“Me?” Skif went round-eyed with innocence. “I am as pure—”

“As what they shovel out of the stables.”

“Hey, I don’t have to sit here and be insulted!”

“That’s right,” Elspeth giggled. “You could ride off and let us insult you behind your back like we were doing already.”

As if to echo her, a bold scarlet jay called down filthy names on him just as he rode beneath it. It hopped along the branch that overhung the road and continued catcalling after he’d passed.

“I do believe I am outnumbered—you’re even getting the wildlife on your side! It’s time, as Master Alberich would say, for a strategic retreat.”

He reined Cymry in and dropped back to resume his place beside Teren, making a face at Elspeth when he saw she was sticking her tongue out at him. Dirk was hard put to keep a straight face.

But a moment later Elspeth’s mood abruptly shifted. “Dirk? Can I ask you something?”

“That’s what I’m here for, imp. Part of it, anyway.”

“What’s evil?”

Dirk nearly lost his teeth. Philosophy was not what he was expecting out of Elspeth. “Ouch! Don’t believe in asking the easy ones, do you?”

He sat silent for a long moment, aware after a sidelong glance at her that he had won Elspeth’s heart forever by taking her question seriously. “Have you ever asked Gwena that one?” he said at last. “She’s probably a better authority than I am.”

“I did—and all she did was look at me like I’d grown horns and say, ‘It just is!’”

He laughed, for the answer sounded very like the kind of response Ahrodie used to give him. “They do seem to have some peculiar blind spots, don’t they? All right, I’ll give it a try. This isn’t the best answer by a long road, but I think it might be somewhere in the right direction. It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can’t ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can’t possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota—the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them.”

“So—‘good’ would be a kind of opposite? Unselfishness?”

He frowned a little, groping for the proper words. “Oh, partially. Evil can’t create, it can only copy, mar, or destroy, because it’s so taken up with itself. So ‘good’ would also be a kind of selflessness. And you know what a lot of sects preach—that ultimate good—Godhead—can only be reached by totally forgetting the self. What brought this on?”