“I’m just trying to help,” said Jim to him in English, suddenly forced to remember what he had acquired by magic had been only an understanding of the Drowned Land language when others used it-not the voice-training to speak it.

Dafydd translated. Grudgingly, the man took another step back. Dismissing him from his mind, Jim knelt beside the boy. He felt for a pulse in one lax wrist.

There was none.

“None of the short arrows hit him,” said a tall man in blue above Jim’s head to Dafydd in the Drowned Land tongue. “It may be he has only swooned.”

Jim held his palm over the King’s mouth to feel for any warmth or moistness of exhaled air that would signal the lad was breathing. There was none.

He rolled back an eyelid, then the other one. The pupils underneath looked perfectly normal; neither was enlarged, or bulged outward. According to what Jim remembered of his first aid, the pupil of a dead person would be expanded to its full size, the muscles completely relaxed in death. If just one pupil had been enlarged and the other not, then the opposite side of the body could have been damaged. But neither eye showed as anything but normal.

Just to make sure, Jim reached down to pinch the inside of the left thigh of the King. The right eye reacted. Good, that was as it should be. Holding the eyes open, Jim turned the head to let the sun of the Drowned Land fall full upon them. The pupils shrank.

He sighed silently with relief. The boy was certainly not dead. But whether Jim could bring him out of whatever had caused this condition was another question.

He looked up at Dafydd.

“I think I can make him well,” Jim said. “I have to try, because I think he has been attacked with magic; and the longer the magic is with him, the more damage it’ll do to him. So I’ll do my best; but your people’ll have to understand I can’t promise they’ll see him completely well again.”

Dafydd rattled off a small torrent of harsh words at those standing around. There was a moment of silence, and then an answering murmur of approval.

“How can we be sure-“ Gruffydd began at the top of his voice; but the murmur rose in volume and became menacing. Those who had moved back from him earlier now began to move in to form a tight, inescapable ring around him. He drew himself up, looking back at them scornfully.

“James,” said Dafydd, “do not hesitate, for the love of God!”

Jim was staring at the motionless young King. There was, as the man in blue had said, no sign of a wound. But a sudden suspicion woke in his mind.

He lifted his head and turned it. Taking advantage of the fact that most of those around him should not understand English, he snapped at Dafydd in that language.

“No one’s to move!” he said. “Everyone stand still, just as they are. Then every one look about them for something the size of a small stick-not just some stray twig, but something shaped purposefully. It’s most probably on the ground. But it may be hard to see, so look closely. Anyone finding something like that, bring it to me. Everyone else stay exactly where you are until I say you can move!”

Dafydd was still passing on Jim’s instructions, in a voice hard with authority. There was no sound for a moment, then a sudden grunt of pain from one of the men in green, standing to Jim’s left and about twelve feet away.

“I did not think it could be what was sought,” he said to Dafydd, as he held out the stick to Jim. “But I picked it up, thinking it strange that it had broken so, and wondering where the rest of it was-“

“Lay it down on the ground beside me,” said Jim, without waiting to hear the last words, or Dafydd’s translation of the whole. “Carefully, now!”

Dafydd passed on the instruction. The man carefully laid the broken shaft down not more than six inches from Jim’s right foot. Jim picked it up carefully by the same feather the man had been holding, and let it dangle from his fingers.

Something like the tingle of a mild electric current touched the fingers. Carefully, Jim took hold of the feather with the thumb and forefinger of his other hand and slid the original two holding fingers down the feather closer toward the shaft. Immediately, the tingle surged upwards in strength to become a burning pain.

“Warded!” said Jim, with grim satisfaction. “It’s all right, the rest of you. You can move around now.”

The tone of his voice was enough, even without Dafydd’s translation. There was no movement, but a faint wave of relaxation that went through all those standing closely about; and something like a sigh of relief.

Jim turned to Dafydd.

“This stick was prepared ahead of time,” he said. “It was magicked; and the magic was protected by a ward. It did not come here through the air. Someone here struck the King with it when the quarrels started falling. Who was standing closest to the boy?”

