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all her family were obedient as always
    to the will of Hastur. And I knew that such little love or kindness as there had been between us, for a few months, was gone forever.
    It would be so easy to damn all women, but I must remember that the ones who love me are under an
    infernal strain—and that's been true of the women unlucky enough to love a Hastur, all the way back to
    the legend of the Blessed Cassilda herself, my hundred times great-grandmother—or so the story says.
    And not the least of the strain they're under is this damned self-pity!
    He sighed and tried to grin and said to Danilo, walking beside him, "Well, now we know how the freak at Festival Fair must feel."
    "Except that we don't get our porridge and meat from having to listen," Danilo muttered.
    The crowd was parting to let them through. As they stepped toward the special transit plane, Regis felt,
    deep inside the crowd, someone with a hand raised. A stone thrown? At him, at his Terran guard? He
    could hear the angry thoughts:
    "Our lord, a Hastur, prisoner of the Terrans?"
    "Has he asked them to cut him off from his people this way?"
    "Slave!"
    "Prisoner!"
    "Hastur!"
    It was a tumult in his mind. The stone flew. He groaned and covered his face with his hands. The stone
    burst into flame in midair and disappeared in a shower of sparks. There was a little despairing "Ahhh!"
    of horror and wonder from the crowd. In its backlash and before it could die away, Regis let his
    bodyguard hustle him up the steps of the special transit plane, dropped into a seat inside and remarked to nobody in particular, "Damn it, I could sit down and howl."
    But he knew it would be repeated all over again: guards, mutterings, crowds, resentments, maybe even
    thrown stones on the airstrip at Arilinn.
    And there wasn't a thing he could do about it.
    Far to the east of Trade cities and Terrans, the Kilghard Hills rise high, and beyond them the Hyades and the Hellers; layer on layer of mountain ridges, where men and nonmen live in the deep wooded slopes.
    A man afoot could travel for months or live a lifetime, and never come to the end of the woods or the
    ranges.
    A gray and rainy dawn was breaking over a morning of disaster as a group of men, wrapped in tattered,
    cut and smoke-scorched furs, dragged themselves downhill toward the ruins of a village. The walls of a
    stone house still stood, rain-drenched and stark white, the blackened remnants of a dozen flattened
    wooden houses around it. Toward this still-standing shelter they made their way.
    Behind them, three miles of forest lay, a blackened horror with wisps of smoke still rising in the rain and sleet. As they came under the roof, sighing and staggering, with exhaustion, one of the men lowered the
    half-burnt carcass of a deer to the floor. He motioned with his head and a worn-looking woman in a
    smoke-damaged fur smock and cape came to heft it. He said wearily, "Better cook what's left of it before it spoils. Little enough meat we'll taste this winter now."
    The woman nodded. She looked too tired to speak. On the floor at the far end of the stone-walled room,
    a dozen young children were sleeping on furs and an odd assortment of cushions and old clothes. Some
    of them raised their heads curiously as the men came in and carefully shut out the drafts, but none of
    them cried out. They had all seen too much in the past two weeks.
    The woman asked, "Was anything saved?"
    "Half a dozen houses at the edge of Greyleaf Town. We'll be living four families to the house, but we won't freeze. There isn't a roof standing in the Naderling Forest, though."
    The woman shut her eyes spasmodically and turned away. One of the men said to another, "Our
    grandsire is dead, Marilla. No, he wasn't caught by fire; he would take a pick with the rest on the fire lines, even though I begged him not; said I'd do his share and mine. But his heart gave out and he fell
    dead as he ate his supper."
    The woman, hardly more than a girl, began to cry