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was no easy-come, easy-go light of love. She favored few males. He had been honored when she asked him into her apartment, delighted that she seemed to find his conversation engaging, and so surprised—and awed—when she invited him into her bed that he had been almost unable to perform.
    Only almost. He suspected Mwynwen could, if she desired, stimulate a corpse. He had staggered home in the dawn and eagerly given her image to his door, the scent of her, the look of her, the essence of her magic, although he had never expected that she would come. And she never had come to him before, although they continued to be lovers.
    "You were so angry," she said, holding out a hand.
    He took her hand, his feelings split in two. He was thrilled that Mwynwen was so attuned to him that she had felt his anger across the Elfhame, for Mwynwen, a Healer, unlike most of the inhabitants of Llachar Lle, lived in a separate manor in the silver woods beyond the palace. At the same time her mention of his anger renewed it. Irritation, pique over the task set him, but more than that, a smoldering rage that he should be accounted of so little worth as to be set to be a puling infant's nursery-guard leapt up in him again, but he could not bear to be petty in Mwynwen's eyes and held his tongue.
    "You are angry again," she said, great eyes growing greater with anxiety, "with me?"
    "No! Not with you. Not ever with you," Denoriel said.
    She folded her hand around his and drew him closer. "Then at whom?"
    "Not whom either," he replied, beginning to smile a little. "One cannot be angry at a FarSeer. What they See is no blame to them. They do not make the future, only say what it might be."
    "Ah!" Mwynwen seated herself again, tugging lightly on Denoriel's hand so that he sat down beside her. "You did not like the future a FarSeer predicted for you? But who had ordered such a Seeing?"
    "Not for me . . . well, yes, of course for me, but it was not my future that was foretold. It was Aleneil—"
    Mwynwen frowned. "I do not believe Aleneil would ever See what was not good for you."
    "Oh, good . . . bad . . ." He wrinkled his nose. "It was cursed undignified , that's what it was."
    "Undignified?" Mwynwen echoed, her perfectly arched brows rising until they nearly touched her gleaming black hair. She tightened her grip on his hand. "You are very young, my Denoriel, to grow so angry over your dignity."
    "I am a warrior," Denoriel said, lifting his head proudly. "I am one of Koronos's best, and when they were brought to bay, I have fought men with steel blades and steel poniards without weakening. Yet my sister and her teachers tell me I am fated to be a—" he hesitated, then confessed it, flushing "—a nursemaid." Not even a proper Guardian to one of our own. . . .  
    "To whom?" Mwynwen asked, not scornful but brightly interested.
    He snorted. "I do not know! A red-haired babe! Some king's get, so they say!"
    Mwynwen frowned. "I cannot recall any babe being born in any Seleighe domain. An Unseleighe—"
    He shook his head. "No, a mortal. Some king's get, in the mortal realms, and they cannot even tell me which." His lip curled. "The mortals breed apace, and the kings are worst of all. How am I to tell which child it is supposed to be, even?"
    But Mwynwen pursed her lips and looked very sober indeed. "Mortal? Then mayhap what you said about not weakening when you fought those who brandished steel weapons was why you were chosen. You know, Denoriel, that only a few of us can bear the mortal world with their iron fireplaces and iron pots and iron nails in so many chairs, even iron belts about their bodies . . ."
    She shuddered and raised her free hand to look at it. Still, so many, many years later there were faint white scars where an iron girdle had burned her fingers when she tried to pull it away from a wound. Before she could find silk enough to shield herself so she could undo the belt, it had been too late. Arthur had not died, but he