooler.

``I suppose it could be worse,'' Josquin said. ``He could have confined me to my apartment. What is that stink?''

``Hem was burning incense, I expect,'' the Empress Glencora said, wrinkling her nose, and rose and went to the windows, opening them, waving her hands in the air, which was warm and still today. The incense hung in the room like a veil. It smelled, Josquin thought, like burning bananas flambéed with cheap cologne and quenched with piss.

Chapter 3

The first battle of his war he'd won with guile. Freia slept, her senses fogged by his gentle postprandial sorcery; he had borne her heavy with dreams to her bed and laid her there, and she'd not wake until morning came. He looked up. The dusky sky was still fringed with clouds to the west; the massive, swift-rising wind driven by Ariel had torn them to shreds and swept them away.

In the south above the undulating tree-canopy Prospero saw the first bright blue-white star of the evening. He stared to the east and discerned, in the deepening line of darkness, the first orange-gold sliver of the moon beyond the sea. The wind that had ruffled his hair and snapped his cloak died. The world was still.

``Master, it's done,'' whispered Ariel.

``Bide,'' Prospero said.

He bent and dipped his hand in the water, brought it to his lips and tasted the jolting freshness. Invigorated, he smiled and, as the moon with gravid dignity rose from her bed, lifted his staff and began to Summon the powers at his command. A light swelled from the water in the basin and from the Spring as he stirred and shaped the force that slept there. It grew into a spindle, four threads of which wove and knotted around him and four others of which began curling, turning with the spindle, reaching out and away through the trees and silver moonlight.

The best of his sorcery always seemed like a dream to him afterward. This had that stamp, the inevitability and perfection of every act, every word, every event at once foreseen and occurring. Prospero's staff hummed and trilled in his hand, and around him the stillness of the world, into which his voice rolled like the very music of the night sphere that turned overhead, brightened with the light of the moon and rustled with life. He knew, as he worked, that this was going to go very well.

``By this hallowed Spring I stand and by it I command all of its nurturing; all that row in the limpid air, all that are borne in the soft water, all that earth and stone engender, all that spawn in the constant flame; here to the heart of the world I Summon ye, here to the Source of your existence, here to me above the Source, gather ye air and water and earth and fire, gather ye within the Bounds I draw by this hallowed Spring . . .''

The arms of power swept outward, stirring like the wind but moving nothing, reaching and gathering. The darkness around Prospero began to fill with rustlings, movements, warm bodies and cool, tense and quick breathing.

The Air Summoning brought birds large and small, lone and mated, who crowded into the branches of the tree behind Prospero, to the north of the Spring. One brilliant dovelike bird with butter- colored feathers and a bright golden crest boldly settled on his shoulder and nestled against his cheek a moment before joining the others. Prospero did not leave off his Summoning, but he smiled.

The Water Summoning included a few great white-winged birds who settled awkwardly on the ground before the Spring; there were splashing and swishing sounds from the night-dark river that ran around the island, just to the south.

The Fire Summoning netted nothing; within the reach of Prospero's spell there were no Elemental creatures of fire, for the Spring was antithetical to Fire. So to the east of the Spring was darkness.

But the Earth Summoning drew as many of its kind as that of the Air. To the west of the Spring, first on a rocky bare patch exposed in the light of the moon and then filling the wood that stretched down over the island to the water that surrounded it, assembled creatures unnamed with horns and claws and hard feet and soft, with long teeth and flat, with bodies of every description adapted for every use. From the forests that undulated over the round-shouldered hills came the animals, hopping or sliding some, bounding and leaping some, pacing with aloof dignity or, sun-eyed, stalking through the undergrowth, plunging fearlessly into the river and swimming to reach Prospero. The forest itself shivered and woke, altered by the tendril forged of the Spring and Prospero's sorcery that curled through it and then held steady, encircling and Binding the Summoned.

Arms upraised, Prospero paused, lit by the light of the moon filling the water and shining out more brightly than the moon herself, who hung just at her fullest as Prospero completed his initial Summoning.

He lowered his arms slowly, barely breathing, wholly sustained by the Spring. His eye fell on the foremost of the animals who crouched, unafraid but overawed and worshipful, to the west. It was one he knew well, a furry, broad-shouldered, blunt-eared creature of long and lumbering body and thick black claws who had dug his burrow by the very Spring. The animal's nose twitched. It rose on its haunches to look at Prospero from bright black eyes, its coarse black-and-brown ticked fur still dusted with the earth of its run.

Prospero bent and cupped water from the shining basin, which overflowed now; the Spring was tentatively exploring a little water- course down the hillside. The water gleamed golden in his hand. The sorcerer poured it onto the unflinching animal's head, starlet drops falling.

The moon, imperceptible to any but the sorcerer, was turning from full.

``Born of earth, be born again a child of Spring and moon and man,'' Prospero said in a low, deep voice, and the water plashed into the coarse fur; the animal dropped to its fours, shook dust away, and its body flowed and took on bulk below the serene, benignant countenance of the moon; and where the animal had fallen, now a man knelt, sitting back slowly on his heels.

Prospero and the man gazed at one another. The man's expression was bemused. He blinked, then smiled, then shook his head again. He was naked. His dark skin held hard muscles and drops of water glistened on his hair. His merry face was bearded and his square hands lay on his legs.

``I am yours to command,'' he said, in a rippling language that had but once before been heard in the world.

``Bide,'' Prospero said, and returned his smile.

The man inclined his head and settled back on his shins. He watched as Prospero repeated the transformation with a dun-furred, lean, sharp-clawed, stump-tailed animal who came to drink at the Spring from time to time, and this one tossed his head and shouted from a mouth losing fangs and acquiring lips and a joyous, fierce smile as he became a man.

``Master!''

``Bide,'' Prospero said again, and as the moon proceeded above in her pirouette with grace and precision, he worked his sorcery on the earth-creatures. When the moon was a good ways down the sky, he turned to the birds, and with the invocation, ``Born of air, be born again a child of Spring and moon and man,'' he touched them with the ever- replenished water of the basin and they became men and women, dazed, smiling, wide-eyed with wonder, looking at their hands and feet and abiding Prospero's command.

The eastern sky took on tints of rose and the moon hovered in the west. Prospero worked over the children of the waters, and he stirred his staff in the basin to make a cloud of light and water which rained down on those who had assembled in their element. In their odd new form they splashed and waded, stumbling, onto the island and crowded it with their number.

The sky brightened. The moon hovered over the horizon. Prospero looked around himself at the quiet, waiting people he had created and nodded. It had gone well.

With a stir of air, the cream-gold bird came to his shoulder again. Soft feathers brushed his cheek. Prospero lifted his hand and brought the bird down, admiring. There had been none other like it among the rest; he had forgotten to make sure---

``There's an instant left yet, and I'd not leave thee, pretty friend, behind,'' he said, and stooped to the water. He cupped his hand and reached, but a dark streak sliced through the surface before he touched it.

