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quarter, so I heard. Perhaps she fell over the cliffs into the sea?”
    “Perhaps,” Ilbran said curtly. It was not a subject that he felt able to discuss, especially not with Giter, a stout merry man with a smile and a joke for all who stopped by his stall, and a heavy thumb on the scales for the unwary, old and young.
    Ilbran pulled away from him, but he leaned over the counter of his stall to chat further. “Great happenings. The sand-doves will be flying north and south with strange messages. They tell queer stories of how she escaped, for all she was only a child … ”
    Ilbran walked away, but not so quickly that he could not hear Giter’s mocking voice saying, “My Lord Fisherman is more sensitive than usual, is he not?” The men standing nearby guffawed in agreement. Ilbran flushed red with embarrassment and anger. He should have stayed and listened, smiled and asked him how his wife did, and his ever-increasing brood of brats. But he loathed the man, his sturdy children, his fine clothes bulging over his well-fed belly.
    Still, this was no day to rage and fret. He was going home early from market, with a double handful of red-metal coins knotted in his pocket. He sat on a low wall and basked in the gentle sun. In a moment, a guard might come to drive him away, but he did not care.
    He could see through a lacework of wrought metal into the courtyard of the house, people there that he would never meet or know, unless it was on Festival day, when the unseen walls came down. A man tutored his son in his catechism. They had gone beyond the Naming questions, and begun on the questions of the Land.
    “What are the three gifts of the Land?”
    “The gifts of Tree, Grain, and Thorn,” the child said. “Lanara, that gives us paper to write on, that we do not forget our ways and past, that clothes us warmly in winter and coolly in summer, and quenches the thirst of the traveler in summertime. Blaggorn, that feeds the people from sea to mountains, and fattens the cattle when they graze on the plains. Thornfruit … thornfruit that … that … ”
    The boy fidgeted, forgetting the lofty phrasing. From the looks of him he was a year or so from his first naming, perhaps five years old, three summers and two winters. He fretted over the formal words that had escaped him, finally bursting out with: “Thornfruit that gives us candy and good things to eat.”
    It caught Ilbran by surprise. His quickly suppressed bark of laughter was heard by the other man, who shouted, “Get away from here, loiterer!”
    Ilbran walked on, but from a distance he still heard the piping childish voice repeating the familiar words. “The law of the land, that we swore when we entered it: We will not sow; we will not plant; we will not set one stone above another. We will not delve in the earth; we will not lay our dead to rest there … ”
    How much of that does a child understand? Ilbran wondered. Yet he learns it. We all learn it—and yet we do not understand . To hear the childhood-learned ritual was a reminder of days when his father was strong and his mother was young.
    We came into this land empty-handed … It was like a table set for us, a bed turned down for us … Though the dark ones run in the forests, yet the fields are wide and welcoming … The grizanes taught us what to do … We live in the houses that other men built; they took the burden of blasphemy on themselves … If we should fail in our vows, let our children be born as strangers.

    But not all men lived in homes where the builders had broken the Law of the Land. Ilbran looked at his mud-brick and thatched home almost fondly. Dimness, the smell of smoke, of fish stew, the relieved smiles of father and mother, glad to see him safe. He spread out the money on the floor, a fine scattering of coins, more than he had ever brought from one day’s marketing.
    Kare counted them delightedly, and scraped another hole in the floor for safekeeping against the day of king’s