Within the Great Hall the fireplaces were blazing; the cressets along the interior walls also brightly burning, shedding light and a welcome small amount of warmth from one end of the long room to the other. Candles set out in honor of the guests made even more light upon the High Table, at which Dafydd, Brian, and Geronde were already sitting.

They had been talking as Angie and Jim came through the door from the courtyard; but this broke off. There was silence as Jim and Angie sat down, and one servant poured wine for them, while another offered the trays of small foods that would start the supper. They helped themselves, drank, and then looked expectantly at the others.

“I must-but I cannot!” Brian burst out as if the conversation had already been going on for some time. “I am between two millstones, James.” The keen eyes of Geronde were upon him; and the candlelight had the effect of making almost invisible the scar where Hugh de Bois had slashed her cheek when she refused to marry him at sword’s point. Jim was reminded suddenly he had meant to ask Carolinus, as soon as the Mage was well again, whether something could not be done, magically, to remove it. Even with the scar, though, Geronde’s face was beautiful.

“-I swore an oath,” Brian was going on, “to be at Castle Smythe whenever my creditors might come there to see me, the castle and the lands that I gave in surety for the debt!”

“Do you remember,” asked Jim quietly, “the exact words you swore to?”

“Of course I do! I solemnly swore before God that should any officer of the court or the creditor come to Castle Smythe, they would see me there within the twenty-four hours after their arrival.”

“Then I don’t think there’s anything to concern yourself about. Carolinus is still with KinetetE, as you know, recovering from what the old Gnarly King did to him. I could try to talk to him, or to KinetetE-in fact, I ought to try KinetetE anyway. Hold on-“

He tilted his head back and spoke to the dark rafters of the Hall, overhead.

He looked down; and, sure enough, just being seated at the table with them- no surprise at all-was KinetetE and-very much a surprise-Carolinus, with wine cups and appetizers now set out before each one of them.

“You wanted to speak to me?” KinetetE asked. “Carolinus insisted on coming. Don’t tire him.”

“Bah!” said Carolinus.

“Of course not,” said Jim. “Yes, I-well, Brian, will you tell KinetetE your situation and what you have to do?”

“An honor,” said Brian, “to speak to you again, Mage KinetetE; and Mage Carolinus, how it gladdens my heart to see you once more. Er-my problem is this...”

He told them, as he had told Jim just a short time before.

“That’s quite in order, Brian,” said Carolinus in a rusty version of his usual voice. “I’ll-“

“No, you won’t,” said KinetetE. “I will! Brian, if it becomes necessary for you to return swiftly, have someone call out my name-“

“I’ll take care of that,” said Geronde.

“Very well. I’ll then talk to you, Geronde. You’ll inform me of the situation. I’ll then speak to you, Brian, wherever you may be; and tell you your immediate return is prepared. You may not be able to leave the exact moment I call you; but it won’t matter. All you need to do is click your heels together three times-“

Jim and Angie, who unfortunately were drinking a private toast together, both choked on their wine at the same moment.

“-clicking your heels together and saying to yourself three times-‘Smythe, Smythe, Smythe.” May I ask what’s got into you two, Jim and Angie?” KinetetE wound up in a steely voice.

“The servants poured the wrong wine for both of us,” said Angie, who was quicker-tongued than Jim. “It was not the wine for our toast, and we didn’t want to drink it.”

“Ah!” said KinetetE, clearly annoyed and disbelieving, but also unable to find a polite formula to put these things into words. “-At any rate, Brian, you will find yourself back at your Castle immediately.”

“I am forever in your debt, Mage.”

“As for the two of us,” KinetetE went on, “we just dropped by to show off Carolinus’s recovery. Say something to them, Carolinus!”

“What the devil can I say?” replied Carolinus in the same rusty voice, but sounding more like his old, snappish self and warming the hearts of the rest at the table. “I’m perfectly all right, now. Be back in my cottage tomorrow!”

“By the end of the week hopefully, let us say,” put in KinetetE. “Now we must go Ah, Jim, Brian, Dafydd-may good chance go with you, down in the Drowned Land and Lyonesse, all of you.”

She and Carolinus disappeared.

There was a long moment of silence in which all those still at the table looked happily at each other.

“So!” said Brian, breaking the silence and lifting his mazer so strongly the wine within almost sloshed out onto the tabletop, “I shall be going to the Drowned Land and mayhap to Lyonesse with you, Jim and Dafydd! This is a day to celebrate!”

“Within reason,” said Geronde.

“Of course. Who would go forth on a task such as we three face with a head like a pumpkin and little sleep?”

“But what about your wedding, Brian?” Angie asked.

“Oh, this can hardly delay matters. After all, our battle at the Loathly Tower was accomplished in a day-“

“Hob!” said Jim.

“Yes, my Lord?” said a timid voice from the nearest fireplace; and the face of the castle hobgoblin appeared, upside down, peeking out from inside the top edge of the fireplace.

“Either,” said Jim irritably, “come all the way in or go away. But stop popping into sight for a second and then out again. We all know you’ve been listening to everything said here, from the first moment Dafydd arrived.”

“Besides,” added Jim, “you probably aren’t allowed there. Remember, Rrrnlf had to leave us at the border of the Drowned Land. Probably Naturals aren’t allowed into the Drowned Land or Lyonesse.”

“I know, my Lord,” said Hob. “But the Sea Devil and other Naturals are different.

They’ve got no proper place in the real world-and that’s the only place they’re allowed to go. But we Hobs are allowed to be with people. Then, there’s some like that Demon Aroman-“

“Arhiman,” said Angie helpfully.

“Thank you, my Lady-Arhiman, my Lord. He had to be summoned, even to come into the real world. Most Naturals who don’t have their proper place there can go into the real world, but not into one of the Kingdoms of other Naturals. The only ones who can are those whose proper place is with people-like me- and, well...”

Hob gulped.

“Trolls, for instance. Their proper place is where they can eat humans-and other people-in the real world, and can go anywhere humans are. Besides, m’Lord forgets I was there with him before.”

Jim had forgotten, remembering only while he and Hob had been talking, just now. He had ignored the memory, however, hoping Hob’s memory had been equally faulty.

Jim opened his mouth and then closed it again. The QB, of course, was the Questing Beast of Arthurian legend, a friendly creature that had literally saved their lives when they had been passing through Lyonesse before. He had come up to Jim after his rescue and barked-not with his famous sound like twenty couple of hounds questing, but with the single bark of a single dog; and Jim could not understand what he was trying to say until Hob translated.

Hob had a point. They might well be bumping into some person or creature along the way with whom Hob could be useful in the same way again.

“QB? QB?” said Brian, conveniently filling the conversational gap. “Oh, you mean that mixture of several beasts, head of a snake, body of a leopard, and tail of a lion? Never expected to see such. It was the one hunted by King Pellinore, was it not, James?”

“It was,” said Jim. “Remember how the youngest Sir Dinedan told us they liked to hunt together? But neither one was a good hunter; and they were always losing each other, so they spent most of their time hunting for each other rather than game-“

Jim caught himself up sharply. He had been about to plunge into a warm bath of reminiscences with an equally willing Brian; and for the first time he realized that the women at the table were being ominously silent.

“Essentially, you’re correct, though, Brian,” he wound up hastily; and put his mind back to what Hob had been asking. “Well, Hob”-he made his best effort at a smile and a conciliatory voice-“I’m glad you reminded me of that. Maybe you will have to come, after all.”

“Oh, good!” caroled Hob, shooting up the chimney and out of sight like a rocket.

“I only said may-“ Jim gave up. Reminding Hob of the escape clause in Jims promise would only plunge the little Natural back into uncertainty and gloom. Might as well let him feel good while he could. Besides, Hob was most probably out of hearing range by now, anyway.

“James!” said Geronde sharply, “if the Mage can bring Brian back here to meet a court officer or a creditor, can you not also bring him back for the wedding and its celebration? It would only take three days.”

“When’s the wedding, then?” asked Jim; for the date had been moved forward, then back, then forward again, several times in the tug-of-war between Geronde’s father-to have it done as quickly as possible so that he could leave on his latest adventure-and Geronde-in her determination that it should be done properly and only when everything was ready-including her wedding dress.

“Three weeks, two days, hence,” she said.

“In that case, Jim,” said Angie, “maybe it’d be a good idea to get started as soon as you can.

“I was just thinking that myself,” said Jim. “I’d better get back to KinetetE right away. I’ll try to come back here to almost this same moment-I mean, I’ll hope to be back with answers almost before I’ve gone.”

“You again?” said KinetetE, as Jim once more appeared in her waiting room. She was sitting there alone in one of the overstuffed chairs, sewing on what looked like another sampler.

Jim sat.

“I thought you’d be expecting me back without too much delay,” he said. “No lineup of people or others to see you?”

“You were put to the head of the line,” said KinetetE. “Also, I needed to do some thinking of my own. To answer your question, yes; knowing you, I was indeed expecting you back at any moment.”

“Very well,” said Jim.

