He is walking through a dead countryside of skeletal trees and scorched earth. He is himself dead, yet unable to pass beyond the Spirit Gate. The mist boils as though churned by a vast intelligence. For years, at this point in the dream, he would see her figure in the unattainable distance, walking along a slope of grass or climbing a rocky escarpment, always in a place he cannot and must not reach because he has a duty to those on earth whom he has sworn to serve.
But this night he finds himself sitting up, still sheltered beneath the wide overhang. Scar drowses. The rains haven't yet come. Mist billows in the air, and she emerges from it. A death-white cloak spills from her shoulders, enveloping her. She rides out of the air as if the air is a path. She can ride on the air because the horse has wings. Its hooves ring on rock as it halts a short distance from him and furls those impossible wings, tips hiding the length of her legs.
'Joss,' she says.
'Mark!' To hear her voice is agony, because he still misses her
although twenty years separate them. 'You're dead,' he adds, apologetically, because it is after all a dream.
'Yes.' Her smile is sad. 'Don't carry this burden. Don't mourn me, Joss. Let it go.'
'Is that you telling me, or me telling myself? Why do you haunt me?'
'I bring you a warning. At dawn, they'll try to kill you. The guards you've agreed to meet by the ironwood trees are not guards but outlaws who have infiltrated this haven to murder you. Beware!'
'They're just lads!'
'Look into your heart, Joss, and you'll see their story doesn't hold water.'
'Everyone is talking about how the temples have ordered it done. As it says in the Tale of Fortune: 'Their spirits were buried.''
'That's not what I mean. You're a reeve. Investigate!'
'Yes, and you're a reeve, too.' The only woman he had truly loved, his first and only lasting passion. She was the only woman he had truly betrayed, and in the worst way: he'd never meant to abandon her to her cruel fate. 'So why do I see you in the form of a Guardian, with a death-white cloak and a winged horse? What are the gods trying to tell me?'
'I don't know what the gods are trying to tell you, Joss.'
'I wish you were here to tell me where that cursed woman Zubaidit and her brother are got to. Taken some side trail into the Soha Hills, but Scar and I haven't found them.'
She looked away abruptly, breaking eye contact. 'There's a black tide trickling north and east through the Soha Hills, the remnants of the army.'
'Is it true a Guardian commands this 'Star of Life'?'
'Lord Radas commands them.'
'Lord Radas of Iliyat?' He remembered the lord's strange behavior, years ago, on the Ili Cutoff. Then he shook his head. 'Maybe so. That doesn't make him a Guardian.'
'How can any of us know what a Guardian is? They walk abroad, hiding themselves in plain sight. I see with my third eye and I understand with my second heart that they are corrupted, so I dare not approach them. They will destroy me if they find me.'
'Because you are a Guardian, or because they are? You speak in riddles.'
She looked back toward him without truly meeting his gaze. 'I'm alone, Joss. You're the only one I know I can trust.'
He tried to make sense of her words. 'A man appeared before the Hieros in the Merciless One's temple by Olossi. He demanded she turn over to him a slave, a 'ghost girl', they called her. He was dressed like an envoy of Ilu, but he claimed to be a Guardian, and the Hieros believed him. He had with him two winged horses, and when he spoke, she said, 'Every heart listened.' As it says in the tale.'
He knew Marit as well as he knew any woman, though that knowledge was twenty years' gone. For months, each least variation in her expression had been; his most intense study. That cast of face — mouth slack, gaze drawn inward as thoughts raced — and the tension in her shoulders marked surprise and shock as a clever, powerful mind reassessed what it thought it knew.
'A man dressed in the manner of an envoy of Ilu, claiming to be a Guardian? On the trail of an outlander? Seen at the Devourer's temple in Olossi?'
He nodded, but she was already turning her horse, moving for the edge of the promontory. She looked back over a shoulder. 'I saw a woman and a man, traveling together, with three horses, camped in the ruins beneath a Guardian altar right where the Soha Cutoff begins its descent into Sohayil.'
'Mark!'
The horse opened its wings and sprang into the sky. A gust raked through the overhang, and he woke to find rain spraying over his blanket and boots.
'The hells!' He scrambled out from under the overhang, right into the teeth of the wind. Rain spat into his face, and he wiped his eyes as he stared into the darkness, but there was nothing there. By the time he crawled back into the shelter, found a brand, lit it, and searched the ledge, the rain had wiped every track away. He knew he would have found nothing anyway, no mark of a horse's hoof. It had only been a dream.
The rain passed, the last drops splattering on stone. Scar chirped, rousing, and Joss saw distant objects in the east, evoked by the lightening that presaged dawn. He shook his head like a dog shedding
water, and shook out his cloak, then rolled it up. In the dim light he picked his way carefully down the slope. There, sitting on the stone where he'd left him, was the farmer, Pash.
'Greetings of the day,' Joss said.
'Morning is coming on,' agreed Pash, who seemed remarkably alert for a man who had, presumably, stayed awake all night. 'Whether it will bode good, or ill, I can't say. You're up early.'
'Where did you say you came from?'
'A little hamlet, you wouldn't have heard of it. We call it Green Water for the particular color of a pool there, a holy place dedicated to the Witherer. It's a day's walk from Candra Crossing.'
'Know you anyone here in the haven that's out of Candra Crossing? In particular I am looking for any person who might have served, or be serving, in the temple of Kotaru there.'
He chuckled. 'Why, indeed, the old battle-axe who took command of us is a captain in the Thunderer's order. You met her. Whew! She hasn't the strength of arm I'm sure she had once, but she has that manner about her that is as good as a blow to the head, if you take my meaning.'
'I'd like to see her right away.'
She was awake, with the night watch, getting ready to turn their duties over to the day watch. She introduced herself as Lehit. It was true she was old enough that her youthful strength was gone, no great threat when it came to arm-wrestling, but none of the militiamen doubted her authority: A look is as good as a hammer, as the saying went.
At his question, she shook her head. 'No youth named Gani apprenticed at the Thunderer's temple in Candra Crossing since I've served there, and that's been forty years. Best we send a party down to the ironwood grove with you. Or better yet, if you'll give me a few breaths to sort things out, set an ambush. If they see us all coming, they're like to flee. I'd like to capture them.'
So it happened that, somewhat after dawn, he walked alone along a track through muddy fields toward the grove of ironwood. The tops of these green pillars swayed in the dawn breeze. A lone iigure stood beside the massive trunk of the closest tree, waving at him to draw him closer. Just out of what he judged to be bowshot, Joss bent as if to shake a stone from his boot.
Shouts rose from the trees. Joss straightened. The figure had vanished, but a moment later Gani burst from behind the tree and sprinted toward Joss with sword drawn.
The hells! Joss drew his sword. In recent days, he'd felt that weight too often in his hand, for as the old reeves who had trained him had always said, 'If you have to draw your sword, you've already lost control of the situation.'
Halfway to him, Gani staggered, stumbled, and fell facedown in the dirt with a pair of arrows sticking out of his back. He thrashed a moment, got his head up, and began crawling toward Joss with a grimace of determination on his beardless face. He was still holding his sword. A pair of militiamen jogged out of the trees, bows in hand. As Joss stared, they ran to the lad, tossed down their bows, and stuck him through with their spears as if they were