It was a snake, a black, thick-bodied, long reptile which had its hole among the roots of the tree; ofttimes he'd seen it basking on the rock, and once it had frightened Freia badly. Dwelling near the Spring, even swimming there, it had become more than mere serpent, intelligent and sorcery-sensitive. Now it reared up on the bank and sought to fix him with dawn-yellow eyes.

He was not such a simpleton as that: to invite the serpent to his company. Even his daughter, innocent fool, had wit to shun it. ``Nay,'' he said, and swiftly scooped water up to plash the golden bird and speak the words of change.

Under his hand, which lay on her shoulder, just as the moon's rim touched the horizon, the bird became a woman with long, fine, straight hair the color of the first mellow moonlight of the previous evening and eyes warm and honey-brown. Prospero's breath caught in his throat; he stood, forgetting time, regarding her.

``Thank you,'' she said, gravely.

``Be welcome,'' he whispered, and bowed.

The snake hissed and rose higher, a vanelike flap of skin to each side of its body undulating.

``Nay, insidious Tython, I know you,'' Prospero said to it; ``you have tarried too long, waiting in your hole; that low form shall be your house for eternity, and in earth your dwelling, for you did not come forward with the rest. The time is past. I shall have the last be the best.'' And he smiled at the woman again.

The snake glared and twisted, rippled into the water.

Prospero took his hand from his last creation and with the proper words released the force which had poured through him for his labor of transformation. As it drained away he shivered, weary now and hollow. The sorcerer, without sorcery, was a hull without meat. He swayed.

A hard grip closed on his elbow. Prospero opened his eyes and looked to his left. The first of his new-made men supported him. On his right, the second stood poised, watchful.

``I must rest,'' Prospero said.

``We will wait for you,'' his man said. ``You have done much. You have made the world.''

``Nay . . . nay. Only changed it. Where . . .'' Prospero looked around him. The fair woman was gone.

``She would not wait,'' said the second.

``She is free to go where she list.'' Prospero smiled a little. The second man lifted the sorcerer's cloak from the ground and hung it around his shoulders.

``We will wait for you,'' said the first again.

Prospero nodded and sat down at the tree's foot. He closed his eyes and leaned back, then looked around him again and lay down to one side. The Spring splashed and jingled softly. There was a soft susurrus of breathing and heartbeat, of quiet waiting, all over the world, waiting for him, but Prospero, exhausted, hunched in his cloak and slept.

Prince Josquin, mallet on shoulder, selected his next shot. His aunt Princess Viola had had the croquet lawn and an impeccable formal garden emplaced many, many years before, wheedling them out of her father when she was in particular favor for some forgotten reason, and she made use of them erratically for garden-party amusements. The Princess was sympathetic to her nephew and had arranged today's party specially for him, and also to spit in her brother the Emperor's eye, because she had invited a considerable number of people who would not usually have received invitations to Palace functions.

``It's almost as good as billiards,'' said Earl Morel's son, who was not among these this year.

Josquin stared at him, astonished. ``I'll take billiards any day.''

``More people at croquet.''

``As I said.''

``When did Your Highness weary of society?''

Josquin chuckled. ``Not exactly that. For mixing and meeting, croquet serves very well, but for a game---'' He bowed to the Countess of Roudé, who had taken her turn at the other side of the lawn, and made his own shot.

``Oh, I'd have to agree with you there; no comparison possible. ---I understand Brightwater is either fled or dead.''

Josquin kept from starting or showing particular interest. ``I'd heard something of the sort. Dead? How dead?''

Morel's turn was up; he aimed and overshot his wicket. ``Dash. Well, there was a devilish fire in rooms he kept at the Broad Shield--- I'd no idea he had quarters there, but evidently he did, besides living at the Greenhead. Double life, eh? Anyway the fire---it's quite something to see the building---it burnt everything but the nails and there's not an eyegleam of him now.''

Balls clicked together, jostling at the center wicket.

``Great shame if it's so. Smoking in bed, perhaps,'' Josquin said. ``He had an eye for horses.'' He strolled toward his green-blue ball for his turn.

Morel laughed ruefully. ``Yes, you won quite a lot on his pick.''

``I was pleasantly surprised by that. I'd never have chosen Bezel's nag myself, but it was worth the flutter. Has he run her lately?''

Morel's first love was cards and his second was the track. Josquin had channelled the discussion away from Brightwater, a subject on which he knew Morel could have no further intelligence than the Emperor.

Which was a pity, Josquin thought, nodding as Morel recounted a race, because he'd like to hear more about Brightwater from somebody, sometime, somewhere. Harrel Brightwater was not the sort of fellow to smoke in bed and burn down an inn. The Prince stared at the lawn, a little chill running down his back as he thought of Brightwater's slow- starting smile and his brilliant blue eyes, his sensuous low voice, his hard-muscled broad-shouldered body when he was fencing coatless and loose-shirted in Bellamy's yard---

``Your Highness,'' interrupted Lady Filday, ``I sue you for mercy and beg that you will not send my poor little ball off to go bushwhacking in the pansies when I have only just escaped them.''

Josquin banished Brightwater, thinking he'd trade a year with all these people for half an hour with him alone, and made her a pretty reply.

The game and party proceeded languorously. It was an unusually warm day; the guests murmured over the temperature with little energy for genuine indignation. Josquin circulated through the crowd, greeting everyone, wearing his official-function manners. Pity Aunt Viola hadn't invited some of the wilder fellows. There might have been something to break up the tedium. She did mean well, though, and it was better than reading trade statistics, and watching certain of the nobility reacting to certain of the guests was better than a play. One enterprising gambler had calculated handicaps for all the ladies present and was surreptitiously collecting wagers, beside the gentlemen's punchbowl, on their performances at croquet. Lady Filday was doing unexpectedly well, to the pleasure of one of her nephews.

The Emperor and Empress were not in attendance. Avril rarely deigned to grace his siblings' parties; today the royal couple sat in a first-floor parlor shaded by a grove of the most ancient trees on the grounds, which must not be cut or pruned. It had been a preferred room of his father's, but the Emperor disliked it because the trees made the room dark and made him uncomfortable with their age and size, and so he used it only when the weather made it expedient, as today. The parlor had a small terrace outside onto which opened tall windows. In shirtsleeves, eschewing formal clothing, the Emperor lounged in an armchair and read Brightwater's dossier.

The Emperor of Landuc retained an agile and able staff of spies, gossips, sponges, sneaks, ears, and eyes. With only three of these set on Harrel Brightwater's trail, directed by the indefatigable Count Pallgrave, he had in hand within three days a thick sheaf of notes regarding the still-absent Brightwater's life in Landuc.

