Exile's Honor

look up—because it was odd. Very odd. It didn't exactly sound like Geri.

Geri stared off into space, his face blank, his eyes looking—elsewhere. And Alberich felt an unaccountable chill on the back of his neck. There was something going on here, something he didn't recognize. 'You are Selenay's bodyguard, Alberich, and when the day of that final battle dawns, she is going to need you more than she ever has before—because the last, the very last thing she will think about is her own safety, so it is the first, indeed, the only thing that you must be concerned about. That is what you must be readying yourself for. Nothing else, nothing less. If need be, you must save her from herself on that day, so that you save her for her Kingdom.'

Alberich had never believed those stories about how 'the hair on the back of someone's neck stood up' when something very, very uncanny happened. Now he did—because he could feel that exact sensation. Geri continued to stare off into space, with that peculiarly blank expression on his face, but something glinting in his eyes. And Alberich had the distinct impression that whatever was speaking, it wasn't Geri. Which left—what? Here in Vkandis' own temple, it couldn't be anything inimical... but it sounded almost as if this was a prophecy.

He wanted to speak and ask something for himself; wanted to ask a question, a dozen—but they were all questions he really didn't want to know the answers to, honestly—

If I did, I'd be trying to tame that Gift of mine and make it serve me predictably.

The Writ said that the future was mutable and unknowable, until one passed through it and it became the past. That was why the Writ spoke against the witch-powers of those who tried to predict the future—not because the attempt to know the future was wrong in itself, but because being told a future closed some peoples' minds to the possibility of any other and they focused all their attention, their hopes, and their fears, on that future to the exclusion of other possibilities... which defeated the entire Prime Principle of Free Will upon which all of the Sunlord's Writ was based.

All this flashed through Alberich's mind in the time it took for the cup to slip out of Geri's fingers and drop to the table with a clatter.

'Botheration!' Geri was back, startled, seizing a cloth and blotting at the spill before it escaped to make an even bigger mess. 'Look at me—woolgathering! I'm sorry, Alberich.'

'No matter.' The hairs on the back of Alberich's neck had settled, but not the uneasy feeling that something had wanted him to know more than he should about the future. A future.

Except that we know there is going to be a final battle. We're planning for that already. And if I had taken thought about it, I would immediately have known that Selenay would never consider her own safety under battlefield conditions. I haven't been told anything I couldn't have figured out for myself. Have I?

'I should be going. My day starts early, and yours, even earlier,' he said, trying not to show any of his unease.

'True enough; good thing for me that I'm a real lark-of-the-morning,' Geri said cheerfully as he walked Alberich to the door. 'Come by here more often, won't you?'

Alberich almost, almost, prevaricated. Then he hesitated.

Because the Writ also said that when Vkandis wished the future to be revealed—or steered—He would find a way to do so.

'I will,' he promised, and went back out into the cold, dark, and the rain—ordinary things.

Ordinary things.

He didn't think he was going to sleep well tonight. Probably not for many more nights to come.

PART THREE

THE LAST BATTLE

12

HE had been expecting it for months, with a feeling of heavy dread and sick anticipation that put him off his food and kept him staring at the ceiling at night. All winter he'd worried and wondered. Were the Tedrels going to break with their pattern and attack in the winter? After that strange evening when Geri briefly spoke for—Something Else—how could he not have felt that the storm was about to break?

He'd wished for an inkling that he was doing the right thing—and he'd gotten it. Nothing inimical could have