Jim waited until the voices of those who had brought them here were gone before he spoke. He had been able to see where Brian and Dafydd had been thrown to the ground-he himself had not been treated so roughly, but that was the only difference. Neither of them was more than eight feet or so from him.

“Why don’t we get together?” he said in an ordinary voice. “It’d make talking a little easier, not having to call out to each other.”

Brian was not ordinarily slow to take a hint; but on occasion he could be as ear-blind as any other person.

“I have not been calling out before now,” he said. “Why should I here? You hear me as we speak now, do you not?”

“I think, Sir Brian,” said Dafydd, “Sir James wishes to tell us it would be somewhat more companionable for speech if we were closer to each other. Perhaps you and I could roll ourselves toward him, since I remember seeing him between us when the torch was here.”

Dafydd’s use of the formal “Sir” toward both of them when they three were alone together, plus the bowman’s slight emphasis on “companionable,” woke Brian now to the meaning of what Jim had said.

Jim heard noises in the blackness and then Brian’s voice barely murmured in his ear.

“Have you a plan, James?”

“In a way,” said Jim, equally quietly. “But now that they’ve left us alone-Dafydd, are you there?”

“-Not a definite plan yet,” Jim told them both. “But I think as long as no one can see us, we ought to see if we can’t get out of these ropes. I thought if we got back to back, maybe we could untie each other’s wrists.”

“Why not, indeed!” said Brian. “I think... James, you will not be offended if I suggest that it is Dafydd and I who should try to untie each other first. You see, one must wait, in any way, and it may be that of the three of us, Dafydd and I may have somewhat greater finger and arm strength-“

“Oh, certainly, certainly!” said Jim; although he had actually been taking for granted that he would be one of the first two to be untied. “I’ll just slide out from between both of you, here. Just a minute.”

“Why do you not stay as you are, James?” said Dafydd. “I have done things not unlike this moving over the ground with my hands and feet tied before; and I can be at Brian’s back quickly.”

His low voice was altering its position, even as he spoke; and, a moment later, it was talking from Brian’s side of Jim.

“If you would hold your wrists steady now, Brian. Again, from experience, I have found that work goes fastest on unmoving cords. If you have some practice in using the fingers so, they quickly come to know where to reach all they have touched before.”

Brian grunted.

Jim lay in the silent darkness, wishing he had some nonmagical way of seeing how Dafydd’s efforts to untie Brian’s wrist ropes were going. But there was none; and neither Brian nor Dafydd was likely to make sounds that would let him know-Brian, out of a lifetime’s training in ignoring discomfort, and Dafydd from probably close to a lifetime of training in doing such things without a sound.

After what seemed a long wait, broken only by a sort of soft shuffling noise outside and behind the tent, Dafydd’s voice broke the silence.

“I am afraid,” he said, “I can do nothing. These knots were drawn tight by a man who had the use of his arm muscles to do so. Because my own wrists are tied, I cannot pull the strands apart to start a loosening. Forgive me for raising your hopes, only to fail you both.”

“Never think so, Dafydd,” said Brian. “If you cannot untie my knots, then none of us can. Though I will try, in case my good name Saint should favor me with a small miracle, if the two of you would wish it. Also it may be that your bonds are less tight-“ Dafydd hissed suddenly for silence. Brian broke off in mid-sentence and Jim held his breath. The shuffling noise had grown slightly louder, but also it seemed closer. As they listened, it stopped suddenly.

Utter soundlessness for a second.

Then, a soft, rubbing noise, very close to Jim, who was the farthest in from the door to the tent. The noise had come from the back wall of the tent, only feet behind him.

But before he could twist his body around and roll over so that he could at least face in that direction-even if he could see nothing-a rough, wet tongue licked his face; and there was a faint whimper that sounded familiar.

“But how-“ Jim broke off. “What do you mean, leading you? Can he see in the dark?”

“Oh no, m’Lord, not in his own body or the hound body he’s in now. He uses his nose.”

