Dalamar Nightson turned his back on the glades, on the stag and the bluebird's song, and followed the shadow.

Dalamar climbed up rock-strewn paths, around washed-out paths, and broad oak trees, and over boulders that surely giants had wedged between the fat oaks. The stout boots he wore, those that had served him well in rough ruins, might as well have been a lord's velvet slippers. His ankles turned on small rocks in the path; he slipped on scree and slid backward, cursing the distance lost. He bled from cuts, and he ached from bruises. Always, he got up again.

The birds who flitted in this northern wood-crows and rooks mostly-had raucous voices, and they followed him like a mocking mob as he climbed. He looked around, trying to see the leading shadow, that swift streak of darkness. Nothing. He looked straight ahead, attending only a little to his peripheral vision, hoping to catch the glimpse. He did not, but he refused to let himself consider turning back. He had never walked an easy path and had never chosen the straight road, the even ground. It made no sense to do that now. The wind dropped, falling away as though it had no mind to lead him farther. Sweat rolled ceaselessly down his face and itched between his shoulders.

He went on, muscles aching, heart thudding hard in his chest, and the pulse in his neck hammering. For a time he went to the rhythm of a prayer, one that began as a request for strength from the Dark Son, from Nuitari of the Night. Soon he had no strength or mind to frame his prayer in words. Soon he let only the hammering of his heart act as his plea. Climbing, slipping back, climbing again, he went on until at last he fell and lay still. His heart beat into the earth. His sweat stained the stones as he lay still on the hard road up.

When at last he stood, he saw a gentling of the path, a leveling of the way. He saw it as a man sees vindication. He put his back into the climb, shouldering forward against the rise, and he walked onto level ground. There he stood, panting and sweating before a large mossy-shouldered boulder upon which sat the dark haired woman, tapping her sapphire-eyed dagger against her knee.

Smiling, she said, "Where are you, Dalamar Nightson?"

He didn't answer. He could not. His throat closed up with sudden thirst, and his knees turned weak.

"Ah," she said, brushing a lock of raven hair from her forehead. She reached behind the boulder and lifted his pack. Rummaging through it as familiarly as though the contents were her own, she pulled out a leather flask and handed it to him. "You look like you need this."

He drank the wine, glaring at her. He drank, and all the smoky sweetness of the Silvanesti Forest in autumn drifted around him and through him as the first mists of the season drift through the aspenwood. The ache he felt then was not an ache of muscle, not a weariness of bone. What he felt was like the melting of ice, the cracking, the groaning. He closed his eyes, tears stung, and grief held tight to his throat. Tighter to his heart did he hold, and he forbade tears, forbade himself to show any sign of sorrow or weakness before this prankster, this sapphire-eyed woman.

"Yes," she said. "It's really all about control, Dalamar Nightson."

"What is?" he asked, wearily opening his eyes.

"Well, all of it." She pulled up her legs tight to her chest, wrapped her arms round her shins and rested her chin on her knees. "Control of yourself. You do that well, don't you? Control of your life-not a concept with which most elves have intimate understanding, I dare say-and, of course, control of the magic each time you embrace it."

Ah, magic, the forest and the paths that led to nowhere. "So, it has all been illusion," he said.

Her blue eyes shone suddenly bright. "The hill and the road up? Not at all. Do your legs feel like you've been walking through an illusion?"

They did not.

She sat up, sweeping her arms wide, embracing all the woodland around, the Forest of Wayreth. "All this is real, and all this is magic. The Master of the Tower is in control of this magic, but that doesn't mean you've lost control- which might be part of the problem."

And then she was gone, vanished, her mossy boulder showing no sign she'd ever been there. Gone, too, was the wine-flask from Dalamar's hand and his pack from the ground.

South into the glades went the wanderer, through meadows where butterflies danced on daises and ruby humming-birds floated over the sweet soft throats of honeysuckle. South into the sunlight, Dalamar walked beside streams where fish shone like bright silver and dragonflies the color of blue steel darted. When he walked through all the wonders of springtime, he came back to the boulder and the blue-eyed woman. He turned from her before she could speak, and he went away west into an endless purpling twilight. Stars hung low over the trees, and the three moons graced the darkling sky but never moved, not even a hand's width across the night. Owls woke in the oaks and bats flitted. A fox barked, another answered. A shadow darted across his path. He looked, and he again saw her, the trickster, the blue-eyed woman, smiling at him and sitting on her gray craggy boulder.

Magic and control. Someone else controlled the forest he wandered in; someone else knew where all the paths led to, and where they all led away from. Magic and control. Dalamar smiled a little.

She looked around, found his pack, and took out the leather wine-flask. He refused when she offered, but politely.

"I've had enough of Silvanesti, of any place outside here. For now." He did not smile, though he wanted to, and he chose his next words with care. "I am here, where I need to be."

"What makes you think that?" asked the dark-haired woman.

He sketched a bow, not so deep but respectful. "All the reports of my senses seem to lie, and yet my feet lead me always here, to this place. You said it yourself: the magic in this forest isn't mine to control; the way and the road belong to someone else. But if I cannot control the magic, I can control my response to it."

She looked at him, a long sapphire stare, and then she threw back her head, her laughter sailing up through the trees. In the next breath, the trees and the tall gray oaks receded all around, drawing back from Dalamar and the woman. Moving, they made no sound, and whatever birds or squirrels inhabited bough or nest made not the least protest. Withdrawing, the trees left a wide clear space-not a glade of waving grasses but a close-cropped sward through which a broad road passed. Six knights riding abreast might have passed comfortably on that road, though they would have had to pass round the boulder, the moss-cloaked stone. Above, the sky shone deeply blue, shading toward the end of the day.

His belly clenching with excitement, his skin tingling as it does when magic is being done, Dalamar looked around, trying to catch a glimpse of the Tower of High Sorcery. He saw nothing, not rising stone, not gated walls… nothing.

"Remember," said the woman, her voice soft as with distance.

Quickly, he ruined back to her. In the act of slipping from the stone, the woman vanished. As though mist had risen from the ground, the boulder shimmered behind a gray veil, and the air around it shivered. A man must blink; the eye does it, not the will. In the instant that he did, Dalamar felt all the world change around him, as though the forest folded itself in upon itself, collapsing and then suddenly springing whole and straight again.

The boulder was gone. No mark of it remained on the firmly packed earth of the road. In its place-and in the place of many trees!-rose great high walls of shining stone. Dalamar's heart leaped, and the blood raced through his veins, singing. He saw not one tower, a solitary monolith such as that at Daltigoth. He saw seven towers.