Brightwater had departed Landuc through the city's Fire Gate at a quarter past the sixth hour of the night on the night that Prince Josquin had fallen into an unexplained stupor. He had appeared to have arrived on some vessel the previous autumn, but his name was on no passenger list; he had owned no baggage but a haversack. His funds had apparently come from selling a Spinel Street jeweler a trio of large pearls, an exceedingly fine diamond, and a pair of rubies. He paid all his bills on time. He had interests in rare books, maps, charts, astrology, alchemy, and history and he was, according to the merchants at the Broad Shield where he had roomed and dined daily, a courteous man who could converse intelligently and with interest on many subjects but who also had seemed clerkish and unworldly. They had pegged him as a noble's scholarly younger son come to the city to seek a Court position; he had never spoken of kin or country to them, and they supposed him without estate or local relations. The Emperor frowned. A gentleman, even if he has no estate, has family---indeed, cannot be said to exist without it. There was no Harrel to be found on any branch of the Brightwaters' family tree.

Only late this spring, after spending autumn and winter in a hermit's routine of books and study, had Brightwater taken up a social life. The Emperor had tailor's bills, descriptions of clothing, dates. The last item was a finely damascened straight sword from Bellamy's; that same morning, the day of his midnight departure, Brightwater had picked up in person (suspicious in itself---he had no valet) a new travelling cloak at Gamtree's, winter-weight and winter-styled, of the finest blue-green double-woven Ascolet wool, a peculiar garment for summer's hottest days. The earliest order was for a pair of stylish suits from Gamtree, and a week later Brightwater had bought his fine horse. A few days after boarding the horse at an hostler's, he had moved to a more-costly less-sedate inn, the Greenhead, and had paid in advance for two months' lodging, though he had kept his place at the Broad Shield as well and had divided his time between the two. The Greenhead innkeeper knew him as a man of informed and expensive tastes.

Brightwater had promptly made a place for himself as a regular card-player and dicer and had appeared to be setting determinedly on a rake's progress downward, seeking out the stews and gambling dens. He won more than he lost. Earl Morel's son had introduced him to Josquin at a card table in one of these loose-knit clubs. Josquin had taken to him at once, but the night the man dined with the Prince Heir in the mperial Residence was the first time he had been in the Palace.

The Emperor reviewed this and nodded thoughtfully. The man had studied Josquin's movements, gotten in with his crowd, gotten close to him, and struck.

But how and why? The Prince Heir was alive and well. He had suffered no obvious ill effects from his night- and day-long nap. What did it mean, that Josquin had seen him throwing---nothing?

The Emperor growled and rose, pacing, impatient with the puzzle. He had no illusions about Josquin. The boy was clever enough but too lazy to think, and this was a direct result of that. It was time for him to take on more responsibility, to be forced to think. He was wasting his time in Landuc, his time, his allowance, his body---

He passed, in his restless circuit of the room, the divan on which the Empress was reading letters of her own. She wore a gold-embroidered opal-green dress of very light silk, and with her fine blonde hair and pale skin, the effect was cool and wintry, belied by her languid, deliberate movements. Glencora, who had been reared in worse winters than this summer, coped with the swelter instinctively.

``Avril,'' she said, finishing a letter.

He grunted.

``Are you thinking of sending Josquin away?''

``Yes.''

She folded the letter, her wide eyes on his light-red head. The Emperor felt the pressure of her gaze but did not look back at her. It was a contest of wills of a sort.

``Do you have some destination in mind?'' she asked.

``Yes.''

``May I ask what it is?''

The Emperor said nothing.

``Avril,'' she said a little severely, setting her narrow chin.

``Tyngis,'' he said shortly.

``No!''

``Yes.''

``At this time of year! Avril!''

``Exactly. Winter is coming.''

``They do nothing but drink from dawn to dawn there and there is nothing to do but that. Do you think that will improve him?'' the Empress demanded. ``I agree that he must do more than dissipate himself, but Tyngis has nothing to offer.''

``Clearly you have a preferred destination already in mind and we shall have no rest until we hear it,'' the Emperor muttered.

``Send him to Madana.''

``He has spent too much time in Madana. He will do nothing but more of the same there.'' The Emperor curled his lip at the thought of Madana. Josquin had passed his boyhood and youth in Madana, and his father blamed all of his present character flaws on it.

``I do not think so,'' the Empress said, folding her delicate hands with precision. ``In the past he has been there and behaved very creditably. You surely remember that he even managed to jolly around Sagorro.''

``Because he's the same stripe of wastrel as our son, only older.''

``He jollied him into signing that treaty.''

That was true. The Emperor grumbled wordlessly and finally looked at the Empress. ``Madana,'' he said.

``Yes. My cousin Iliele could host him.''

``Iliele?'' The name was utterly unfamiliar. The Emperor shrugged; his wife was related to half of Madana.

``She has a daughter, Avril.''

``Do women think of nothing but marriage? Josquin is not marrying your cousin's daughter. Indeed if he doesn't mend his ways it will be difficult to talk anyone into having him.''

``Don't be silly. He's our son,'' the Empress said firmly.

``True.'' The Emperor shrugged again. ``So your cousin has a daughter on the market and she wants Josquin to look her over.''

``You don't understand,'' the Empress said, exasperated. ``They'll be having many social events, parties, outings, what you will---don't you see? It's a very good set of people, but they're the independent Eastern landowners---''

The Emperor comprehended. He smiled slowly, narrowly. ``Glencora, you are a very marvel. By all means let Josquin go to East Madana. His drinking prowess will awe them into supporting us more openhandedly, he can win them over with his dicing and cards, he can escort his umpteenth-cousin Iliele's daughter, and if we are extremely fortunate he'll lose his virginity to the girl.''

The Empress blushed and glared at him.

``East Madana it is,'' the Emperor said. ``Yes, things are quiet in Tyngis. It will do him good to go south for the winter.''

Chapter 4

Prospero's dream-self ran leaden-legged through mighty colonnaded trees of a forest---perhaps the forest that surrounded his island of safety in the Well-scourged wastes---pursuing glimpses of Freia fleeting through the trunks, chasing her with sluggard feet, pursued himself by a consuming darkness that drew closer and closer to his back, devouring the world. The darkness was blood-stained, blood-black; he had made it himself, and it would destroy him as it would destroy all around it, but if he could but reach Freia there might be some hope . . .. He never caught her; when the darkness reached his neck he'd wake breathing rapidly, his heart rattling in his breast, recalling that he'd had the dream more than once before this, turning, sleeping again.