“We knew we’d get a chance to speak to you, finally,” Hob was going on. “There’s no one else around at all now. He just dug under the cloth of the tent. Now, we’ll turn you all loose. He’s chewing on the rope about your wrists now, m’Lord.”

“I know,” said Jim, who was being jerked one way and another as the hound alternately chewed on the ropes or set his teeth in one of them and tried to pull it loose. “How’s he doing?”

But at that moment, Jim felt the ropes fall away.

“Good,” he said, massaging his wrists and flexing his fingers. They did not hurt, what with his earlier antipain personal magic; but they felt a little numb. The ropes must have been tight. “Where’s the QB now?” he asked the darkness.

“He’s biting loose Sir Brian, m’Lord.”

“Dafydd,” said Jim. “Say something so I can find you. I can work on your ropes while the QB works on Brian’s.”

Jim tried to get to his feet, and immediately fell over.

“My ankles are still tied!” he announced, as much to the QB and Hob as to Dafydd.

Jim’s visible weapons had, of course, been taken from him; but his little hideout knife was still tucked into its hidden pocket on the inside of his belt.

“I’ll be right with you,” he said to Dafydd, sawing on the ropes around his ankles with the small blade. The ropes parted; and he began to feel his way toward the archer.

“My thanks to you, James,” said Dafydd, as his ropes were cut.

“Don’t thank me,” said Jim. “It’s the QB who’s turned us all loose. Brian? I can cut your ropes now.”

“Needs not,” said Brian with a grunt. “I have my own small knife in hand, now; and-there goes the last of my ankle bindings.”

“Then best we leave this place as quickly as we can,” said Dafydd.

“If I may say so,” said the unexpected, normal voice of the QB, himself, “best that you hear what Hob and I have to tell you before we venture out. I will be a hound again in a moment: I just turned into myself so I could speak with you; and, I hope, lead you safely to your horses. But first you should listen-“

“The horses, yes!” said Brian. “Blanchard! I will not leave here without him. But our weapons, what of our weapons? We would travel naked-without them!”

“We found those, too,” piped up Hob. “There was a dying campfire in the open with no one around it; and I managed to get to it and ride off on a waft of its smoke, just as though I was going from a fireplace back at Malencontri. I went over the horse lines from end to end-Blanchard and the rest are at the end we were all going to when the men took you prisoner.”

“But our weapons!”

“Sir Hugh kept them, Sir Brian. It was all but certain he would,” broke in the QB. “Of your favor, Hob, I’d like to tell the important information first.”

“Important?” said Brian. “More important than Blanchard and our weapons... I crave pardon, my Lord QB, you were saying?”

“There is no need for any to crave my pardon. But it is important you know that after it grew to nightfall here, I stole back from where I had slipped off to, as a hound; and found that Hob had left his hiding place under the cloth covering the load of the sumpter horse as soon as the crowd of men who took you prisoner had carried you off. Unobserved, for twilight had already begun to fall, he was seeking the place where you had been taken.”

“As I was about to say,” interrupted the QB once more, “together, we returned to the tent of Sir Hugh de Bois; but although my hound nose told me that you had been there recently, you were not there-though we found your weapons as I have said. But I followed your scent moving away from his tent, to a larger tent where you were talking to a lady and gentleman. That is the important matter; for with my hound’s nose I smelled, from beneath a back wall of the tent, not only those two but another man hidden behind them-a man I knew.”

“Modred,” said both Jim and Brian-thoughtfully on Jim’s part, but questioningly on the part of Brian. The QB had evidently heard the latter as well.

“Did you not know, Sir Brian,” his voice said, “how Gawain, driven by hate for Lancelot, kept telling the King that Lancelot, overseas in his own domain, was raising great armies against him; and therefore, in the end, Arthur left his kingdom in the charge of Modred, and went with a great army of his own, but with a heavy heart, to France, to attack the lands of Lancelot?”

