And in the next moment he was upon the river. Both banks had disappeared and there was nothing but mist everywhere.

He was a long time on the black water. Vast shapes moved just below the surface, and sometimes the boat rocked as they passed beneath it; once or twice the things even broke water and he could see their wet hides, black and shiny as polished metal. They did not touch him or threaten him in any way, but he was very glad he was in a boat and not floundering in the dark, cold current with those huge shapes swimming beneath him, drawn to his warmth and movement.

Ferras Vansen. That is my name, he reminded himself—here on the river he could almost feel it slipping away again as the mists streamed past. It had seemed so clear when the child said it, so true, and yet he knew he could lose it again as easily he had forgotten it in the forest of black trees.

How did I come to these lands? But that memory was even more lost than his name had been. He knew only that the child had said he did not come the way most men came—mischance, she had named it—and that was enough, somehow, to comfort him.

Something felt strange beneath his hands, under his feet. He looked down and saw that the boat was no longer made of gray wood, but of snakes—hundreds of dully shining shapes woven together like the twig mats old women made so their husbands and sons and grandsons could wipe the mud of the fields off their boots. But these were not twigs, they were serpents, alive and writhing. He lifted his feet and hands but it was no good: the entire boat was made of snakes and there was nowhere to go to escape them.

Even as he stared in horrified surprise, the snake-boat began to unravel, those at the top and along the rails slithering free of their weave and dropping like heavy ropes into the dark, quiet water. They kept peeling away, first in ones and twos and then more swiftly, until the water was coming in on all sides and he rode on nothing more solid than a blanket of cold, thrashing shapes.

He looked up, staring helplessly into the mists ahead in search of the far bank, a stone in the river, anything that might save him. The snakes fell away. The boat fell away. He tried to remember the names of the gods so he could pray but even those had been taken from him.

Vansen. I am Ferras Vansen. I am a soldier. I love a woman who does not love me, and could not if she would. I am Ferras Vansen!

And then he tumbled into the cold swells and swallowed all the blackness.

He was not in the river or on the shore, but in a twilight street. The lamps had been lit above the cobbles. They burned as fitfully as witchfire, glowing without much illuminating the ramshackle houses. It was not yet full dark but the streets seemed utterly empty.