Smoke. Gyir said it was the smoke from some huge fire, filling the sky, killing the light. Barrick’s eyes had stung for most of a day, he remembered now, and they had been forced to stop riding because he and Vansen the guard captain had trouble breathing.

Barrick crawled to the fire and poked the embers. Vansen was asleep with his mouth open, wearing his arming-cap against the chill. Why was the man still here? Why hadn’t he turned and ridden back to Southmarch as any sane person would have done? Instead, here he lay beside his new friend, that ugly, splotch-feathered raven (which was sleeping too, apparently, its head under its wing). Barrick disliked the raven intensely, although he could not say why.

When he looked at Gyir Barrick’s heart sped again, even as his stomach seemed to twist inside him. By all the gods, the fairy was a horror! He dimly remembered a feeling of friendship, of kinship even, between himself and this faceless abomination that had led an army of other monsters into the lands of real people, to burn and to kill. How could such madness be? And now he was virtually this creature’s prisoner, being led toward the gods only knew what kind of horrible fate!

Barrick looked to the place the horses stood, mostly in shadow, Vansen’s slumbering mount and the restless bulk of the Twilight horse which had somehow become Barrick’s own, although he did not remember it happening. I could be in the saddle and riding away in an instant, he realized. Should he wake Vansen? Did he dare risk the time? Barrick’s hand slid across the ground until it closed on the pommel of his falchion. Even better: he could have the long, sharp edge on the Gyir-reature’s throat just as quickly.

But even as the fingers of Barrick’s good hand closed around the corded hilt, Gyir’s eyes flickered open and fixed on him just as if the fairy-man had smelled something of the prince’s murderous thoughts. Gyir stared hard and knowingly at him for a moment, his pupils round and black in the dim light, but then he closed his eyes again as if to say, Do what you will.

Barrick hesitated. The loathing itself now seemed alien, just another unlikely feeling to grip him. My blood, my thoughts—they turn and change like the wind! He had always been moody and had often feared for his sanity, but now he felt a terror that he might lose his very self. Father said own malady was better once he left the castle. For a while mine seemed the same, but now it is back and stronger than ever.

Barrick tried to order his thoughts as his father had taught him, and could not help wishing he had spent more time listening and less sulking when the king spoke. He was trapped in a place where errors could kill him. How could he decide what was real and what was not? Only hours before he had thought of the faceless man as an ally, perhaps even a friend. Moments ago he had seemed an utter monster instead. Was Gyir really such a threat, or was he simply a warrior who served a foreign master?