“But then, there are no accidents,” Dorje went on. “We are all pilgrims on the Way; taking different paths, but eventually the paths will meet. Is it then a surprise that the pilgrims do likewise?”

The Abbot of Chenrezi Monastery looked exactly as Ritva remembered in her last sight of him when the questers left the Valley of the Sun in the spring of the previous year. The shabby wrapped orange robe might have been the same one. It left one shoulder bare, and the skinny knotted legs that ended in gnarled sandaled feet. His head needed no razor, and his face was a mass of wrinkles and yet somehow like a boy’s, with a flicker of humor in the dark narrow eyes. The hard travel he must have gone through in the mountains and deserts had left no mark that she could see. You could feel the tough mountain peasant he’d been born beneath the bonze still.

Nor had the task of turning a panic-stricken resort community and a gaggle of quarrelsome Buddhists of a dozen different varieties thrown together by circumstance into a living community made him any softer in the years since the Change. She leaned back against her borrowed saddle and sighed with something that was not exactly pleasure . . .

More like relaxation, as if I were back at Stardell in one of the chairs by the fire and wine were mulling and snow falling against the windows. I don’t know why, because we aren’t home and lot of what the Rimpoche says isn’t exactly comforting.

Lawrence Jr. scampered over, with his mother in pursuit; there had been wolf-howls in the distant hills, and it was not the sort of place you wanted a child to wander away from light and people. He took a look at the monk and then crawled into his lap. The man settled him comfortably, and then beckoned to his mother.

Ritva scowled slightly as she turned to her second bowl of stew; it had venison in it as well as dried vegetables and cracked barley and it had been quite tasty, for camp food. A lot of the folk from the Valley of the Sun didn’t eat meat, but a lot did, and the ones who didn’t weren’t the sort who got in your face about it. It tasted less good with Juliet Thurston in the circle, and she wasn’t the only one who felt like that.

“A fine boy,” Dorje said, and smiled at the mother. “You are brave, to undertake the responsibility of raising him.”

Juliet’s face was usually hard and reserved, but the lines of grief on it were visible now. She made a small sound and seemed to shrink into herself at the glares she would once have ignored.