“Furthermore,” went on KinetetE, “never forget that it’s being lent to you. Not given. The magick Carolinus gave you in the past was from his credit and it was lent, too-“

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“No doubt that was because, as your Master-in-Magick, he has control of your account and can pay himself back out of what you’ve earned from actions like the battle at the Loathly Tower, or your going to World’s End to awaken the Phoenix. But I’ll expect you to remember-if you survive-that what you will have gotten from me was borrowed. You’ll have to speak to the Accounting Office to pay me back. Can I count on that?”

“Of course you can,” said Jim. But the matter-of-fact tone of the words “... if you survive...” had sent a chill down his back.

He had been in a number of dangerous situations since he had first come to this world. So far, he had always come out of them safely. But Carolinus had never treated him with the solemnity that KinetetE was showing. Now he remembered that time when, inhabiting the body of the dragon Gorbash, he had hung between life and death, with the lance of Sir Hugh de Bois all the way through his chest; and also the knife in his back from Edgar de Wiggin.

Perhaps he had come to think too much of himself as someone invulnerable. But there had been that cold note just now in KinetetE’s voice as she mentioned his chance of survival... He put it aside for the moment.

“Good. Then about this magic I’ll need-“ But KinetetE was already talking to thin air.

“Accounting Office?” she was now saying to the otherwise empty room. “Have you made a note of the agreement on this Magick I have just lent the Apprentice, Jim Eckert?”

“I have,” said the bass voice of the Accounting Office, as usual out of thin air, some five feet above the floor. And as usual, in spite of the fact he was expecting to hear it, Jim jumped.

That was an unfortunate error, Mage. A one-in-a-million-“

Just so this matter doesn’t become the second in that million. You can go now.”

“Yes, Mage.”

Tell me,” asked Jim, as the bass voice fell silent and before he thought, “why do you and Carolinus always give the Accounting Office such a hard time?”

“Is he gone?” KinetetE took another look at the thin air that the voice had been coming from. “Yes. Good. Keeps him in line. Tracking our magickal credit gives him no authority over us-rather vice-versa. But, now that the terms between us are settled, I’ve a lot to tell you about Lyonesse.”

“By the way, I’ll need to get back to where I just came from, only a minute or so after I left there to come here. And when you send me back there, could you-“

“Do you? I hope so. Doubtless whoever told you that also told you it was a Land of Old Magic?”

“Yes, come to think of it,” said Jim, remembering Carolinus’s words, in the projection he had left for Jim to find on his last trip into Lyonesse. “I was told.”

“Then suppose we start with that as the basics and enlarge on the matter from there. Old Magic-have you any idea what that means?”

About to say “Of course. It means magic that’s old,” Jim checked himself just in time.

“No,” he said. “Tell me.”

“Old Magic,” said KinetetE, “is magick that is very old indeed. Old before all remembrance. Old before Lyonesse was upheaven from the abyss by fire, to sink into the abyss again-“

“Who?”

“Alfred, Lord Tennyson. A poet of the nineteenth-a poet whose poems we know back where I come from.”

“When King Arthur and his army came to Lyonesse for the last battle with his son Modred, that delayed the land’s sinking back into the abyss, which it otherwise would have done before now. But it’s something that has to happen eventually- hopefully, not while you and your friends are there.”

“Why should it happen then?”

“Because,” said KinetetE, “the Dark Powers are single-minded, unthinking Natural Forces. But compared to the Old Magic they’re no more than jumped-up latecomers who don’t know the risk they’re taking. They’re playing with fire in trying to take over Lyonesse, though they don’t suspect it. They could win Lyonesse, but by doing that destroy not only it but themselves.”

“How can you be so sure they don’t suspect it?” asked Jim.

“Because they don’t have our capabilities, Apprentice. Their power is only in the present, so that’s where they live. From their viewpoint there never was a past and the word future means nothing,” said KinetetE. “Obvious enough, I should think?”

“Yes,” said Jim; and made up his mind to say no more for the moment.

“As far as they know, they only have to own Lyonesse to have a physical base in the real world, something they’ve never been able to have. A place. Hah! Little do they know what they may have to go through to win it. And little do we know what we’ll have to go through if they do win it-“

“It could make that much difference?” said Jim, in spite of his determination to be quiet.

“How could it not? But to finish what I was trying to say-to win, the Powers at least realize they’ll have to take it from those of the Round Table who are loyal to Arthur. But as far as the Powers understand it, if they just do that, they’ve got it. They can’t conceive of the Old Magic refusing to let them hold it-possibly, they don’t even realize the Old Magic exists. But, while they might win it, they won’t be able to hold it except by agreement of the humans or Naturals occupying it. Bodiless forces can’t possess earth.”

“Makes sense,” said Jim, forgetting again about his recent vow of silence.

“I’m glad to hear it. But-if the Dark Powers do manage to hold it, then with humans loyal to them, they’ll have a powerful base in Reality to launch future attacks on History and Chaos. In a word, they would come closer to being sentient beings, rather than just Forces-which would allow them to think more like us who oppose them by making History-a great advantage.”

She stopped and stared hard at Jim.

“Ah, I see,” said Jim, since clearly, now, at last, he was expected to speak.

“So you can understand,” said KinetetE, “why the use of any outside magick by anyone, in Lyonesse, causes double danger. Not only is it subject to erasure or retaliation, but any transfer of the ownership of that Land from Arthur and his Knights-his original Knights of the Legends-to the Dark Powers may disturb the precarious magickal balance that keeps the land itself from sinking in fire once more into the abyss.”

“Oh,” said Jim.

“Not only that, but any improper use of magick from elsewhere may also upset the balance, with the same result.”

I should warn you,” she said, “that if you are stripped of that magick while you’re there, you must leave Lyonesse immediately, to resupply yourself. Do not take the risk of trying to recover what you have lost while you’re there. But if I lend you the amount of magick needed for what I just mentioned, you should be amply supplied.”

“What for?”

A wild memory from his own twentieth-century world flashed into Jim’s mind, of having watched, on television, as people being forced to testify invoked the Fifth Amendment. Impossible here, of course. But...

“I will only say that the sort of magic I have used on several occasions, successfully up until now, requires that I have as much as is needed, and a free hand in using it. I estimate I could need at least double the amount you had in mind-or more. I’ll also mention that at one time I had an unlimited drawing account; and when Carolinus arranged for me to have it, he made no stipulations about its use.”

“If you could simply give me some grounds for asking and acting like this...

“No,” said Jim. “That’s not possible, either.” But he could feel his determination weakening.

“Then I have no choice but to refuse to help you in any way at this time.”

“Very well,” said Jim. He unfolded his arms and stood up.

Jim continued to sit without saying anything. After a pause, she looked back at him.

“Tell me one thing,” she said. “Did Carolinus actually never, at any time, require accountability from you?”

“He never did.”

“Well” she said. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. That’s Carolinus for you through and through. Very well. I’m still only lending you this magick credit, remember; but you may have the amount you want, and do with it as you think necessary. And the boy’s only an Apprentice, in the name of all that’s magick!”

The last words were addressed only to the room in general. Jim scrambled mentally for the safest thing to say under the circumstances.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Very well,” said KinetetE, “I’ll do what you asked when I sent you back to the Royal Cave of the Gnarlies: send you to Lyonesse with a ward that includes some of the Here around you.”

“That would be just what I was hoping,” said Jim.

“-And I’ll protect you as well as I can. But you must remember it’s only while the ward holds that you’ll have magick to strike out with; and once anyone or anything in Lyonesse senses you’re warded, he, she, or it may wipe the ward out as easily as you breathe on a snowflake to melt it. Also, remember what I said; no one, including me, knows all the Old Magic. Merlin might have, but there’s no one like him today. So your powers can disappear without warning.”

“Ah... yes,” said Jim. “I’ll remember everything you’ve had to tell me. But isn’t it time now you gave me the magic and sent me off?”

“Very well,” she said. “But recall this as well. I have a long memory, myself; and woe to you at my hands if you’re careless or wasteful with the magick you borrow from me!”

“I’ll have it in mind,” said Jim stiffly.

“Very well,” she said. “Then you’re warded and equipped as of this second. Oh, by the way, the ward I gave you and the power to bring or send back and forth your friends; but you understand your own ward protects you only against magick. Good luck.”

She had gotten back at him after all. Jim had simply assumed his ward would protect him against accident and unexpected wounds. That was an automatic coverage of the ordinary personal ward, in addition to whatever else it was set up to Protect from. He had been a little surprised to get away with facing her down over Brian’s transportation home in a hurry. He had been right to be surprised. He hadn’t.

“Thank you,” said Jim.

Graceful acknowledgment of being bested. Only thing to do. And he was immediately back in the Great Hall of Malencontri, with Dafydd, Geronde and Brian all looking at him.

“Something wrong?” he asked, sitting down, “You were hardly gone a minute, Jim!” said Angie.

“Indeed,” said Dafydd, “the time was very short. Did something go amiss?” “Oh, no!,” Jim said. “Everything went well. Piece of cake. I’m now prepared to send you home on a moment’s notice, Brian. Or send all of us home on a moment’s notice if it comes to that. The swiftness of it was just one of those things that happens when magic goes smoothly.”

