“How do I come to be here?”

The man shrugged helplessly and looked past Temar to someone at his back. Angry at himself for allowing them to take him unawares like this, Temar swung rapidly around to find himself outnumbered and took a pace sideways to get the solid rock of the gorge to defend his back.

“We are here to help you,” a lad some few years younger than Temar spoke up, snub-nosed face pale with tension beneath a thatch of coarse brown hair, a small book in one hand, crammed with odd notes and scraps of parchment. “My name is Parrail and I have some knowledge of enchantment.” His words were spoken with painstaking care and his sincerity was evident. “What you know as Artifice,” he added hastily.

That was all very well, but Temar was more concerned about the other people he could see. Two men, guardsmen by his guess, were further up the gorge, looking at him with frank curiosity, while a tempting blossom with tousled red hair was standing rather closer, arms folded and an expression close to hatred burning in her grass green eyes. Temar found himself recoiling from this a little, unable to think how he might have offended the lady, though her claim to such a courtesy looked rather doubtful, given her immodest breeches and manlike jerkin. The last member of this band of brigands was a quiet man of no more than usual height with thinning sandy hair and shrewd eyes, dressed in some kind of long robe with no weapons that Temar could see. Was he a priest of some kind? Temar looked around again and realized with some relief that only the retainers and the woman looked to be carrying weapons. If it came to a fight, the runes were not too heavily weighted against him.

He laid a hand to his own hip, reassured by the familiar feel of his own sword and glanced down instinctively. What he saw chilled him to the bone. This was not his hand; it was older, broader, tanned with oil ingrained around the nails, small scars pale in a lattice around the knuckles, a hard-worked hand with its fellow matching it. Temar spread both hands before him, unable to stop them shaking, mouth agape in consternation. These were an artisan’s hands, no noble bloodline bore these sturdy workmanlike fingers. The great sapphire that had been his father’s was gone too, but a deep indentation marked the flesh of the central finger, for all the world like the mark from the band of a ring.

Was this madness? Had he finally succumbed to the insanity that had tormented him through the smothering darkness of the enchantment? Terror threatened to overwhelm him. Stumbling, he fell to his knees, heedless of the pain of the sharp rocks. The scene before him shifted and altered, everything distorted as if he were looking through cheap and flawed glass.

“Come on,” the man called Shiv caught him under the arms and helped him stand. Temar’s vision cleared but his confusion grew as he realized he now stood taller than this man, not shorter. He looked down to see long, muscular legs encased in stained leather breeches running down to boots far wider and longer than they should have been. Temar was certain he had never owned such garments or footwear. What had happened to him?

The scribe or whatever he was hurried to Temar’s other side. “You are under an enchantment, a sorcery, laid upon you by the Lady Guinalle. We are here to restore you and your fellows if we can only find the cavern where you are hidden.”

Guinalle! All Temar’s alarm for himself receded as he picked that name out of the man’s slow words. He clung to the thought. Guinalle—she would help him, she would know why he was so fearfully transformed, she could answer all the questions that were crowding around him, threatening, taunting.

“Where is Guinalle?” The man with the bandage seemed almost to be hearing his thoughts.

Temar shook off his hands and scowled, sensation returning to his nerveless hands and feet. “What do you want with her?”

“We wish to restore her to herself, to awaken her,” the lad with the parchments said hesitantly.

“We need her aid to defend ourselves against invaders from the sea,” the thoughtful man in brown spoke up, picking his halting words with evident care, his accent still strange to Temar’s ear. The red-headed girl said something fast and furious that escaped Temar completely, her speech an incomprehensible gabble.

The lad rummaged in a pocket and held out a ring to Temar, a tarnished and battered circle of bronze whose engraved crest was worn to little more than a shadow. It was the crest of Den Rannion’s house, the ring a retainer would wear to show his allegiance and status.

“Vahil!” Memory came hurrying back to Temar and a frail hope reached past the taunts of delusion. “Vahil returned home? He has sent you?”

The one called Parrail hesitated, but the two unarmed men answered as one: “He has.”

“To seek your help against the men from the sea.”

Sudden recollection of the invaders’ assault shook Temar. “They are here?”

“Not yet, but they are coming,” replied the man in green.

“We need to find the cavern before they arrive,” added the man in brown, hushing the lad, who was looking more and more confused.

Temar shut his eyes for a moment and rubbed a hand over his aching head, stopping in consternation to feel a mass of short curls. That should tell him something, he knew, but what?

“What has happened to me?” he asked, more in anguish than in any hope of answer.

The redhead spat something at him but the man in green snapped back at her in words too rapid and oddly spoken for Temar to understand.

“Guinalle will be able to restore you.” The brown-robed man took a step forward and offered a pale-skinned hand. “We mean no harm to any of you. We only wish to help.”

Temar reached out one trembling, unfamiliar hand and clutched the man’s thin fingers. Contact with another living being steadied him; this was certainly no dream, no delusion wrought of fear and tangled memory.

“Where is Guinalle?” the man asked, eyes intent despite his friendly expression.

She would have the answers, Temar realized at once. Guinalle would know what to do; she might even know these people, whomever it was that Vahil had sent, from whatever distant land. He had to find Guinalle!

Turning, he surveyed the gorge, dismayed to find it narrower and deeper, the bottom choked with stones and clinging ferns as the foaming water splashed and bubbled its way through to the river. Was this the right place? Low oaks clung grimly to crevices in the rocks, twisted branches reaching upwards to the light. Finer branches of ash and hazel dappled the ground with shifting shadow. Winter storms must have sent landslides or floods or something to reshape the land so drastically, Temar concluded desperately. Struggling along the treacherous stream bed with no little difficulty, he scanned the sides of the defile frantically for any sign of the cavern’s entrance. Chest heaving with burgeoning panic, Temar halted, turning abruptly to see these strange visitors watching him, waiting, expressions wary.

“Search, curse you,” he shouted, suddenly enraged. “Help me!”

“What do we seek?” the lad Parrail called after an awkward moment of still silence.

“A narrow ledge, leading to rock-cut steps, a walk down into a small cave that gives onto a larger.” Temar looked around helplessly. “I cannot tell where it might be.”

“Think of Guinalle,” the wounded man urged as he made his way through the jumble of broken rock. “Let your instincts lead you to her.”

As the man spoke Temar felt an irresistible conviction that Guinalle was somewhere close. He turned and turned again, head going from side to side like a hound searching for a windblown scent. Moving rapidly, eyes unseeing, he let this unfamiliar body stumble through the chattering stream until he was brought up hard against the treacherous surface of a long, sliding scree of shattered rock. Blinking through blurred vision, temples throbbing, Temar looked up to see a familiar series of hills far distant, sharp profiles against the clear blue sky, backdrop to the raw and broken stones blocking the entrance to the cavern.