"He's up," Elke said gruffly to her. "I'm getting tired of you stringing my son along, Jesmind. Either marry him or let him go. Don't keep doing this."

"We don't marry, Elke," she said casually, padding in and sitting at the table. He couldn't stop looking at her. Her face was like a blazing awakening of the past, and it conjured memories of their brief, stormy relationship. "I do as much as I can to get around that, though," she said with a sweet smile at him. "Mother forbade me from living with him. She says it restricts him, and it really angers the other females. So I built a cottage just up the path from him. She can't say anything about that," she chuckled wickedly. "You ready to go?" she asked him.

He was still speechless from seeing her, from having his mind go crazy at the sight of her. Jesmind. This just had to be a dream. The Jesmind he knew would never be so… agreeable. But it was so real, it just couldn't be a dream. He could only nod dumbly to her. He couldn't think of anything to say.

"Well let's go," she said with a smile and a wink. "And don't forget your staff this time. I'll meet you outside."

She got up and left, and he stayed at the table for a moment longer, his mind racing. Jesmind! He just couldn't get over it. After so long, he finally got to see Jesmind again. And she was so nice! From the way they talked, he and Jesmind were something of an item. How could that be?

"Well, go on, suta," Elke urged. "She'll just get cranky if you make her wait."

Without much thought, Tarrin stood up and started for the door. He walked through the plainly furnished living room, picking his staff up from the wall just beside the door, beside a wall rack holding a bow, an axe, and a sword. The family weapons, ready and waiting in case they needed to be used in a hurry. he opened the door and found himself looking at the front yard of the Kael homestead. Over there was the small barn, and his father's brewing shed was just to the side of the woodshed over there. A small fence in front of the barn penned in two pigs, and a small flock of chickens wandered aimlessly around the front yard. The field was to the right of him, a field of brown stalks cut low to the ground. Jesmind stood by the fence, leaning against it and looking at the pigs, who were very unsettled by her presence. Her tail lashed back and forth in a manner that told him she was entertaining thoughts of irritating the animals, just for the fun of it. She looked up when he approached her mutely, marvelling at how beautiful she was. She just smiled at him and reached out, and grabbed his paw. "Are you ready?" she asked.

"Ready for what?" he managed to reply.

"Tarrin," she growled playfully, "what do we do every day?"

"I… I don't know."

"Are you feeling alright?" she asked with sudden concern, putting her paw to his forehead.

"I'm not sure," he said. "I don't know how I got here. I, I don't remember anything."

Jesmind laughed. "Now I know you're playing with me," she said with a teasing grin. "Tarrin, love, we've been seeing each other for five years. Every day I come and get you, and we spend the day at my place. We do all sorts of things, and some of them are very naughty," she said with a wicked little smile. "Then you go home at sunset. And it's going to stay that way until I can convince my mother to leave us alone. She's really getting me mad."

"What is she doing?" he asked as they started walking towards a path on the far side of the field, a path he didn't remember from before.

"She's either riding me for holding onto your attention, or riding me because I'm not pregnant. By the trees, what does she think I'm trying to do!" she growled. "If I can't hold your attention, how does she expect me to get pregnant?"

"Uh, well, maybe she wants you to see other males," he offered weakly.

She glared at him, and that was enough to make him take a step back. "There are no other males in my eyes, Tarrin," she said adamantly. "You are mine."

Now that sounded like Jesmind. He relaxed significantly, though he still felt completely baffled by what was going on. "This may sound weird, but tell me how we got here," he told her. "How we ended up back home."

"It's where you went, not me," she replied. "After you stole the Firestaff from the Witch-King of Stygia, just before the day, you came back home. I still want to know what you did with it," she said coyly. "They say you could hear him shouting all the way in Valkar."

"If it's past that time, then it's useless," he said clinically. "At least for another five thousand years."

"Here, let me carry that," Jesmind said, reaching over him and grabbing his staff. She pulled it out of his paw and looked down at it. "I'm surprised you still have this," she said. "After that Demon woman stole it from you. It was pretty amazing, how you got it back. Unless you were just embellishing to make it sound better," she winked.

"Demon woman?" Tarrin said uneasily. That sent a twinge through him, a memory of what he was so worried about that last night that he could remember.

"What was her name? Shiika? The one that was the Empress?"

Shiika? He didn't know that name. It wasn't the name of the Empress, anyway.

"Oh, nevermind," she said, stopping. "Do me a favor, Tarrin."

"What?"

"Kiss me," she said with a seductive smile.

Tarrin gave Jesmind a long look. Why would she ask? Jesmind would never ask. She would just kiss him, and to the hells with whether he wanted to kiss her or not. That was the way she was. Jesmind never played around when it came to what she wanted. She wasn't coy or seductive, unless she was feeling playful. And she didn't look to be in that kind of a mood.

"What's the matter?" Jesmind asked, a bit annoyed with him. "It's not like we've never kissed before, Tarrin."

Again, the wrongness of it all touched him. No matter how real it felt, no matter how real it seemed, it just couldn't be real. How could he go from Arak to Aldreth in one night? He had no memory of anything else. But things did seem so very real. Time seemed to have passed during his memory lapse, maybe even years. Jesmind seemed to know his mother, and she certainly felt real when he touched her. Her scent was even real, and the smells of the forest were very real. Tarrin was a being grounded in his senses, and his senses told him that everything he was seeing, hearing, smelling, it all was real. It all fit in with what he expected to see and hear and smell. He found it very hard to accept that what his senses was telling him was real actually was not. The very idea of it shocked his sensibilities.

He shook his head as if to clear it, putting a palm to his head gently. His head hurt. What was going on? Was this real, or wasn't it? If it was, what happened to him to make him forget? If it wasn't, how could a dream feel so real? It just didn't make sense!

"Are you feeling alright?" Jesmind asked directly.

"I, I don't know," he told her. "I just don't remember anything."

"Well, I'm sure things will make sense in a moment," she smiled. It was a cold smile, something he had never seen on Jesmind's face before. "Actually, I think they should make sense right now."

Jesmind took one step back from him, and then absolutely everything he saw, everything he heard, everything he smelled, it all just vanished. There was a fleeting moment of absolute nothingness, where he could see nor hear nor smell, a moment of utter isolation that nearly sent him into a panic. But it ended quickly, and he found himself standing in the cool air of Dala Yar Arak, on a dark, deserted side street. He stood in front of a bizarre female, a tall woman whose face and body could only be described as the absolute paragon of feminine perfection. There was absolutely nothing about the blond beauty that was wrong, or even not quite right. She was just gorgeous . The only things that made it apparent to anyone looking at her that she wasn't human was the small horns that protruded from her head, just in front of where his ears were on his own head, growing straight up and then turning sharply forward, towards her eyes. The other feature were the large, leathery wings that rested on her back, large and tall and proud in their display. She was tall for a woman, but much shorter than he. She wore a halter very much like the one that Camara Tal wore, a halter that showed off a great deal of her perfectly ample breasts and her sleek belly. A garment that wouldn't foul her wings. She wore a simple white sash around her waist, over a pair of black trousers that were tucked into black leather boots that ended just beneath her knees.