16

Garric dreamed.

A man was coming toward him through a foreground that seemed to change with every stride. At first it was a meadow; a moment later the man walked in a grove of hard corals, ducking beneath their branches. The reef's vivid colors were dimmed to pastel as if by light filtered through clear water, but the man strode on unaffected.

"Who are you?" the dream Garric called, though a part of him was sure it already knew the answer. His own voice seemed very distant.

The man was a youthful-looking forty years old, with muscular arms and thighs. He wore boots to midcalf and a rich blue tunic; where his skin was bare it was tanned as dark as Haft shepherd's.

The man waved; his lips moved, but Garric couldn't hear the words. He was in a forest now, stepping in and out of shafts of sunlight that waked dazzling richness from his tunic and the metal ornaments he wore.

He smiled broadly. His face looked as though he laughed often and with roaring abandon, the sort of laughter that Garric had heard in his mind all this evening and night.

The dream Garric closed his hand on the coin hanging around his neck on a silken cord. The warm, smooth metal in his fist wasn't a dream.

In rougher clothing the man would pass for a resident of Barca's Hamlet, though he was taller than most and his shoulders broad enough to rouse notice. He looked like an older version of Garric or-Reise, dressed in shimmering cloth. The dark ringlets of his hair were bound with a simple gold diadem.

"Who are you?" Garric repeated. His shout sank into fathomless space. His dream self stood in nothingness, separated by eternity from everything and everyone.

"I'm Carus, King of the Isles, lad!" the man called in a distance-muted voice. He splashed through a swamp in boots of leather dyed the same brilliant blue as his tunic. "You know me."

Garric stared at the man. It was like looking into a mirror which distorted not images but time itself. "But you're dead," he shouted.

"Am I, lad?" Carus said. His laughter boomed like far-off thunder. Sand blew off a dune and skirled through the air around him, glinting on his sweaty skin like a dusting of jewels. "Am I?"

The figure of the ancient king remained the same size, but his voice grew stronger with every stride he took toward Garric. His face showed the tired determination of a man who had journeyed far and would go farther yet—as far as the road led—before he rested.

"I'll help you become King of the Isles, lad," Carus said. "And you'll bring me to Duke Tedry of Yole, who has unfinished business with me."

Garric watched the figure, now being lashed by rain on a rock-strewn slope. Pine trees bent in the wind; Carus hunched against the blast, and his legs scissored forward with the regularity of a pendulum stroking.

"Yole sank a thousand years ago!" Garric cried. "King Carus is dead!"

Carus threw his head back and laughed with the full-throated enthusiasm of a man who took joy wherever he found it: whether in a sunset or the steel-sparkling air of a battlefield.

Garric spun away, his dream self rejoining with the youth sleeping on the straw of his father's stable, wrapped in a thin blanket and clutching the ancient coin he wore around his neck.