Now he darted with dream-urgency through the dark trunks, and this time the dream was different. Freia was going more slowly; he saw her between two trees ahead of him, and though the destruction he fled was on his heels he thought he could catch her. She paused, looking away, and he drew near; she went forward, and he followed, passing betwixt the two trunks.

They were not trees, but columns. He stood in his own hilltop tomb in Landuc between two pillars supporting the portico, lichen- and vine-covered stone festooned with dark wild grapes hanging in clusters, the sepulchre foully whited by generations of nesting birds. It was a masterpiece of neglect, Avril dealing superficial insult because he was incapable of real injury; Prince Prospero flourished yet, for the Node of the Well's power that rose here still pulsed through him where he stood gazing toward the approach that led to the ivied arch over the stair down the hill.

With dream-suddenness, someone stood there in the archway. Prospero stepped forward.

The visitor approached slowly. Prospero's leadenness had left him, and now he was in command of himself, thinking with exactness and clarity. This was a portentous dream; that they met at his tomb signified that they two were deeply linked, and Prospero must assure that later he would know who this man was, what he was. The man was a stranger now, but Fortuna would cast them in one another's paths. Prospero felt his blood within his body surge and reach toward the man, and he knew: a near connection.

``Though we meet at my tomb, I am not dead,'' Prospero said.

The visitor nodded.

Prospero looked penetratingly at the young man; it was plain to see that he was a man of oceans, rivers, waterfalls, alive and active. The visitor's face was intelligent, his eyes an uncommonly pure and brilliant blue. The Well leapt bright in him, contained and channelled: he was a man of powers, then---but Prospero was a sorcerer, accustomed to binding power. ``I lay upon thee this geas. Thou shalt seek me until we meet, and when we meet shalt thou tell me thy name and lineage that I will know thee.''

The fellow seemed disoriented, studying Prospero, perplexed.

``Safe journey,'' Prospero said. ``That which brought thee here will bear thee safely away.'' Behind the young man, Prospero's late father Panurgus reached for the youth's arm and spun him around, and they vanished as they turned; Prospero turned himself, back to his suddenly- enlarged tomb (as high now as a temple), and saw Freia small and forlorn in her pretty green dress, standing between two massive stone columns. Prospero started toward her, but the dream dissolved as he did.

Beneath the tree that stood beside his life-soaked Spring, Prospero turned and drowned his dream in deeper sleep.

Josquin's valet had packed everything. In order to allow him to do it, the Prince Heir went a-hunting with his uncle Prince Herne and his aunt Princess Evote, and a large party of others, while the work was under way. When he returned he observed approvingly that efficient Orle had finished.

One small case was on the bed, as the Prince had instructed. As his valet began filling the bath, Josquin opened the case. He took the keys to his desk from his pocket, opened the desk, and froze.

A very unpleasant frisson went through him.

He began dumping things out of the desk onto the floor, pulling out drawers and rifling them carelessly, feeling all the while a deadly certainty that he would find nothing but stationery, pens, old notes and invitations, creased and stained IOUs, seals, nibs, ink-bottles, calling-cards, bills, pencils, sealing-wax, pocket-sized memorandum- books . . ..

When the desk was emptied, he looked in the waiting case on the bed. Then, pale and sicker by the minute, he bolted from the room.

He hurried through the Palace to the Emperor's apartment. His father was dressing for dinner and frowned at the unseemly interruption.

``What is this?'' snapped the Emperor.

``Leave us,'' Josquin ordered the valet.

The valet looked at the Emperor, who frowned more and nodded. He left.

``They're gone,'' said Josquin, sitting down on the bed.

``What's gone?''

``My Map. My Ephemeris.''

The Emperor whitened. ``Gone? How could they be gone?''

``Not in my desk. I've got the key. Only key,'' Josquin whispered.

The Emperor looked at the clock. There remained a quarter of an hour before dinner. ``We'll go to your rooms.''

They hurried there. The Emperor looked at the mess.

``You found it thus?''

``No. No. I, I came in from hunting with Herne. Saw that Orle had done the packing. He'd left this case as I'd told him to; I meant to put the book and the Map in it. I unlocked and opened the desk and saw they weren't there. I searched.''

The Emperor glared at his heir. ``When did you last use them?''

Josquin shook his head. ``Two and a half years ago at least. I went to Brutt with Uncle Fulgens. I haven't looked at them since.''

``When did you last open the desk and see them?''

``I--- Hm.'' Josquin sat down at the desk and closed his eyes. ``I took out some cards last month, and they were there then. Yes.''

``Last month,'' the Emperor repeated quietly.

``I'm not in the habit of looking at them daily!'' Josquin cried defensively. ``Who---''

``Most likely we know who.''

``Brightwater?'' whispered Josquin, horrified.

The Emperor strode out.

Within Prospero's cave there stood two beds, one at each end of the long room. The one was high, carved and deep-curtained, its panels rich with broidered allegory and arcane signs; the other was low, a simple white cot half-hidden behind a screen painted with woodlands and hills, screened from the chill stone of the cave wall by an arras depicting herbs and trees of many varieties, none local. The fireplace was empty and cold, bare of ashes, and two high-backed chairs stood, unoccupied, to either side of the hollow hearth. All around were shelves and cupboards of dark wood, carved or inlaid with geometrical patterns, burdened with heavy books and parchments and things of metals, wood, and stone, with locks and seals and knots to ward them from curiosity.

A sweet, velvet-warm breeze stirred through the cave, rustled the dried herbs suspended from the roof, rippled the arrases, and left.

``Tricksy wind! Leave Mistress sleeping,'' Caliban roared from the bushes beyond the lawn.

``Ho, wouldst thou teach me my errand?'' Ariel jeered, and he rattled down leaves on Caliban. ``Mind thy netherworld affairs, and I shall not hinder thee.''

``Master set me here,'' Caliban retorted, ``Master bade me wait for Mistress.''

``For Mistress, for the Lady! Small wonder then she dreams yet, that must see thy ugly face when she wakes. Thou hideous man-mock, thou crude sculpture!''

``Wicked wind-thing, nothing! Lady talks to me of flowers.''

``She will not look on thee, travesty! For thou art foul to look on, deck thee with flowers as thou wouldst.''

``Ladies like flowers!''

``What, dost liken thyself to a flower, thou lichen-crusted relic of failed Art?''

``Master made me!'' bellowed Caliban. ``Master made me, this form is his making!'' He swatted futilely at Ariel, and Ariel hissed mockingly though the fronds and leaves and sped away, uncatchable. Caliban subsided, grumbling, sinking halfway into the earth in the darkest shade he could find; the daylight pained his eyes, but Prospero had commanded him to bide here on Freia's waking, and Caliban must obey.

