He reached Betwys-y-Coed after expending several days and utilizing various forms of transportation, and he booked himself at a small inn. It began to rain the day he arrived, and it kept raining afterward. He waited for the rain to stop, spending time in the public rooms of the inn and exploring various shops he remembered from his visit before. A few of the residents remembered him. The village, he found, was substantially unchanged.

He spent time thinking about what he would say to the Lady when he came face-to-face with her. It would not be easy to tell her he could no longer be in her service. She was a powerful presence, and she would try to dissuade him from his purpose. Perhaps she would even hurt him. He still remembered how she had crippled him. After his return to his parents’ home in Ohio, her emissary, O’olish Amaneh, had come to him with the staff, and he had sensed immediately that his life would change irrevocably if he accepted it. His determination and conviction had been eroding steadily since his return from England, but now there was no time left to equivocate. The staff was thrust upon him, and the moment his hands touched the polished wood, his foot and leg cramped and withered, the pain excruciating, and he was bound to the talisman forever.

Would that change now? he wondered. If he was no longer a Knight of the Word, would his leg be healed, be made whole and strong again? Or would his decision to abandon his charge cost him even more?

He tried not to dwell on the matter, but the longer he waited, the harder it became to convince himself to carry through on his resolve. His imagination was working overtime after a week of deliberation, stimulated by the rain and the gray and his own fears, turned gloomy and despairing of hope. This was a mistake, he began to believe. This was stupid. He should not have come here. He should have stayed where he was. It was sufficient that he refused to act as a Knight of the Word. His decision did not require the Lady’s validation. He barely dreamed at all anymore, his dreams so indistinct by now that they lacked any recognizable purpose. They were closer to real dreams, to the ones normal people had that involved bits and pieces of events and places and people, all of it disjointed and meaningless. He was no longer being shown a usable future. He was no longer being given clues to a past he might act upon. Wasn’t that sufficient proof that he was severed from his charge as a Knight of the Word?

But in the end he decided that he was being cowardly. He had come a long way just to turn around and go home again, and he should at least give it a try. He put on a slicker and boots and hitched a ride out to the Fairy Glen. He went at midday, thinking that perhaps the daylight would lessen his trepidation. But it was a slow, steady rain that fell, turning everything gray and misty, and the world had taken on a hazy, ephemeral look in which nothing seemed substantive, but was all made of shadows and the damp.