The Door into Sunset by Diane Duane Page B

something.”
    Eftgan nodded. Freelorn glanced over at Herewiss and found his loved looking at him with the strangest brooding expression, one that seemed to say, in astonishment and (most startling to Lorn) discomfort, At last, my loved is a man indeed ... ! Freelorn strained for the underhearing that had been troubling him all morning. It refused to come, and he turned away to look at Eftgan, troubled at heart.
    “Good enough,” she said. “Go your ways, my dears. We’ll talk more on this after dinner, with the Council. But I think we shouldn’t wait more than a few days to start.”
    People got up, one by one, and headed out, while Freelorn sat still and studied the table.
    “Lorn?”
    He looked up. He and Eftgan were by themselves. A lark sailed singing past the high window, up into the blue air, till its song was lost.
    “In seven years, nearly,” Freelorn said, “I haven’t been alone.”
    Eftgan sighed, and got up. “When you’re a king, as far as people go, you’re alone all the time,” she said. “Did you think She gives kingship away for free?” She patted him on the shoulder as she went by on her way out. “But stay with it, my brother. It has its moments.”
    Like that one just then, with Herewiss? he thought, as she left.
    For several minutes Lorn sat there, and then got up and went out to see about his disguise.
    In the grate, from the fire, eyes looked after him.

THREE

    I think I love you,
    and the problem
    is the thinking.

    d’Kaleth, Lament

    There is a story that when the Maiden was making the world, She purposely dug the bed of the river Darst in a nearly complete circle around Mount Hirindë because She felt that the only thing needed to make its already splendid view perfect was water. As in other such stories, the truth is likely to be as complex as She. Mistress of the arts of war as well as those of peace, perhaps She was also thinking of the defensibility of such a hill, seven-eighths surrounded by a river a mile wide, full of treacherous shoals, and stretching out into great flats of wetland and bogland that would eat any attacking force alive. In any case, Darthis has never been taken by any foe, and the view is still unparalleled in the north country, particularly by moonlight.
    Lorn stood there leaning on the low parapet of the Square Tower, the highest one in Blackcastle, looking southward across the town to the dull hammered-pewter gleam of the river, and the marshes rough and silvery under the first-quarter Moon. It was late, an evening a week after the Hammering. Under him the town was a scattering of streets dim in cresset-light, clusters of peaked roofs, the broad broken part-circle contour of the city’s second wall, long grown over and through with houses; here and there a tallow-glass or rushlight showed in a high window. The occasional voice, a shout of laughter or a snatch of song, drifted up through the cool air, coming and going as the wind shifted.
    He swatted a hungry bug that was biting him earnestly in the neck, and looked out past the marshes, south, where patchwork fields and black blots of forest merged and melted together into a dark silver shimmer of distance: no brightness about them but a faint horizontal white line, the Kings’ Road, its pale stone running eastward in wide curves and vanishing into the mingling of horizon and night. It would be nice to be going that way, he thought. That was the way to the Brightwood, among other places. Four or five times he had ridden that road, sometimes with his father, on visits of state to the Wood... and later on his own business, for Herewiss’s boyhood home was there. A long time ago, that first visit with its arguments, its snubs, the standoffishness that shifted unexpectedly one night into friendship between a pair of preadolescent princes.
    Lorn laughed softly at himself. He had thought Herewiss ludicrously provincial when he first saw him—a dark, scowling beanpole in a muddy jerkin, taciturn and