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laughter. Aidan heard someone say, “This is just too much.” He thought the voice was Maynard’s, but it was hard to say. The words sounded as if they were coming to him from underwater.
    Only the old man’s voice sounded clear. “Hail to the Wilderking, Corenwald’s deliverer.” Aidan could hear his brothers laughing. He thought they must have been laughing at him, but he didn’t care. He was transfixed by the eyes of the old stranger. They shone with tears of gladness. Still the brothers laughed.
    “Enough!” Father’s sharp voice broke Aidan’s trance. The brothers fell silent. Errol put his hand on the old man’s elbow. “Come, old friend, let’s sit down again.”
    The stranger let Errol lead him to his chair. He sat down. But his eyes never left Aidan’s face.
    “Aidan,” said his father. “This is Bayard the Truthspeaker. You have heard me speak of him often.”
    “Yes, Father.” Somehow Aidan already knew who the man was. He had never seen him before; indeed, no one had seen him since he left Darrow’s court and took to the forest twenty years earlier. Most people assumed he was dead. And yet, when their eyes met, Aidan knew who this old man was, just as surely as the old man knew him.
    Only now did Errol notice his son’s disheveled state— the scratched and muddy face, the black eye, the ripped tunic.
    “What happened to you, Aidan?”
    Aidan looked down at himself, not sure where to begin or how much to tell.
    “Whose blood is that on your tunic?”
    Aidan remembered lifting the panther’s body off Dobro. “That must be the panther’s blood.”
    “Panther’s blood? What panther?”
    “I killed a panther, Father. With my sling. It was stalking the sheep. I slew a panther with a stone.”
    The room fell silent. Everyone was thinking the same thing:
    With a stone he shall quell the panther fell.
Watch for the Wilderking!
    “But Aidan,” continued his father. “Why are you so battered and muddy? A panther slashes and bites. Does it also bruise?”
    “No, Father,” Aidan chuckled. “But Dobro does.”
    “Dobro?”
    “Dobro Turtlebane. We had a wrestling match in the bottom pasture. He’s one of the feechiefolk.”
    At this his brothers began to laugh. Now they got it; Aidan was making a joke. Wilderkings, wandering prophets, feechiefolk—it was all make-believe.
    “Ha, ha! The feechiefolk! Ha, ha, ha!”
    “You had me going, Aidan. I almost believed the part about the panther!”
    Errol was laughing, too, as much from relief as from amusement. Then it occurred to him that if Aidan were joking, the joke was at Bayard’s expense. “Be ashamed, Aidan!” he thundered. “All of you, be ashamed! It is ungenerous, it is unmanly, to tease a person who is not …” He had started to say “not sane” but couldn’t bring himself to describe his old friend that way. “Who is not well.”
    Aidan was hurt that his father would accuse him of such disrespect toward Corenwald’s Truthspeaker. “But, Father, I wasn’t teasing. About the panther or the feechie boy.” Errol looked askance at his youngest son. These were wild tales indeed. And yet he had never known the boy to lie.
    Bayard cleared his throat. Now that he had found what he came seeking, he was starting to carry himself more like a normal man—as if the very sight of Aidan had released him from a trance. “Oh, I don’t think Aidan was teasing, old friend. I have met Dobro Turtlebane. A most unruly boy, as I remember, though not much more so than the average feechie.”
    Aidan’s brothers could contain themselves no longer. They laughed uncontrollably and teased their little brother with the outsized imagination.
    “Aidan Errolson, feechie fighter!”
    “He wasn’t fighting feechies; he was training them for his Wilderking army.”
    “From the looks of him, they should be training him!”
    “Out!” Errol’s voice rose above their mockery. “Leave this room!”
    The brothers jostled out of the great hall,