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on me.
    Night came, clear and full of stars, as I had hoped. I sat and blinked at the shadow-stars floating on the surface of the deep, black pool. A wind whispered down the mountainside, out of the west, and the shadow-stars shifted, rose and drifted in air like dimly shining snow motes, took shape of—a tree like the one on the sunstuff panel? No. White starwisps still swirled, and I blinked again and saw—it was he, gloriously robed, he, the prince out of the past, regal face turned toward me as he gazed across the abyss of time.
    The night we had camped here, Kor and I, we had seen two legendary warriors, they who had sailed to Mahela’s realm and perhaps not been entirely bested. They whose swords we wore. And we had trembled in terror of them, and learned the comfort of handbond.
    I was not very much afraid, this time. Too much had happened for me to be very much afraid. Indeed, like an ass, I was merely surprised, and before I recalled myself I blurted out loud, “Where is your comrade?”
    He did not move or answer, he, Chal, if it was Chal. His eyes that looked on me so steadily seemed shadowed and saddened, his ageless face very grave. His was a somber, seeing gaze that shamed me, though I did not understand why.
    â€œCan you hear me?” I asked more softly. “Can you speak to me?”
    He did not answer. I saw a slight stirring, as if a wind had troubled the starlight folds of his robes.
    â€œWhere is Sakeema?” I begged him. “Please. For the sake of the world’s healing.”
    Still he stared at me without a sign or an answer, and suddenly I recognized the sorrow in his face. It was reproach.
    â€œI am sorry,” I whispered. “Though I don’t know what I have done.” And suddenly, though nothing had changed, I seemed to see another kingly face instead of Chal’s—it was Kor! Truly, it was he, the short fur-cut hair, the simple clothing his own, and storm raged all around him, sending his sealskin cloak lashing across his face like a whip. The surface on which he stood tossed unsteadily. It was the pool of vision, and it seethed and churned like the sea in storm, rose in towering waves, opened a black maw and—took him. He sank. Only his stark face remained, filling my sight, filling the stormy, tossing surface of the sea—Kor was as vast as sea, as sky. Ocean swells were his tears, whitecaps the glimmer of his sea-deep eyes, and out of the waves he gazed at me, looking as though I had hurt him to his heart’s heart, as if I had put a knife in him and turned the blade. With a wordless shout I leaped to my feet. The vision vanished.
    â€œNo!” I shouted to the black pool, which lay as still and dark as before.
    Always, since I had known him, I had sensed something fated about Kor, some shadowed, uncanny end awaiting him, some dire price he would have to pay; why, I did not know.… And though in the past I had felt that his doom had somehow to do with women, at this despairing time my muddled mind leaped straight to the thought I feared the most. “No, Kor cannot be dead!” I pleaded to the faceless pool. “He can’t be!”
    There was no answer, and for a crazed moment I felt certain that I had killed my bond brother, I, the murderer, for I had killed men once, unknowing. No amount of water could cleanse me of their blood. I would have to drown myself, as my father had once tried to drown me in this very pool. He, Tyonoc, demon-possessed, he had been a murderer too. Now I was the same, and I had killed Kor—
    â€œNo!” I roared at the night.
    â€œPeace, my son.”
    I grew very still, for I knew that voice. My dead father’s voice, coming to me on the breath of wind.
    â€œPrince Chal cannot answer you.”
    I saw my father’s shade drifting in the warm wind that summerlong blew down the landward side of the mountains, drifting nearly within my reach, had I cared to reach. His wraith,