As the noontide clocks struck in Castle di Caela, the air was filled with a chorus of metallic bird cries. For the first time since Aunt Evania and Sir Robert began this collection of offensive machinery, all of the castle cuckoos sang together, marking the passing hour.

Up in the Vingaard Mountains, a high sun washed the vallenwoods and oaks and maples in a brilliant white light. The leaves turned and silvered in the light breeze from the east, and Longwalker stopped on his way through the wooded foothills. He cocked his head, as if somewhere east of him he had heard something shift, some slight but important movement in the fabric of things.

"Now," he said to the Plainsmen about him. "Old Tellus is at rest. The time is back. It will not be long before they all can return, can go back to words and memory."

It was obscure to them, what Longwalker said. The younger Que-Nara looked at one another, then nodded as though they understood their leader.

Someday, Longwalker thought. Someday you will understand all of this. How those in the hearts of the opal are always only a step from you. That as thin as the line is between breathing and translation, it is just as thin when you come back the other way. You will understand this.

Two strix owls took wing out of the dark branches of a blue aeterna. Shocked by the daylight and the Plainsmen around them, they wheeled quickly in the air and swooped into a stand of golden oak not twenty yards away. The children started, then quickly recovered their calm and implacable faces.

Longwalker frowned privately, lost in his thoughts.

"I do not know what this will bring the Solamnics," he confided to his people, "but there is a grove where the plains meet the foothills, where vallenwood and pine and aeterna mix with the lesser trees. There, if their guiding is done and the Que-Tana have followed, we shall find the others, and stone will link with stone, and cousins will clasp hands in friendship and reunion."

He walked away from his camp on the plains with its lean-tos of hide and light wood, the smell of smoke and roast venison. The earth stilled beneath him as the dale worm settled back into long sleep, but even its slightest shiftings stirred the mountains.

Chapter XXIV

The last of the settings remained stoneless, unadorned. For a moment, the Namer held the thirteenth stone above it.

"This is the One Stone," he said quietly. "Always present in its absence."

He handed the One Stone to the man seated beside him, who in turn handed it to another. And as the stone passed from Plainsman to Plainsman, the Namer brought the story full circle.

There was no doubting that the surface was near, for now the air smelled fresher, greener in the part of the passage around me. Upward I moved, the borrowed sword in my right hand, my left hand grappling for purchase amid loose and tumbling rock.

The deciding was over.

In a rush, I took off up the corridor toward the light. All around me the vast network of tunnel and chamber was crumbling, shaking. It seemed that everything momentous that had ever happened to me centered around an earthquake, and I recalled thinking, If this is the last thing, then there is something just and fitting in it. Then, with an unsettling lurch, the ground I had just crossed split open not ten yards behind me.

I passed through one cloud of red dust, then a corridor branching to my right, which collapsed with a rolling crash that doubled my speed, if doubling was possible. The air was growing thick and powdery, difficult to breathe.

I pulled my cloak up over my mouth and rose. It was a time for opals, that was certain.

A trio of tenebrals rushed by me, chittering. I followed, and I heard someone or something cry out in front of me the instant before I turned a corner.

My momentum propelling me, I turned nonetheless and saw Firebrand ahead, out of reach and practically past recall, scrambling into a gray steady light as the dust passed in waves behind him.

I heard the shriek and the popping as the tenebrals fluttered into the sunlight. With a prayer to whatever god looked after headstrong fools, I rushed to the surface, too, sword at the ready, toward the sunlight and the sound of Firebrand's chanting.

I burst into the Bright Lands with a gasp, with relief, for whatever awaited me, however dangerous, was a change from the gloom and the damp and the stagnant corridors.

I did not know that standing there in confusing light, armed with a long dagger and a shield, my greatest adversary awaited, who made the dark magic of the Scorpion and of Firebrand look like child's play.

It was Galen Pathwarden, the Weasel, oily and mean, crouched on an outcropping of granite. He looked years younger than I remembered myself, and decades younger than I felt.

I remembered his face when it was my face, years and adventures ago, when I had stared at myself hatefully in the one looking glass Father kept in the moathouse. The beady brown eyes, the matted red hair, the rodent's twitch and squint.

What was it Firebrand had said? Those that your memory summons in a night of bad dreams. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong.

Firebrand stood apart from us, laughing wickedly beneath the drooping branches of a vallenwood. The opals glittered in his silver crown, and his eye blazed like the darkest and most powerful stone of all.

"Here's the deal," Weasel whined, slipping behind his shield until he was scarcely visible. "We've come so far together, you and I, to where our differences are just about to bring us to grief…"

I turned my sword in my hand. I could not figure out what to do about this. Somewhere in the corner of my vision, I saw Firebrand move, heard his laughter. Beneath me, the ground rumbled in reply, as though it, too, was laughing.

"So I suggest we just… call things off," Weasel urged. "We depart, whether separately or together, leaving this Firebrand fellow to his own sorry devices."

He raised his head from behind the shield and gave me a knowing wink.

It was the moment I had been waiting for.

Three strides carried me across the clearing. Weasel dropped the shield and backed away, cringing and groveling like some shifty, disgusting vermin. I gripped my sword tightly, took one last step toward Weasel, and drove the blade halfway into his chest.

He looked into my eyes and shrieked.

I looked away, unable to return his gaze. A pain wrenched hot in my chest. And the choices you make, as always, will be wrong, I heard once again. I saw Firebrand gliding through the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, circling me like a large, scavenging bird.

I felt Weasel climbing up the sword, pulling himself toward me, driving the blade deeper and deeper into his chest as he moved. Finally he clutched my sword hand in his thin, leathery grasp and pulled me toward him.

"The deal is this is this is this," he chattered, his fingers groping for my throat. I felt heavy, leaden and slow, as though I, not he, was the one who was conjured from stone.

Behind me, the sound of footsteps approached.

"You're a liar, Firebrand!" I shouted and hung on.

I remember thinking, swiftly and in some recess where words could not reach, as I wrestled myself in the clearing. Thinking that Firebrand could summon figure after figure from my brief but disreputable past. However, he could not make me heed them.

And no doubt Weasel was the worst he could do.

I heaved, straddled my slithering opponent.