Yet she did not find what she sought, though he told me a tale of perils, a tremor of the earth, and finally a dragon, from which, he said, she had saved him by bravery, sorcery, and an acquaintance with the gods. True, the beast had smitten him first, a blow of blows. Yet when it had been slain, he had started up alive, apparently to this incorrigible witch’s delighted surprise. She had touched his shoulder, as if to be sure he was real. Seeing the joy in her eyes, and sensing it in her touch as she appraised him sound, he hugged her close.

“She had a fragrance to her,” he said, “a green pure fragrance like spring leaves or the smell of the morning on the hills. It was not a perfume, some cosmetic from a jar. It was the actual scent of her flesh. Holding her, I felt only love, not desire or heat. She was like a girl I had known the whole of my life, someone who had never failed me, who had always been gentle, someone who had enriched my days. And now,” Peyuan added, “seeing you will not otherwise believe in the dragon, let me show you proof.”

He turned himself that his back should be to me, and lifted up his long, graying hair. On his neck and up along the lower ridge of his skull was a cindery toothed scar, broad as two fingers of my hand. The sort of wound a curved blade would make, or an enormous claw.

The sort of wound, too, from which a man should not recover.

“I never guessed I wore this,” he said. “It was my wife who found it, the white girl I wed, Hwenit’s mother. She asked had I got it in some battle. Thus, on my marriage night, I discovered that I had come as near death as a man may that half-year before, out there on the black beach, my scalp opened by the lizard’s paw. It was she, Morda—by some exercise of her lost Power, by her passion and desperation that I live—who had turned death aside from me, and healed me and made me whole. But clearly she never knew fully what she had done.”

Then he glanced about, and observed I had swallowed his words like a dish of salt, unwilling and choking on it, but to the last grain. And what now should I do with this woman, half malefic, half tender? No, his account concerned a moment of her existence; her aspect had been benevolent to Peyuan and he had loved her. If this were true with him, she had been other things to other men. My father had not profited by her, or considered her benign.

“What comes next?” I asked Peyuan. “A god, maybe, on silver wings, to bear your lady into the sky?”

“No,” he said, “it is less gaudy than that. The dragon dead, we slept past sunrise on the shore. There had been a watch, and I near asleep at my part of it, and she told me she would stand in my stead. But when we woke—Fethlin, Wexl, and I—the sun an hour risen, and she was gone. Only her footsteps, which led down into the sea, showed the path she had taken.”