Almost as instinctively, when Jim reached a safe height and a river of air moving parallel to the ground in the general direction of the Drowned Land border, he gave over climbing. He extended his wings and began soaring like a hawk.

The border was closer than he had expected, believing that the QB would have used his magiclike ability to make large distances in Lyonesse seem like small ones, when he had taken them to Pellinore. Even now, as Jim looked around and behind him from this altitude, Lyonesse appeared to stretch to a farther horizon, with only the top of a ridge above the treescape, that would be the rock cliff-face behind which lay the passage to the lands of the Gnarly.

Interestingly, he could see both suns in the sky from up here, the white sun of Lyonesse and that of the Drowned Land. They were far apart, but moving parallel to each other through the two different skies. Evidently time must be very much the same in both lands; though they seemed to have nothing in common otherwise.

He pulled himself out of these thoughts to find himself over the Drowned Land, and evidently some distance into it. His soaring, however, had inevitably moved him downward in the air current on which he was traveling, until he was now not more than a couple of hundred feet off the ground.

This did not fill in with his plans at all. From his previous experience with Harpies, he expected to find them flying at no great height above the ground.

He put his wings to work again, climbing until he could now see the dark shape of the Borderland camp to his far left, like a blotch on the horizon. But there were several glints between him and it that must be Drowned Land cities. He started a more shallow glide downward toward the nearest of these, searching as he went for a thermal updraft of warm air that would let him climb even higher.

He found it; and mounted the upward-flowing air in spirals until he could see, beyond the reflected light of the cities, a thin, dark line that would be the sea. Not a seashore, as would be normal, but the wall of water that would be the undersea, stretching up to the few small clouds like puffballs in the Drowned Land, here looking like large, softheaded pins, holding the wall erect and keeping the sea from flooding these two ocean-buried lands.

The thermal thinned and died beneath him as it cooled, rising. He abandoned it, extending his spirals to slow his descent and examining the cities as he went, to find the largest one. That would be the capital city of the Drowned Land- almost certainly the city from which David and Dafydd both had come to Pellinore, and the one most heavily under attack by Harpies.

It was not hard to pick out. It was the city with the tallest buildings; the one from which their Drowned Lander guide had most probably come for Dafydd when they had first arrived in this land.

He focused his dragon vision on an invisible line that marked the shortest point between the city and the nearest dark edge of Lyonesse.

His human eyes would have begun to water after minutes of such a steadily held gaze; particularly a gaze which was concentrating on seeing some tiny movement in the air along the shortest line of distance between the border of Lyonesse and the capital city. His dragon eyes did not.

And their ability was rewarded. After perhaps an hour, during which he had to climb twice more to maintain the height from which he intended to watch, he caught sight of what seemed no more than a close, moving clutter of dark objects; broken occasionally by a flash of white amid the dark. The whole was moving at a height of no more than four hundred feet; and slowly-it seemed from his point of view-toward the capital city, sitting in the warm Drowned Land afternoon light.

He used his wings, slowly but powerfully, to move toward what he was watching, but kept himself a good five to six hundred feet above them. As he approached, the black and white resolved itself into the shapes of eight Harpies, flying toward the capital. The black was the color of their bodies and wings-all of each of them-except their faces. The unnatural white of those faces showed with the effort of their wings from moment to moment, to make the flashes he had seen from a distance.

He had been right. They were both low and slow-compared to his winged dragon body.

He hesitated over his next move. But here in the Drowned Land he was beyond Morgan le Fay’s touch and also-what was important right now-out of her sight. He could afford one experiment.

He put himself into a glide to a point at which he would be only a few hundred feet above the Harpies. The air rushed past him, the earth below grew larger-it was startling the way the distant Harpies seemed to leap at him. He maneuvered to approach behind them.

Seen from above as he came within range of what he wanted to try, they were flying in a V-shaped formation like migrating geese, but with about the rate of wing-beat of crows. Theoretically, he told himself, they should not be able to fly at all, with that heavy, human head behind each white face.

Then, as he flew along above them, he began to understand more clearly that there was no heavy human head. What each had was only the naked-skinned, insane white face, spread out over what would normally be a bird’s head and upper body-like a mask, or almost like something painted there, after all facial feathers had been plucked.

But there was no more time to waste in observation. It was time to try his experiment and then get out of here and do the more important things he had left Lyonesse to accomplish.

