“If you’re all right, then, follow me,” Herald Teren said, and started off, quite as if he assumed Skif would follow and not bolt. Which Skif did, of course; it seemed that he was “in for it” after all, but not in the way he’d thought. His emotions were mixed, to say the least.

On top of it all was excitement and some apprehension still. Just beneath that was a bewildered sort of wonder and the certainty that at any moment they would realize they’d made a mistake—or that fearsome Alberich would call the Guards. He’d lived with what he was for so long…

Beneath that, though—was something still of the new image of the world and his place in it that he’d gotten during that encounter with Alberich. That—granted, the world stank, and a lot of people in it were rotten, and horrible things happened—but that he, little old Skif, petty thief, had a chance that wasn’t given to many people, to help make things better. Not right; the job of making everything right was too big for one person, for a group of people like the Heralds, even—but better.

And under all of that, slowly and implacably filling in places he hadn’t known were empty, was a feeling he couldn’t even put a name to. It was big, that feeling, and it had been the thing that had broken through his barriers back there, when Cymry reaffirmed her bond with him. It was compounded of a lot of things; release, relief, those were certainly in there. But with the release came a sense that he was now irrevocably bound to something—something good. And accepted by that “something.” A feeling that he belonged, at last, to something he’d been searching for without ever realizing that he’d been looking. And there was an emotion connected with Cymry in there that, if he had to put a name to it, he might have said (with some embarrassment) was love. It was scary, having something that big sweep him up in itself. And if he had to think about it, he knew he’d be absolutely paralyzed—

So he didn’t think about it. He just let it do whatever it was going to do, turning a blind eye to it. But he couldn’t help but feel a little more cheerful, a little more at ease here, with every heartbeat that passed.

And there was plenty to keep him distracted from anything going on inside him, anyway.

Teren led him away from the stable and toward a building that absolutely dwarfed every other structure he had ever seen. And if he was impressed, he hated to think how all those farmboys and fisherfolk Cymry had talked about must have felt when they first saw it.