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work. So he came with Lared into the forest, searching for mushrooms before the first snow killed them all. And Jason had an eye for herbs, too, asking which was which yet knowing more of the answers than Lared, who had thought he knew them all.
    “Are the herbs the same as here, where you come from?” Lared asked him one day.
    Haltingly, Jason answered, “All worlds come are same ships from. Are come.”
    “From the same ships.”
    “Yes.”
    Lared had been puzzling out coincidences. “The world of Worthing, that the book of the Finding of the Stars talks about. Have you ever lived there?”
    Jason smiled as if the question caused him secret pleasure and secret pain; “Seeing it. But live there, no.”
    “Does this world called Worthing have something to do with the name of God?”
    Jason did not answer. Instead he pointed at a flower. “Did you eat this ever?”
    “It's poisonous.”
    “Flower be—is poisonous.” Jason broke the stem at the ground, and tossed the Flower far away. Then he freed the soil around the root and brought it up. It was almost perfectly round and black. “For winter eating.” He broke it open it was speckled black inside. “Water hot,” he said, struggling for the word.
    “Boil it?”
    “Yes. What is going up?”
    “Steam.”
    “Yes. Drinking steam from this, it makes children.” Jason grinned as he said it, to show he didn't believe that particular cure.
    They walked on. Lared found a patch of safe mushrooms, and they filled their bag. Lared kept up a constant chatter, Jason answering as he could. They came to the boggy ground near the edge of the swamp, and Lared showed Jason how to use his quarterstaff to vault the fingers and arms of water. By the end of the morning, Jason and Lared were running madly at the water, plunging in the staves, and overleaping the stream without getting wet; Except once, when Jason set the staff too deeply, and it didn't come away when he reached the other bank. Jason seemed at a loss for words, as he sat there covered with mud. Lared taught him some of the more colorful words of the language, and Jason laughed.
    “Some things is the same between languages,” he said.
    Lared insisted, then, that Jason teach him the words he used. By the time they got home, they were both thoroughly bilingual in cursing.
     
    The cry of “Boat down river!” came late in the day, at the time when travelers would often put to shore and spend the night in a friendly village. So Father and Mother and Lared and Sala all ran to the dock to watch the coming boat. To their surprise it was a raft, though the logging season wasn't till the breakup of ice in the spring. And what seemed a large cookfire was much greater—one end of the raft itself was afire, right down to the waterline.
    “There's a man aboard!” shouted someone, and the villagers at once put out in their rowboats. Lared was in a boat with Father, whose strong arms brought them to the raft before any of the others. The man was lying atop a pile of wood, surrounded by flame. Lared pulled himself across the short distance between boat and raft, thinking to pull the man from the boat before the fire reached him. But, standing aboard the raft, Lared saw that the fire had already reached him, that it was burning his legs; Lared smelled the flesh, the smell he knew from Clany's death. Lared staggered back to the edge of the raft, reached out and pulled the boat near enough to get in.
    “He's dead,” Lared said. Then the stench and the fear of having been aboard the flaming raft and the memory of flames rising from the man's naked flesh had Lared leaning over the edge of the boat, casting up his guts. Father said nothing. He's ashamed of me, Lared thought. He looked up from the water. Father had taken his hands from the oars and turned to signal the others to go back. Lared saw his face, how grim he looked. Is he ashamed of me, for being so afraid? Or does he think of me at all? Then Lared looked at the raft,