He turned downward; and the reflexes of his dragon body took over for him. Like a falcon stooping upon a pigeon, he plunged toward the last harpy in line. At least he could rid the Drowned Land archers of one of these.

He had imagined himself dropping in dead silence-but he was no more silent than a light plane with its motor off, diving earthward. The air whistled and sang about his body, the Harpies heard-and the one on the end saw him coming.

He had counted on their having little or nothing in the way of brains. They should be flesh, blood, and feather-little more-killing machines only, judging by the other creatures made by the Dark Powers, like the ogres and Worms he and Brian had fought in the past. But either they also had self-preservative instincts, or they were programmed to fight in the air. The last harpy immediately flipped over; and he found himself falling directly into the white face, the mouth open like that of an angry cat and the sharp teeth gleaming.

He banked almost without thinking, to sideslip past the creature-and almost made it. He felt something, a hard blow, halfway out along his right leading wing-tip. Then he was below the Harpies and pulling out of his dive, too full of his own adrenalin for his dragon self to react in any way to the fact that he might have been fatally poisoned, even while his human mind was telling him he had been an idiot to attack as he had.

Then, as he steadied in level flight again, well away from the Harpies overhead, and easily able to outfly them-at least as long as life remained in him-he saw something dark, off to his right and tumbling toward the ground, falling below him.

It turned, falling, and it had a white face. Its bird body was crushed, almost cut in two in the middle, and the creature was either dying or already dead.

His mind refused to put two and two together for a moment; and then he remembered the blow he had felt against his wing. Plainly, it had been his contact with the now stricken harpy; and it had been too powerful and too brief for the creature to get its teeth into him, if the blow had come that far back from its mouth.

He had not been poisoned then, after all. The relief from realizing he had not been killed came so swiftly behind the realization of it that neither one really had time to register on him. He did not feel relieved, so much as he felt numb for a moment-no feeling at all.

The remaining Harpies were turning back, turning away from the city.

He exerted his powerful wings to leave them below and behind him; and flew off himself in another direction, toward the closest patch of trees he could see, less than a mile away. It was not a large patch, but the small forest was thick enough so that he could land out of the sight of either harpy or human. Most of the Drowned Land was arable open plain; but small forests, like this one, were to be seen scattered almost evenly about.

He landed, safely out of sight; and turned back into his human body to be out of his dragon one and get his mind working completely human-wise, and in the direction he had intended when he had decided to come here. There were no two ways about it. Being a dragon was advantageous, but it was not a body in which to do any deep thinking.

As a dragon, he was more adventurous; and therefore more thoughtless. As a human, he was prey to all sorts of worries that would never occur to his dragon self; but on the other hand he could think and plan more clearly. He had never thought of doing something mathematical, or playing a game of chess, or some such thing, when he was in his dragon body-just to see whether he handled those things as well as he did when human or not. He must try that, sometime.

Right now his greatest need was to be able to think. He thought he had something in mind that might do a great deal to change the balance of forces here; and he would bet it was something that would never have occurred to KinetetE or Carolinus, or anyone else dealing in either magic or magick. When in doubt, attack-some military notable had said once.

But once safely on the ground with the trees hiding the empty landscape around him, human again and almost certainly free of watchers in any case, with the Harpies abroad, the first thing he did was to enlarge his ward so that it made a sort of small room, with about five feet of open space all around him. The next was to magically borrow the first small table he could think of, one in a storeroom back at Malencontri.

It appeared before him as commanded in the space he had made inside the ward, and he concentrated on its top, after blowing the dust off it. He wanted five different fruits.

“Apple,” he said; and there was an apple-unfortunately rather small and green.

“Damn it! I meant a ripe, red apple, of course!” he snapped-and checked himself, suddenly reminded by the sound of his voice of the way Carolinus and KinetetE spoke to the Auditing Department. But who would have thought everything magical had to be spoken to or spelled out in the finest of detail each time something was wanted of it-he checked the short burst of bad temper; at any rate, this time he had gotten what he wanted. An undeniably ripe, undeniably red apple smiled placatingly up from the table at him.

“Everything ripe, now. Plum. Grape-just one-that’s right. Pear. Banana-no, scrub the banana.”