Within the cave, the wind's stirring breath on Freia's face had stirred her sleep. She sighed, murmured wordless sounds, and opened her eyes a crack. The creamy background of her screen was bright; thus it was day, and she might rise without fear of interrupting Prospero at his night-work. She pushed the bedclothes down and rubbed her eyes and head; groggy, foggy, her thoughts were jumbled. Such dreams she'd had ---she might tell Prospero, for they'd been vivid and strange.

Freia stood, stretched, peered around the painted screen and saw no Prospero. She padded out, barefoot beneath her drifting smock, yesterday's gown unbound, to wet a cloth and splash and wipe her face and eyes, waking. Her father's bed was empty. Prospero walked the isle, no doubt, or groomed the horses or did any of the thousand things to do outside the dim cool cave on such a shining day, and she had slept longer than ever was her wont in summer.

Freia went out and stopped, her ear struck by the sound beneath the birdsongs. There were not as many birdsongs as there ought to be--- why, but a single one, a dull-chiming bell-bird, rhythmically chirping its tedious note.

``Good-morrow, Mistress---''

``Quiet, Caliban. I'm listening.'' Frowning, she tilted her head and strained for the sounds: murmuring like water, odd barkings now and again---something like wind and water and rustling leaves all together, a new sound under the sun. The sun pierced her thin smock and glowed on her skin; there was no wind. She opened her eyes and looked down on Caliban, perplexity on her face. ``Where is Prospero? And whatever are you doing here?'' Caliban shunned daylight, shunned visibility; he was Prospero's diligent laborer at some task Freia knew nothing of, deep beneath the earth, and he never left it save at Prospero's command.

``Mistress, Master bade me wait here for you and tell you he wishes you to wait here for him. Could you tell me again of the flowers, Mistress, the mountain-flowers---''

``Why should I wait here?'' Freia asked the world generally. ``This is not a day for staying within. I'm going hunting,'' she said firmly.

``O, Mistress, do not go!'' Caliban protested, but she had returned to the cave, and he might not enter there.

Sandals, tunic, leggings---she would go bare-legged for now, but in the undergrowth she'd need cover. Freia dressed and braided up her hair, packed a leathern bag with leggings, salt, dried apples, and bread, put her knife at her belt, and took her bow and arrows from their pegs behind the door. Prospero had not come, and she would linger no longer here.

Caliban called to her as she left the cave again. ``O, Mistress, Mistress, bide the Master, bide, he commands you,'' he said in his gravelly voice.

``Caliban, I will not. I said I would hunt today, and I shall hunt, and you may remind Papa of that when he seeks to blame you for my leaving. He was supposed to hunt with me. Go back to your own tasks that he set you and he won't be angry.''

The noise was still there, the birds still quiet. Caliban grumbled unhappily behind her as she set off along the path that would take her to the upstream end of the island. From there she would paddle the tippy little curricle to the mainland.

The strange sound grew louder to her ear as she went. Suspicion stirred in Freia's thoughts; Prospero had said he would change things, and she feared he had done that, had worked some sorcery to alter the island. He'd made her sleep before when he had great sorceries afoot, things he did not wish her to witness (not trusting obedience to conquer curiosity). There had been a midwinter night she'd slept three days, waking famine-hungry to find Prospero irritable and short-tempered; he'd never told her what he'd done then, but thereafter she had encountered queer hooved and horned little people, shy and difficult to approach, in the surrounding forest, and other, stranger things of blended natures. This overlong night's sleep smacked of such sorceries, and Caliban's relayed command to her to wait at the cave for Prospero was novel. Ever before she had had liberty to go where she liked.

Prospero, then, had done something, Freia decided, trotting along the footworn path. But what might it be?

She pulled up short as the path came out into a bit of meadow where they pastured the horses from time to time, seeing before her the unbelievable answer to her question.

The crowd of people standing and sitting and lying in the long grass, playing with flowers and laughing and talking and becoming acquainted with themselves and one another, the crowd of strange voices and odd faces and nude bodies pale and dark, the crowd fell silent and stared back at Freia.

A breeze gusted past her and rippled the grass that the people had not matted down, passing up the hillside in the hard, hot sun.

Freia, tense and wary, continued along the path slowly, her gait stiff, looking with distrustful dismay at the faces and bodies of the intruders.

They surged, following her, whispers swirling through them. A hand reached for her. Freia flinched from the alien touch; the hand dropped away. They crowded around her but let her pass, slowly, moving nearer and farther, all of them jostling to look at her.

Freia began hurrying. They parted, still following her, too close, too many; the heat and sweaty smell of their bodies was overwhelming, the sight of their hands and hair and torsos and faces a dizzying mosaic. A hand brushed her arm; another touched her braided hair, and then there were many touches, light inquisitive fingers feeling her leather tunic, her bow, her body. They whispered, said with strange words things she understood: ``Soft . . . hard . . . tail . . . mane . . . claws . . . breast . . . hide . . . smooth . . . soft . . .'' in a torrent of puzzled collective exploration. They were too big, too many, too intent on her; Freia panicked, pushed, bolted.

They shied, running away in a mass---or some tried to. The meadow became a churning disturbance, and there were cries of pain and fear as others were jostled roughly. Freia shoved and shouldered her way through them, touching bodies, bodies, bodies, hair and skin and limbs and softness and hardness, and she shut her eyes and put her fist forward---clutching her bow and quiver to her with the other---and bulled blindly ahead. They shouted, words she didn't listen to, jumbled noise among the jumbled bodies.

She struck something coarse and hard, not skin; it grabbed her and she screamed and twisted away.

``Freia!'' Prospero shouted, seizing her wrists, dragging her to him. ``Stop this! Thou'lt frighten the folk.''

``Let go!'' Freia screamed.

He shook her quickly; she was panicked, though, and Prospero must drag her out of the press of bodies, shouting over her head at them until they parted meekly and left space for him to lead his struggling daughter to the trees' shade. Prospero hugged her, wrapping his cloak around her despite the heat, hampering her movements as he would net a bird to confine it.

``Freia. Freia! Hold, hold---I did bid thee abide my return, girl, and thou'rt paid for impatience. Freia! Look on me.''

She did, wild-eyed.

Prospero nodded and gazed into her eyes. ``Now calm thyself,'' he said. ``There's none here will harm thee. Thou hast given them worser fright than they have given thee.''

``What are they?'' Freia whispered, looking from Prospero to them. They stood, watching, their faces serene and interested.

``They are people, my people,'' Prospero said proudly.

``I don't want people here! Why did you bring them?''

``These folk have been here all their days,'' Prospero replied, ``and they've as firm a right as thou to live here, for I have made them of the native creatures of the place. I shall not brook thee quarrelling with them, Freia: like thou, they are made to dwell here, and---''

``There's no room for them!''

``Pah, they'll build houses for themselves, and a better for thee and me as well, a dwelling fit for men.''

