"He is very good, Your Highness," he said, turning to the king. "He's surprisingly quick and knows all the moves. His teacher must have known his business. If we'd been fighting instead of sparring, I would have been hard pressed, for then his great strength would have begun to count."

Later, in his chamber, the king ran for his privy counselor, a man whose role no others in the palace knew. And if any suspected, they kept careful silence. The man came at the king's call.

"Did you read the man that Ferenc brought to me for the guard?" Janos asked.

"Yes."

"What did you see in him? And was he telling the truth about a seeress?"

"He was truthful at all times, m'lord. I was limited in reading him because his native tongue is unfamiliar to me, but I assure you he was truthful. I believe he is unable to lie."

"You're joking!"

The counselor bowed slightly. "I never joke, Your Highness. There is that about him which makes me believe he is unable to lie."

"Amazing. That must truly be a handicap."

Sometimes you are almost discerning, the counselor thought to himself. And ordinarily I would agree with that reaction. I wish the swine held discourse with himself. I've never known anyone before who could stand fully conscious for several minutes and not talk to himself within his mind. And it isn't a screen. I will watch him carefully.

The guard soon accepted Nils as one of them, despite their normal animosity toward foreigners. In sparring he was never bested, but even so, the men sensed that he held himself in, and they interpreted that correctly as a desire to avoid making anyone look bad. His disposition was mild and harmonious. And he learned quickly, so that in a few weeks he could converse slowly on a fair assortment of subjects.

One day of his first week Nils was being instructed in Magyar by Sergeant Bela, when a boy in his early teens entered the guard room; he was dressed as a squire and spoke to the sergeant. Bela turned back to Nils.

"This is Imre Rakosi, Nils, a squire to the king. He wants to talk to you through me, as he doesn't have much confidence in the little Anglic he speaks. First he wants to know if it's true that you are a great swordsman."

"It is true," Nils said. He sensed an openness and honesty in the boy.

"And is it true that you come from a barbaric land far from the sun and have traveled in many lands?"

"That's true, too," Nils admitted. "Except that I have traveled only in several lands."

Bela repeated in Magyar, then turned back to Nils. "Imre would like to become fluent in Anglic. And he believes it would be better to learn it from you than from some other tutor. You cannot lapse into Magyar, and in the learning he hopes to hear about lands and customs that we know little of in our land. Will you teach him?"

"I'll be glad to."

The boy addressed Nils directly now, in Anglic.

"Thank you," he said carefully, holding out his hand. Nils shook it.

"He would like to begin after supper this evening," Bela said, "in the outer hall, for it's always open and the benches there are comfortable. If he can't be there, he'll get word to you. Is that all right?"

"Certainly," said Nils, and Imre Rakosi left.

"Are squires here the sons of knights only?" Nils asked.

"Usually. This one is the son of Lord Istvan Rakosi of the eastern marches."

"And was he sponsored earlier by the older king, Janos II?"

"No, he's been with Janos III for almost eight years, since the boy was seven and old enough to serve as a page. The king is a widower, and childless," the sergeant went on. "This boy is like a son to him. And he's a good lad, as Janos is a good master."

Nils had the third and fourth watches-from 0800 to 1600-and his duties were primarily two. When Janos held court, Nils was one of his personal guards, standing behind his throne to its right. At other hours, when Janos was in the throne room, Nils's post was outside the thick door.

And in a chamber behind the throne room, a lean, dark-brown man sat in a black robe reading the mind of the king's visitors. But always, whether Nils stood by the throne or outside the heavy door, the secret counselor monitored the big warrior's mind with one small part of his superbly sensitive psychic awareness. He received almost nothing in the way of either thoughts or emotions there, however, for mostly Nils simply received, sorting and filing data of almost every kind without discussing it with himself.

But the evidence was increasingly unmistakable.

One winter evening the counselor took from a small chest a gray plastic box, closed a switch, and patiently waited. He didn't wait long. As a hair-like needle twitched on the dial, a voice in his mind commanded him.

His mind reviewed the event of Nils's arrival and what he had observed, the little he had been able to learn from Nils's mind, and what he had learned from the minds of others when they had thought about Nils. "And there is no question," he thought, "the barbarian is a psi, and I feel he is not here accidentally. I don't know any details, for I can read nothing specific myself. But you could force him, Master."

His thoughts paused, as if hesitating, and there was a sharp painful tug at the counselor's mind that made him wince and continue.

"And today, as I watched, I became aware that he knows I am here, and that he let me know purposely, realizing I would know it was on purpose. Of course, he could easily know of me from the king's mind. But he knows more about me than the king does; it may be he knows all that I am.

"And he as an undisturbed as a stone."

That winter at Pest was the coldest of memory, Nils was told. Old people, and even the middle-aged, complained that winters were longer and colder than when they were young. But even recent winters had had frequent days when temperatures rose above freezing, weather when the surface of the ground thawed to mud. This winter it remained like stone. The snow from the great October storm had never been much deeper at Pest than a man's knees, and little new snow had been added. Yet until late March the ground remained covered, except on strong south slopes and near the south sides of buildings.

The River Danube, which the Magyars called Duna, froze deeply, and boys and youths fastened skates to their feet for sport, while people of every age cut holes through the ice and fished for pike and sturgeon. Not until April did the ice soften enough that several fishermen fell through to be carried away beneath it by the current.

By that time Nils had taken opportunities to examine maps, but had made no plans. When the time came, he would have a plan. Meanwhile, he worked, ate, slept, and learned, finding life quite agreeable. Imre Rakosi had learned to speak the simple Anglic tongue quite creditably, while Nils, living with the Magyar tongue, had substantially mastered its agglutinative complexities. The two youths had become close friends.

At the beginning of April they had the first days of true spring that promise summer. On one such day both were free from duty, and they rode together along a muddy, rutted road above the Duna, watching the fishermen standing in the shallow water that flowed across the gray and spongy ice. But on a shirt-sleeve day in April they found little inspiration in the sight of a river still ice-bound. So they left the bank and turned their horses up the rubble-paved road to Old Pest.

Old Pest had been immensely larger than the present town. Around Old Pest lay the open plain, grazed in summer or planted with wheat. But Old Pest itself was an extensive forest, mainly of oak but with other broad-leaved trees, its openings overgrown with hazel brush. The rubble and broken pavement prevented cultivation, at the same time concentrating rainwater in the breaks so that trees could sprout and grow. Here and there parts of a building still stood above the trees. The rest had fallen to storms and the gradual deterioration of material. Over the centuries many building stones had been hauled away to be used in the growth of New Pest, and concrete had been crushed for remanufacturing. Even steel construction rods had been broken and hauled away, to be stacked in smithies for cleaning and reuse. And the paving stones of New Pest came from the rubble of the Old.