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into mine for a moment; then he turned to Maryon. “Tell her.”
    The futureteller drew herself up to her considerable height. “Fer Obernewtyn’s sake, Elspeth, th’ gypsy mun be returned to her people. This was the futuretellin’ fer which I sent to recall ye from the city under Tor. But yesterday, when I fell into a second an’ deeper trance, I learned another thing:
You
mun be th’ one to take her back. Nowt fer Obernewtyn’s sake but fer yer own.”
    “Mine?” I echoed.
    Maryon went on, her face grave. “On th’ journey, you—an’ only you—will have th’ chance to learn what the word
swallow
means. If ye fail, I have foreseen … that ye’ll die afore th’ next Days of Rain.”

4
    O N THE SIDE of the road were patches of scrub and a few of the immense white-trunked ur trees that characterized lowland terrain. Matthew had not seen many of them before, but the trees had grown in great profusion around my childhood home in Rangorn.
    I thought fleetingly of picking berries in their shade with my mother. Then I sighed and shook myself.
    Rushton, Dameon, and Ceirwan had seen us off at first light, the gravity of the expedition diverted at the last minute by a hysterical tantrum of the young empath-coercer Dragon, whom we had rescued on a previous expedition. She had suddenly realized she would not be going with us, and it had taken all of Dameon’s empathy to prevent her from flinging herself after us as the gypsy wagon pulled away in the gray mountain dawn.
    My last sight of Rushton had been of him frowning after me, arms folded across his chest.
    Thunder rumbled now, and I looked up at the lowering sky, wondering if we would reach Sutrium before the storm broke. We had not long passed Glenelg Mor, its sodden earth invisible beneath a veil of mist.
    I sent a brief command for Matthew to take up the reins, rather than letting them hang down loosely. “It will look oddif someone comes along and sees no one is steering the wagon.”
    “Gypsy horses are trained to stay on the road while their owners sleep. Besides, who in their right minds would be out so late with a storm brewin’?” Matthew grumbled, but he did as I bade.
    A few minutes later, a horse galloped around a bend behind us. I gave Matthew a pointed look, though in truth he was right about seldom meeting anyone on the road. He did not notice, because he was all agog at the sight of the exotic-looking gold-skinned rider—wrapped in a purple cloak and bent low over the horse’s neck—who thundered past and out of sight around a bend in the road ahead.
    “That were one of them Sador tribesfolk,” Matthew said excitedly. “I’m goin’ to visit Sador someday.” His eyes glowed at the thought.
    The road to the remote region had only just been opened up in the last year, as the Blacklands taint along the eastern shore of the Land faded, allowing a slender, and some said dangerous, passage along the coast.
    The Council had always maintained the Land was all that remained unpoisoned of the world, while the Herders preached it was all Lud had seen fit to spare of the corrupt Beforetime. Seafarers had long known this to be a lie, but they had a rigid code of silence imposed by the Council. Even so, word had leaked out, initially as gossip and rumor. But with Sador suddenly accessible and known to all, it seemed more likely than ever that there was a world beyond the Blacklands.
    Looking before us to where the Sadorian rider had disappeared, I remembered Gahltha, who was scouting ahead fordanger. I asked Matthew how long the horse had been absent.
    “Nowt long. He won’t go too far with you here.”
    I ignored the questions implicit in his tone. There was no way of explaining Gahltha’s transformation from a vicious human-hating fury into my devoted guardian without relating the whole fantastic story of my deliverance from death by the Agyllians. It was Atthis who had called the black horse to carry me down from the high mountains, and