He laughed cheerfully. But the chill persisted as well. He kept up his outward smile. There were a number of uncomfortable possibilities, according to what she had said, waiting for them in Lyonesse.

He laughed, admiring KinetetE for the exactness with which she had returned him to the time he had asked for. She had not been exaggerating when she said she never forgot anything-but that thought was a sobering one. Her final words came back to him. If she was that good at keeping promises, there was that uncomfortable little bit about woe to him at her hands if he was careless or wasteful with the borrowed magic. Ah, well...

He kept his smile, firmly setting to one side memory of KinetetE’s comments about his survival. Cross those bridges when he came to them.

That evening at bedtime, just before they settled down for the night, he showed Angie the magic glasses he had made. They were just about as good-looking as glasses for him could get, he thought-with thin gold rims and earpieces-“temples,” he remembered the oculist calling them. They were about as unnoticeable as spectacles could be; but were protected against breakage by a ward.

“Jim, they look stunning!” said Angie, trying them on herself. “Oh, but Jim-you don’t need bifocals yet, do you? There’s some kind of a line between the upper and lower parts of the lenses!”

“An idea of my own, in fact,” said Jim, feeling a touch of complacency. “You see, I had to make them so they’d react to any color around me, whether I was deliberately noticing or not; and I might not be noticing if-well, for example, if there was something like a glare in my eyes. So the lower halves are the part that shows color-more brightly than I’d see it with the naked eye, actually.” He pointed a finger at a lens while she still wore the glasses.

“In contrast,” he went on, “the upper half will still show the black-and-silver, but will shield me from glare, a bit. They’re something like sunglasses, in principle- the kind that get darker the brighter the light is.”

“That was clever of you,” said Angie. She took the spectacles off and held them at arm’s length toward the flame of their single candle on the candlestick stand of her side of the bed. “Yes, it does! Well, that was a good idea. Now all I have to worry about is your getting mixed up in something dangerous.”

And KinetetE’s promise about what would happen to him if he did not use his borrowed magic right, thought Jim. But there was no reason for Angie to have that worrying her.

“We can take him, can’t we, m’Lord?” asked Hob, who at the moment was riding on Jim’s back-a feather’s weight there, only. “I’m afraid not,” Jim said. “He’s not allowed.”

“That’s right, very wee Hob,” said Rrrnlf. “We Sea Devils can go anywhere- except where we’re not allowed. Places like this Drowned Land are unallowed.”

They were finally descending the last hundred of many hundred feet of deep salt ocean. The four horses-Gorp, Blanchard, Dafydd’s light but courageous roan stallion, and Jim’s sumpter horse-were enclosed in a calming enchantment and held in one enormous Sea Devil hand. Rrrnlf’s other hand carried Jim, Brian, and Dafydd in another ward, but without the calming enchantment-which had a side effect of dulling the senses. Both sets of passengers were completely protected from the crushing pressure at this great depth-and the horses, at least, were completely indifferent to their surroundings. Brian and Dafydd appeared indifferent, too; but Jim knew that in any unusual place and situation, that was the way they would strive to appear.

As for Jim, he was occupied.

He knew that a properly set-up ward was unbreakable, of course, so he could have been as indifferent as the horses; but at the moment he had gotten himself particularly interested in the manner in which they would enter the air-wall between sea and the Drowned Land. He had not thought to pay any attention to it the one time they had entered it before, on their way to the Gnarly Kingdom.

His attention was all on the approaching fields of the Drowned Land, and the feet of Rrrnlf’s thirty-plus-foot body, as they crossed the seabed rapidly. If he just kept watching carefully... Jim told himself.

Rrrnlf stooped and pressed the two wards-invisible, of course, but undoubtedly very solid feeling in his two hands-and pushed them hard against the surface where water met air. They stopped moving suddenly.

“That’s as far as I can take you, wee people,” he said.

He turned his wrists around-widdershins, Jim noted-and the front surfaces of the wards went through the wall. Rrrnlf let them go and stepped back.

“That is all and more than needed, good Rrrnlf,” Jim answered. The Sea Devil raised a hand, then simply vanished.

Jim was pleased with himself. Watching closely, with eyes now trained in magic, he had caught the briefest possible glint of a circular swirl in the air-like the swirl in the water made by a fish, just under the surface of a lake, when it turned suddenly in quick fright from a baited hook it had been investigating.

Then Dafydd’s hand was through the air-wall into the land beyond, his body followed it, and Jim and Brian followed him. To their right the horses were following Dafydd’s roan steed out in the same way.

“Hah!” said Jim, delighted and out loud, without thinking. “Of course. The simplest thing in the world! The Witch’s Gate!”

“Witches?” said Brian, suddenly and sharply staring around him. “Where, James?”

“No. I mean, none, Brian. It was just a manner of speaking. I was pondering on a point of magic, that was all, and spoke up without thinking.”

“Shall we mount and go, Sirs?” said Dafydd, almost sharply.

Mounting his roan as Jim and Brian also mounted, Dafydd led them inland from the shore onto the greensward.

“-Is this land all pastureland like this?” Brian asked Dafydd.

“No,” said the archer. He had straightened somewhat since they had left their wards behind; and seemed taller than Jim was used to seeing him. “There are clumps of trees, but no real forests. But farther in, the land becomes rugged and rises to small mountains. As you start down the farther side of that you enter the Borderland-Drowned Land country, but a wild place where rough forest starts; and that forest becomes the forest of Lyonesse in no large distance.”

Dafydd, as suited a prince in his own country-as he was here-now rode first, followed by Jim and Brian-Brian on a Blanchard who, for a wonder, this one time did not seem disposed to push himself ahead of Dafydd’s roan. It was as if even the destrier was recognizing the present difference in rank. Now it was Brian who had tied to his saddle the lead rope of the sumpter horse that carried their baggage.

It was the same sumpter horse that had carried their baggage on their earlier trip through here to Gnarlyland. There had been a general feeling on the part of the stable hands at Malencontri that it would be bad luck to take a different horse if the original horse was still available

The horses, in fact, were all on their best manners. Jim had been half afraid the sudden change of scene might at least have spooked Brian’s Blanchard-who could take offense at almost anything unexpected. But on this occasion, he had accepted the magical shift in scene with indifference.

The roan himself, beautiful but lighter than the two destriers of Brian and Jim, was typical of the horses they had seen on their previous trip through the Drowned Land. He plainly loved the man he carried; as, for that matter, did Blanchard love his own rider, Brian-once, Jim had seen the big destrier, for all his usual tantrums and demands for first place, refuse to take shelter one cold, rainy night, to stand in the open over his unconscious master. When Gorp had long since taken shelter under one of the heavy-leafed surrounding trees.

Dafydd, Jim and Brian had discovered, could ride, and ride well, when the need was there, although he preferred under ordinary conditions to travel afoot. In fact, Jim had never seen him on the roan until this last year; and it was only a few months back that he spoke about it to Dafydd, when it occurred to him to ask the name of the roan. The answer had been enlightening.

“Owen?” Jim had echoed the name-for Dafydd’s life was spent among the English nowadays; and Owen had been the name of a Welsh leader who had been a real thorn in the side of those English trying to conquer and subdue Wales. “You named him Owen?”

“I did. He is named after Owen Glendower,” Dafydd had replied.

“I guessed as much. But why that particular name?” asked Jim.

“I did that, so when, as has happened, some Englishman might ask me his name, I could answer it was Owen. Then if the man should further ask how I should give a horse such a strange-sounding name, I could reply he was named after Owen Glendower; and if that same man should then wonder who Owen Glendower might be-then, if need be, I could take him aside and explain it to his full understanding.”

Obviously, such an “explanation” might become a physically active one. Dafydd continually spoke of himself as “not a man of great dispute,” but it was remarkable the way dispute came and found him. He was, in truth, always soft-voiced and polite to everyone. But even as an archer, he carried himself like a prince; and this was more than enough to make him a walking challenge to some other males.

Plainly, the name had been Dafydd’s way of educating some of the English about a Welsh hero, the leader of the uprising there earlier in this century. It had been Wales’s last strong bid to free itself from English rule, from what Jim remembered from his history-which, admittedly, was not always a perfect match for the history of this world.

Clearly, the horse Owen seemed to share much of the same attitude as his rider. At no time when they had been together had he challenged the larger Gorp or Blanchard, as stallions were sometimes prone to do-Blanchard very much so. But once when Blanchard had moved to domineer over him, Owen had responded like a screaming fury, attacking the heavier warhorse so swiftly he had appeared to be the one who had started the fight. Luckily, on that one occasion, the stable hands at Malencontri had got the two into separate stalls before any real damage was done on either side.

At any rate, so far, things had gone well. Hopefully, the King of the Drowned Land would be able to tell them more about the Dark Powers trying to take over Lyonesse-and his Kingdom, as well-

Jim’s thoughts broke off suddenly; for a rider was coming toward them at a speed that raised a spreading cloud of dust from the unpaved road behind him. Dafydd raised a hand and reined Owen to a stop. Jim and Brian both rode forward a few steps to come up close to-but not quite level with-him, and also reined in to await the coming of the approaching rider.

