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disappearing noiselessly back into the copse and gone.
    Rhodry winced and stared into the fire.
    “I think, O brother of mine, that there’s somewhat you don’t quite understand.” Salamander paused for dramaticeffect. “Jill’s beyond you now. Beyond us both, truly, for I’ll admit that there was a time or brief season in my life when I was madly in love with her myself—without the slightest result, let me hasten to add, but a cold and most cruel rejection, a sundering of my heart and the smashing to little bits of my hopes.”
    “Oh. Who is he, then?”
    “Not who, O jealousy personified. What. The dweomer. It takes some people that way. Why, by every god in the sky, do you think she left you in the first place? Because a love of dweomer is a burning twice stronger than lust or even sentiment, which it ofttimes overpowers.”
    Rhodry and Jill had parted so long ago that Rhodry quite simply couldn’t remember its details, but he could remember all too well his bitterness.
    “I didn’t understand then and I don’t understand now, and cursed if I even want to.”
    “Then there’s naught I can say about it, is there? But I warn you, don’t let yourself fall in love with her again.”
    Rhodry merely shrugged, wondering if the warning were coming too late.
    On the morrow morn they splashed across Y Brog and left the settled lands behind. All that day they rode through fallow grasslands, dotted here and there with copses or crossed with tiny streamlets; that night they camped in green emptiness. Yet early on the next day Rhodry saw rising on the horizon a broken tower, as lonely in the endless grass as a cairn marking a warrior’s grave—which, he supposed, it might well have been.
    “Did this dun fall to the sword?”
    “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Jill said. “Calonderiel might know.”
    The elf in question, an old friend and a warleader among his people, was waiting for them near the empty gap in the outer walls that once had held wooden gates. They saw his horse first, a splendid golden gelding with a silvery mane and tail, tethered at his leisure out in the grass. Calonderiel himself was pacing idly back and forth in the ward, where grass grew round the last few cobbles and a profusion of ivy was sieging the broch itself. A tall man but slender, as most of his people were, the warleader had dark purple eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s, moonbeam-pale hair,and, of course, ears as long and delicately pointed as a seashell.
    “So there you are!” he sang out in Deverrian. “I thought Salamander had gone and gotten you all lost.”
    “Spare me the implied insults, if you please.” Salamander made him a sketch of a bow. “You must have been talking with my father, if you’d think so ill of me. Which reminds me. Where is the esteemed parent? I thought he’d be eager for a first look at this other son of his.”
    “No doubt he will, when he finds out you’ve ridden west.” Calonderiel turned to Rhodry. “My apologies, but Devaberiel’s gone off north somewhere with one of the alarli. I’ve got my men out riding, passing the word along and looking for him. He’ll turn up.”
    “Blast and curse it all!” Jill got in before Rhodry could say a word. “I wanted to speak with him before I rode on, and now I’ll have to sit around here and wait.”
    “Impatient, isn’t she?” Calonderiel was grinning. “You should be used to elven ways by now, Jill. Things happen when they happen, and not a moment before.”
    “Well,” Rhodry said. “I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed myself.”
    “And you must admit, Cal,” Salamander broke in, “that my father can take his sweet time about things. He calls his progresses stately or measured; I call them dilatory, tardy, lackadaisical, or just plain slow.”
    “Well, you’ve got a point.” The warleader glanced Jill’s way. “Aderyn’s at the encampment.”
    “That’ll make the waiting easier, truly. How far away is