"O come," said the phooka, grinning. His teeth were white and the frontmost were uncommon square and sturdy, in a long beardless jaw. His eyes were black and merry, and red lights danced in them even by daylight. "Do you not like a joke?"

"It will be a great joke when you drown me. Of that I'm sure." The phooka grinned. "O I like you well, mac Sliabhin. I missed the water with you, did I not?" Caith said nothing. He limped onward, flung off the hand again as they walked along the streamside, picking up the road. The phooka walked by him as if he had only started out a moment ago, fresh and easy as youth itself.

"Where is the other?" Caith asked, after some little walking. "Where has he gotten to?" For the bright Sidhe had been with them until that leap across the stream.

"Oh, well, that one. He's not far. Never far."

"Watching us."

"He might be." The phooka kicked a stone. "He has no liking for roads, that one. Nuallan is his name. He's one of the Fair Folk." An engaging, square-toothed grin. "I'm the other kind."

"What do you call yourself?"

The phooka laughed again. "Call myself indeed. Now you know we'd not hand you allour names. Dubhain. Dubhain am I. Would you ride again?"

"Not yet, phooka."

"Dubhain," the phooka reminded him. It was the wickedest laugh ever Caith had heard. There were dark nights in it, and cold depths where phookas lived, deep in rivers, haunting fords and luring travelers to die beneath the waters. Darkness, his name was. "So we walk together." The phooka looked up. His eyes gleamed like live coals beneath the mop of black hair. "We are in Gleann Fiach now, mac Sliabhin. Do you not find it fair?"

The road took them farther and farther from the woods. The deep glen showed itself bright with sun, its hilly walls different from Gleann Gleatharan, un-tilled, unhedged. Gorse grew wild up the hillsides, from what had once been hedges, and grass grew uncropped. It was a fair land, but there was something wrong in that fairness, for it was empty. Un-tenanted. Waste, even in its green pastures.

And coming over a gentle rise, Caith could see the dun itself at this great distance, a towered mass, a threat lowering amid its few tilled fields. Now indeed Caith saw pasturages up on the hillsides; but they were few for so great a place, and all near the dun. The most of the tillage closely surrounded the dun itself, gathered to its skirts like some pathwork order struggling to exist in the chaos of the land. Gleann Fiach was wide. There was promise in the land, but it was all blighted promise.

Caith had stopped walking. "Come on," the phooka said with a sidelong glance that mocked all Caith's fears and doubts. Caith set out again with Dubhain at his side, the two of them no more than a pair of dusty travelers, himself fair, his companion dark.

Caith was weary of the miles, the flight, the restless night; his companion had strength to spare. Like some lawless bare-skinned boy Dubhain gathered stones as he came on them and skipped them down the road.

"There," he would say, "did you see that one, man?"

"Oh, aye," Caith would answer, angry at the first, and then bemazed, that a thing so wicked could be so blithe, whether it was utterest evil or blindest innocence, like storm, like destroying flood. The phooka grinned up at him, less than his stature, and for a moment the eyes were like coals again, reminding him of death.

"A wager, man?"

"Not with you," he said.'

"What have you to lose?" And the phooka laughed, all wickedness.

"You would find something," he said.

The grin widened. The phooka hurled another stone. No man could match that cast, that sped and sped far beyond any natural limit.

"I thought so," said Caith, and the phooka looked smug and pleased.

"Cannot match it."

"No."

The phooka shape-shifted, became again the horse, again the youth, and broke a stem of grass, sucking on it as he went, like any country lad. Dubhain winked. He was more disreputable than he had been, a ragged wayfarer. A moment ago he had been bare as he was born, dusky-skinned. Now he went in clothes, ragged and dusty, ruined finery with a bordering of tinsel gold.

"It is a glamor," the phooka said. "Can you see through it?"

"No."

"If you had the amulet you might."

"I don't."

Another grin.

"You will help me," asked Caith, "inside the walls—or just stand by?"

"Oh, assuredly I shall help."

"—me."

"O Caith, o merry friend, of course, how could you doubt?"

Caith looked askance at Dubhain, uneasy in all his thoughts now. The Sidhe would both trick him if they could, if he gave them the least chance. He thought through the compact he had made a hundred times as they walked the sunlit dust, as they came down farther and farther into the glen. Of what lay before him in Dun Mhor he wished not to think at all, but his thoughts drifted that way constantly, darker and more terrible, and the phooka beside him was constant in his gibes. Sliabhin's son. And Moralach's. All his life seemed lived beneath some deceiving glamor. He had conjured loyalty to Gaelan, to a dream that never was. He came to avenge Gaelan, and his own father was the murderer.

But the stones before them were real and no illusion. There was truth about to happen. It must be truth, finally, after a life of lies and falseness.

The day and distance dwindled in the crossing of the glen. Caith rested little, except at the last, taking the chance to sleep a bit, in the cover of a thicket, at the edge of the dun's few tilled fields and scant pastures, before he should commit himself to all that he had come to do. And quickly there was a nightmare, a dream of murder, of Moralach the queen hanging from the rooftree of Dun Mhor.

"You," Caith said to the phooka when he waked sweating and trembling to find him crouching near. "Is it some prank of yours, to give me bad dreams?"

"Conscience," said the phooka. "I'm told you mortals have it. It seems nuisanceful to me." And then Dubhain reached out and touched Caith's face with callused fingertips, and there came to him a strength running up from the earth like summer heat, something dark and healing at once, that took his breath.

"Keep your hands from me!" Caith cried, striking the Sidhe-touch away.

"Ah," said Dubhain, "scruples even yet. There is that left to trade."

"That I will not." Caith scrambled to his feet, shuddering at the wellness and the unhuman strength in himself.

"You've dropped your sword," the phooka said, handing it up to him with a grin on his face and the least hint of red glow within his eyes.

Caith snatched it, hooked the sheath to his belt and caught his oiled-wool cloak about him and his tartan as he hit out upon the road.

Dubhain was quickly with him, striding lightly at his side.

And Dun Mhor rose ever nearer as they came past the wild hedges onto the road. The dun lowered as a dark mass of stone in the evening that had fallen while Caith slept in his thicket. No lights showed from Dun Mhor in this twilight time, not from this side, though some gleamed about the hills. Cattle were home; sheep in their folds; the folk behind the walls of their cottages and of the great keep that was many times the size of rustic Dun Gorm.

I am mad, Caith thought, having seen the size of the place. As well walk into Dun na nGall and try to take it.