“I don’t know … I hadn’t learned yet. I do remember she said my grandmother would teach me. Perhaps it is an elven game.” He opened the box and showed them the tiles. “I don’t know what these symbols are, either.”

“That one’s truth,” Linne said, one of the half-elf Squires.

“Truth?”

“Yes … and look, this one here. This is untruth.” She flicked the tiles around. “Honor … dishonor. Reward … disgrace … danger…”

“And this was a game?” asked Panin.

“So I was told,” Kieri said. He could not now remember anything of the game. He had liked the colors, he did recall, and the glitter of the silver and gold. “What kind of game …?” He picked up the tile marked with “Truth” and ran his finger over the rune.

“Would it be like dice?” one asked. “Shake them in the box and pour them out? Toss them?”

“We could see,” Berne said. “Sir king?”

“I am not sure.” Kieri picked up Untruth and held the two in one hand. What question could such answer? He shook them in his hand, and thought, This was the place, and released them.

On the cloth Truth lay upright; Untruth had landed blank side up. Both were red; both had gold runes. It could be chance, after all. But the chill that ran down his back suggested something more than chance.

“I heard once,” one of the new Squires, Ceilar, said, “that the elves had ways of telling what would come and of divining the inner aims of other elves. These might be such, might they not?”

A game, his mother had said. But was it? Adults might say that to a child when the truth was more complicated, even dangerous. He picked up Untruth again and looked more closely. Was that gold, or … he picked up Truth again … no. Not gold, but fool’s gold. He shivered … this, like all the rest, had come to him for a reason, a reason that had survived his mother’s death, and by a power he did not know or understand.

“The gods may reveal it,” Kieri said. He was not sure which of the gods. His mother had been full elf, so her god would have been the Singer, for whom the only name he knew was Adyan, Namer. He touched his ruby again. Falk had a name for truth and mercy, for keeping oaths and releasing prisoners. Here, in this place, he had to wonder if Falk had had anything to do with releasing him … and why, if so, Falk had let him suffer so long. The old sorrow rose again, though this time he could breathe through it. Here, in this place, he had changed from the child he had been and started on the road to the man he now was. None of this had been his choice, but since then he had made many choices, and they had led back here, to the place of no-choice.