They were both a lot wearier than either of them thought. He told her to start at the beginning and she took him at his word. She told him about the “ride”—and to her embarrassment, discovered that the song had made it as far as Valdemar. Once past the decision to leave home and beg some kind of instructions from her grandmother, she caught him yawning.

“I’m not—oh—that boring, am I?” she asked, finding the yawns contagious.

“No,” he said, “It’s just that I can’t keep my eyes open.”

“Well, I don’t think any Karsites are going to creep up on us in the dark,” she admitted, “And it’s well after sundown. I never once noticed anyone moving around after dark except army patrols. And even they wouldn’t go off the roads.” She did not mention the strange and frightening instances when she’d felt as if she was being hunted; she had no proof, and anyway, nothing had ever come of it.

She got up and went to the tangled heap of blankets, intending to throw them over that invitingly thick bed of bracken he’d made. Eldan joined her in the task, still yawning.

“They seem to think that demons travel by night,” he said, shaking out his blanket. “It seems that people vanish out of their houses by night—whole families, sometimes—and are never seen again. And not surprisingly, the ones that vanish are the ones that are the least devout, or have asked uncomfortable questions, or have shown some other signs of rebellion.”

She thought about the army patrols she’d seen moving about at night, and was perfectly capable of putting the two together. “Hmm. Demons on horseback, do you suppose? In uniform, perhaps?”

“A good guess,” he acknowledged.

“Makes me very grateful I wasn’t born in Karse.”

Eldan spread the last of the blankets over the improvised bed, and tilted his head to one side. “Not all the ‘vanished’ end up dead, my lady,” he said. “Some of them end up in the priesthood.”

“Not a chance!” she exclaimed.

“I hadn’t finished. They retain their skills—but they’ve forgotten everything about their old life. Everything; it happened to someone I was watching as a possible contact. She had a Gift of Mindspeech, one that was just developing. When I next saw her, she didn’t recognize anyone she had known before. Her mind was a complete blank—and her devotion to the Sunlord was total.” He nodded as she felt the blood drain from her face.

“You mean—everybody with these ‘Gifts’ winds up in the priesthood—and someone in the priesthood strips their minds?” The idea was horrible, more horrifying than rape and torture, somehow. Rape and torture still left you with your own mind, your own thoughts.