"Can you do the routine with torches and knives?" Valentine asked him.

Zalzan Kavol brightened instantly. "Of course. And do you see those pins there?" He pointed to some huge wooden clubs, nearly four feet long, stowed in a rack near the mast. "Last night Erfon and I practiced with those, when everyone slept. If your admiral has no objections, we’ll use them tonight."

"Those? How can you juggle anything so long?"

"Get me the admiral’s permission, my lord, and tonight I’ll show you!"

All afternoon the troupe rehearsed in a large vacant chamber down in the hold. It was the first time they had done such a thing since Ilirivoyne, what seemed like half a lifetime ago. But, using the improvised array of objects that the Skandars had quietly gathered, they fell swiftly into the rhythm of it.

Valentine, watching, felt a warm glow at the sight of them — Sleet and Carabella furiously passing clubs back and forth, Zalzan Kavol and Rovorn and Erfon devising intricate new patterns of interchange to replace those that had been destroyed with the death of their three brothers. For a moment it was like the innocent old times in Falkynkip or Dulorn, when nothing mattered except getting hired on at the festival or the circus, and the only challenge life offered was the one of keeping hand and eye coordinated. There was no going back to those days. Now that they had been swept up into high intrigue, the making and unmaking of Powers, none of them would ever be as they had been before. These five had dined with the Lady, had shared lodgings with the Coronal, were sailing onward toward a rendezvous with the Pontifex; they were already a part of history, even if Valentine’s campaign came to nothing. Yet here they were juggling again as though juggling were all there was in life.

It had taken many days to bring his people together at Inner Temple. Valentine had imagined that the Lady or her hierarchs had merely to close their eyes and they could reach any mind on Majipoor, but it was not that simple; communication was imprecise and limited. They had located the Skandars first, in the outermost terrace. Shanamir had reached Second Cliff and in his youthful guileless way was advancing swiftly inward; Sleet, neither youthful nor guileless, had likewise wangled advancement to Second Cliff, and so had Vinorkis; Carabella was just behind them, at the Terrace of Mirrors, but through an error she was sought elsewhere at first; finding Khun and Lisamon Hultin had been no great task, since they were so much unlike all other pilgrims in appearance, but Gorzval’s three former crewmen, Pandelon, Cordeine, and Thesme, had vanished into the population of the island as though they were invisible, so that Valentine would have had to abandon them had they not turned up at the last moment. Hardest of all to track down was Autifon Deliamber. The Isle had many Vroons, some of them as diminutive as the little wizard, and all efforts at tracing him led to mistakes of identity. With the fleet ready to sail, Deliamber had still been unfound, but on the eve of departure, Valentine desperately torn between the need to move onward and the unwillingness to part from his most useful counselor, the Vroon appeared at Numinor, offering no explanations of where he had been or how he had crossed the Isle undetected. So all were united, those who had survived the long trek from Pidruid.

On Castle Mount, Valentine knew, Lord Valentine had had his own ring of intimates, whose faces and names now had been restored to his knowledge, princes and courtiers and officials close to him since childhood, Elidath, Stasilaine, Tunigorn, the dearest comrades he had; and yet, though he still felt loyalty to those people, they had become terribly distant from his soul, and his random assortment of companions acquired during his time of wanderings now stood nearest to him. He wondered how it would be when he returned to Castle Mount and had to reconcile one group with the other.

On one score, at least, he had reassured himself out of his newly regained memories. No wife awaited him at the Castle, nor intended bride, nor even an important lover to contest Carabella’s place at his side. As prince and as young Coronal he had lived a carefree and unattached life, the Divine be thanked. It would be difficult enough, imposing on the court the notion that the Coronal’s beloved was a commoner, a woman of the lowland cities, a wandering juggler; but it would be altogether impossible if his heart had already been given, and now he were to claim to have given it again.

"Valentine!" Carabella called.

Her voice broke him free of reverie. He looked toward her and she giggled and tossed him a club. He caught it as they had taught him so long ago, between thumb and fingers with the club’s head pointing at an angle. An instant later came a second one from Sleet, and then a third from Carabella. He laughed and sent the clubs whirling above his head in the old familiar pattern, throw and throw and catch, and Carabella clapped her hands and sent another one his way. It was good to be juggling again. Lord Valentine — a superb athlete, quick of eye and skilled at many games, though hampered somewhat by a slight limp from an old riding injury — had not known juggling. Juggling was the art of the simpler Valentine. Aboard this ship, wearing now the aura of authority that had come upon him by his mother’s healing of his mind, Valentine had felt his companions holding him at arm’s length, try as they might to regard him as the old Valentine of the Zimroel days. So it gave him special pleasure to have Carabella so irreverently fling a club his way.

And it gave him pleasure, too, to be handling the clubs — even when he dropped one, and, stooping for it, was hit on the head by another, provoking a snort of contempt out of Zalzan Kavol.

"Do that tonight," the Skandar called, "and you’ll forfeit your wine for a week!"

"Have no fear," Valentine retorted. "I drop the clubs now only for practice in recovering them. You’ll see no such blunders this evening."

Nor were there any. The ship’s entire company gathered at sundown on the deck for the entertainment. To one side, Asenhart and his officers occupied a platform where they would have the best view; but when the admiral beckoned to Valentine, offering him the chair of honor, he declined with a smile. Asenhart looked puzzled at that, but his expression was not nearly so strained as it became a few moments later, when Shanamir and Vinorkis and Lisamon Hultin began to pound on drums and tootle on coilpipes, and the jugglers emerged from a hatch in a gleeful sprint, and as they began to perform their wonders the figure of Lord Valentine the Coronal appeared among them, blithely hurling clubs and dishes and pieces of fruit like any vulgar entertainer.

—2—

IF ADMIRAL ASENHART had had his way, there would have been a grand celebration in Stoien to mark Valentine’s arrival, something at least as splendid as the festival held in Pidruid at the time of the visit of the false Coronal. But Valentine, as soon as he got word of Asenhart’s plan, put a stop to it. He was not yet ready to claim the throne, to make public accusations against the individual who called himself Lord Valentine, or to ask for any sort of homage from the citizenry at large. "Until I have the support of the Pontifex," Valentine told Asenhart sternly, "I mean to move quietly and gather strength without attracting attention. There will be no festivals for me in Stoien."

So it was that the Lady Thiin made a relatively inconspicuous landfall at that great port at the southwestern tip of Alhanroel. Even though there were seven ships in the fleet — and ships of the Lady, though common enough in the harbor at Stoien, did not generally arrive in such numbers — they came in quietly, flying no fancy banners. The port officials asked few questions: obviously they traveled on the business of the Lady of the Isle, and her doings were beyond the purview of customs-clerks.