Carabella cried out in terror.

Her eyes opened, but she saw nothing — the sign of a sending. A shudder went rippling the length of her body. She trembled and turned to him, still asleep, still dreaming, and he held her while she whimpered and moaned, giving her dream-service, dream-comfort, protecting her against the darkness of the spirit by the strength of his arms, and at last the fury of her dream ran its course and she relaxed, limp, sweat-soaked, against his chest.

She lay still for some moments, until Valentine thought she had fallen peacefully asleep. No. She was awake, but motionless, as if contemplating her dream, confronting it, trying to carry it upward into the realm of wakefulness. Suddenly she sat upright and gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes were wild and glassy.

"My lord!" she whispered. She backed away from him, scuttling across the bed in a strange crablike crawl, holding one arm folded above her breasts and the other as a kind of shield across her face. Her lips were quivering. Valentine reached for her, but she pulled away in horror and threw herself to the rough wooden floor, where she crouched in an eerie huddle, folded inward on herself as if trying to conceal her nakedness.

"Carabella?" he said, bewildered.

She looked up at him. "Lord— lord— please— let me be, lord—"

And bowed again, and made the starburst with her fingers, the two-handed gesture of obeisance that one makes only when one comes before the Coronal.

—15—

WONDERING WHETHER IT MIGHT BE he and not she that had been dreaming, and the dream still going on, Valentine rose, found a robe for Carabella to wear, put on one of his own garments. Still she crouched apart from him, stunned and shattered. When he tried to comfort her she pulled away, huddling still deeper into herself.

"What is it?" he asked. "What happened, Carabella?"

"I dreamed— I dreamed that you were—" She faltered. "So real, so terrible—"

"Tell me. I’ll speak your dream for you, if I can."

"It needs no speaking. It speaks of itself." She made the starburst sign at him again. In a cold, low, inflectionless voice she said, "I dreamed that you were the true Coronal Lord Valentine, that had been robbed of your power and all your memory, and set into another’s body, and turned loose near Pidruid to roam and live an idle life while someone else ruled in your stead."

Valentine felt himself at the edge of a great abyss, and the ground crumbling beneath his feet.

"Was this a sending?" he asked.

"It was a sending. I know not from whom, Lady or King, but it was no dream of mine, it was something that was placed in my mind from outside. I saw you, lord—"

"Stop calling me that."

" — atop Castle Mount, and your face was the face of the other Lord Valentine, the dark-haired one we juggled for, and then you came down from the Mount to travel on the grand processional in all the lands, and while you were in the south, in my own city of Til-omon it was, they gave you a drug and seized you in your sleep and changed you into this body and cast you out, and no one was the wiser that you had been magicked out of your royal powers. And I have touched you, lord, and shared your bed, and been familiar with you in a thousand ways, and how will I be forgiven, lord?"

"Carabella?"

She cowered and trembled.

"Look up, Carabella. Look at me."

She shook her head. He knelt before her, and touched his hand to her chin. She shuddered as though he had marked her with acid. Her muscles were rigid. He touched her again.

"Raise your head," he said gently. "Look at me."

She looked up, slowly, timidly, the way one might look into the face of the sun, fearing the brightness.

He said, "I am Valentine the juggler and nothing more."

"No, lord."

"The Coronal is a dark-haired man, and my hair is golden."

"I beg you, lord, let me be. You frighten me."

"A wandering juggler frightens you?"

"It is not who you are that frightens me. The person you are is a friend I have come to love. It is who you have been, lord. You have stood beside the Pontifex and tasted the royal wine. You have walked in the highest rooms of Castle Mount. You have known the fullest power of the world. It was a true dream, lord, it was as clear and real as anything I have ever seen, a sending beyond doubt, not to be questioned. And you are rightful Coronal, and I have touched your body and you have touched mine, and it is sacrilege a thousand times over for an ordinary woman like me to approach a Coronal so closely. And I will die for it."

Valentine smiled. "If I was ever Coronal, love, it was in another body, and there’s nothing holy about the one you embraced tonight. But I was never Coronal."

Her gaze rested squarely on him. Her tone was less quavering as she said, "You remember nothing of your life before Pidruid. You were unable to tell me your father’s name, and you told me of your childhood in Ni-moya and didn’t believe it yourself, and you guessed at a name for your mother. Is this not true?"

Valentine nodded.

"And Shanamir has told me you had much money in your purse, but had no idea what any of it was worth, and tried to pay a sausage-man with a fifty-royal piece. True?"

He nodded again.

"As though you had lived all your life at court, perhaps, and never handled money? You know so little, Valentine! You have to be taught, like a child."

"Something has happened to my memory, yes. But does that make me Coronal?"

"The way you juggle, so naturally, as though all skills are yours if you want them — the way you move, the way you hold yourself, the radiance that comes from you, the sense you give everyone that you were born to hold power—"

"Do I give that?"

"We have talked of little else, since you came among us. That you must be a fallen prince, some exiled duke perhaps. But then my dream — it leaves no doubt, lord—"

Her face was white with strain. For a moment she had overcome her awe, but only for a moment, and now she trembled again. And the awe was contagious, it seemed, for Valentine himself began to feel fear, a coldness of the skin. Was there truth in any of this? Was he an anointed Coronal that had touched hands with Tyeveras in the heart of the Labyrinth and at the summit of Castle Mount?

He heard the voice of the dream-speaker Tisana. You have fallen from a high place, and now you must begin to climb back to it, she had said. Impossible. Unthinkable. Nevertheless, Lord Valentine, that ascent awaits you, and it is not I who lays it on you. Unreal. Impossible. And yet his dreams, that brother who would have slain him, and whom he had slain instead, and those Coronals and Pontifexes moving through the chambers of his soul, and all the rest. Could it be? Impossible. Impossible.

He said, "You mustn’t fear me, Carabella."

She shivered. He reached for her and she shied away, crying, "No! Don’t touch me! My lord—"

Tenderly he said, "Even if I was once Coronal — and how strange and foolish that sounds to me — even if, Carabella, I am Coronal no longer, I am not in any anointed body, and what has taken place between us is no sacrilege. I am Valentine the juggler now, whoever I may have been in a former life."

"You don’t understand, lord."

"I understand that a Coronal is a man like any other, only he bears more responsibilities than others, but there is nothing magical about him and nothing to fear except his power, and I have none of that. If ever I had."

"No," she said. "A Coronal is touched by the highest grace, and it never goes from him."

"Anyone can be Coronal, given the right training and the right cast of mind. One isn’t bred for it. Coronals have come from every district of Majipoor, every level of society."