``Then there's no room for me,'' Freia declared. ``Let me go!''

Prospero released her wrists, though he still held her arm loosely. Frowning, he said, ``It is my will that they be here, and my will shalt thou not shake! Whither goest thou so furnished?''

``Hunting! You said you'd hunt with me today,'' Freia reminded him.

``I've much to do amongst the folk,'' Prospero said, ``and I gave no promise to course the wood with thee---''

``Then I'll go alone,'' Freia said, and she slipped from his hand and darted from him, from the people, into the trees.

The Emperor, oddly, did not seem to blame Josquin particularly for the theft---at least, not to Josquin's face. He bid him a fair journey in the morning without visible rancor.

``He must be angry,'' muttered Josquin to the Empress.

``There's nothing to be done for it now, dear,'' she whispered back.

Josquin knew better. His father believed firmly in the efficacy of revenge.

When the Prince Heir had gone in his coach to the dock where his ship waited, the Emperor went to his private office, told his secretary he would have no disturbances, and locked himself in.

He drew the red brocaded draperies closed and went to a black- lacquered writing table which stood against a wall with a large, convex Mirror of Vision over it. From the locked drawers of the table he took a number of articles, setting them on its polished red marble top, and then from his pocket a smallish, heavy leather packet which he untied. It held an assortment of peculiarly-shaped Keys.

Selecting one, he put the rest away and seated himself. A quarter of an hour was spent in arranging the apparatus correctly and consulting yellowed sheets of handwritten notes; then the Emperor touched a candle to the oil in the glossy brass firepan which now stood beneath the Mirror. He chanted in a furtive undertone.

The glass brightened; it took on an insubstantial depth and appeared to enlarge itself somehow, to iris open on a fog, although its shape and size were unchanged.

Shortly, the glass cleared and the Emperor faced not his own image but that of another man, head and shoulders taller than the Emperor, broader and darker, frowning slightly as he rubbed his sleeve on a spot on the glass into which he gazed. Two long-flamed candles in knots of brass stood to either side of his Mirror, sparking reflections in his gold-brown eyes.

``Avril,'' said he, and then, as an afterthought, ``Your Majesty.''

``Gaston,'' the Emperor said, ``we have trouble.''

Prince Gaston nodded. The flames swayed.

``Josquin has buggered us all. He picked up a hot one and we're properly burned.''

``This I have not heard.''

The Emperor snorted. ``Why, how surprising; Viola knew of it. Our son, in his usual way, took up with a man calling himself Harrel Brightwater. The man's no member of the Brightwater clan . . .'' and he told Gaston of what had followed.

``You believe this man to be some degree of sorcerer,'' said Prince Gaston slowly.

``We fear it is so.''

``Yet he cannot have been to the Well of late.''

``No. Not the way it is now.'' A gnawing worry bit the Emperor afresh: since their father King Panurgus's lingering death, the Well that was the world's heart had been dark and deep-withdrawn, not leaping with sheets of fire. The Emperor took it as a personal slight. The Well had obeyed Panurgus's slightest whim, the Fire shifting and changing as it sustained the world, as the King had willed it. Panurgus had left no instructions on how to tap and command the Fire, and the Emperor had refrained from experimenting with the thing, a failure he suspected everyone of whispering about.

``An he hath not been to the Well, there'll be but scant good he get of Map and book,'' Prince Gaston said. ``They are of no use; he cannot reach the Road without passing the Well's fire, though he know where the Road lieth.''

``He knew something. At the least he knew where to look, and although Josquin is a fool he has told no one where he kept them. Nothing else is missing.''

``His servants?''

``They are being questioned, but they have all been here a long time.''

``And are still there.''

``Exactly. No sudden departures.''

Prince Gaston rubbed his chin and leaned back in his chair; the Emperor's flame swayed toward the Mirror, toward him. ``I know not what might be done to remedy this, brother,'' he said finally. ``On the one hand: 'tis done. On t'other: perhaps could be undone, but if so I know not how. You seek him?''

``Still. Yes.''

Prince Gaston appeared to be thinking out loud. ``Without having passed through the Well's Fire, he cannot leave Landuc on the Road. He must conceal him, masked by an assumed name, a disguised face--- Ah. The horse.''

``Horse?'' the Emperor repeated.

``You said he kept a horse. A good animal?''

``They are looking for the horse too. Yes, it's harder to disguise a beast than a man. That is what is bad, Gaston: he has vanished from the Empire.''

``'Tis possible one of the others hath sponsored him. The wards Panurgus set are old, belike weakened, failed.'' Prince Gaston said this reluctantly; it touched on a charged subject.

``We thought of that. Oriana, Esclados---unpredictable and untrustworthy, all that sorcerous lot are.'' The Emperor shook his head. ``But it makes no sense, for in that case he needn't steal Map and Ephemeris. He'd copy his sponsor's.''

``True.''

``It could be Prospero,'' the Emperor said.

The Prince shook his head slowly. ``Why? No doubt he could disguise himself, but why wait, why befriend Josquin? If he lacked Map and book, he could slip in and take them. He knoweth the lie of the Palace as he knoweth his arms, his legs. It's not reasonable that the thief be Prospero.''

``Perhaps Prospero sponsored this so-called Brightwater, then. He has been too quiet for too long.''

Prince Gaston forbore to point out that the same objections applied to Prospero as to any other sorcerer. ``He may have quit his claim.''

The Emperor slapped the table with his hand, glaring at Prince Gaston. ``Hah! Don't play the fool, Gaston. You don't like facing him, but he will never give it up until he has been defeated and killed. You have managed the one and never the other.''

``I saw him deeply wounded last time. 'Tis possible he died,'' said Prince Gaston, ``elsewhere.''

``We haven't seen his corpse.''

Prince Gaston nodded slightly. ``Nor heard of him.''

``Nor heard anything.'' The Emperor tapped his fingers quickly, once, in succession. ``Golias hasn't been heard of, either,'' he said, his mind skipping to other bad old news.

``'Tis lamentable we lost his trail in wild Ascolet. I'm more certain of his return than of Prospero's. Yet it hath been many years, Avril.''

``And their tombs are empty,'' said the Emperor. ``It has not been time enough.'' His hand tightened into a fist.

Chapter 5

The constructions are a marvel of the sorcerer's Art. One tells the time in a place so far removed from this one that the nature of the creatures who live there is fundamentally different. The other tells the time at a place very far away which can be found only with difficulty, but yet is more attainable than the first.

Their ticking never synchronizes. They chime out-of-order; sometimes one will ring a single hour to two or three of the other's; sometimes they ring midnight and dawn together. The spheres and circles, beautifully and precisely etched on metal and glass, move around and around one another in motion as perpetual as the Universe--- or rather, Universes. Standing on their black table at one side of the room, the clocks collect light coatings of dust, which are regularly removed by a quick hand wielding a soft old flannel cloth, and they reflect sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and the light of the more and less earthly fires made by the hand which dusts them.