He was with them in moments, and hauled his sweating, pawing horse to a stop. But the first words he spoke to Dafydd were in the language of the Drowned Land, which neither Jim nor Brian understood. Jim could have used his magic to interpret, but he felt vaguely that this might be a little like listening at keyholes. He and Brian waited.

The conversation was brief. Dafydd listened to what the horseman had to say and spoke to him briefly. Then he turned to Jim and Brian.

“Madog, here, will stay with you and guide you safely to the border of Lyonesse. He will take you to a different place on that border than the one we crossed at before to get to the entrance of the Gnarly Kingdom. I must leave you here.”

“But you said nothing of this earlier!” said Brian. “I thought we would all pause while you saw your King-perhaps a day or two-and then you would go on with us.”

“Matters have arisen,” said Dafydd. “In brief, the King is ill. Deathly ill; and his one living son, who has been hidden for his own safety, for reasons that are privy to those very close to the King-is now revealed. He is wise beyond his years, but still too young in my King’s mind to take on the responsibility of the Kingdom, with this threat heavy above us. I must go to the King now, while he lives. Madog will see you well to the border and I will join you there in Lyonesse as soon as I can. Farewell for now.”

He lifted the reins, and Owen broke almost immediately into a gallop, building to a swiftness that might well have given Blanchard a run for Brian’s money. Jim had little doubt of which horse would win over a distance, however. Blanchard was so remarkable as to be almost a freak. In spite of his weight and size, endless power seemed stored in his great-chested body. “It was almost visible, radiating from him, to any who saw him-the element that had made Chandos and others speak of him so highly.

Jim sat Gorp now, feeling strangely deserted and exposed by Dafydd’s sudden leaving. He and Brian looked at Madog, sitting his wet horse and waiting for their attention.

The man was dressed exactly as had been others of the King’s personal guards they had seen on their previous visit to the Drowned Land. In fact, he could have been one of those they had seen then, an escort mounted on beautiful, but small, bay horses-like the one he rode now. He carried a light spear held upright in a boot by his right toe, and was clad in armor of boiled leather reinforced by plates of metal. He also wore a helmet of antique style, with a nasal bar that left his facial area open. Hanging from his waist was a dark leather scabbard that held a slim, flat sword with a small silver hilt.

Behind the nasal bar, his face was tanned and sharp-boned, with keen brown eyes. There was something restless, eager, and potentially explosive-as Owen had been-about him.

“Do you speak English?” Jim asked him.

Madog shook his head, but half turned his horse and pointed ahead along the road they had been following. He said something in the same liquid language that he and Dafydd had spoken together.

“Clearly,” said Brian, “he waits for us to follow him.”

Jim nodded. They put their horses into motion, the sumpter horse shrugging as she necessarily followed on her lead rope; and, behind the Drowned Land soldier, they went on their way, now at a trot instead of the walking pace they had been using before.

“Meseemeth,” said Brian judiciously, “that this fellow is eager to discharge the duty Dafydd laid upon him and get back to others more familiar.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” answered Jim.

They followed Madog in silence for perhaps half an hour; and though the landscape on each side of the road continued much the same, they began to see, along the horizon ahead, either rugged hills or distant mountains. Shortly, they also saw a whiteness ahead but off to their left; and as they moved on, it resolved itself into a city, its buildings-some of them of surprising height-apparently constructed of some marblelike material. A little later the wide road they were on divided, sending another route, equally wide, off in the direction of the city.

Madog, however, continued to lead them straight on for some distance, then branched off onto a narrow road to their right. Jim looked ahead with some surprise. It did not seem that they had covered so much distance, but now the mountains ahead were a great deal closer.

As they went on, their new road narrowed; more so when the ground began to slope upward into the flanks of the nearest mountains. Shortly, it had dwindled to little more than a bridle path on which it was only just possible for two to travel side by side.

They were higher up now, and the mountain was beginning to live up to that name. Under the horses’ hooves earth had given way to rock, loose chips of reddish white stone on which the metal of horseshoes slipped; and uneven surfaces of the same rock, unbroken. The sumpter horse, not usually taken far from Malencontri, had not been considered worth horseshoeing, and was having an easier time of it. So, Jim noticed, was the horse of the royal guardsman up ahead. Of course, he told himself, the Drowned Land must almost certainly have sunk beneath the waves long before the medieval invention of the horseshoe.

“James!” said Brian in a low voice, behind him.

Jim turned his head. Brian was reining Blanchard close in beside him as they climbed; and Jim could hear the hard breathing of the warhorse.

“What is it?” he asked in an equally low voice, for Brian was clearly not trusting to the soldier’s claim that he could not understand English.

“Have you noticed?” Brian said. “The shadow. Does it not seem to you to be going along with us?”

Jim, deep in his own thoughts, had not. But now he looked up at the sky, clear and blue save for a few puffy clouds on the northern horizon,, and at the mountainside, brightly lit in the afternoon light, with its wealth of dry stone riverbeds and spires. No visible shadow showed; but he knew what Brian meant. Now that he gave it his attention, he felt its presence-the darkness they had noticed in the Great Hall. There was no doubt.

“I wouldn’t think-since we’re only just into the Drowned Land, not Lyonesse-“ began Jim, then checked himself. “But maybe you’re right.”

Now that he had taken notice of this shadow of the Dark Powers, he felt the same instinct to be wary that was moving Brian. Half unconsciously, he reached for the hilt of his own sword; and followed Brian’s example by breaking the tightness that riding and gravity had brought it to in his scabbard.

“Darkness... and mist,” he said to Brian. “Remember the mist that held about the marsh and the Loathly Tower before Carolinus showed up with his staff to hold it back so we could fight what they sent against us. We might watch for any sign of mist or fog.”

“No sign of such, yet,” muttered Brian. He scanned the peaceful sky overhead. “But you say well, James. From now on let us be on watch-though our guide does not seem concerned about it.”

He frowned at the back of the soldier ahead.

“If our way grows much steeper,” he added, “we will have to dismount and walk, leading the horses.”

This was correct, Jim realized now. The soldier was not sparing his own horse, or acting as if he was about to. But just then they entered a cleft running upward in the rock; and when at last they emerged from this into the open again, the way they were following had struck a long downward slope that continued until a belt of trees could be seen. The soldier broke into a gallop.

“Hold!” shouted Brian furiously, reining in Blanchard. “Damn your bones and guts! Fellow! Come back here!”

The language might be unintelligible to the rider ahead, but the tone of Brian’s voice was not. The other pulled his horse to a stop and turned in his saddle.

“Come back here!” roared Brian, beckoning him with full arm movements. The soldier turned his horse and rode back up to them.

“Are there no wits at all in that wooden head of yours?” exploded Brian. “Do you think I’d risk the legs of a warhorse the worth of Blanchard by galloping down a slope like that-just because you don’t give a damn if you break the neck of that screw you’re riding? By all the Saints in the Calendar, I’ll see you in Hell and roasting first! We go down as carefully as we came up, or you can...”

Brian’s language became very colorful indeed. Once more, the words in which they were uttered might mean nothing to the soldier, but Brian’s obvious anger, reinforced by emphatic gestures at his mount and the rock underfoot, could not be misunderstood. The expression on the soldier’s face hardly changed. Only his mouth tightened. Without a word he turned his horse downslope once more and walked it forward.

Jim and Brian followed at the same pace. Brian, deprived of a target for his outrage, snorted and grumbled for several minutes to Jim, gradually bleeding off what was left of his fury.

“It could be,” said Jim diplomatically, when his friend finally fell silent, “his horse is used to a pace like that on such a slope.”

“Bloody fool, anyway!” muttered Brian. “But you may be right, James. He may not have thought it a danger any more for us than it was for him.”

With that, the fit of anger, like all such with Brian, was gone, and already half-forgotten.

They reached the trees in a very short time, after all. Distance seemed strangely foreshortened here in the Drowned Land, thought Jim. Perhaps that was part of its innate magic for those who had chosen to stay with it-to have a kingdom larger than it seemed.

Now that he had noticed it, he was not surprised when, after traveling for only a short time through the trees, they came out on a grassy plain. In the apparent distance there was another green band of trees, stretching as far ahead of them as Jim could see; and in no way different from the trees they had just passed through.

Here, however, their guide reined in his horse. When they rode up level with him, he waved his hand forward, almost as if shooing them onward, and turned his own horse around as if to ride back.

“He can’t mean that is Lyonesse ahead there,” said Brian. “James, I am going to have a word with Dafydd when this is all over. The same sun, shining on the same sort of forest? That’s not what I remember from the moonlit, black-and-silver country we visited before. Can you not find some way to speak to this-this Maggot?”

“Madog,” said Jim; and the soldier, hearing his name pronounced in approximately recognizable fashion, looked at him.

“Lyonesse?” asked Jim, pointing his finger forward and sweeping it from left to right across the grassy plain and the trees beyond it.

“I doubt him,” said Brian coldly. “It does not look like Lyonesse, it does not feel like Lyonesse. There is something amiss here, James, and it begins with this one. I no longer trust him.”

