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she was and where she went.
The forest should have been alive with searchers, the realm with pursuit. But
none followed her. Han-Gilen was quiescent about her.
    As if, she thought when at last she took time to think, as
if, after all, her father was minded to let her go.
    She had a brief, striking vision: a hawk, freed to hunt for
its master or to escape his will. And far beneath it in its flight, her father,
watching, waiting for it to return to his hand.
    Anger blurred the image and scattered it. He was so certain;
so splendidly, utterly confident that in the end she would yield.
    “I’ll die first!” she cried.

FOUR
    The northern border of Han-Gilen was called the Rampart of
the North, its pass the Eye of the Realm. There the hills rose to lofty ridge
and fell sheer, down and down to the rolling green levels of Iban.
    Because Iban’s lord was tributary and kinsman to the Prince
of Han-Gilen, the fortress that guarded the Eye was lightly manned, watchful
but not suspicious even of one who rode alone by night. Although Elian’s neck
prickled and her heart thudded, certain that her father had laid his trap here
where she had no escape, no challenge rang from the gate; no armed company
barred her way. She was free to go or to stay.
    In the high center of the Eye, she halted the mare.
Han-Gilen lay behind her. Iban was a shadow ahead, moonlit and starlit, deep in
its midnight sleep.
    Above her loomed the tower, dark and silent. If she called
out, named herself, demanded lodging, she would have it, and in the morning an
armed escort to bring her to her father.
    Her back stiffened. Had she come so far, to turn back now?
With high head and set face, she sent her mare down into Iban.
    oOo
    When Elian was young, she had learned by rote the names of
all the Hundred Realms. Some were tiny, little more than a walled town and its
fields; some were kingdom-wide. Most owed friendship or tribute to the Red
Prince of Han-Gilen.
    As she rode across sleeping Iban, she called to mind the
realms between Han-Gilen and the wild north. Green Iban; Kurion with its
singing forests; Sarios where ruled her mother’s father; Baian, Emari; Halion
and Irion whose princes were always blood brothers; Ebros and Poros and stony
Ashan. And beyond the fortress walls of Ashan, the wild lands and the wilder
tribes that called Mirain king.
    So close to mighty Han-Gilen and so far still from the
outlands, her father’s peace held firm. But there was a strangeness in the air.
Mirain An-Sh’Endor: men dreaded the rumor of him with his barbarian hordes. Had
not imperial Asanion itself begun to arm against him?
    No, she thought, pausing before dawn to lever a stone from
her mare’s hoof. It was not all fear. Some of it was anticipation, some even
joy at the coming of the Sun-king.
    No hiding place offered itself to her with the dawn, only
the open fields and a village clustered around an ancient shrine. Elian might
have pressed on past, but the mare, unused to steady traveling, was stumbling
with weariness. And no temple, however small, would deny a traveler shelter,
whoever that traveler might be.
    This shrine was small indeed, made of stone but shaped like
the villagers’ huts, round and peak-roofed with a door-curtain of leather. Its
altar stood where the hearth should be, with the Sun’s fire on it in a battered
bowl, and a clutter of holy things.
    Behind the shrine stood the priest-house, a simple wattle
hut with a pen for an odd assortment of animals: a lame woolbeast, a white hind,
a one-eyed hound. The woolbeast blatted at mare and rider, the hound yawned,
the hind watched from a far corner with eyes like blood rubies.
    Elian dismounted stiffly. The village seemed asleep or
deserted, but she felt the pressure of eyes upon her. Her hand went
unconsciously to her head, to the cap that hid her hair, drawing it down over
the bright sweep of her brows.
    Someone moved within the hut. Tired though she was, the
senel lifted her head, ears pricked.
    This