There was no answer. But a small, almost noiseless movement went through the men standing about, like a ripple on the surface of a pond; and everyone had moved away again slightly, so there was now a little space around Gruffydd.

“Here,” said Jim in English, holding the piece of wood by its feathers and extending its further end toward Gruffydd.

“I will not,” said Gruffydd. “Am I to obey the whim of any Saxon?”

“You will obey me,” said Dafydd.

“Here, take it!” Gruffydd extended the shaft to Jim; but Jim had already gone back a step and was out of reach.

“Keep holding it a while longer,” he said in a level voice. “It’ll burn to the bones in a moment or two; and then you’ll have nothing left but a claw for a hand.”

The threat of being made one-handed got the result for which Jim had hoped. Gruffydd threw the stick at him; and as he did, his self-control broke. He grunted, Waving the hand that had held the stick in the air, as if to cool it. A dark line could be seen running across his palm.

Once again, it was only Jim there who saw the mark as confirmation of what he had suspected. That line-very like a burn-was Gruffydd’s body’s reaction to the magic that was still animating the stick.

It was not for nothing Jim had been an AAA-rated volleyball player in the future from which he had come. With only a few feet between himself and the Sea-Purple Leader, he still easily sidestepped the thrown stick and caught it with his right thumb and forefinger, grasping one of the flight feathers, holding it harmlessly as he had before.

He dropped onto his own knees beside the unmoving King. He still had the stick in his hand, held by one feather; and he looked at it closely.

He could safely open his ward to use his personal magic. That was no problem here. On the other hand, on their last trip through here to Gnarlyland, his magic had not worked. But-he remembered suddenly, that was before KinetetE sent him back down with her own double ward.

So, there was a way around the magic limitation, he knew now. He could envelope the boy with him inside his double ward-and work all his art within the special enclosure that made possible. No, getting the magic and the boy together was not the real problem. The problem was which way to cure the young King.

The obvious way was to strip it from him, as Morgan le Fay had intended to strip Jim’s magic from him-if KinetetE had not booby-trapped his ward against anyone trying exactly that. This that held the King in thrall might well be booby-trapped, too; and the trap could be deadly. It could be a killing trap of the sort that could only be used in offense-that type of use which the Collegiate of Magickians, to which Carolinus and KinetetE belonged, had agreed never to use.

He could try to direct the magic elsewhere-but that meant he would be responsible for using its power offensively, if it did turn out to be a killer. He wondered why it had not killed the boy. Obviously, it must have been deliberately designed not to-but he could inquire into the why of that later.

A weighty, additional problem was that if he did any of these things that helped the King magically, whoever had designed this piece of wood to do its work would have to know another magician had countered it-and that this other magician had to be loose now in the Drowned Land.

Only as long as he did not use magic outside himself here would he be invisible to someone like Morgan le Fey. She would have to physically come, herself, into the Drowned Land, to use her magic against him, of course-but there was nothing to stop her doing that. The QB might have been doubtful if any of the legendary figures from Lyonesse could go on existing outside it; but Morgan would be under no such delusion. If she did come... magic for magic, she would be like a heavy warship compared to him as a weekend pleasure boat.

But how could he possibly remove magic from the boy without using magic? It was an impossibility-

No, it wasn’t. His racing mind had stumbled over the answer and almost passed on without recognizing it. There was just the shadow of a possibility...

He had touched the King already to examine him; and nothing had happened. So the boy’s body was safe to handle. He looked around himself and saw, at about fifty yards of distance, a grove of what looked like oak trees.

“Dafydd,” he said, “can we carry the King carefully over to the nearest of those trees? I want one with a thick trunk.”

“Yes,” answered Dafydd; and switched to the Drowned Land tongue, calling to the crowd.

“My cousins! I need your help! Three of you-William, Thomas, and Rhys!”

Three of the tall men in sky-blue with bows on their shoulders came forward. Dafydd explained; and they, with him, picked up the lax figure and followed Jim. The rest of the crowd trailed behind.