“But we don’t have much choice,” said Jim, “unless we want to turn around and go back. I can’t believe Dafydd would send us with a guide who couldn’t or wouldn’t show us where we wanted to go.”

“There is that,” said Brian slowly, running his forefinger across the stiff blond bristles of an upper lip unshaven since the day before. His eyes went to the soldier. “Harkee, Maggot! If thou hast played us false, and I live, I will bring thee to due reward for it!”

Madog looked back at him fearlessly, but otherwise with no expression at all, remounted his horse, and left them at a good pace, back up the side of the mountain they had just come down.

“It’s just three more steps on, m’Lord!” piped up a small voice behind him; and both Jim and Brian turned to see Hob’s head poking out from under the cover of their belongings on the back of the sumpter horse.

Hob had been completely quiet from the moment they had left Malencontri, possibly taking no chance that Jim might get annoyed with him and send him home by magic, after all. But now his face was one wide smile. Jim had actually forgotten he was with them; and he suspected Brian had also.

Jim turned. He took a step forward across the grassy plain toward the farther band of trees, bright in the sunlight. Then a second step... and a third-

With the last, the warm sun was no longer overhead. There was no distant line of trees, but black, heavy trunks with black, twisted limbs loomed close about him, under an oversized, white sun or moon shedding a light that was bright, but showed no color anywhere, in ground or trees; and the sky was a pale white like the horizon just before moonrise.

Jim turned about and looked behind him. Brian was gone, along with the normal sun and the rising ground to the mountain they had just crossed. Where those had been was a small glen, or treeless patch, with only colorless grass sparse upon the black soil. All shadows were sharp-edged and impenetrable in their darkness.

He took a long step back the way he had come-and there was sunlight, blue sky, green vegetation, Brian, and the horses.

“Stay where you are a moment, Brian,” he said. “It’s Lyonesse, all right. I just have to check on something else. Be back in just a few moments.”

He visualized KinetetE’s sitting room and felt his magic work. He was there; and KinetetE was in the same chair he had seen her in before, but this time apparently reading from the rolled parchment of a manuscript. She looked up at him, over the top edge of it.

“Well?” she said. “What’s it this time?”

“We’ve reached the border between the Drowned Land and Lyonesse,” said Jim. “But not at the entrance to the Gnarlyland caves. I just wanted to check with you as to whether this was a safe place to cross over.”

“Oh,” said Jim. “Dafydd had to leave us to go to the King of the Drowned Land-“

“I know. What else do you want to tell me that I already know?”

“Well, for one thing...” he said. He was becoming so used to KinetetE’s sharp-tongued manner that it hardly registered on him anymore. It was simply a different version of Carolinus’s short-tempered way of expressing himself. Perhaps all Mages developed something of the sort with time. “Well, for one thing, Brian and I and Hob-“

“Can you feel magick directed against you?”

“And when you told me,” Jim continued, “I’d have to leave Lyonesse to get it again; did that mean that whoever there took it from me wouldn’t be able to destroy it, or keep it for themselves?”

“No one,” said KinetetE severely, “can destroy magick. As for anyone keeping it for her or his own, that is not possible, even in a place like Lyonesse. No, once You’re outside, it will automatically come back to you as the Magickian it belongs with.”

“Good,” said Jim. He took a deep, relieved breath.

“Now,” he said, “one last question. Have you any advice, any instructions, warnings... anything at all to tell me?”

But the thick-trunked trees stood a distance apart, as they might have in the world above where the shade of leaves overhead had killed off nearly all undergrowth. Here, too, the trees were miserly, with scant leaves, but their heavy trunks and thick branches hid the ground from the white sun, painting it with a pattern of utter darkness.

It was all no different than it had been the time they had ridden through this same sort of forest under this same unnatural sun; but Jim had forgotten the feel of it until now. Glancing over at Brian, he saw his friend’s face was set and expressionless; and guessed Brian had forgotten, also.

There was no indication of the way they should go-except straight ahead. But, unless this part of Lyonesse was different from that they had passed through on an earlier trip, they would come eventually to some person, creature, or sign that would give them an idea in which way they might head.

But silence like this on Brian’s part was not like him. Jim glanced at his friend out of the corners of his eyes. Brian was riding along, frowning at Blanchard’s ears, now. That was better. It was not Brian’s nature to be impressed with any gloomy emotion for long-and, as if Blanchard knew this-he was wonderfully sensitive to Brian’s moods-the horse was finding his own way softly over the dark growth carpeting the ground between the trees.

Jim opened his mouth to say something to rouse Brian, but before he could speak, Brian spoke.

“Hold, James,” he said, reining in. “Something is bothering Blanchard’s right leg. Ho, now, lad-stand you still!”

He swung down out of his saddle and expertly lifted his destrier’s right leg, bending it up backward at the knee to look at the surface of the hoof.

“As I thought, a small stone...” While he spoke, he was prying the source of irritation out, using his eating knife to do so. No knight in his right mind would dull his carefully sharpened and pointed poiniard or other dagger in that sort of task. “Underfoot growth like this often hides such...”

Sitting Gorp and waiting, Jim was suddenly aware, from the edge of his vision, of a branch bending down as a small, dark form ran down it and leaped fairly onto the pommel of his saddle. It stared at him. He stared at it. A squirrel-gray at guess, if he had been able to see it in color. It looked at him completely unafraid, its jaws a little open almost as if it was about to laugh at him. Then it leaped to the ground and was gone.

“... For all that,” Brian was going on as he remounted, “we should be in a sad contretemps in this foreign land, if either of our horses need shoeing.” He settled himself and picked up his reins. They moved forward. “-But you know, James, it may be I misjudged that fellow Dafydd gave us for guide.”

“Language difficulties,” offered Jim.

“Ah, you think so?” said Brian, brightening at once; and Jim, with a sinking feeling inside him, realized that the knight had not understood his answer at all; but had taken it as an explanation that completely relieved him of any need to feel he had been unkind. “Still, that is the way things are nowadays, James. A hard time to be alive and live as a gentleman should.”

The was no point in trying to correct him now. Jim nodded.

“Could you ever have imagined any times like ours?” went on Brian; and, without waiting for an answer, he began to pour forth words. “One never knows how a fellow like that-a foreigner, poor lad, of course; not a word of English-will react to the simplest order; and it’s not as if he was an equal one could call to account for his attitude or tone of voice. All a piece of the same thing nowadays-three pence a day for extra men at harvest time, ever since the plague began! Our fathers and our fathers’ fathers lived in paradise by comparison. Who could expect so much change in one generation? In their time, life was at least as a man might expect it to be: if they were faithful to Holy Church and lived as men ought, they could expect things to go as they should from birth to grave.”

“Well...” began Jim, but Brian poured on.

“Oh, there might be an occasional short harvest and a somewhat heavy winter- hunger in cot and hall. Raiders from the sea might foray inland upon them from time to time; and a few other ordinary difficulties might arise. But if they went on much as their forefathers had, they knew that life would go as all men were used.

“Every generation-“ Jim made another attempt, but was still thwarted.

“Of course!” Brian was going on. “True, they knew nothing of the larger world. Unless they went on Crusade, they never set foot in the Holy Land. They wore armor of no more than naked chain mail-and you know yourself, James, that while chain mail without plates at vulnerable spots-I am not speaking of those rich suits all of plate-plain chain mail, I say, may stop a sword point or edge from cutting the flesh; yet the force of the blow alone may well break the bones beneath the chain. And old-fashioned helms such as our guide wore-“

“Brian,” said Jim, with determination to get a word in edgewise, “in every time and place, people think no other time could match theirs for troubles and accomplishments. But half a century later their great-grandchildren are singing the same song.”

“But that is exactly what I am telling you, James! Such would think that the small things they knew and endured must be the best and worst of all that could happen-that none could ever struggle as they did, or endured what they were enduring! Would it not open their eyes to live in the times we do now?”

“It certainly did... I mean would-“ Jim caught himself just in time. But Brian, in full cry after his argument now, did not hear.

“They would be amazed at what we could do and have done; but think the Earth was about to be called to justice, when they learned of the plagues, the assaults, the wars, the crushing taxes-“

Brian had pulled Blanchard to a halt. Jim stopped Gorp beside the other horse and listened. Now that neither of them were talking, he could clearly hear what Brian had mentioned, though it was at some little distance. It was someone crying, although the sound was not that of a child in tears. Possibly a woman.

Come,” said Brian, and started Blanchard through the trees off to their left. Jim caught up with him, after being stopped short by the need to catch the lead rope of the sumpter horse, which Brian had summarily cut loose from Blanchard’s saddle.

The sumpter horse, in fact, had taken advantage of their pause to crop some of the dark vegetation underhoof; and it looked at Jim with a disgusted “What now?” expression as it had to follow once more.

“My Lady,” he said, “is help needed? Because if it is I am at your command.”

She wept a few more tears.

She began to weep more heavily, into a tiny white handkerchief that should by this time be too sodden to be of any use; but at this moment seemed as dry as if it had never absorbed a tear.

“Brian,” said Jim uneasily, looking at that handkerchief. But Brian paid no attention.