He was running out of fruits that could not give Morgan le Fay or anyone with her the idea that he was anything but an ordinary magickian from the land above. His first few choices were all growths that any English knight-if he could get them all in season at the same time-might be carrying. A banana was not that.

“Hell!” he said. “Make it one red grape and one white grape-seedless.”

The one grape that had already appeared was a red grape. A white grape appeared between the red one and the pear.

They were lined up dutifully across the table.

“All right,” he told the fruits. “Listen to me, all of you! If I take any one of you out and bite into you while I’m thinking of a magic command, the one I bite into will execute that command. I’m giving you all the power to do that. Do you understand? Jump up and down if you do.”

None of them stirred a fraction of an inch.

“Hell!” he said again; and found himself suddenly aware of how his language degenerated when there was no one around to hear him. “I forgot. Now! I am now giving you the power to hear what I say to you-not just my magic commands-all right, let’s see you all jump up and down, now!”

“-All right. All right, I said! You don’t have to keep jumping. Once up and once down will do... that’s better. Now, I’m going to bring the ward in close around me, alone, once more. Then I’m going to put you in my purse”-he decreased the ward and started stuffing them into the large catchall bag hanging from his ordinary belt, a leather one that encircled him above the broad, weapon-supporting knight’s belt-“and if I think a command at one of you while biting into whichever one of you it is, the magic in you will be liberated to execute it. Understood?”

The fruits already in his purse began to jump up and down. The apple, still in his hand, leaped clear out of it, back onto the table.

“Got you,” said Jim, recapturing the apple and putting it safely away with the other fruits in his purse. Having done so, he remembered he had been going to try all this in his dragon body. Well, that part would have to wait.

Fruit pocketed-though “bagged” might have been a better word-and the ward closed up tight around him once more, he took off skyward; and once he had climbed to an altitude where he would not be flying into either incoming or exiting Harpies, he headed for a quick look from high up at what he had decided was the capital city.

He soared over it at a little above fifteen hundred feet. There were Harpies there, individually roaming its streets just below roof level of the buildings. Every so often, one of them would drop with an arrow through it. But from this height Jim could not make out where the arrows were coming from. All the windows were shuttered tight and there was no one to be seen in the streets.

Certainly, from here at least, the Drowned Land archers seemed to be more than holding their own.

Curiosity drew him down. He sideslipped lower and lower until he had the good luck with his dragon sight to catch the flicker of an arrow coming out from one of the shuttered windows; but he still could not see how.

Another hundred feet down and his dragon-sight was able to make out a small slit in the shutter. He pumped with his wings to lever himself up another story of the building and see if he could discover any other shutters with arrow slits in them-just as an arrow flickered through the air where he had been a second before.

It had not occurred to him that those in the buildings could be taking him for some other creature sent by the Dark Powers. Once more he found himself wishing that KinetetE had made his ward proof against weapons as well as magic. But it was clear he was simply going to have to take that lack into account in his plans.

He flew back to Lyonesse.

Somewhat to his pleased surprise, he found no one had left. Dafydd and David were still there, as was the QB. Hob was jumping up and down, possibly with excitement, as Jim came in for a landing and turned back into a human being.

“What happened to you?” he asked Brian, the first one to reach him, “You look different.”

“Nothing happened. Dull, here. Unless you mean-“ He ran a hand over the lower half of his face. “I am now shaven. King Pellinore was good enough to lend me his shaving knife. I did not bring with me a hone capable of putting a fine edge on any blade I have with me; and you may have noticed, James-I say, you may have noticed my beard grows somewhat swiftly. Outright nuisance! I remember I used to go two, or even three days without needing to shave-ah, your Highness! You wished to speak to Sir James?”

“What news, Sir James?” said David, pushing in between Brian and Jim. “What news? Have you any word of my poor land and people?”

“I don’t think you need worry too much,” Jim said. “I flew over your capital. Things may have been bad at the time you left; but everyone is under cover there now, with doors and shutters closed; and the Harpies are hunting around without much luck I could see. In fact, from time to time one of your archers, shooting through an arrow slit in a shutter, downed one; and it may be Sir Brian and I can do more about stopping any more coming, soon.”

“James?” said Brian in a happy voice.

“Talk to you about that in a bit, Brian,” said Jim. “But, Sire, I was under the impression you and Dafydd were going back there.”

