arm, supporting her, helping her to greater speed.
When they had passed beyond a hedgerow she paused to catch her breath. Moonlight and shrubs made crazy shadows around her. She firmly pushed away the thought that this might be someone else from the realm of the Wanderers beside her. “I hope you didn’t have to kill them,” she said, then realized he could not answer. “Squeeze my hand twice if you did.”
He did not squeeze at all. “Good,” she said. “When my father dies they will be my guards.”
She listened but heard only the ordinary sounds of the night: a chirping of insects in the meadow, small creatures rustling in the hedgerow, and in the distance the slow sound of waves. King Hadros had apparently not yet come up from the harbor.
Karin suddenly felt fully herself again, unafraid, able to assess dangers, able to plan. In fact, since Roric did not know where they were and could not speak, she had to plan for both of them. Would Queen Arane approve of this new method of manipulating men?
She smiled at this thought and started walking rapidly. In the darkness it was a little better; the solidity at her shoulder felt like Roric as long as she did not look toward him. “We have a head start,” she said. “By the time they realize in the castle that I have been gone too long, by the time those guards recover consciousness, by the time Hadros comes up from the harbor and demands to see his son, we will be well on the way to the Mirror-seer’s lake. They will not think to look for us there tonight.”
Her feet found the track that led up the valley. “As long as we are both gone, Valmar and I,” she said to the silent presence next to her, “it will be hard for King Hadros to start the war again on the presumption that Valmar was murdered here. Hadros and my father may even agree that they both were cruelly deceived by you, who first killed Valmar and then kidnapped me. But I am afraid the two of them will agree together that Valmar and I will have to marry if we can be recovered.”
She felt the tension in the arm that touched hers and laughed. “No, Roric, I really do not want to marry my foster-brother. He is better looking than you,” she added teasingly, “but I thought today would have answered all your questions about my intentions. By the time he returns from the Wanderers’ realm, I will have thought of something to change Hadros’s mind-women can always outmaneuver men if they want.”
But a thought nagged at her, driving away her laughter. The Wanderer had asked all three of them if they were outcasts. He might have been deliberately looking for someone with no ties because whoever went to assist the Wanderers against fate would not be coming back.
“You probably don’t know about the Mirror-seer,” she said to Roric because she did not want to think about Valmar. The track was beginning to rise, and they had to go slowly in the dark. “It was he who told me I would find a Wanderer on Graytop-but could not tell me where you had gone. Now that the Wanderers have their mortal he’s got to tell us more.”
The way seemed much longer in the dark and on foot than it had in daylight and on horseback. The moon was well into the western sky by the time they topped the escarpment to see the lake’s surface calm before them, reflecting stars.
As she picked her way along the damp shore the calls of the frogs grew silent, and there were splashes as they leapt from shore to water, but behind her their song began again. The Mirror-seer’s house was a black, indistinct shape.
She stood hesitating on the dock before it, realizing he must be asleep, wondering if he could see anything with his mirrors in the dark. But this was no time, she told herself, for timidity. She lifted her fist and rapped boldly on the door.
There was a confused banging inside, while the frogs went silent again and a little wind sprang up among the reeds. Then through the small window she could see a candle come to life, and the door opened before her.
“Princess!” said the little round man in surprise, pulling disordered clothes more firmly around himself. His eyes were hidden by shadow. “What can have brought you here in the darkest night? And this?”
He turned toward the emptiness where Roric stood, holding up his candle. She turned too, eagerly, but saw nothing but the candle’s flickering flame.
“Then you are back in mortal lands, Roric No-man’s son,” said the Seer gravely.
“You can see him?” she asked urgently.
“Of course. And you cannot?”
He turned then, seeming to listen to something. “I understand,” he said soberly. “You were not with the lords of voima themselves but with a simulacrum of them. That is why your beard did not grow while you were there, and why in the realms under the sun you are only fully real when the sun is shining.” To Karin the Seer added, “My own voima allows me to see him. But there may be something I can do…”
“We need to find someone,” said Karin, “Valmar Hadros’s son. He walked out over the sea on moonlight to join the Wanderers.” She realized the Mirror-seer was tapping the fingers of one hand against his thigh and added hastily, “You can have this ring. It used to be my mother’s; I think it is very valuable.”
The Seer took the ring she handed him but did not look at it. “You will soon exhaust your father’s treasury with all these people you want to see, Princess,” he commented. “And you should know I cannot see someone no longer under the sun.”
“We do not need to see him,” said Karin, and from the way the Seer turned his head Roric apparently said something too. “But we need to bring him back from the Wanderers’ realm. King Hadros will kill somebody-maybe my father-unless we produce his son very soon.”
Again Roric seemed to add something, for the Seer said dryly, “Those who seek the Wanderers usually have deeper concerns than recovery of a horse.”
“If we cross the channel again,” said Karin, “and go to the stone gateway where Roric followed the-followed whatever the being was, will we be in the Wanderers’ realm?”
“There is no gateway there that mortals can pass unaided.”
For a second she could feel despair starting to mount. Coming here had been useless, at best a temporary delay until she had to face the two kings, whose men were even now doubtless searching the woods for her.
But she was not going to give up now. She set her jaw and asked, “I am not asking you to see anything by darkness. I only want information. Before you told me where to find a Wanderer. Now I want to find the rest of them-and the knowledge you tried to keep from me before.”
“I kept no knowledge from you,” said the Mirror-seer, but he seemed uneasy, and his turned his face away toward the lake.
“You told me that an end is fated for everyone, even the Wanderers. Now tell us what role they want all of us-Roric, Valmar, and me-to play as they fight against that end.”
For a moment the Seer played with the heavy ring, tossing it up and catching it one-handed. The gold glinted in the candle light. Then suddenly he closed his fingers around it. “I am not doing this for a piece of jewelry,” he said. “But you are the heiress of the kingdom in which, after all, I have to live. The mirrors will sometimes show something different by night…”
He turned then abruptly and disappeared back into his house. Karin stood waiting on the dock, listening to the little waves against the shore. Although she strained to hear, there was no sound of pursuit from the castle. It grew colder, and Roric put an invisible arm around her shoulders.
In twenty minutes the Seer was back, completely draped with black cloth, so that at first the candle he held up seemed held by a disembodied hand. She pressed against Roric, either to reassure him or for reassurance herself.
“This is for you, Roric No-man’s son,” said the Seer, holding out another black cloth. Roric let go of her, and in a second the cloth had disappeared, although with the moon low virtually everything outside the range of the candle flame was invisible.
The Mirror-seer went to the edge of the dock and held up the candle so that its light was reflected in a dozen shining shards on the waves below. He held a mirror over the candle, then went perfectly still. He kept his eyes turned to the mirror, bringing his face closer and closer as the candle smoke gradually spread a dark stain over the glass. To Karin, waiting with indrawn breath and heart pounding, the Seer seemed to stand motionless for an hour.
Abruptly there came a loud splash, followed almost instantaneously by another. The candle light was gone, but something was thrashing in the water by the dock.
Karin froze in terror and uncertainty. “Help me out, Princess!” came a voice from the water, the Mirror-seer’s
