She also told about her father. "He knows an awful lot. He's read hundreds of books, some of them ten times, I guess, and thought about them all. He knows a lot about the ylver. Some people at home don't like them very much; some don't like them at all. But my father says ylver are just people with tilty eyes and pointy ears. Some of them can't even do magic, he says. And they don't live forever; they just stay young a long time. He says we're lucky they're here. For every person in the kingdom who died during the war, he says probably three have been saved because we don't fight our neighbors anymore."

Varia didn't reply. She was thinking it would be better if there weren't wars at all.

"What was it like growing up a Sister?" Hermiss prompted.

"Different than you told about. We had duties."

"Like what?"

"Whatever work they trained you for, assigned you to. Making jewelry, all kinds of ceramics, taking care of babies, working in the dining room… I was best in the kitchen. I got to be a very good cook."

"Really?" Pause. "Did you, you know-have to make babies?" Hermiss paused, then added, "I've heard…" and trailed off.

"After I grew up, I was sent to Farside to marry a man the Sisterhood wanted me to have babies with."

"Farside!?"

"Farside."

"What happened to him?"

Varia began to cry, quietly as usual. Hermiss could hear something though, and peered intently at her in the seepage of lantern light. "Are-you crying, Varia?"

Varia nodded, fighting now to keep silent.

"Oh Varia! I'm so sorry!" Hermiss too began to cry, and put her arms around her. "I shouldn't have asked. I shouldn't. I've been terrible to you!"

The girl tried to cry quietly, too, but began to sob and hiccup, and now it was Varia doing the comforting, hugging her, patting her shoulder. "It's all right, Hermy, it's all right. You couldn't know. You couldn't know."

Hermiss quieted and they let each other go. After a bit, Varia could see the girl's aura smoothen, softening in sleep, but she herself was wide awake now, listening to the rain drum on the roof. "God, Curtis," she whispered drily, "how I wish! How I wish!"

She became aware of movement then, as if someone had been outside the stall and was moving away. Rolling to her knees, she got up and peered out. Cyncaidh was at the hayloft ladder, a hand on a riser. Realizing he'd been seen, he stopped, stood waiting. Varia walked to whispering distance.

"It's all right," she murmured. "The trouble in the potroom got to her, that's all. And the ale. She's fine now. Sleeping."

Cyncaidh stared at her, his eyes dark in the lantern light, and she realized he hadn't just come down to investigate Hermiss's sobbing. His aura was thick with emotions: embarrassment, grief… something else.

"You were listening," she said.

He nodded.

"From the beginning."

"From when Hermiss said something about killing vermin. Then she asked what you did when the man tried to kiss you. I'd come down to hear your version of what happened in the potroom, so I stayed where I was and listened. And found out. Then-I stayed and heard the rest of it."

She stared long at Cyncaidh and his aura. "If you're to be my jailer," she said at last, "I suppose it's best you know. And I could never have told you directly."

He nodded, stood silent for a moment. "Good night Varia," he said quietly, and reaching, almost touched her face, then turned and climbed the ladder.

She watched him disappear, heard Caerith's voice question softly and Cyncaidh's reply. Then she turned and went back to the box stall, settling onto her blanket again.

To stare blankly into the darkness above her, her mind's eye seeing Cyncaidh's aura as it had been by the ladder. What am I going to do? she asked herself. What in hell am I going to do now? For she realized what another part of Cyncaidh's emotional mix was. She should have seen it sooner, she realized. It had been there all along.

My god, she thought numbly, he loves me! He's not just attracted to me physically, though that's part of it. And he's not attracted because I'm a pretty woman in a trap. He actually loves me!

The rain continued to beat. She willed it to beat forever-beat until it washed the world away; that part of it at least. Then shook her head at what seemed weakness. Just keep us here long enough for me to figure out what to do, she corrected. I'll settle for that.

As if in answer, thunders rumbled, then boomed; another convection cell was moving in. "That's the way," she muttered, and closed her eyes, inviting sleep.

I'm his prisoner, she whispered in her mind, and he loves me. He'll never help me get back to a gate. Not that he ever said he would. I'll have to get there on my own or not at all.

14: A Different Land

" ^ "

Varia awoke in the night needing to relieve herself. Rain still drummed on the roof, and she was reluctant to run sixty yards through it to the latrine; her dry clothes would get soaked. She decided instead to duck out the back door, wearing only her rain cape, and use the wide overhang of the shelter where the packhorses were. They wouldn't mind, and it was only seven or eight yards away.

By the time she got back, she had a plan.

She next awoke to Caerith knocking on the outside of the box stall. Rain still fell, but now it only muttered on the shingles, barely audible. Breakfast was far better than supper, and Varia wondered what Cyncaidh had said to the innkeeper, the night before. There was oatmeal without lumps, crisp side pork, cheese, bread and butter and buttermilk. By the time they finished eating, the rain had stopped. Outside, the sun shone through a broad gap in the clouds.

The soldiers were not energetic this morning, but Cyncaidh pushed them, and in half an hour the pack string was loaded, ready for the road again. Varia was ready before them, tight with nerves and purpose, keeping mostly out of sight, not wanting Cyncaidh to note the tension in her aura.

Her plan, such as it was, included only an overall purpose, a general strategy, and a first step. Mostly it was unknowns and assumptions. When you're desperate enough, she told herself, and the alternatives are unacceptable, you grab whatever opportunity you find, and hope something good happens. The odds, it seemed to her, were at least as good as she'd faced when she'd stepped out the door of the Tiger barracks a few weeks earlier, and that had worked out. More or less. To a degree.

Then Cyncaidh called to fall in and mount up. Varia and Hermiss led their horses from the stable and swung into their saddles, Varia barefoot, her still-wet boots tied to saddle rings-to get them drier, she'd told Hermiss. Cyncaidh, after looking back over the column, shouted another order, and they rode out of the inn's muddy yard.

Until they'd left Fort Ternass, Varia had always been kept in the midst of the mounted men. But since Hermiss had been added to the party, they'd been put behind the remount string, in front of the pack string, with the horse handler the only soldier behind them, back at the very end. Apparently to give them privacy if they wished to talk.

It was Varia who opened the conversation now, telling stories about Washington County and the Macurdies, recounting the funnier things she could remember. Beginning with the time that seven-year-old Curtis had tried to ride a calf and gotten bucked off into a wheelbarrow full of mucky cow manure. He'd run howling and stinking into the house, tracking manure on the linoleum, which enraged his mother. With a grip developed by years of wringing laundry by hand, she'd taken him by the ear to the windmill. It was March, still given to freezing at night, and after stripping him, she'd immersed him in the icy water of the horse tank, which set him howling even louder, then scrubbed him with a gunny sack.