“Indeed, Sir James, I came to a change of mind,” said Dafydd. “With the countryside empty of people, the danger of bringing my King back to the capital across that much open ground and only myself to guard him from Harpies, seemed the worst choice. And then, by staying with you, we can be at your meeting with the Original Knights of Lyonesse; for it is my thought that we of the Drowned Land and they are together in this, and it would be well we should talk without delay of joining forces.”

“Well, yes,” said Jim. “It’s been my thought, too-stop jumping up and down, Hob! I’ll talk to you in a minute.” For Hob was now standing on his right shoulder, going up and down like a magic fruit told to leap. “-My idea, too, that both lands should join forces. You’ve got plenty of people; but as I understand it, few armored knights. Lyonesse has a lot of them, but all together they don’t add up to a very great army, since Lyonesse is sparsely populated forest, mostly. Am I right about that, QB?”

“Perfectly right,” said the QB. “But I think Hob has something very important to suggest to you.”

“He has? I’m sorry, Hob,” said Jim. “I didn’t realize what you wanted to talk about was that important. Sorry to make you wait.”

“It was awful-I didn’t mind at all, I mean-m’Lord,” the blocked-off words came out of Hob in a rush, “but I’ve had this magnificent idea. None of you could do it-crave pardon, Master Dafydd, Sir Brian, m’Lords, and your Royal Majesty-I just mean because it’s just something a hobgoblin is made so he can do. All I need is a waft of smoke here; and I can ride it back to where those villains are camped on the Borderland, and hide in the smokes of their fires, listening to their talk. I can probably learn everything they’re going to do; and bring it back to you. It would be as easy as... as drinking milk.”

“Hob...” began Jim, and checked himself. There were a number of reasons against Hob’s doing what he had offered to do. But it would be tricky to phrase a refusal so that it did not make Hob useless and unhappy. He was fairly glowing with his idea.

Furthermore, Jim could not turn down Hob’s suggestion in such a way as to seem particularly careful of the small Natural. Not with the others listening-all of whom were ready to risk their own lives, and would see no reason why Hob should not take outrageous chances with his, to gain information.

“It’s a fine idea, Hob,” he said; and Hob’s face fell immediately at the tone of his Lord’s voice, anticipating refusal. “The trouble is, though, that Queen Morgan le Fay is watching you and me all the time when we’re here in Lyonesse. She’d notice immediately if you left me, and keep watching you to see where you went.”

“I would be happy to go,” put in the QB. “It is true, as you yourself know Sir James, that I can easily go to where I wish, unobserved in the dark. I pray you will let Hob do what he suggests and take me with him, provided we wait until past sundown. I had thought there was nothing I could do to protect Lyonesse; but this would be useful; and I long to do it.”

“No harm in letting the two go, James; and much mayhap to be gained. I counsel you do so,” said Brian.

“I would give much to know,” said King David, “when those in the Borderland plan to move; and in what direction. If it be toward the Drowned Land, we must beg the Knights and Kings of Lyonesse for assistance. We will give them as much as we have, if the attack is to be here.”

Dafydd said nothing; but Jim saw his friend was watching him closely.

“All right, Hob,” said Jim, pointedly speaking directly to Hob and to none of the others. “But I reserve the right to change my mind right up to the time you have to go. For one thing, QB-or any of you-has King Pellinore said when we might talk to the Originals? The sooner we meet with them, the better.”

“He said,” answered the QB, “that they are not all gathered together yet. Indeed, some may still be coming in by the time the issue of where battle might be is decided and the battle about to commence. Neither of his sons, Sir Percival or Sir Lamorack of Wales, have been heard of so far; and I know he yearns to see them. The battle will be nothing to him, compared to that.”

“He didn’t say anything, then,” Jim said, “of just when a gathering of the Originals might take place?”

“He will make it happen,” said the QB. “But in any case most of the great King’s Knights who decide to be here, will appear soon-and there would be no more time to wait now, in any case. The dark comes soon.”

“Again?” Jim looked up at the sky and was startled to see the white sun once more low above the trees.

“Our sun was a gift to Lyonesse of the Old Magic,” said the QB, “and chooses its own way and time to come and go-and I think that its going so often, lately, is connected with our present peril. It goes now.”

Indeed it was. Even as Jim watched, its lower rim touched the tops of the black trees.