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brightening in the silver-white haze of the close-looming sky—a brightening that drew closer every day, as if some celestial body inscribed a slow progression that might sometime bring it in line with the single slit of window that lit the round tower chamber that was his world.
    Or might never.
    As to the room itself, it had curving stone walls and a floor of concentric circles of precisely cut gray flags inset with spirals of silver that here and there lapped up the walls and in four places reached the domed ceiling and spread out once more, though cracks and flakes and fissures disturbed the complex pattern.
    For the rest, he had a silver-framed bed with torn sheets of rough gray silk, and a coverlet of ragged gray fur, and a table and chair of gray wood gilt with silver. The simple breeches and sleeveless tunic he wore were also of that non-color, and made of plain coarse wool; and his pierced and gathered shoes were of nondescript gray leather. He had chains, too: Iron-alloyed bonds lined with wyvem skin that bound his wrists and ankles to the wall and trailed across the floor behind him when he paced out the narrow limits of his freedom. But even that metal was dull: gave off no reflections, so that Fionchadd could not see the green of his own eyes, or the gold of his hair, or the pink of his lips and his tongue. His skin was pale—too pale to offer much contrast, and he had thought more than once of slicing open his veins so that the gush of red would relieve the monotony that drugged his sight. Not suicide that cut, for such was an impossibility with his kind. Oh, he might sever the ties between body and soul for a space of seasons, but the two would rejoin in time, and there was nothing he could do to forestall that reunion. And his captors would still have his body, and when the two reunited, the cycle would start all over with his situation not one whit better.
    So Fionchadd had only to sit and wait and gaze out his window at a vista of white-silver water across which four bands of silver light slowly spun with the tower itself as their hub, until they merged with the like-colored sky of this strange, tiny land no one had heard of. Straight Tracks, he thought: roads between Times and Worlds. But who had ever seen them in silver?
    He had asked once, queried the friendliest of the Erennese guards; but the man had told him little. Finvarra alone knew of this place, he had discovered, but almost nothing more except that it was not truly a part of Faerie. He still hoped by careful questioning of his captors to learn the full, true tale in time. It was something to do, after all, a puzzle to fill the spaces between more troublesome concerns, the principal one of which was winning his freedom.
    But escape eluded him, because of that same pain that dulled his mind and would not let him draw on the Power that should have let him choose any number of shapes and so win free. There were two kinds of pain, too; one he had learned to live with, and one that was troubling and new.
    The first, the wound in his soul, had never healed. It ached always, a gnawing between his thoughts, around his movements; so much a part of him he could no longer remember what it was like before. It, he had mastered; it, in a sense, he could numb—as he could ignore the slap and hiss of waves outside and the tangy smell of salt water, and center on other sounds and odors. But that did not mean it was not present.
    The other agony was born of the Iron rings that bound him, for the fires of the World’s first making yet burned in that metal and never cooled. It was tolerable—barely, if he was careful; but of it, too, he could not be free.
    And a final thing he could not elude was fear. For himself, of course, but more importantly for his mother, the Fireshaper Morwyn, whose fate he did not know except that she had offered herself up in exchange for his freedom when Finvarra had demanded she surrender herself for judgment because of her role in