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cold…”
    “I wondered about their origin,” the Visitor said. He sat next to Caredd, looking from one speaker to the next as though in a schoolroom, teacher or pupil or both. Mother Caredd had no more lesson to say, and shrugged and smiled. The unhappy end of her playing at politics had left her vaguer even than she had always been, but also somehow calmer, more lovely, and gently accepting; where the Visitor disturbed and perplexed Fauconred, and fascinated Caredd, Mother Caredd just smiled at him, as though his dropping from heaven were the most natural of things.
    “For any real answers,” Caredd said, “you’ll have to go to the Grays, in the end. For all old knowledge.”
    “They know?”
    “They say they know. Help me here.” She was trying with her long patient fingers to restring an old carved instrument.
    “They say,” Mother Caredd went on as though to herself, “that all the Just have names for their names. Is that so? Naming their names, and why… Their Guns have names too, all of them, don’t they? I wonder if the Guns’ names have names, and so on and on…”
    “I don’t know, Mother,” Caredd said, laughing. “Could they remember all that?”
    “I couldn’t. But I wouldn’t want to, would I?”
    Caredd loved her mother fiercely, and though she allowed herself to smile at her rambling chatter, she let none mock her, and would die to keep her from being hurt again.
    “The Just,” the Visitor said, nodding; these he knew; but after a moment asked: “Who are they? How would I know them?”
    “Murderers,” Caredd answered simply. “These keys are warped.”
    “Bandits, as I told you,” Fauconred said, frowning into his cup. “The men without law or honor; the women whores.”
    “Madmen,” said Mother Caredd.
    “Why Just, then?” the Visitor asked Caredd.
    “A name from longer ago than anyone remembers. Perhaps once the name had a meaning. It’s said they’re dreamers.” She plucked a dampened note. “Nightmare dreamers.”
    “Old names persist,” Fauconred said. “Like Protector, Defender. Protectors and Defenders of the Folk, anciently.”
    “Protectors of the Folk against…”
    Fauconred knitted his gray brows. “Why, against the Just, I suppose.”
    Caredd strummed a tuneless tune and put down the ancient instrument. The two widows went on spinning their eternal thread. “If it snows on Yearend Day,” they sang, “then, snow and rain will fall till Fain/Brings the New Year round again…”
    By evening, the rain had blown away toward the City, leaving only a rent sash of clouds for the sun to color as it set. To watch, Caredd had climbed a hundred stairs to the long, fanged battlement that guarded Redsdown’s Outward side, and then up between two broken castellations to where she knew of a flat, private place to sit. On the tower behind her, two forked banners, sunset-red, snapped tirelessly in rhythm with her own heavy cloak’s blowing. She pulled it tighter around her, drew her knees up, wondered what Redhand was about tonight… There was a polite, introductory sort of noise on the battlement below. Caredd smiled down at the tireless Visitor.
    “Even here?” she asked. “Those steps are long.”
    “I’m sorry,” said the Visitor. “I’ll go back.”
    “No. Stay. Better to talk to you than… Stay.”
    “I was wondering,” he began, and Caredd laughed. He put his head down and went on carefully. “Wondering why no one of the Folk will talk with me.” He had gone about the farms with Caredd, watching her stop everywhere to hug and talk and fondle babies, be cooed over herself by old ones who treated her as something between a cherished pet and a princess. But their happy chatter had ceased before him, turned to a cool reserve; he had never had any yield him anything but a nod and a wary, almost frightened smile.
    “They think you are a creature of the Grays,” Caredd said simply.
    “A… creature?”
    “Of old, the Grays could make combatants