On the wall over the clocks has been engraved and painted an elaborate analemma for telling local time, along whose curves sun and shadow progress through the year. Beneath the analemma, a grey slab of slate covering the wall is covered in turn with small and large chalked notations. The center of the room is occupied by a polished black table, its mirror-slick surface adorned with curious looping, stretching, curling designs set in fine lines of gold like spiderwebs mixed with cyclonic swirls and radiant bursts. The design is partially obscured by sheets of parchment and paper and papyrus, by curled scrolls of smoothed bark and thin metal sheets finely scratched with notations, but enough is uncovered to show that the lines have two foci at opposite ends of the long table's top.

Close examination would show that some of the designs on the table's surface also appear in the engraved circles and spheres of the clocks.

The door is of triple-thick and cross-grained dark wood, reinforced with iron bands shaped like arms reaching from one side to another so that the hands grip the hinges. It stands ajar, and one can see that it lets upon a small landing from which descends a narrow stair. The stair is lit by a skylight above it, and now, at high noon, a patch of sun skylight-shaped falls straight down upon the landing, a doormat of light.

Beneath the skylight, to one side, hang three glass globes, like those which formed the spheres of the clocks. One has a bubble; one is infinitesimally thicker on the bottom than on the top, and the third has the beginnings of engravings upon it, one of which contains an eyelash- fine line imperfectly curved. These are inadequate to become parts of clocks, but sorcerers are thrifty and do not willingly discard even broken apparatus after having invested so much of their time and themselves in its making.

Today the two clocks look like soap bubbles. Freshly dusted this morning, they sparkle as they move in harmony with the different pulses they measure, until the sun that falls on them is briefly interrupted by the graceful flight of a folded piece of paper.

The paper glider whisshed as it landed on the gold-inlaid black- topped table in front of a dark-haired, young-looking man in a finely pleated blue-green silk shirt. He was folding another paper glider out of a sheet of closely-scribbled paper decorated on both sides with large, definitive X's. He launched this vessel with a quick flick of his wrist and watched it spiral up and up and then plunge nose-down into the floor from about five meters altitude.

``Bah,'' he said, and collected an armada of paper from the floor and doorway. Returning to his table, he smoothed them out again and put his head in his hands.

``I am a charlatan,'' he grumbled, and pushed the whole stack of papers away. ``I ought to hang out a shingle and go into business, peddle love potions and wart removers to benighted villagers,'' he went on to the empty room. ``I've studied geomancy, hydrology, pyromancy, lithology, astronomy; mathematics, alchemy, logic, and botany---I've learned them all and more, all the pillars of the Great Art. None has mastered the Art as I have; none has travelled as far as I, and I believe there is none living who has stood to both Fire and Stone. But look at me! Were this insoluble the cosmos could not exist. I find no error. None! The cosmos does exist---this is the base of philosophy, truth fundamental, a sine qua non!---and thus I'm in error. But where?'' he cried, and slapped the papers with his hand.

The clocks moved.

The sorcerer glared at the clocks. It was the clocks which had first caused this unexpected detour in his programme of research, which had begun years previously with an ungentlemanly but necessary violation of hospitality. They were wrong: a tiny, tiny error, like all errors of the sort, had cumulatively thrown them off by varying orders of magnitude, and they were useless. He trusted his craftsmanship enough to say that the clocks were capable of keeping time correctly; the error's root was that the forces they measured were not behaving as they ought. They were being bent and distorted, rather than flowing in the prescribed currents.

Understanding that there was an error and then calculating how great it was and how it increased had occupied him in his lonely octagonal tower for nearly twenty years. He had been confident, as he began, that he would discover some simple fault in his calibration or calculation, but there were no mistakes: the clocks ran correctly and the times they kept were wrong.

It was remarkable that they ran at all, but he wanted them to be right. He had come here to live in peace and quiet, to occupy himself with building ingenious devices and elegant apparatus and using them, to invent new ways of doing and new things to do, and now he was confounded by a flaw in the very foundation of his premise. He could ignore the flaw and develop his skills further---it did not affect most of his activities---but the idea of leaving the problem unsolved galled him. Arrogantly, yet accurately, he believed himself uniquely talented and blessed with ability in all the worlds, and since only he knew of this problem then only he could solve it. Indeed, he ardently desired to solve it.

It defied solution.

The checking and re-checking of his figuring was making him a little mad, feeding the righteous anger he was beginning to feel at the Universe for not operating the way he thought it should. He had gotten back into the habit of pacing agitatedly, a habit he had been glad to lose somewhere after his childhood; he granted the most trivial of doubts and possibilities serious consideration day and night; he could no longer divert himself with music, books, or poetry. Now he went up and down beside his table, from window to blackboard, not really thinking of anything but his own vexation.

When both clocks chimed at once, it was too much; he flung himself out of the workroom and stomped down a flight of stairs, through a library to a door which led to another flight of stairs. At the bottom were some pegs on which hung a few pieces of clothing and a bench with a couple of pairs of boots under it. He doffed his slippers, donned a nondescript grey-brown coat and tough brown boots with thick soles, and went out through the door beside the pegs. The commotion in his head had grown too cacophonous to be contained in the tower.

Outside, it was a fine day, brisk as late spring was apt to be. The nameless long-thorned flowers which grew in abundance at the base of the tower and some little distance up its sheer sides were setting buds. Seemingly blowing in the breeze, they drew back from him and from the doorway, clearing a path through their thicket of tough vines and finger-long thorns. The sorcerer stood for a moment on his doorstep, inhaling and looking around, and then set off in no particular direction.

He returned as the shadows were filling the valleys. The stairway was dark, but lights leapt up in iron sconces when he opened the door and crossed the threshold. He sat on the bench and put on his slippers again slowly, hung up the coat, and then shuffled into the kitchen, tired after a day-long trek up hill and down dale but still---still with the same load of mind-bending, world-distorting problems he had had before.

However, he thought, at least it would be easier to sleep when he was this tired. He hadn't cheated; he'd rambled all day, drunk water from a stream when he was thirsty and jogged on, ascending, circling, and descending the straight-shouldered mountain nearest to his tower in its bowl-like dell. He rummaged in his cupboards for dried fruits and vegetables, bread, a cheese, and ate an uninteresting but filling supper.

When he had cleaned up the kitchen and put everything away, he started out and tripped on a small three-legged stool which was hidden in the shadow of the table. He was a tall man, but agile, and he would have recovered but for the stool's getting under his other foot as well. It rolled; he staggered and grabbed the table with an ``Ow!'' of surprise, and his head struck the side of the stove as he was thrown backward.

