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the braided silk knots of spell-cord, twined separately around each wrist. His fingers touched the worn softness of old blankets, and he smelled the unmistakable, fusty odor of a straw bed tick under his cheek.
    Somewhere a bird sang, plaintive and sweet and achingly familiar.
    Meadowlarks.
    He moved again, to the muted creak of mattress ropes unevenly tightened.
    The air was a threnody of spring foliage, of water, of spruce sweetness and the sour, acidic pong of bogs; of flat distances running untouched to the hem of wind-washed sky; of distant ice.
    The Sykerst.
    He was home.
    The ache of it wrung him, obliterating all else in the hurt of nostalgic joy.
    Shadow dimmed the nacreous dawn light that lay across his face.
    “Daurannon?” He blinked up, recognizing the man who bent over him. The wide-set hazel eyes, the cupid-bow mouth, the straight nose and coal-black tousle of hair—Daurannon Stapler was one of those men who would look seventeen till the day he died.
    “Drink this.” The melodious tenor still had the soft under-purr of a lower-class St. Cyr accent. How many nights, Antryg wondered, had he heard that accent, in the years he and Daur spent studying together under the Archmage Salteris' tutelage? And after that, when he himself had been admitted to the High Council—the youngest mage ever to be so—and had been, nominally, Daur's tutor. He wondered, as he had even then, how much that had bothered the friend who had been only three years younger than himself.
    With Daurannon it was always difficult to tell.
    The bed ropes creaked as Daur sat beside him, helped him up with a strong arm beneath his head and shoulders; the cold stem of a metal goblet was pressed into his grip. As his lips touched the cup's rim, he smelled the bitter steep of phylax root in the water and drew back.
    “If you don't drink it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to call the guards and make you,” said Daur's voice behind his head. “I don't want to do this, but we've got to ... now. They'll be in in a minute.”
    By the smell of it the concentration of phylax was very strong, enough to strip him of any ability to work all but the most minor magics for at least twenty-four hours. On the other hand, thought Antryg through the pounding pain in his skull, he had no doubt they'd hold him down and pour the stuff down his throat. That was what the Witchfinders had done, anyway, nearly drowning him in the process. With the spell-cord around his wrists, there was no real way he could fight.
    Not against Daur, anyway.
    Even in that split-second hesitation he heard the door open. He sat up quickly and drained the potion, almost throwing it up again immediately as his head gave a blinding throb. “Dammit,” he whispered, his body bending under the reaction to the pain. Daurannon's hands, firm and warm and sure of themselves, pushed through his tangled hair to touch his scalp, seeking automatically the energy lines and pressure points; he felt the pain shunt away like fluid from a lanced sore, and with it, the worst of the aftertaste of his dreams.
    After a few queasy moments he managed to straighten up a little. Around the low, coffin-shaped arch of the small chamber's door he made out the clotted wall of black that was all he could see of the guards.
    But even without his spectacles he knew the room. It was the larger of the two upstairs chambers in the round stone house called the Pepper-Grinder, one of the several dwellings in the Citadel of Wizards traditionally given over to novices and Juniors. The lumpish, uneven window, and its sill and jambs of fieldstone, was half-obscured by encroaching ivy and weeds—clearly Bentick the Steward was having his usual problems finding enough village youths willing to help with the gardening.
    The casements were open. The air breathed a delirium of dew.
    He frowned up at Daur. “Is old Fred still the gardener here?” he asked, squinting. Most mages were able to control or arrest the deterioration of