Or you. Kieri shivered. It was his own mind, he was sure … and yet he had heard the voices of the bones, of his father and sister and the others. He picked up the ring, the gold torc he now recalled his mother wearing around her neck, the enameled fitting with the leaping hound and stag entwined that he recalled from her belt. They were all bright and clean as if they had just come from a jewel case. A little enameled box that rattled softly as he picked it up … His fingers found the catch easily, and there were the tiles he remembered, blue and green and red, with the runes on them in gold and silver. It had been a selani set, a game he had just been learning … and what had he been told about it? A game we play? He’d not seen it anywhere since. He’d played with the tiles, stacking them, arranging them in patterns, and then his mother had put them back in the box and said, “Your grandmother will teach you.” Teach him what? Was it an elven game?

He looked at the tiles more closely, sighed, and poured them back into the box, latching it again. Selani … how could he have forgotten that name? But in the years of slavery, he hadn’t known his own name for a long time.

What should he do with these things? Did they belong here or … Not here. He shivered again. It must be Falk … he touched his ruby and murmured a prayer. When he had gathered all that lay in the grass, he took them back to the camp and showed his Squires.

“I didn’t see those yesterday,” Berne said.

“Nor I,” Kieri said. “They were here when the sun came … and did you see the rock?”

They looked at the rock, then at him. “Did you carve that last night, sir king?”

“No. Yestereve, I thought of having it carved, exactly like that—a marker of my mother’s death, a place to remember her—but I’m not a stonecarver. I could not have done it.”

“Save by magery,” Berne said.

“I’m not rockfolk,” Kieri said. “And elves have no power over stone, do they? Even the Lady had rockfolk carve out her underground stronghold. Besides, I would know if I were doing magery; I would feel the power leave me. I felt nothing; I slept the night.”

“What’s in this?” asked Panin, another of the Squires, pointing to the box.

“Selani tiles,” Kieri said. “Do you know that game?”

“Selani? I don’t know the word.”

“They were my mother’s—she was starting to teach me to play the game. You don’t know it?”

“I never heard of it. How do you play it?”