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that guide your people lead you through this, only to have you fall short?”
    :Your logic is flawed,: Vesily retorted petulantly, :Because why would your agents of change allow my Chosen into the swamp again?:
    Sherra frowned again. “I don’t know. Maybe they couldn’t reach her for some reason having to do with the Mire, or the Changecircles, or how her mind is.” Wait. What was that the Companion had just said? “What do you mean, my agents of change and your Chosen?” She blinked, thinking fast. “You mean that your Chosen is Tayledras?”
    :She isn’t Valdemaran. She keeps thinking of places and people I don’t recognize, and there are images of birds of prey and magic. Big stones that glow. A lot of bathing, a lot of food. A shadow of a gryphon, maybe. But no places in Valdemar that I have ever heard of.:
    “There is a chance things are not as bad as they seem. Many Tayledras can survive in the wild.” Sherra didn’t mention that probably three-quarters of the Hawkbrothers never left a Vale more than once a year. It might help Vesily’s morale if she went right on thinking that all Hawkbrothers were scouts.
    The overcast sky darkened as they set off again and soon drops of rain made rippling rings in the swamp-water. Thunder boomed from their left, then right. The drizzle picked up, and by the time they were again deeply into the swamp, it was a downpour.
    This had its advantages; the rain was clean to drink, and it kept many of the dangers of the Mire hunkered down. But it was absolute misery to trek through.
    Finally Vesily stopped. :This is ridiculous. I can go faster with you on my back, and you weigh almost nothing. Take to my saddle.:
    Sherra hesitated, looking up at the Companion through the pouring rain. “Ah . . . I cannot ride, Lady,” she admitted.
    Vesily snorted. :Neither can most of the Chosen when we Choose them. Take to my saddle.:
    Sherra didn’t argue; she simply crawled up onto the saddle and let the Companion pick through the deeper parts of the swamp. Vesily seemed to take the direction straight from her mind now; certainly she was going exactly the way that Sherra sensed they should.
    The storm picked up. About three hundred horse lengths away was deep swamp. Again, mixed blessings; it would shelter them from the storm, but be slower to traverse. Out here they were exposed, and dusk was already here. Gods forfend, they might even be struck by lightning out here. There certainly was a lot of lightning around to be struck by. One particular cloud-to-cloud lightning flash lasted so long that it illuminated the entire Mire as clearly as bright daylight.
    It lit up a particular something at the edge of the deep swamp.
    Sherra leaped onto a vine-twisted snag for a better look, hanging on to Vesily’s saddle for stability. Visibility was poor, thanks to the rain, even for her sharp eyes, but she was sure she caught a patch of yellow, like the bandage fragments in the Changecircle, amidst the orange glow of what she hoped was not webbing. It was at the base of a huge tree, of the kind that only the Pelagirs could produce. Sherra knew of only six other of this kind, and this was half again bigger than those she had known before. Its form was twisted and massive, and its trunks split into scores of branches, and each of them in turn into dozens more, all weighed down with vines by the thousands, each as big as Sherra’s arm. It did not obscure the canopy; it was the canopy, reaching far beyond what Sherra had ever seen from anything in the Mire. It filled the horizon so that the lightning seemed to come from inside it. In more than one of the gaps between the trunks, an orderly latticework could be seen, but it emitted light of its own, rather than shining silver in lightning. The larger sections glowed a mottled deep orange, and the thinner parts were a brighter orange, all about the brightness of an oil lamp. As they moved closer, Sherra hoped they were human- or hertasi -made, but with a