Did he believe in her proposal? He was not sure, that was the thing. And the voices still cried, screamed, roared, all their words confounded in the depths of his hearing.

“You have never renounced your ambition,” she said.

He shrugged, and did look up, discovered, pinned for the moment to the truth. “No,” he said. “But it’s not likely.”

“The voices have always spoken to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“You are to investigate, Marak Trin. You are my eyes and my ears in this matter. I ask, and you’ve promised me answers. How long have the voices spoken to you?”

“Since about my sixth year. Since then.”

“And the visions?”

“They’ve always been there.”

“Did a stranger come to Kais Tain when you were a baby?”

“I have no way to know,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s a common part of the story. A mysterious stranger. A visitation. A baby that grows up mad.”

He found that idea sinister beyond belief. No stranger had touched him that he knew, but his mother had never said, one way or the other.

“It wouldn’t be easy to come into our household.”

“Among the lords of Kais Tain? Perhaps not. But very easy, in most peasant houses. Perhaps it’s why mad lords are so rare, and mad farmers are so common. Farmers are generally more hospitable.”

“I’ve no idea.” They sat so easily, so madly companionable. “Who are these strangers? What do they do, and why?”

“I have some ideas. I know, for instance, that the madness that afflicts you is a specific madness, and that all that have it are under thirty years of age. How old are you?”

“Thirty.” He thought of the old man, and doubted what she said. But had it been the same madness? Was there more than one kind?

“Do you hear the voices now?”

“I hear a roaring.” What she asked was an intimate confession, one he had never made except to his father and his mother. “I sometimes hear my name.”

“That seems common,” she said, leaning forward, as if they gossiped together. “What else do you hear?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Yet you know this thing is in the east.”

“The world tilts that way.”

“Does it?”

“To us it does. It does it morning and evening, regular as you like it. Watch the madmen. Most will fall down.”

She neither laughed nor grew angry. “If I had your ears, if I had your eyes, I could know what I wish to know. If I had your strength, I might walk to the east and know what I wish to know. So I purchase them. I purchase you. Is the price enough?”

“I can’t bargain with you.”

“Ah, but you can. Ask me.”

“I have nothing to ask.”