“I pray you, sorrow no more, fair lady,” he was saying. “I and my friend will escort you forward; and I promise it, you may fear none of those who lie in wait for us.”

“Brian-“ began Jim more strongly; but before he could say anything else, the blackness of the grass below him seemed to flow up about him, wrapping itself around him like a tight, heavy blanket, immobilizing and stifling him, so that he could not breathe. He felt himself suffocating, slipping away so that he plunged into unconsciousness.

He came to groggily at first, but his head cleared rapidly. He was in what was clearly a castle, remindful of some of the older ones he had seen in England, since its walls were of rough-faced cut stone. But the arched doorway and ceiling gave a different feel to the building. Brian was not with him.

The room was large and the ceiling high. A few straight chairs stood around the walls; and one, with carved armrests and a tall back with what looked like a snake cut into it, sat alone on a dais at the far end of the room. Immediately before him was the maiden they had seen, but grown suddenly taller, and older-with all the helplessness gone out of her.

She was a tall woman now; and her dress, while still white, was a delicate thing of lace and a shimmering fabric like silk. But her hair was the color of utter lightlessness and her eyes so dark it was impossible to say what their original color was.

She was incredibly beautiful, but there was a hardness and imperiousness about her that was the extreme opposite of the helplessness he and Brian had looked upon earlier.

“So,” she said, “you are recovered. You understand me now, do you not, my rash young intruder? What made you think you could intrude on my Domain, as if these lands were free of passage to anyone-“

She broke off and sniffed at him.

“Aha!” she said. “I smell magick on you. So you know something of the Art and that is what made you think you could trespass here-and you have a little ward, as well-no doubt with your filthy little magick inside. How did one so young even think he could learn enough to face me?”

No answer came to Jim, offhand. This was all too much like a very old-fashioned melodrama, with the villain twirling his black mustache and saying to the heroine: “Hab, me proud beauty! So you dared to come plead with me yourself?... etc.”

He stood wordless, staring at her.

“-Well, I’ll just strip that ward from you and see what pitiful little power you do possess...”

Her hand came toward him as she spoke, but before it touched him, a little flare like miniature lightning leaped from Jim’s chest to meet her oncoming fingers; and she snatched her hand back, crying out.

“Poisoned!” She spit the word out. “Poisoned against me, personally! Who dares do that?”

Jim’s lips parted without his willing it; but the voice that came out of him was not his, though it had become a very familiar one lately.

“I am KinetetE.”

“Kin... what sort of unpronounceable name is that? I never heard of you. You must have some small holding of magick to poison the ward about this young lout here-let alone poison it against Me! Did you realize who you were offending when you did that to Queen Morgan le Fay?”

“Why you insufferable cow! How dare you address me by my given name?”

“We Mages speak to all lesser ones so.”

“Merlin is locked in a tree forevermore. I am unchallenged in Lyonesse.”

“Time is greater than you think, Morgan,” said KinetetE. “Not that I think Merlin would have ever considered dealing with you as anything of a challenge.”

“You tire me,” said Morgan le Fay. “It is time I was rid of you.” She pointed a finger at Jim. “Come to me, here, Kin-whatever your name is! Now!”

The finger stayed there. Nothing happened.

“As I’ve been trying to make clear to you, Morgan,” said KinetetE, “you vastly overrate yourself-and most vastly underrate me. You can’t move me unless I let you. But if you really want to try yourself against what I know, come to where I am.”

“You are Elsewhere, in the world where Lyonesse was once,” the Queen said. “None of us who lived there in its past may go back again. You know that much; at least. What has been cannot be changed.”

“I can move you here, if you really want to come. Just say so.”

“I will not let you take me against the Time, to break its Laws. Nor can you bring me there against my will.”

“Frankly,” said KinetetE, “you’re right. No, I can’t.”

“So!” Morgan’s voice was triumphant. “You admit a weakness!”

“Which you don’t; and which is the reason I know more than you do and keep on learning more. The Knight-Dragon will take care of you eventually, no doubt. But for now he must be tired, standing there and listening to us talk. I suggest you put him back carefully as he was; and don’t bother him or anyone with him, from now on. I may not be able to get us together, but there are sendings I can direct your way; and I can promise there won’t be one of them you like.”

“These can. But as I say, enough of this. Send Jim back now while I’m still watching.”

“Jim? Knight-Dragon? What is he? Both or which? What’s his name?”

“Nonsense! But I’m glad to be rid of you both. Go, Knight-Dragon; and your name and bodies with you!”

Jim was back, sitting on Gorp-who gave a grunt of surprise at the sudden weight returned to his saddle.

Jim came close to giving a grunt of surprise himself. He, Gorp, and the sumpter horse were back in the forest of Lyonesse, but not in the glade where they had been when the shadows snatched him away from Brian and the weeping maiden.

Morgan le Fay’s voice spoke out of the air beside him, savagely.

“Very well, my Knight-Dragon! I have done what your friend asked, but just because I couldn’t lift your ward doesn’t mean you aren’t going to lose it along the way-and then you will be one to find what it means to anger Queen Morgan le Fay. I’ve just sent you and your beasts to the Forest Dedale. May you enjoy yourself there!”

Jim got a sudden, very clear impression that Morgan le Fay had now abandoned him.

“Hell!” he said. He leaned back to make sure that the sumpter horse’s lead rope was securely tied to his saddle, then put them all in motion. He was moving at random, possibly in the wrong direction, but it helped him to feel he was attacking the situation rather than sitting baffled and helpless.

This was a fine start for three heroes who had gone off to perform a rescue. Dafydd left behind in another Kingdom entirely, Brian almost surely tricked into going off on a rescue that was probably a trap even he couldn’t fight himself out of-and Jim, himself, having already found an enemy in the most powerful magician still active in Lyonesse; and not even knowing where he was.

The Forest Dedale?

The name “Dedale” baffled him-though it had a familiar ring, as if he ought to know it. It sounded something like a French word, but what did it mean? He had an uncomfortable feeling about it. Morgan le Fay would not have sent him here if it was a pleasant or happy place to be. But the meaning of the name, if any, eluded him; though there was a faint tickle in the back of his mind... if only he could pin it down to some specific meaning...

“Dedale... Dedale...” He said it out loud, and Gorp looked back at him curiously. The sumpter horse ignored him completely and thought about grazing on the ground cover. Hopefully it would not turn out to be poisonous to horses. Jim went on thinking.

French, of course, was a latinate language, so there should be an ancestor of that word familiar to Romans-or even ancient Greeks. He knew Latin to some extent; but this did not sound as if it could be twisted into a word in that tongue. More likely the ancestor was a classic Greek one-he had it!

Daedalus, of course! It all came back to him suddenly. The man, according to legend, who created the Labyrinth in Crete, to contain the Minotaur, the manlike monster with the head of a bull. Theseus was the name of the hero who finally killed it-and Daedalus died when the daughters of King Cocalus poured boiling water over him as he sat in his bath. They really liked gruesome endings in those early legends-come to think of it, so they did in this other time he had chosen to live in.

“Of course!” said Jim out loud. “A Maze! That’s what it is!”

“What’s a maze, m’Lord?” asked Hob in his right ear. The little hobgoblin had moved out onto Jim’s shoulder.

A puzzle. A place that someone made deliberately hard to find your way out of,” said Jim. “That’s what this Forest Dedale is-this place Morgan le Fay’s landed us in.”

“Is it a bad place, then?”

I don’t suppose,” said Jim, “that it’s any worse than any other location in Lyonesse-except that it’s like a closed box with only one hole in it. I’ll just have to find that hole so we can get out.”

“If it’s a box with only one hole,” said Hob, “I can find the way out for us in no time at all, my Lord.”

Jim hauled on the reins; Gorp stopped, and the sumpter horse had to check abruptly to keep from running into the stallion’s hindquarters, with the danger of automatically being kicked.

It glared at Jim’s back. Now what? it was clearly saying. Jim, used to the sumpter horse and its ways, ignored it.

“Hob,” he said, “you’re a genius.”

“Oh, thank you, m’Lord!” said Hob; and hesitated. “Er-my Lord, is it good or bad to be a genius?”

“It’s good, very good,” grunted Jim, now bent over, scanning the ground from his saddle for twigs and other small burnables to start a fire with.

“Oh, thank you, m’Lord! Why am I a genius?”

“Because you thought of using smoke to find our way out. I know about how you ride smoke, but it just never occurred to me to use it here.”

He dismounted as he spoke, to gather some twigs and dry grass; and began to struggle with flint and steel to get a spark. He had finally learned how to use the two for that purpose, but use still did not come easy. After several ineffective strikes of the one against the other, a spark did jump, the dry, dead ground cover he had piled in a small heap for tinder began to smolder-and seconds later a small flame wavered upward.

“Oh, good!” said Hob happily, leaping on the first thin waft of smoke that lifted from the flames. “Be right back, m’Lord.”

He zipped off, out of sight in an instant between the black trees. Jim sat back, cross-legged on the ground, wondering how soon “right back” might be. After a few minutes, it occurred to him that in such a position he might be at a disadvantage if he was faced with a sudden attack by man, beast, or whatever. He climbed back onto Gorp; and, sitting there, lost himself in trying to think of a really popular fourteenth-century song that ended with everybody happy.

