"He did okay," she said in a monotone.

"Okay? Well, aren't you proud?" She said nothing. "Well, how about you?" he asked. "Did you get to see our master's guests? Did you meet Turcaret?"

Emmy glanced up; her eyes met Jordan's. He looked down, squirmed in his chair. "Yes," said Emmy.

"He's pretty grand, isn't he? I hear his house is twice the size of Castor's. Mind, that would be twice the work, I expect."

"I—I don't like Turcaret," blurted Emmy.

Their father reared back, raising his eyebrows. "What? That's a pretty definite opinion to have for somebody you've barely met, especially one of your superiors. What brought that on?"

Emmy didn't answer immediately, hunkering down over her meal. Finally she said, "He got Castor to make me wear my old dress tomorrow."

"What dress?" asked their mother.

"The canary one."

"But you've outgrown that dress, dear."

"I told them that."

There was a brief silence. Jordan felt a familiar tension, and the clamoring need to defuse it. He cast about for something

funny to say, but his father was faster. "You still have it? I thought you gave it to Jordan as a hand-me-down!"

Everybody laughed except Emmy. She looked a bit sick, actually, and Jordan's own laugh died in embarrassed silence.

"Well, after dinner we can try to let it out a bit," said mother.

Emmy looked at her aghast. Then she pushed away from the table and ran for the stairs.

"Emmy!" thundered their father, then more weakly, "come back."

They sat in silence for a few moments, then mother got up. "I'll talk to her," she said quietly, and padded up the stairs after Emmy.

Jordan and his father completed their meal in silence.

After dinner Jordan took a walk to the spot where he planned to build his own house. He was heartsick. He strolled the rutted, red tracks that joined the houses of the village, but it only took a few minutes to cover them all. He stopped to talk to a few people, family and friends who sat in the lazing sun and talked while their hands busied with spinning and mending. He was distracted, however, and soon resumed walking again. The Penners were fixing their roof, along with a mob of relatives. Jordan avoided them; they would just want his advice.

This village was his home, always and forever. Jordan enjoyed hearing tales of the outside world, and often dreamed of a life as an traveller. But outside the village waited the forest.

The forest appeared in the fading daylight as a ragged swath of green-black across the eastern horizon, exhaling its hostility across the reach of fields and air to Jordan. The forest was a domain of the Winds, and of the morphs that served them. Unlike the morphs, the true Winds had no form, but only a monstrous passion sufficient to animate dead moss and clay. They drove the wall of trees forward like a tidal wave, slowed to imperceptibility by some low cunning, but just as unstoppable. The previous summer, Jacob Walker had gone to the back of his fields to cull some of the young birch trees that had invaded his fields. His son had seen the morphs take him, and the way Jordan heard it, the trees themselves had moved at the morphs' command. Walker's farm was abandoned now, saplings spiking up here and there in the field, the crops turned to woodsage and fireweed, poison ivy and thistle. The Walker family now lived in another village, and did odd jobs.

Some things could not be avoided, or confronted. There must have been a time, Jordan felt, when he was unaware of the pressure of the sky on him, of the eyes of conscious nature watching from the underbrush. He vaguely remembered running carelessly through the woods when he was very young. But he was swiftly educated out of that. Once, too, he had run and laughed in the corridors of the manor, but he knew now that however familiar Castor might be, he was something different than Jordan and his people, hence in his own way a force of nature like the Winds. To be obeyed, his anger sidestepped if possible, else accommodated. Jordan could not become that.

Better not to think about it. His pace had increased as his thoughts drifted back to the manor, and the visiting Lord. Jordan slowed his pace, consciously unclenched his fists. From here, at the edge of the village, he could see the roof of his parents' house over those of the neighbors. Everything looked peaceful in the goldening glow of evening. He had come to a fence, past which a row of haystacks squatted, surfaces alive with attendant grasshoppers, wise blinking birds sitting on their peaks. He sat down on the stile, and propped his chin on his hands.

Across the road was a expanse of unruly brush, interspersed with trees. It was far from the forest. Jordan had decided when he was ten years old that he would build his house here. Although he had yet to buy the land, only just having begun to earn a wage, he felt the place was already his. Lately he had begun drawing up plans for the building. Father had laughed when he saw them. "That's a bit optimistic, isn't it?" he'd said. "Better start small."

Jordan had kept the plans as they were. His house would have a big workshop where he could do stonework. Why limit himself to repair work? People would need detailing for new buildings. He could do that. So he needed that extra space, regardless of what Father said.

Evening canted slowly over the village, lighting and deepening the roofs as planes and parallelograms of russet and amber. There came a time when there were shadows, and Jordan knew this was when he should go back. The hammering from the Penners' had stopped, and now only a few lazy laughs drifted in, mixed with the barking of dogs called on to herd the goats back home.

Jordan heard a sound behind him. It was only a blackbird taking off, but he realized it too late to stop a cold flush of adrenaline. He stood up, brushing dust off the backs of his pants, and glanced at the dark line of the forest. Yes, go back.

He did feel better now, his mind calmed of any bad thoughts. His father was sitting in the doorway of the cottage, whittling, as he did sometimes. Yawning, Jordan bade him good night; his father barely glanced up, only grunting acknowledgment. Jordan saw no sign of his mother or sister inside. He padded up to the attic and threw himself on his narrow bed.

As he drifted off, he saw and heard flashes reminiscent of his nightmare last night. Every one would jolt him awake again, a little pulse of fear setting him to roll over or hug the blankets tighter about himself. He imagined something creeping in through the little window and whispering in his ear. He was sure someone had touched his face while he slept last night, and that this had set the nightmares off. What if it had been a morph?

Jordan sat up, blinking in the total darkness. It had not been a Wind. It was a person, someone unfamiliar whom he had seen, sometime today. Turcaret? He couldn't remember.

He had been so absorbed in battling memory that he hadn't noticed the sounds coming from downstairs. Now Jordan could plainly hear his father and his sister arguing, it sounded like in the back room.

"I won't go back there," she said.

"What are you saying?" said their father. "What will you do instead? There is nothing else, nowhere else to go. Don't be silly."

"I won't."

"Emmy."

"He's an evil man, and he makes Castor evil whenever he comes. They were... they were looking at me. I won't wear this."

"Castor commanded it. He's our employer, Emmy. We owe everything we have to him. How can you be so ungrateful? If it weren't for him, where would we be? Huddling in the forest with the windlorn."

"You'd let him... you would..." She was in tears.

Father's voice became softer, placating. "Emmy, nothing is going to happen. We have to trust Castor. We have no choice."