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" The troll scratched behind Qantaqa's ears. "Where is your lady?" Isgrimnur asked, looking around. Dawn was creeping into the sky overhead, but the hillside was deserted except for the three men and the wolf. "I would think she'd want to come and say farewell." Binabik did not meet his eye, but rather stared at Qantaqa's shaggy neck. "We were saying our farewells in the earliness of the morning, Sisqi and I," he said quietly. "It is a hard thing for her to see me riding away." Isgrimnur felt a great wash of regret for all the unwise, unthinking remarks he had ever made about trolls. They were small and strange, but they were certainly as bold-hearted as bigger men. He extended his hand for Binabik to clasp. "Ride safely," the duke said. "Come back to us." Josua did the same. "I hope you find Miriamele and Simon. But if you do not, there is no shame in it. As Isgrimnur said, come back to us as soon as you can, Binabik." "And I am hoping that things will be going well for you in Nabban." "But how will you find us?" Josua asked suddenly, his long face worried. Binabik stared at him for a moment, then, surprisingly, let out a loud laugh. "How can I be finding an army of grasslanders and stone-dwellers mixed together, led by a dead hero of great famousness and a one-handed prince? I am thinking that it will not be difficult obtaining word of you." Josua's face relaxed into a smile. "I suppose you are right. Farewell, Binabik." He raised his hand, exposing for a moment the dulled manacle he wore as a reminder of his imprisonment and the debt he owed his brother for it. "Farewell, Josua and Isgrimnur," said the troll. "Please be saying that for me to the others as well. I could not bear to be making good-byes to all at once." He leaned forward to whisper something to the patiently waiting wolf, then turned back toward them. "In the mountains, we are saying this: Iny koku na siqqasa min taq'— 'When we meet again, that will be a good day.' " He sunk both his hands into the wolf's hackles. "Hinik, Qantaqa. Find Simon. Hinik ummu!" The wolf leaped forward up the wet hillside. Binahik swayed on her broad back but kept his seat. Isgrimnur and Josua watched until the strange rider and his stranger mount topped the hilt's crest and vanished from sight. "I fear I will never see them again," said Josua. "I am cold, Isgrimnur." The duke put his hand on the prince's shoulder. He was not himself feeling either very warm or very happy. "Let's go back. We have near a thousand people we need to get moving by the time the sun is above the hilltops." Josua nodded. "So we do. Come, then." They turned and retraced their own footsteps in the sodden grass. 4 A Thousand Leaves, A Thousand Shadows Miriamele and Simon spent the first week of their flight in the forest. The traveling was slow and painfully laborious, but Miriamele had decided long before her escape that it would be far better to lose time than to be captured. The daylight hours were spent struggling through the dense trees and matted, tangling undergrowth, all to the tune of Simon's grumbling. They led their horses more often than they rode them.

"Be happy," she told him once as they rested in a clearing, leaning against the trunk of an old oak. "At least we are getting to see the sun for a few days. When we leave the forest again, we'll be riding by night." "At least if we ride at night I won't have to look at the things that are tearing all the skin off my body," Simon said crossly, rubbing at his tattered breeches and the bruised flesh underneath. It was heartening, Miriamele discovered, to have something to do. The feeling of helpless dread that had gripped her for weeks faded away, leaving her able to think clearly, to see everything around her as if with new eyes... and even to enjoy being with Simon. She did enjoy his company. Sometimes she wished she didn't enjoy it quite so much. It was hard not to feel as though she were tricking him somehow. It was more than just not telling him all her reasons for leaving Uncle Josua and setting out for the Hayholt. She also felt as though she were not wholly clean, not wholly fit to be with someone else. It is Aspitis, she thought. He did this to me. Before him, I was as pure as anyone could want to he. But was that really true? He had not forced himself upon her. She had let him do what he wished—in some ways she had welcomed it. In the end, Aspitis had proved to be a monster, but the way in which he came to her bed was no different than that in which most men came to their sweethearts. He had not savaged her. If what they had done was wrong and sinful, she bore equal blame. And what, then, of Simon? She had very mixed feelings. He was not a boy any more but a man, and a part of her feared the man he had become, as it would fear any man. But, she thought, there was also something about him that had remained strangely innocent. In his earnest attempts to do right, in the poorly-hidden hurt that he showed when she was short with him, he was still almost childlike. This made her feel even worse, that in his transparent regard for her he had no clue as to what she was truly like. It was precisely when he was kindest to her, when he most admired and complimented her, that she felt most angry with him. It seemed he was being willfully blind. It was a dreadful way to feel. Luckily, Simon seemed to understand that his sincere affection was somehow painful to her, so he fell back on the jesting, mocking friendship with which she was more comfortable. When she could be around him without thinking about herself, she found him good company. Despite growing up in the courts of her grandfather and father, Miriamele had found little opportunity to be with boys. King John's knights were mostly dead or long since retired to their estates scattered about Erkynland and elsewhere, and in her grandfather's later years the king's court had become empty of almost any but those who had to live near the king for the sake of their day-to-day livelihoods. Later, when her mother had died, her father had frowned on her spending time even with the few boys and girls of her age.