“Here I am!” sang Hob, bringing him back abruptly. “I found the way out, m’Lord.” He hovered in the air on his waft of smoke a foot or so in front of Jim’s eyes. “It’s easy. First you go right, then you go left, then you go left again, then you go right, and then left and another right and another right-“

“Hold it,” said Jim. “Why don’t you just show me the way, instead of telling me?”

“Of course, my Lord. This way, then.”

Hob started off between the trees to Jim’s left and disappeared again. “Sorry, m’Lord,” he said, reappearing. I’ll keep just ahead of you.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “That’ll be better.”

They started, Jim riding and leading the sumpter horse, and Hob riding his waft of smoke more or less level with Jim himself but slightly ahead and on the left.

“Now right, my Lord,” he said, turning for no apparent reason between two of the big trees. “That’s right. Now go right again... now left... now left... now right, and right again-“

“Whoa! Stop! Come back here!” called Jim, pulling his two horses to a stop. Hob turned and rode his waft back, looking apologetic.

“Oh yes, m’Lord. If we went any other way we’d just come to a great wall of stone like the face of a cliff, or a bottomless pit or a deadly marsh.” “Well,” said Jim, “if you say so.” “We do run into some people on the way, m’Lord.” “We do? Well, we’ll deal with them as we reach them. Lead on.” Hob turned his waft of smoke forward once more, and they went on together. “-And now left,” Hob was saying, for what seemed to Jim to be the thousandth time; Jim’s mind was elsewhere again, considering whether he should use the magic inside his ward once he was out of the Forest, to find Brian. Brian might have run into serious trouble by now-if not something worse. Jim told himself not to think about anything worse. Brian must remain unkillable, in Jim’s mind at least.

But also, there was the unhappy feeling that the first time he dared open his ward to use magic, Morgan le Fay would know of it; would pounce on him, gaining some advantage that could end with her managing to take it from him, or working out something disastrous with the Dark Powers-or something else to put him and Brian in trouble.

“And now right... and there he is, my Lord.” “Brian?” said Jim, startled back to his surroundings. “Where?” “No, my Lord,” said Hob. “The first of the people I said we’d meet with.” Jim stared ahead. They had come out into a large opening in the trees, a space big enough to hold a castle in the farther distance; and, closer, a pavilion before which stood another young maiden with a very sorrowful, pale face. An armed retainer with a sword stood on each side of her. Before her and these others a large knight, fully armored and weaponed, sat waiting.

“Ah!” he cried. “Long have I waited here! And now ye shall die, unless ye save your life by a foul deed.”

“Foul deed?” echoed Jim, reining Gorp in hard. “What’s all this?”

“It is my curse-fetch my horse and forget not the lance,” he added to the closest of the armed servitors, who ran back into the pavilion. “I had a curse laid on me that I should never have wife nor children, though I would always be able to find a maiden I loved. But once I had, I must fight with the first knight who came this way. If I won, the knight I fought might have his life spared only by one act. He must strike off the head of the maiden I loved. Only if the passing knight overcame me and showed me mercy would I be free to marry and know happiness and family.”

“Well.” said Jim, and ran out of words, his mind busily hunting for a way to get out of this situation. He was only too aware of how little skill he had with the lance, or any other weapons-in spite of Brian’s efforts to teach him. Furthermore, he was enough of a magician to know how complicated a curse like that would be, and how much magical energy would have to be invested in making it.

More likely, he thought, the knight was given to delusions. So it would not be possible to simply talk him out of believing as he did. An excuse in his own terms was the only thing that would work.

“What a sad shame it is, then,” said Jim, “that I’ve only this one lance I ride with. It is consecrated; to be used only against a certain, especially foul foe. A knight who has committed so great a sin it cannot be named. But don’t worry. Someone’s bound to come along who can beat you.”

“Never!” said the knight; and to Jim’s embarrassment, he saw that the other had begun to shed tears. “For another part of my curse is that no one but a man who was never born on earth can best me. But joust you must, for fight I must; and I have no lack of spears.”

“Not when you’re wearing all that armor and weapons, m’Lord. You’re too heavy. Er-m’Lord, with your grace-I think I’ll wait for now on the sumpter horse.”

“You might as well,” said Jim gloomily. He reached down to untie the sumpter horse’s lead rope, and simply let it fall to the ground. Where were his brains? There had to be some way of avoiding this nonsense.

The retainer came out with two lances under one arm and leading a saddled and bridled warhorse, the color of pale mist over a black swamp on a cloud-dark, early morning.

The knight wiped his eyes with a large forefinger, shook the wetness off the finger, and took one of the lances. He climbed into the saddle of the mist-colored horse. The retainer brought the other lance to Jim, took Jim’s lance carefully from its socket on the right side of his saddle, and laid it reverently on the grass.

Jim balanced the lance he now held. It felt strange, for it was a good deal lighter than those Brian had trained him with. It was, in fact, little more than a pole with a steel point on its end. Untypically at a loss to think of any further excuse, Jim turned with the long weapon balanced in his hand, to face the knight of the pavilion.

It was well he did. Without any further challenge or warning, the knight had already put his horse in motion and was coming at him.

Belatedly, Jim got Gorp moving. He did not have time to bring his horse up to full gallop; but, fortunately, just as the lance he had been given had turned out to be lighter than what he was used to, so the knight’s mount was both smaller and lighter than Gorp. Jim found himself approaching the knight with their combined speeds at slightly better than ten miles an hour.

Jim was doing his best to hold the spear loosely until the moment of impact, as Brian had taught him; but looking along its length at the foe thundering toward him, his spearpoint seemed to be wavering and bobbing all over the landscape. He tried to hold it more on target, but without tightening up. It was no use-and now the knight was upon him.

At the last second Jim, for the first time without being reminded of it by Brian, remembered what his friend had tried to hammer into him-slant your shield! Holding the heavy shield high to cover his head as well as his upper body, he angled the face of it to the left.

There was a sickening impact, and the point of the knight’s lance shot past him on his left. Gorp collided with the other horse and knocked the lighter animal to the ground, with its rider still in the saddle.

The knight pulled himself loose from his steed just in time to avoid being pinned as it fell, staggered to his feet looking dazed, and pulled his sword by what must have been more reflex than anything else.

The collision had brought Gorp to a standstill, however, and Jim had profited by the time that gave him to get his own sword out first. From the advantage of the height of Gorp’s saddle, he hesitated for only a fraction of a second before, wincing but desperate, he brought the edge of it down with all his strength-again as Brian had taught him-on the side of the knight’s simple, old-fashioned helm, which had only a steel nasal bar to protect his face.

The steel head covering was proof against the edge of Jim’s sword; but the padding between helm and head in the era this armor came from was nothing to write home about. The knight dropped.

He came to within seconds. But Jim was already off Gorp’s back and had the point of his weapon at the other’s throat.

“Yield, damn you!” he panted, without stopping to think that this was hardly the chivalrous way to ask a fellow knight to surrender.

The knight made a sudden, convulsive move to squirm sideways from under the sword point, but by that time, Jim was on his knees, this time with the sword edge against his opponent’s throat.

“I yield me, gentle knight,” said the other. “Never in all my life have I been bested-nor thought I could be-so swiftly. You are one of great prowess. Though, if my steed had not fallen, perhaps-but such talk is idle. I pray your mercy; which I have never given the knight in no such work of arms, myself, and which you will refuse, of course.”

“That need not be,” said Jim, now remembering the proper way to talk in such situations, “for you on your part are better than anyone else I have ever met in such a wayside bicker as this. I grant you your life-on one condition only. That is that you swear upon your honor to immediately take to wife that maiden I see yonder, if indeed she it is whom you love.”

“That will I, and gladly,” said the knight. “For this day sees the hope fulfilled which I had given up long since. Yet do I repent me that fought so poorly as to be defeated.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” said Jim. “It just chances that of all knights now alive, I happen to be the only one who was not born on this earth.”

“And is this so?” The knight leaped up. His sword was still in his hand, but he threw it from him and clasped Jim in a rib-threatening embrace. “Then my curse is broken and I will be a happy man all the rest of my days. Ye are my savior and I and my family-to-be will never cease from blessing your name. Pray tell it me.”

Jim felt the cold hand of a reasonless caution on the back of his neck. Certainly it ought to do no harm to mention his name. Still, he hesitated.

“Alas,” he said, “I’m forbidden to tell anyone that. But you can think of me as the Knight-Dragon-and now I’ve got to keep going.”

“Farewell and Godspeed, then, Sir Knight-Dragon,” said the knight, turning to hurry to the maiden, who-seeing him come-began to hurry to him. Jim picked up his own lance and remounted Gorp, and felt a sudden small pressure at his back.

“I am with you again, my Lord,” Hob said.

“Welcome back,” said Jim. He looked over his shoulder as he rode off with the sumpter horse nodding along behind him at the end of the lead rope again. The knight and the maiden were entwined in each other’s arms; and it looked to Jim as if both of them were now weeping-happily, he trusted.

