time we arrived at the castle.
Things seemed in disarray all over. The vending carts that usually milled in the bailey were scattered and broken, evidence that the quake we felt in the Vingaards had reached this far into Solamnia. Indeed, a most forgiving Raphael told me that the first quake had left an enormous fissure underneath the foundation of the castle-I was not to hear the adventure surrounding it until later-and that the second quake, arising from nowhere little more than a week ago, had closed it again altogether.
It seemed like farfetched geology to me, but I had seen stranger things to the west and was inclined to believe him.
Brandon Rus had been preparing to leave eastward on a pilgrimage to the Blood Sea of Istar. Indeed, he had packed for the next morning, but he postponed his departure another night and day so that he could hear the adventures that had befallen us. It was from his account that I began to piece together what had happened underneath the castle while we were away. I went to Enid and to Bayard later for the rest of the story, and got more than I bargained for.
You see, not only did they grace me with the account of the pendant and the cats and the dangerous dreams and Marigold's shipwrecked hair, but they had exciting news that surpassed even the joy of restoring the castle.
For it seems that on one of those evenings a month or so before I was made Knight in the Great Hall of Castle di Caela, things more quiet and far more momentous were taking place in the upstairs chambers.
It seems as though I was disinherited, or at least pushed a ways down the line of succession.
For the heir of both branches, di Caela and Brightblade, would be welcomed to the world sometime in the early spring. Enid was not altogether as radiant as the mythology surrounding expectant mothers said that she should be. She was sick of a morning and craved pastry all through the day, but to Bayard she was the splendid bright creature he saw from the battlements years ago, and she was more now, here at the start of their greatest adventure together.
Speaking of pastry, Marigold remained a nocturnal factor in the chambers of Castle di Caela. At night, it seemed, her specter haunted the quarters of Sir Robert di Caela, who, having flooded the caverns below the foundation and thereby saved the castle and, by chance, the surrounding continent, was all prepared to dine on the story for years until the ghost took his appetite away. He looked… haunted now, and he jumped at the chance to sleep in the open air again when a band of us gathered to accept Longwalker's invitation to attend the Plainsman Night of Telling in the early fall.
But before the larger and more joyous Telling, there was a telling of my own to go through.
It was the evening after we arrived when I told Father about Alfric.
Of course he knew already. After all, Alfric hadn't returned with us, and when the tale of attack and ambush and underground cave-in unfolded, Sir Andrew concluded the worst. He was resigned when Brithelm and I came to him.
Resigned and expectant.
'I shall save you boys the reliving of this,' he said as we entered his chamber, pushing himself away from the desk where, by lamplight, he had been crouched, quill in hand, over a large piece of parchment.
'The simple questions, according to the Measure, will suffice.'
Brithelm and I looked at one another.
How like the old man to fall into the arms of the Order when he could not put word or thought around his grief. For there he sat in front of us, eyes brimming. I had never seen my father weep, but come to think of it, I had never seen him with a pen in hand, either.
It was the depths that the armor covered.
'One,' he began, his old back rigid. He started to stand, steadying his right leg, injured in a long-past boar hunt. 'One. Where did the boy fall?'
'In the heart of the Vingaard Mountains, sir. Into the breast of Huma,' I replied, hoping I had the formula right.
'And when did he fall?'
'Elev-ten nights passing, sir. Into the breast of Huma.'
And we said it together-that prayer I have heard on solemn occasions, before and since, over old Knights who passed on peacefully in their sleep and over young ones killed by adventure or accident. Over a centaur friend of mine, once in the mountains. And over my brother, who lay beneath those mountains, asleep in the heart of the planet.
The prayer over, the tears shed, the old man looked up at me.
'And tell me one more thing, Galen,' he began.
'He fell most bravely, Father,' I said. 'His last thoughts were heroic.'
Brithelm looked at me briefly, but he added nothing, of course. And he always claimed, quite truthfully, that he did not see his eldest brother fall.
But our story must not end without a week in middle autumn, when briskness rode on the wind and the horses' breath misted the air for the first time that season.
We rode together, Brithelm and Danelle and I, along with a mess of Knights and retainers-from Raphael and Bradley all the way to the dog, Birgis-out from Castle di Caela and south, past the Thelgaard Keep and, keeping the Garnet Mountains to our left, into the sacred Telling Ground that Longwalker and Wanderer, the Namer of the Que- Shu, had marked off for the ceremonies at hand.
I would imagine there were ten thousand Plainsmen camped around us, the air filled with smoke and chanting and the smell of leather and grain and memory.
Memory was the richest of those smells. On the first night, we seated ourselves in the immense mile-wide circle that linked tribe to tribe. The ceremonial spears stood anchored in the ground, atop them the tribal totems- the pelts of leopard and bear and fox, the feathers of eagles, and the antlers of the springbok.
We sat beneath the sign of the antelope, totem of the Que-Nara. Longwalker greeted us and with quiet ceremony draped the hides of antelopes over my shoulders and those of Brithelm. A third, smaller hide, well tanned and softened and white and gray like the peaks of the Vingaards, had been saved for the Lady Dannelle.
They smelled of the plains to the south, those hides-of the clean, unchangeable grasslands and the sudden, crisp, metallic smell in the air when winter snows approach. I nestled into the warmth of the fur and watched the smoke rise from the fire that practical Bradley built in an instant before us.
The smoke, caught up in a strong October breeze, eddied toward the southwest, over Coastlund and out to the New-sea beyond it. It curled and surged like a river, and it circled twice over the large central fire of the Telling before gathering itself into a larger, higher current of smoke and bending away over the horizon.
Longwalker sat down in front of me, and the Telling began.
Wanderer spoke first. His tales told of a country to the south, of a people nomadic and tireless, haunted by shifts in the weather and gaps in their memories. Mournfully the young Que-Shu Namer began one telling, then paused, then told another story he seemed to join in midstride, because at the heart of each story was the melancholy phrase, 'And this we do not remember…'
He spoke through the first night, and we slept until noontime restlessly. Longwalker woke me when the sun was high, his voice encouraging, a strange gleam in his eyes.
'Take off the mantles of sorrow, Solamnic,' he said, his eyes fixed on the central fire, 'for tonight you will see the Telling brought out of the darkness. You will see the time redeemed.'
And I confess that the smell in the air was lighter, that something arose in the midst of us promising joy and history, and the second night was rollicksome until the new Que-Nara Namer began to speak.
First, it was a night of reunion. Ramiro, it seemed, had made the long journey westward across Goodlund and
