"It would be truer mercy," Metock said.

"Death is a false mercy," the Oldest Woman said bitterly.

So they discussed the matter back and forth for some while, equably but with a gravity that included both moral concern and a heavier, more anxious care, never stated but only hinted at whenever one of them spoke the word Shing. Parth took no part in the discussion, being only fifteen, but she listened intently. She was bound by sympathy to the stranger and wanted him to live.

Rayna and Kretyan joined the group; Rayna had been running what physiological tests she could on the stranger, with Kretyan standing by to catch any mental response. They had little to report as yet, other than that the stranger's nervous system and the sense areas and basic motor capacity of his brain seemed normal, though his physical responses and motor skill compared with those of a year-old child, perhaps, and no stimulus of localities in the speech area had got any response at all. "A man's strength, a baby's coordination, an empty mind," Ranya said.

"If we don't kill him like a wild beast," said Buckeye, "then we shall have to tame him like a wild beast…"

Kretyan's brother Kai spoke up. "It seems worth trying. Let some of us younger ones have charge of him; we'll see what we can do. We don't have to teach him the Inner Canons right away, after all. At least teaching him not to wet the bed comes first…I want to know if he's human. Do you think he is, Master?"

Zove spread out his big hands. "Who knows? Rayna's blood-tests may tell us. I never heard that any Shing had yellow eyes, or any visible differences from Terran men. But if he is neither Shing nor human, what is he? No being from the Other Worlds that once were known has walked on Earth for twelve hundred years. Like you, Kai, I think I would risk his presence here among us out of pure curiosity…"

So they let their guest live.

At first he was little trouble to the young people who looked after him. He regained strength slowly, sleeping much, sitting or lying quietly most of the time he was awake. Parth named him Falk, which in the dialect of the Eastern Forest meant "yellow," for his sallow skin and opal eyes.

One morning several days after his arrival, coming to an unpatterned stretch in the cloth she was weaving, she left her sunpowered loom to purr away by itself down in the garden and climbed up to the screened balcony where "Falk" was kept. He did not see her enter. He was sitting on his pallet gazing intently up at the haze-dimmed summer sky. The glare made his eyes water and he rubbed them vigorously with his hand, then seeing his hand stared at it, the back and the palm. He clenched and extended the fingers, frowning. Then he raised his face again to the white glare of the sun and slowly, tentative, reached his open hand up towards it.

"That's the sun, Falk," Parth said. "Sun—"

"Sun," he repeated, gazing at it, centered on it, the void and vacancy of his being filled with the light of the sun and the sound of its name.

So his education began.

Parth came up from the cellars and passing through the Old Kitchen saw Falk hunched up in one of the window-bays, alone, watching the snow fall outside the grimy glass. It was a tennight now since he had struck Rossa and they had to lock him up till he calmed down. Ever since then he had been dour and would not speak. It was strange to see his man's face dulled and blunted by a child's sulky obstinate suffering. "Come on in by the fire, Falk," Parth said, but did not stop to wait for him. In the great hall by the fire she did wait a little, then gave him up and looked for something to raise her own low spirits. There was nothing to do; the snow fell, all the faces were too familiar, all the books told of things long ago and far away that were no longer true. All around the silent House and its fields lay the silent forest, endless, monotonous, indifferent; winter after winter, and she would never leave this House, for where was there to go, what was there to do? …

On one of the empty tables Ranya had left her teanb, a nat, keyed instrument, said to be of Hainish origin. Parth picked out a tune in the melancholic Stepped Mode of the Eastern Forest, then retuned the instrument to its native scale and began anew. She had no skill with the teanb and found the notes slowly, singing the words, spinning them out to keep the melody going as she sought the next note.

She lost the tune, then found it again:

A legend who knew how old, from a world incredibly remote, its words and tune had been part of man's heritage for centuries. Parth sang on very softly, alone in the great firelit room, snow and twilight darkening the windows.

There was a sound behind her and she turned to see Falk standing there. There were tears in his strange eyes. He said, "Parth—stop—"

"Falk, what's wrong?"

"It hurts me," he said, turning away his face that so clearly revealed the incoherent and defenseless mind.

"What a compliment to my singing," she teased him, but she was moved, and sang no more. Later that night she saw Falk stand by the table on which the teanb lay. He raised his hand to it but dared not touch it, as if fearing to release the sweet relentless demon within it that had cried out under Perth's hands and changed her voice to music.

"My child learns faster than yours," Parth said to her cousin Garra, "but yours grows faster. Fortunately."

"Yours is quite big enough," Garra agreed, looking down across the kitchen-garden to the brookside where Falk stood with Garra's year-old baby on his shoulder. The early summer afternoon sang with the shrilling of crickets and gnats. Parth's hair clung in black locks to her cheeks as she tripped and reset and tripped the catches of her loom. Above her patterning shuttle rose the heads and necks of a row of dancing herons, silver thread on gray. At seventeen she was the best weaver among the women. In winter her hands were always stained with the chemicals of which her threads and yarns were made and the dyes that colored them, and all summer she wove at her sunpowered loom the delicate and various stuff of her imagination.

"Little spider," said her mother nearby, "a joke is a joke. But a man is a man."

"And you want me to go along with Metock to Kathol's house and trade my heron-tapestry for a husband. I know," said Parth.

"I never said it—did I?" inquired her mother, and went weeding on away between the lettuce-rows.

Falk came up the path, the baby on his shoulder squinting in the glare and smiling benignly. He put her down on the grass and said, as if to a grown person, "It's hotter up here, isn't it?" Then turning to Parth with the grave candor that was characteristic of him he asked, "Is there an end to the Forest, Parth?"

"So they say. The maps are all different. But that way lies the sea at last—and that way the prairie."

"Prairie?"

"Open lands, grasslands. Like the Clearing but going on for a thousand miles to the mountains."

"The mountains?" he asked, innocently relentless as any child.

"High hills, with snow on their tops all year. Like this." Pausing to reset her shuttle, Parth put her long, round, brown fingers together in the shape of a peak.

Falk's yellow eyes lit up suddenly, and his face became intense. "Below the white is blue, and below that the—the lines—the hills far away—"

Parth looked at him, saying nothing. A great part of all he knew had come straight from her, for she had always been the one who could teach him. The remaking of his life had been an effect and a part of the growth of her own. Their minds were very closely interwoven.