It was not until they were lost to sight behind him in the forest that it occurred to Jim why he had been right in avoiding the telling of his name. Any magic-maker gained a certain amount of power over another simply by discovering that one’s right name; and Morgan le Fay, who could be watching him in the Lyonesse equivalent of a scrying glass, right now, was most certainly a magic-maker who, by simply knowing he was in Lyonesse and a beginning magician, knew too much about him already.

His thoughts moved to different possible dangers.

“Hob,” he said, “you mentioned other people we’d meet on our way out of this wood. How many more of them do we still have to run into; and what are they like?”

“Oh, just two, my Lord. That is, only two important people. One will be a great black horse; and he will have a bad-tempered little man with him. The other is a poor little bird tied to the limb of a tree; and with her a plant that squeaks and squawks so loudly you can hear it a long way before you see it. It says it knows you, m’Lord. It has big, drooping green leaves; and it said it had told you its name, but you were impolite and didn’t tell it yours. It wanted me to tell it what your name was; but it commanded me to tell, instead of just asking, so I wouldn’t.”

“Good,” said Jim. He realized that he should have thought of this before. “Don’t tell anyone my name, Hob, while we’re here. Will you remember not to do that?”

“Oh, yes, my Lord. I never forget anything.”

They rode on. That is to say, Jim rode on, Hob flew on, Gorp and the sumpter horse paced forward. Jim, however, was not thinking of those with him. His mind was occupied with the fact that he had been extraordinarily lucky to come out safe and sound from his combat with the knight-to say nothing of winning. It had been that one piece of advice from Brian on fourteenth-century weapon-handling, plus the advantage of Gorp’s size and weight, that had brought him through it unharmed.

He must do some thinking, he told himself, about how to avoid such fights from now on. This Forest Dedale seemed to be a place of adventures right out of the original legends about King Arthur and his Knights. Almost anyone else he encountered most likely would not only be thoroughly trained in using weapons, but powerful with them, as a result of frequent use. In a fair and even combat with an opponent like that, he probably wouldn’t stand a chance of coming out alive.

If he could only stay alive long enough to find Brian, he might stand more of a chance. Meanwhile, what he was going to need was an all-purpose good excuse for not fighting...

“There they are, m’Lord!” chirped Hob at his right ear.

“Already?” They had just reached the open fringe of trees bordering a clear area on the side of what could be called either a large stream or a small river. The remarkable thing about this stream, however, was that its waters seemed to be racing along at a speed Jim guessed to be around thirty miles an hour. In level country, how could it have built up such a speed-the race of a high mountain stream throwing itself down a precipitous slope?

Magic again! thought Jim, with immediate suspicion-but a second thought reminded him that the magic energy required to move such a volume of water continuously had to be mind-boggling. One way would be to remodel the countryside to create a high altitude farther up the river; but for such a speed, that higher ground would have to be very high, and very near. But he could see no sign of a hill or mountain upstream, looming over the treetops there.

Something else was at work here besides magic-figure that out later.

Now that he took his attention off the rushing stream, what caught his gaze was a very flimsy-looking, floating bridge crossing it. At the near end of the bridge a small tent was pitched; and outside the tent, apparently untethered, stood what might be the largest horse he had ever seen, a horse the color of the black water of a swamp just before the sun’s rise. It was standing equipped with saddle, saddle-clothes, and bridle of the same color.

Jim reined up. He leaned forward in his saddle to get a better look through the thin screen of branches. “Where’s that little man you talked about?”

“Well, here we go, then,” said Jim, starting Gorp forward at a walk. The sumpter horse followed sulkily.

“Good,” said Jim, “you’re still there. Stay there for the moment and don’t say anything or make a noise. I’ll give you a chance to leave me without being noticed, if you want that. I’ll tell you when it’s safe to go.”

The closer he got to the tent, which appeared half black, half white-seeming black where the shadow of a great tree on the other side of the rushing water fell on it, and pure white in the part that was in the sun-the more puzzled he was. No one came out of the tent to challenge his presence, though he was close enough now for the creak and jingle of his horses’ harnesses to be heard. The black horse himself did not look in Jim’s direction, though horses were usually curious about the approach of others of their kind, and stallions particularly watchful for other stallions.

It was as if he and his two animals were not there at all.

“What is it, my Lord?” asked the muted voice of Hob in his ear.

“Just sit tight and be quiet,” whispered Jim. He turned Gorp around, caught a disgusted make-up-your-mind look briefly from the sumpter horse, and led the way back toward the forest edge.

Once far enough inside it so that he would be more or less out of sight from the tent, but able to see it and everything else in the clearing from between the tree trunks, Jim pulled Gorp to a halt, turned around once more, and looked back at the scene they had just left.

“Hob,” he said, “you can see that black horse, can’t you? Of course you can, because you told me about seeing it earlier.”

“Are you through saying what you were saying, my Lord?” asked Hob timidly.

“For the moment. Did you have something to tell me?”

“Just-horses can do a sort of talking. But most of it’s twitching their ears and baring their teeth, and things like that. If they think something that goes into words, sometimes I can understand them. But I don’t know if they’d understand a question, or if when they answered I could understand them; and then, of course, You never know. Sometimes they just don’t answer.”

“I was afraid of something like that,” said Jim. “But I still can’t believe they’re seeing him, or smelling him. The sumpter horse might ignore him; but for Gorp to ignore another stallion-I wish I could look at what’s there through their eyes.”

Of course, no sooner had he said it than he realized he could-or at least look at the horse through nonhuman eyes; and without risking using any of the magic inside his ward.

He had used his dragon-vision often before now, to get a good look at objects in the distance; but, of course, a dragon was actually not an animal-but also, for that matter, neither a Natural nor a human. They were a breed apart. But maybe it was worth trying. He visualized himself with the eyesight of a dragon, and felt the bulging sensation below his forehead that went along with the enlarged eye structure. He looked at the scene by the tent.

The black horse had not moved. No one had come out of the tent. There was no visible difference in the scene.

He returned his eyesight to human. That was that, he thought-but then it occurred to him his dragon-changing ability offered another possibility of help. If he could see with dragon-sight, as he had just done, he could as well fly with dragon-wings-all without once cracking his ward.

“Hob,” he said, “if I changed to my dragon body, you could ride on me, couldn’t you?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Then, if I flew where you told me, could you show me from the air the way to where we can get out of this forest?”

“Oh, certainly, my Lord. But I don’t think we could get out even if we got to it.”

“Why not?”

“Well...” Hob sounded embarrassed. “I tried myself, my Lord, when the smoke took me to it-and the way out disappeared. The smoke had to find it again, in the new place it’d gone to.”

“I see,” said Jim grimly. A movable exit. Indeed, he told himself, he should have suspected that, himself. A brand-new Apprentice at magic should have.

If there was supposed to be only one way out, then the resident magic in a place like this Forest Dedale would have means of preventing any escape by cheating. Hob’s finding the exit had not been cheating because it was part of hobgoblin nature to be able to ride smoke; and smoke had a right to find its way to any exit because that was a natural attribute of smoke. But Jim’s going around and over when an ordinary escapee would not be able to without encountering the dangers set up along the way, would be blocked.

Of course, that was true, too. True, and so obvious he should have thought of it before he spoke.

Think again. Think thoroughly, this time.

She had said, just before KinetetE joined the conversation, that she would strip away his ward, because she wanted to see how much pitiful power he really had.

She had not found out, of course-thanks to KinetetE. She had not even discovered his name.

This Dedale encounter could be set up to make him reveal as much other information about himself as possible.

The encounter with the knight who could never marry might have been a way to find out something about him. About his magic? No, there had been no magic involved to test Jim’s. On the other hand, maybe Morgan was simply collecting as much knowledge of him generally as she could-since he had turned out to have KinetetE for an ally.

In fact, that last encounter had been more like a test of his courage and knightly skill than a simple attempt to make him use his magic-which would mean opening his ward and making himself vulnerable to her. Would she have realized how much of his success in the lance-running had been because of the difference between the ancient warhorses and armor of Lyonesse and that of the fourteenth century? Possibly not. Never mind-call that a test of him as a person.

But there certainly was magic at work with both the strange horse and the racing waterway. More so, if the black horse was not really there.

So, the black horse at least, if not the tent, the dwarf Hob had spoken of seeing, and the river, could all be part of a different test set up by Morgan le Fay to measure something else about him. Perhaps an attempt to force or tempt him to crack his ward instinctively, in panic or absentmindedness? So that Morgan could measure his self-control as an opponent?

Well, if she had mistaken him for a bold and skillful knight after his meeting with the Unwed Knight, she was in for another mistake. Most magicians from the land above had magic and nothing else. What she couldn’t know or guess was that the greater part of his dangerousness to her was his knowledge that came from being born hundreds of years in the future.

He would go back to the tent and the river, and feel his way, this time, bearing in mind that the black horse could be an illusion.

“Hob,” he said, “leave me and hide under the cover of the load on the sumpter horse.”

The slight pressure against his spine that was Hob was abruptly gone. He lifted Gorp’s reins and rode back to the tent by the river.