Know that? Like a child learning language, I echoed her final words, trying to pin meaning to them. Her kindness to me fascinated me, and I did long to immerse myself in her. To me, she seemed made of love and acceptance. I could let go of my boundaries, if she would allow me, and simply mingle what 1 had been with what she was. I would know no more, think no more, and fear no more.

Without my speaking, she seemed to know my mind. And that is what you would truly wish, little one? To stop being yourself, before you have even completed yourself? There is so much more you could grow to be.

To be, I echoed, and suddenly the simple words took force and I existed again. I knew a moment of full realization, as if I had surfaced from a very deep dive and taken a full deep, breath of air. Molly and Nettle, Dutiful and Hap, Patience and Thick, Chade and Kettricken, all of them came back to me in a wave of possibilities. Fear mingled wildly with hope as to what I could become through them.

Ah. I thought perhaps there was something more for you. Then you wish to go back?

Go back.

Where?

Buckkeep. Molly. Nettle. Friends.

I do not think the words had meanings for her. She was beyond all that, beyond the sorting of love into little individual persons or places. But I think my longing was what she could read.

Very well then. Back you go. Next time, be more careful. Better yet, do not let there be a next time. Not until you are ready to stay.

Very abruptly, I had a body. It sprawled face down in grass on a chill hillside. Somehow, I still gripped the two bags I had slung over my shoulder. They were on top of me. I closed my eyes. The grass was tickling my face and dust was in my nose. I breathed in the intricacy of earth and grass, sheep and manure, and my amazement at their network stole all my thoughts. I think I slept.

It was dawn when next I came awake. I was shaking with cold, despite the blanketed scrolls on top of me. I was stiff and my skin was wet with dew. I sat up with a groan, and the world spun lazily around me until I lay back down again. The sheep that lifted their heads in surprise to see me stir were fat with wool. I got to my hands and knees and then tottered upright, staring around me like a new foal as I tried to make the ends of my life meet. I took deep slow breaths, but felt little better. I decided that food and a real bed would put me right, and that I'd find that at Buckkeep Castle.

I shouldered one sack and dragged the other. At least, such was my intention. I went three steps and down I went. I felt, if anything, worse than when I had first emerged from the stones. Prilkop was right, I decided grudgingly, and wondered uneasily how long it would be before I dared make a return trip through the portals. But I had more immediate problems to solve.

I groped out with the Skill. I could barely focus enough to wield it, and when I found Thick's music and then Thick, he was already in contact with Dutiful and Chade. I tried to break in and could not. Their thoughts rattled against mine. They did not seem to be passing information, but attempting some Skill-exercise. I became aware of Nettle, floating like a faint perfume. She caught at their circle, almost held, then wafted away again. In the disappointed silence that followed her failed attempt, I found a place for my faint Skilling-

Thick. I'm not well. Can you come to meet me at the Witness Stones?

Bring a pony, or even a donkey and cart. I'm not sure I could sit up to ride. I have two large sacks of scrolls.

I felt a wordless blast of amazement from all of them. And then, a pelting of questions: Where are you?

Where have you been?

Are you hurt? Were you attacked by something?

Held prisoner?

I just came through the stones. I'm weak. Sick. Prilkop said, don't use the stones too often. And then I let it go, feeling wretchedly nauseous and dizzy. I lay down on my side in the grass. The morning was cold, and I pulled one of the blanket sacks half over me and lay still, shivering.

They all came. I heard sounds and opened my eyes and found myself looking at Nettle's shoes and riding skirt. A healer annoyed me by feeling me all over for broken bones and peering into my eyes. He asked if I had been attacked. I managed to shake my head. Chade said, 'Ask him where he has been for the last month? We have been expecting these scrolls since before we arrived back at Buckkeep.' I closed my eyes and held my tongue. Then the healer and his helper lifted me into the back of a cart. The bundles of scrolls were placed beside me. The cart lurched off down the tussocky hillside. Chade and Dutiful rode on one side of it, looking grave. Thick came behind on a stocky pony, managing it well enough. Nettle rode a mare, obviously one of Burrich's breeding. Several mounted guards followed, with the edgy look of men who had expected to confront at least a minor enemy and still had dwindling hopes of a skirmish. I had said little, fearing to say too much before ears that should not hear it.

