Andrew braced himself and gave the rope a brisk yank.

"I suppose," he concluded, "it's as the deer hunters say up in Coastlund, where I come from. Them not skinning can at least hold a leg.' "

Reluctantly, straining beneath armor and cheese and sausage, Robert di Caela clutched the rope as well.

Gileandos whimpered again, then put hands to the cord.

Bayard limped toward the edge of the darkness, left arm over Brandon's shoulder, right hand clutching an unsheathed broadsword. He felt foolish with weapon drawn, for the creatures he had met in the subterranean corridors were either too small to bother with or too large to disturb. And yet somehow to step into the darkness armed and ready seemed just and right and proper… seemed Solamnic and Measured.

"Your leg, Bayard!" Enid protested, but by now she knew that those protests, the urging or argument or even the begging, were useless, except in the small comfort of having set forth a warning.

"I shall be careful, my dear," Bayard tried to reassure her. The words sounded superior and smug.

Those words were drowned out by a small voice in Enid's dark imagining, a voice growing louder and louder, seeming to rush from the walls around her and the rock beneath her and most of all from the oily dark of the fissure.

He is going to die, the voice repeated. He is going to die, and you will be a widow at twenty, alone in this terrible, unsteady castle with memory and misgiving. You are right: You should not have said those words about widowhood. Your words and his foolishness will leave you bereft.

"A little slack there, Robert," Bayard called back out of the shadows. "A man can't venture that far into certain doom when you're holding the rope like there's a tug-of-war in the wings."

The earth rumbled once more about them, this time more loudly. And suddenly, as though the world was collapsing, exploding in upon them, the roof of the corridor caved in behind them.

Sir Andrew released the rope and lunged toward Enid, gathering her into his arms and shielding her with his body against the tumbling rocks and surge of water. Marigold screamed, pulling Sir Robert down on top of her. Raphael tumbled pathetically into a ball oh the floor, while Bayard and Brandon rushed back up the corridor, back into sight of the others. All were shouting and embracing and colliding as everyone huddled together, expecting the worst from the ceilings and walls.

But the awaited collapse never came. The corridor tilted about them, clouding with gravel and debris. Bayard reached his wife and embraced her as Robert and Marigold disentangled and the ill-matched band of adventurers gaped and gasped and choked in the dust-filled air.

"Nothing but rubble in that direction," Robert observed, gesturing at the corridor behind them. He ducked under Marigold's knee and wrestled laboriously to his feet. "Rubble and Gileandos."

There was a yawning moment of silence, in which the horror of what had happened to the tutor descended on the lot of them like a rockslide.

Chapter XIX

While Bayard and his followers huddled in rubble and fear deep beneath the foundations of Castle di Caela, Dannelle was riding south into the highlands, barely atop the game little palfrey that Longwalker had brought her.

She rode homeward, traveling through the night, uncertain of what she would find when she got there and even more uncertain as to what she would do about it.

She was a comical sight. A young woman scarcely out of her teens, scarcely five feet tall, her hood blown back by the brisk wind and the wild ride, her red hair billowing behind her like a banner.

It was like something from a painting, from a legend or romantic myth, if it were not for the dog behind her on the horse. For Birgis rode with Dannelle, tethered to her back like a Plainsman baby, though the creature weighed nearly as much as the girl herself.

His long snout rested on her shoulder. His tongue dangled blissfully as he tasted the air and reveled in the wind passing over his face.

"It's all beyond my understanding," Dannelle said over the sound of wind and hoofbeats, her only listener the dog draped over her shoulder, his short front legs braced on either side of her neck. He closed his dark eyes and grumbled in her ear. "Beyond my understanding why a strapping old veteran like Longwalker can't gather up his charges and descend on the whole bunch of them down in that warren. I'll bet you he could come back with Galen and Brithelm and Ramiro and leave a lot of smoke in his wake."

She paused a moment, blushing because she was talking to a dog. Birgis sniffed her neck serenely, his long, badger-breaking snout poked seriously under her chin.

"All this talk of ban and bane and cannot lift a hand! Why, the Plainsmen out-Solamnic Solamnics with their promises and posturing."

Birgis snorted and whuffed. It seemed to Dannelle di Caela that he was answering her, saying, "You are right, Dannelle. You are right, and there is salt on your ears."

The girl snorted, too, as Birgis licked her. She nodded her head and flicked the reins, and the palfrey quickened to a gallop on a smooth downhill slope extending for miles into the Vingaard foothills, leaving behind the bare and rocky terrain.

Down into greenery the girl rode, past the spot where, days or years ago-things happened so fast and so far underground she was unsure of time-she and Galen and the others had met the troll on the road.

"It's like forever ago, Birgis, no matter how long it has been by calendar or clock," she mused, and they rode quickly past, the dainty hooves of the pony flinging turf and mud behind them now. "And now the clock has begun to move again-now that I have to ride for help and all. And you know, it's like that clock is making up for lost time, because Galen's in danger and so the hours are shorter and shorter still."

She looked into Birgis's muzzle, and he licked her nose solemnly.

"Oh, and the others, too, Birgis!" she corrected, "though I expect that of all of them, your master Shardos can take care of himself. It's just that Galen… he… means too much to me."

They rode together in silence, and the road seemed to be turning east, though it was hard to tell under the moonlight.

"The one thing that troubles me about all of this," Dannelle confessed as they left the highlands and descended onto the still soggy plains of Solamnia, "is that I haven't the first idea what we shall do when we get to the castle "

Birgis yawned colossally at Dannelle's shoulder. Resolutely she clicked her tongue at the pony beneath her. It was galloping gamely now, stretched far beyond its usual duties as a lady's or child's mount.

Nor was Dannelle aware when the gait of the little horse changed, began to waver and tire. The resting and watering and airing of animals had always been the groom's job, or on long trips the job of the man escorting her. It had been Dannelle di Caela's job to order those men about.

The first she noticed of the palfrey's distress was when the animal slowed to a trot, then a walk, then stopped and refused to move.

The three of them were like a tableau, standing there below the blue fragrant branches of a huge aeterna tree: the stubborn, winded palfrey, the angry young woman, and the dog who sniffed the branches above him for squirrels, unconcerned by the conflict between horse and rider.

"Damn!" she shouted, rifling her saddlebags for a whip or crop or spurs, none of which were to be found since, after all, a Plainsman saddled the horse. Finally, disconsolate and immobile, the girl scrambled out of the saddle, staggered under the heavy dog on her back, slipped in the mud, and fell facefirst in a heap, clutching frantically at the reins that dangled above her head.