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blinding illuminations. But these perceptions can’t be readily communicated, called for at will, or stored in a jar against future need, so…”
    He paced. “The perceiver first classifies them as undependable and later, useless, and finally, unreal. Most ordinary people are so practiced at this negation that by the time they are in their mid-teens they suffer their sudden understandings as though they were bellyaches and are quickly over them. The sage or the ecstatic, on the other hand…”
    His face tightened. “Do I have it right, Nazhuret, or am I previous, and you were only swooning from insufficiency of food?”
    I told him he had it, and that as Zhurrie the Goblin was certainly dead, and peace-filled Nazhuret the Revisitor seemed to have disappeared also, I had no idea who was talking to him at all. I stared not at the floor but at his gleaming shoes, soiled by September dew and forest mulch only a bit on the sides of the toes, and he patted me on the head, where I would have been bald had I been Powl.
    “That is a very good beginning,” he said to me.
     
    The clothing in the bundle—that I was to wear and wash out nightly—was a coarse handweave shirt as well as woolen knee breeches, stockings, and wooden clogs. “I am to dress like a peasant and wash like a lord?” I asked him, trying not to make it sound like a protest.
    “Yes,” he replied, with his grin turned away from me. “And eat like a lady and talk like a scholar with a long gray beard. All these things, you see, are perfection in their own variety, and perfection is what we strive for.”
    I was grateful for the lack of mirror in the room, not because I thought I looked so much worse in the poor clothes but because I was very much afraid I would find they looked more appropriate on me than my frock coat. “Peasant shirts are more perfect than… than linen and pearls, Master Powl? Then what about—”
    “No ‘Master,’ Nazhuret. Just ‘Powl.’ And as for my own dress—if it is any of your business—I am in disguise.”
    Powl glanced over me with satisfaction as I stood before him in my rude finery, and I was more and more certain he thought it the right clothing for the sort of person I was. I was tempted to remind him about Sordaling School and its rules for admission, but among the lessons I had learned at that school was that many things were for sale that were not supposed   to be salable, and how could I say that admission for a low-born or bastard son was not among these? I held my peace. He fed me more cheese, bread, and beer, until the natural man in me began to climb out of his stupor.
    “Do you remember why you came here and why you stayed, Nazhuret?” Powl ate more slowly than I and far more delicately, so that I had been waiting across the table from him for five minutes.
    “I remember…” I began, and then memories that had
seemed perfect and coherent as long as I didn’t look directly at them began to behave
alarmingly. “I came because of a dream,” I answered at last, “and I stayed because
you…” and here I became unsure of myself, wretchedly so, so that it was almost
impossible to continue. Powl prodded me. “Because I what, lad? Speak.”
    “Because you called me back. From death.”
    Powl skinned an apple. Its fragrance filled the air, even overwhelming the cheese, “Called you back from death? Now, how could I do that?”
    I don’t know where my anger came from, but I was shouting, “Don’t make fun of me that way! You were only an hour ago saying that I must believe my own memories, that it required cussedness that was actually faith, that—”
    He waved me down with a light gesture, “No, I’m not making fun of you. It was a legitimate question. By what power could I call a man back from death? I’m not God, I assure you, nor some prescientific notion of a wizard.”
    This outraged me, for although I didn’t confuse the man with
the Almighty, yet he was exactly my “prescientific”