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suffered his help without complaint. They were within sight of the stele when she fainted.
    W hen she opened her eyes again, she was lying on a soft bed in a cool, dim room at the inn. Sunlight streamed in through a crack in the dusty shutter and struck shadows across the carved wall beside the bed. Arkoniel sat beside her, clearly worried.
    “What happened with the Oracle?” he asked.
    Illior spoke and my question was answered
, she thought bitterly.
How I wish I’d listened to Agazhar.
    She took his hand. “Later, when I’m feeling stronger. Tell me your vision. Was your query answered?”
    Her answer obviously frustrated him, but he knewbetter than to press her. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I asked what sort of wizard I’d become, what my path would be. She showed me a vision in the air, but all I could make out was an image of me holding a young boy in my arms.”
    “Did he have blond hair?” she asked, thinking of the child in the beautiful white tower.
    “No, it was black. To be honest, I was disappointed, coming all this way just for that. I must have done something wrong in the asking.”
    “Sometimes you must wait for the meaning to be revealed.” Iya turned away from that earnest young face, wishing that the Lightbearer had granted her such a respite. The sun still blazed down on the square outside her window, but Iya saw only the road back to Ero before her, and darkness at its end.

Chapter 2
    A red harvest moon cast the sleeping capital into a towering mosaic of light and shadow that nineteenth night of Erasin. Crooked Ero, the capital was called. Built on a rambling hill overlooking the islands of the Inner Sea, the streets spread like poorly woven lace down from the walls of the Palatine Circle to the quays and shipyards and rambling slums below. Poor and wealthy alike lived cheek by jowl, and every house in sight of the harbor had at least one window facing east toward Plenimar like a watchful eye.
    The priests claim Death comes in the west door
, Arkoniel thought miserably as he rode through the west gate behind Iya and the witch. Tonight would be the culmination of the nightmare that had started nearly five months earlier at Afra.
    The two women rode in silence, their faces hidden by their deep hoods. Heartsick at the task that lay before them, Arkoniel willed Iya to speak, change her mind, turn aside, but she said nothing and he could not see her eyes to read them. For over half his life she’d been teacher, mentor, and second mother to him. Since Afra, she’d become a house full of closed doors.
    Lhel had gone quiet, too. Her kind had been unwelcome here for generations. She wrinkled her nose now as the stink of the city engulfed them. “You great village? Ha! Too many.”
    “Not so loud!” Arkoniel looked around nervously. Wandering wizards were not as welcome here as they hadbeen, either. It would go hard on them all to be found with a hill witch.
    “Smells like
tok,”
Lhel muttered.
    Iya pushed back her hood and surprised Arkoniel with a thin smile. “She says it smells like shit here, and so it does.”
    Lhel’s one to talk
, Arkoniel thought. He’d kept upwind of the hill woman since they’d met.
    A fter their strange visit to Afra they’d gone first to Ero and guested with the duke and his lovely, fragile princess. By day they gamed and rode. Each night Iya spoke in secret with the duke.
    From there, he and Iya spent the rest of that hot, sullen summer searching the remote mountain valleys of the northern province for a witch to aid them, for no Orëska wizard possessed the magic for the task that Illior had set them. By the time they found one, the aspen leaves were already edged with gold.
    Driven from the fertile lowlands by the first incursions of Skalan settlers, the small, dark-skinned hill people kept to their high valleys and did not welcome travelers. When Iya and Arkoniel approached a village, they might hear dogs barking the alarm, or mothers calling their