“Meseems to me now I did hear the tale of something like that,” said Brian. “But it was when I was very young; and I do not remember well what came of it.”

“Lancelot would not fight Arthur, and the King was loath to shed the blood of so many of his fellowship. Then, while all hung in the balance, came news from Arthur’s realm that Modred, as Regent back in England, had claimed that the King had fallen in battle with Lancelot; and proclaimed himself King in Arthur’s place. So Arthur came back and won one fierce battle at Dover against a larger force led by Modred. A treaty was agreed upon to fight no more, providing no man on either side drew his sword.”

“It comes back to me now,” said Brian’s voice. “It was a knight of the King’s side who was bitten in the foot by an adder, and drew his sword to kill it. Modred saw the flash of that sword and led his army against the King, so that at last the field was sown only with dead men-but the King saw Modred, and rushed at him with a spear-was not that the way of it?”

“It was. The spear pierced Modred through for half its length; and he, feeling his death-wound, thrust himself up the shaft of the spear with the life remaining in him, and struck his father with his sword, so that it pierced both helm and brainpan.”

“So that he was wounded near to Death,” said Brian, almost in the same tone of voice, as if he was making a habit-engraved response in church, “and three Queens in a boat came to take him to the Vale of Avalon. Is that not how it went? But Modred, it comes to me now-Modred was ended by that spear blow.”

“So he was,” the QB said. “He fell down dead. I never expected to see him alive again; but in this latest trouble, many of those who died in the time of our legends have now returned-King Pellinore’s two sons among them.

“Perhaps it is an act of the Old Magic which keeps our Originals, those Knights from the Table Round, still living-though their descendants bear their names and ride the Wood of Rencontres, where you first met me. But my hound’s nose, which had smelled Modred at Arthur’s Court aforetime, knew him,” wound up the QB, “as I sniffed under the wall of the tent and you talked to the Lord and Lady at the table.”

“Hadn’t we better be going?” Jim said. “We can talk more when we’re in a safer place.”

“Indeed,” said Dafydd. “And, more than that, I must be taking word of this back to my own King and people as swiftly as possible.”

“While I must carry the same word to Lyonesse,” said the QB, “and any other talking will have to be done with those who go with me. Will you come, James and Brian? After all, it was to help Lyonesse that you came, I understood.”

“I think we must, James,” said Brian. “But if you have other word...”

“No. We’d better go with the QB,” said Jim.

“Then, once we are well out of this camp and into open country,” said Dafydd, “none will be able to find or catch us. Trust me for that. We will part then.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “I’d hoped, after we came to the Drowned Land and found you again, we three’d be staying together for the rest of this mess. Things never go the way you think.”

We are near the end of the horse lines, now,” said the low voice.

Now that they were away from the dimly lit tents, the voice came out of an impenetrable darkness; as far as Jim knew, the QB might not have bothered to change back to his hound shape. If not, he had been leading just with his natural ability to read the scents about them; but he had been leading them all as surely as a seeing-eye dog. “This end of it is less than a rod’s distance from us now; and I can smell your Blanchard, Sir Brian, clearly.”

At less than sixteen and a half feet, Jim himself could now smell the horse lines. He could not, however, identify Blanchard’s personal odor-the QB’s normal nose might not equal his canine one, but clearly it was much better than a human’s.

Beside Jim-in fact, holding to his sword belt, so as not to go astray; just as Jim was hanging on to Dafydd, who seemed able to follow the QB without hanging on-Brian gave a low, almost soundless, whistle.

Jim recognized it. It was one of the signals Brian had trained Blanchard to know: a warning not to greet his master with any sound. Jim had tried to train Gorp to the same response; but Gorp, who normally did not whinny at such times anyway, was not the student Blanchard had obviously been. He might just choose this moment to forget his training.

“Hob,” said Jim, low-voiced, “could you go ahead of us and keep Gorp and the sumpter horse quiet-or could you get lost if you try?”