My mind churned like a team stuck in mud. It dragged out the old legends of standing stones. Lovers fled angry parents into them, and returned a year or a decade later, to find all grievances forgotten. They were the gates to the land of the Pecksies, where a year might pass as a day. Or a day as a year. I recalled, hazily, my time in the starry blackness. How much time had passed? A few weeks? Chade had mentioned a month. Obviously enough time had passed that they had returned to Buckkeep from Mayle. For here they were. I smiled faintly at that 'swift' leap of logic.

When we reached Buckkeep, Chadc led off the guards with the trove of scrolls. The Prince took my hand and thanked me for a job well done, as if I were any guardsman who had completed a difficult task at risk to himself. Hand to hand, he pushed his Skilling into my mind. I could barely bear him. Come to see you soon. Rest now.

Nettle and Thick followed him as he strode away and I was assisted into the infirmary where I was very content to lie still and think of nothing. I believe that several days passed- It was hard to keep track of things like time. The headaches and dizziness passed, but the vagueness lingered. I had been somewhere and experienced something vast and I knew that, but could not find any words for it, even to explain it to myself. It was so large and foreign an event that it challenged all the meaning and order that I gave to the rest of my life. Small things stole my attention: the dance of motes in a beam of sunlight, the twisted wool woven to form my blanket, the grain of the wood in the frame of my bed. It wasn't that I could not Skill; it was more that I could not see the point of it, nor gather the energy and focus to do it.

They fed me well and let me rest. Visitors came and went and left almost no impression on me. Once I opened my eyes to see Lacey looking down on me with stern disapproval. I closed them. The healer could do nothing for me and often loudly observed in my vicinity that he thought I was a lazy malingerer. They brought an old, old woman to see me. After our eyes met, she nodded vigorously and said, 'Oh, yes, he has that Pecksie-nibbled look to him. The Pecksies took him underground and fed on him. It's known they have a hole up there, near the Witness Stones. They'll take a new lamb or a child, or even a strong man if he's in his cups when he wanders about up there.' She nodded sagely and advised, 'Give him mint tea and cook his meat with garlic until he reeks of it. They can't abide that, and they'll soon enough let him go. When his nails have grown long enough to be cut, and he cuts them, that'll set him free.'

And so they fed me a meal of garlicky mutton with mint tea, and then pronounced me cured and turned me out of the infirmary. Riddle was waiting for me. He told me that I looked like a mooncalf. He took me to the steams, crowded with noisy guardsmen laughing far too loudly, and then in the guardsman's act of ultimate purification, took me to the complete chaos of the guards' tables and effortlessly persuaded me to drink ale with him until I had to stagger outside and vomit. The level of shouted conversation and laughter made me feel oddly alone. One young guardsman asked me six times where I had been, and finally I simply said, 'I got lost coming back,' which made me the cleverest fellow at the table for nearly an hour. If he had expected it to shake loose my tale from me, it failed- Yet, oddly enough, I felt better, as if my body's violent protest over the mistreatment had persuaded me that, yes, I was human and had to make allowances for it. I woke the next day in the barracks, stinking and sweaty, and went back to the steams. I scraped my fouled beard from my face and scrubbed myself with salt and then washed all over with cold water. I dressed in a fresh guard's uniform, for my trunk had returned with the rest of the quest's company and gear, and then ate a very simple and small breakfast of porridge in the crowded and noisy guardroom. Just outside the door of the guards' mess, the kitchen rattled and clanged as if a battle were going on there, with whole companies of kitchen help attacking their tasks.