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a witch.”
    â€œI am Takya, and I have the power.” It was an assertion of fact rather than agreement.
    She settled in her favorite cross-legged position, selected a fruit from her bowl and examined it with the interest of a housewife who has shopped for supplies on a limited budget. Then she placed it in his hand before she chose another for herself. He bit into the plumlike globe. If she would only drop her barrier, let him communicate in the way which was fuller and deeper than speech.
    â€œYou also have the power.”
    Craike decided to be no more communicative than she. He replied to that with a curt nod.
    â€œYet you have not been horned.”
    â€œNot as you have been. But in my own world, yes.”
    â€œYour world?” Her eyes held some of the feral glow of a hunting cat’s. “What world, and why were you horned there, man of sand and ash power?”
    Without knowing why Craike related the events of the days past. Takya listened, he was certain, with more than ears alone. She picked up a stick from the pile of firewood and drew patterns in the sand and ash, patterns which had something to do with her listening.

    â€œYour power was great enough to break a world wall.” She snapped the stick between two fingers, threw it into the flames.
    â€œA world wall?”
    â€œWe of the power have long known that different worlds lie together in such a fashion.” She held up her hand with the fingers tight lying one to another. “Sometimes there comes a moment when two touch so closely that the power can carry one through, if at that moment there is a desperate need for escape. But those places of meeting cannot be readily found, and the moment of their touch can lay only for an instant. Have you in your world no reports of men and women who have vanished almost in sight of their fellows?”
    Remembering old tales, he nodded.
    â€œI have seen a summoning from another world,” she continued with a shiver, running both hands down the length of her braids as if so she evoked a shield for both mind and body. “To summon so is a great evil, for no man can hold in check the power of something alien. You broke the will of the Black Hoods when I was a beast running from their hunt. When I made the serpent to warn you off, you changed it: into a fox. And when the Black Hoods would have shorn my power—” she looped the braids about her wrists, caressing, treasuring them against her small breasts, “again you broke their hold and set me free for a second time. But this you could not have done had you been born into this world, for our power must follow set laws. Yours lies outside our patterns and can cut across those laws, even as the knife cut this.” She touched the rough patch of hair at her temple.
    â€œFollow patterns? Then it was those patterns in stone which drew you down from the mesa?”
    â€œYes. Takyi, my womb brother, whom they slew there, was blood of my blood, bone of my bone. When they crushed him, then they could use him to draw me, and I could not resist. But in the slaying of his husk they freed me, to their great torment as Tousuth shall discover in time.”
    â€œTell me of this country. Who are the Black Hoods and why did they horn you? Are you not of their breed since you have the power?”
    But Tayka did not answer at once in words. Nor did she, as he had hoped, lower her mind barrier.
    Her fingers now held one long hair she had pulled from her head, and this she began to weave in and out, swiftly, intricately, in a complicated series of loops and crossedstrands. After a moment Craike did not see the white fingers, nor the black hair they passed in loops from one to another. Rather did he see the pictures she wrought in her weaving.
    There was a wide land, largely wilderness. The impressions he had gathered from Kaluf and the traders crystallized into vivid life. Small holdings here and there were ruled by petty lords; new