Jim led them all to the largest tree trunk he could see.

“Put his Majesty down, sitting with his back against the tree,” he said to Dafydd.

They did so. Happily, there was a space between two large exposed roots for the lad’s hips to fit; so that he actually sat at a small distance from the trunk, and only his upper back and head leaned against it. The tree was broad enough so that his head did not roll back around either side of it. He held his position, once they had put him there.

Dafydd, however, hovered nearby in case the unconscious body should slip. The three men who had helped to carry the boy backed off; and the crowd that had been following formed a circle at a respectful distance from any magic that might be about to happen.

“It’s all right, Dafydd,” Jim said. “You can stand by if you want, but you’d better back off a few feet. The King won’t slip. I’ll use magic if necessary to keep him as he is.”

Turning his face away from those who watched the King, he thought the words he wanted to say but dared not risk saying out loud. There was one other way he might manage-a way the tree should hear, but not the people standing close by.

He could feel the movement in his vocal cords as he tried it, subvocalizing his message.

“Dear tree,” he subvocalized, “can you help this lad sitting against you? Or can you get in touch with the trees of Lyonesse and see if they can’t take away whatever magic has him unconscious now? I think it is part of the alien magic that is trying to take over the land of Lyonesse, and now troubles matters here. I know the trees of Lyonesse are willing to help. Will you? I can’t do it myself, or I would; and I’m afraid that if the magic isn’t taken off him, his unconsciousness will give way to death.”

He stopped. He could not hear or sense any response from the tree.

“Hob,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Did the tree hear? Did you hear it say anything to me?”

“Oh yes, my Lord. It said the boy wouldn’t die, but he would not wake up, either. That would mean the leaders of the Colors would have to choose someone else for King. No one, not even the man in brown you made hold the magick stick, dares to actually kill a king. But unless rescued, the boy will sleep forevermore; and there is no hope for the Drowned Land under a wrong king.”

It was a long speech for Hob, Jim thought, even as he was turning the information over in his head.

“But will the tree-this tree, or the trees of the Drowned Land in general- help?” he asked finally.

“This tree says so, m’Lord-I mean, my Lord. Pray pardon for not telling you that first. This tree’s going to take the magick holding the boy and push it out through every leaf, twig, or branch end it’s got. He says any tree can do that much. Then the magick’ll be split up into lots and lots of small parts, so that none of them will be big enough for whoever sent it to find; and many too many to be put together again. So no one can find how it never worked.”

“Excellent!” said Jim, hugging the tree in sheer happiness. Then he let go of the trunk. “But why didn’t I hear the tree say that? I heard the one in Lyonesse.”

“The Lyonesse trees talk in a different place from the ones here-or back home.”

“Place?” said Jim. “Place?”

“Yes-“ Hob hopped off Jim’s shoulder to stand remarkably balanced on a wart-like bulge of the tree trunk level with Jim’s eyes. He held his two hands flat, palm to palm, one above the other, with their fingers parallel but with a space between them. Then he passed the two hands back and forth on their different levels, still one above the other.

“See, m’Lord?” he said. “When a tree in Lyonesse tries to talk to a tree in the Drowned Land, they miss each other. Neither one can hear the other. They miss.”

“You mean-they’re on different wavelengths!”

“Wave? Oh no, m’Lord, it’s just in the air, not on the water.”

“What is this?” said the King. “One moment we are under attack, then we are- what happened?”

“My King,” said Dafydd, dropping to one knee in front of him. “God be praised. You are restored and well!”

“Of course I am well! Why should I not be? I asked what had happened? Rise, Dafydd; and answer me!”

“You will learn all, my Lord King,” said Dafydd, rising to his feet with his face darkening. He shouted over his shoulder to the cluster of men in their different colors, behind him.

“Seize Gruffydd ap Howel and bring him here!”

There was a stir among the men, a stir that prolonged itself and finally, shamefacedly, settled into stillness. Gruffydd was not among them. He was nowhere to be found.