The lights in the kitchen burned tirelessly.

Upstairs in the workroom, the clocks whirled and spun slowly.

The man on the floor groaned to himself and rolled onto his side, holding his head. There was blood on his hand---he'd cut the scalp, and he was glad it hadn't been an eye he'd hit on the iron stove. With crabbed, uncomfortable movements he rose and saw the stool. One kick sent it crashing into the opposite wall.

``Oohhhhh . . .'' sighed its victim, and tottered to a trapdoor in the floor. Beneath it in a hidden drawer was ice, chips of which he dropped into the dishrag and held to his head as, one-handed, he closed the icebox again. When he had risen, the stool came in for another kick back toward the door. He started toward it for a third and picked it up instead, an incendiary spell on his tongue.

It had been a long, difficult spring, the culmination of long, increasingly frustrating years. He was a little mad, but only a little, and the idea of taking vengeance on the stool suddenly appeared to him to be as ludicrous as it was. He laughed and shook his head, then hefted the stool to toss it in the corner. It landed, rolled, and lay on its side. He gave it a small kick to upend it and turned to leave the kitchen, still cooling his bruised head.

Then he stopped and looked at the stool carefully.

He bent and picked it up again, staring at it, a frown coming onto his face.

``Three,'' he said.

The melting ice and blood began to run down his neck into his collar.

``Three,'' he whispered reverently, and set the stool carefully in its proper place beneath the table.

The blackboards were covered with smudgy numbers, lists, and diagrams drawn freehand over everything else. The table was clear save for a few small, oddly-shaped counters, placed on certain parts of the engraving which covered its top, and a trio of instruments. Papers and books were stacked on every other flat surface---beside the clocks, on the windowsills, on the shelves, on a chair. A delicate scale made of some fine-spun transparent stuff clearer than glass stood in the center of the table; a thing that looked like a windmill growing out of a compass of the same delicate crystal stood a foot or so away from it. Its feathery vanes were spinning lethargically. Another, identical device was on the other side of the table, pointing in a different direction, also moving but more slowly. They would have been invisible but for the reflected light flashing from them as they turned.

The clocks twirled and precessed in degrees.

The workroom was empty. On the bed in the next room, the tower's occupant, half-undressed, lay on his back snoring softly. His previously clean-shaven face had accumulated a short beard. His mouth was slightly open, and his hands were slack on his chest, where the laces of his shirt lay untied in his fingers.

A partly-eaten apple had rolled onto the floor at his feet. The exposed white flesh had become brown; the peel was curled around the bitten area.

A square of sun progressed along the wall and across the carpet and then along the wall again before he moved.

``Uff,'' he exhaled, and drew his legs up onto the bed, crawled to the pillows, and lay down with his face in them. From the workroom, the soft chimes of a clock sounded. He chuckled before falling asleep again to descend into an old dream.

He walked away from the burning Well in its eight-sided white wall and wandered in dream-fashion through gardens, until he came to the Royal Tombs and found himself standing in the ivy-choked arch that led to one. He ascended the mossed and crumbling stair behind the arch and found at the top a great tomb.

A tall man, bearded, by his bearing powerful yet clothed austerely, emerged from the tomb's grapevine-overgrown portico. The grapes were ripe and purple. ``Though we meet at my tomb, I am not dead,'' he said.

The dreaming sorcerer nodded.

Now the stranger walked toward the dreamer, down the weedy walkway of the tomb's approach, and stood before him. ``I lay upon thee this geas,'' he said, and he moved his hands and spoke slowly, and the force of the Well flowed into his words so that they became one with the world. ``Seek me until we meet, and when we meet shalt thou tell me thy name and lineage that I shall know thee.''

The sorcerer looked into the man's eyes, which were bright grey like clouds, not cold but kind and grave, and the geas fell, settling on his life and altering it.

``Safe journey,'' the man said. ``That which brought thee here will bear thee safely away.''

Something tugged the sorcerer deeper into sleep, deeper than dreams, and he sighed and turned unknowing.

When the sorcerer rose from his bed, he bathed and dressed, then went down to his kitchen and prepared a hero's breakfast. Having eaten well and tidied the room, he climbed up to his bright workroom again and stood, arms folded, contemplating the table.

The twin vaned compasses, which he had designed and built in his fury of enlightened insight, still pointed in two different directions. However, the lines along which they pointed intersected in an area nearly devoid of the markings etched into the table's glossy black surface.

``I have you at last,'' he whispered to the table, uncrossing his arms and leaning over the place where the lines intersected. ``There: wherever there might be.''

The sorcerer took from a shelf a single-dish scale with a polished ball of flawless rock crystal suspended where the pan would be. This he placed on the table, changing the location by fractions of millimeters many times, until he was satisfied, crouching at eye-level to the tabletop and squinting at the vaned compasses, sighting from it to them. He straightened and reached for one of the compasses, touching it lightly. A golden line sprang from it, running back to the center of the diagram, where the scale swayed and steadied itself, and more lines sprang out from the counters placed here and there on the lines, finally hitting the second compass. A new line arced from both compasses now and struck the crystal sphere, which bobbed, and the sorcerer reached into the lacework of the spell and adjusted the sphere's placement again and again until the ball filled with light of its own and a new network of lines sprang into being over the old, very pale and fine.

He took his hand away and looked at the tabletop, which lit the room now, and then opened a glass-fronted cabinet to take out a long slender sliding-rule with six moving bars and peculiar scales engraved on it. With this he sat by the table for a long time, calculating, writing in a leather-bound book.

One of the clocks chimed with an almost apologetic note. He snorted softly and murmured ``You're next'' to it but did not look up.

Thus he passed the day and the night, then slept awhile and worked again, measuring and calculating and plotting in his book, seized by an inspiration of genius and knowledge and revelling in the possession. This phase of his labors bore him through the waxing and waning of summer in the mountains around his tower. In the autumn, he found his apparatus to be inadequate to his vision and passed the winter, and many seasons following, designing and building a substitute for his tabletop covered with fine lines. It required that he leave the solitude of his tower several times to travel and obtain materials. He was exacting about the composition and purity of everything he used and could tell at a glance what were the qualities of a stone or spool of wire.

The old table was retired to the kitchen with honors; for the sorcerer loved kitchens and respected them. A new, larger, more detailed---and round---table took its place. The sorcerer sat looking at it, pleased, for some little while when he had it arranged; and when he had looked his fill, when he had fully savored his accomplishment in its creation, he rose and left the table, left the cunning whirling clocks which were now correct and now were three in number, left the glassed cases stuffed full of the tools of his trade, and, wearing his long sea-green caped cloak, he locked the tower behind him and set out on a great journey whose ending he could still only dimly forecast.

-end-