I halted. "What? More of them?"

It reverted to character, would say no more.

Never will I comprehend those old stones. Hell, I still don't understand why they are on our side. They hate all outsiders separately but equally. They and every one of the weird sentiences out here.

I slipped into my quarters, unstrung my bow, left it leaning against the earth wall. I settled at my worktable and opened the packet.

I did not recognize the hand. I found the ending was not signed. I began to read.

Chapter Three:
STORY FROM YESTERYEAR

Croaker:

The woman was bitching again. Bomanz massaged his temples. The throbbing did not slacken. He covered his eyes. "Saita, sayta, suta," he murmured, his sibilants angry and ophidian.

He bit his tongue. One did not make a sending upon one's wife. One endured with humbled dignity the consequences of youthful folly. Ah, but what temptation! What provocation!

Enough, fool! Study the damned chart.

Neither Jasmine nor the headache relented.

"Bloody hell!" He slapped the weights off the corners of the chart, rolled the thin silk around a wisp of glass rod. He slipped the rod inside the shaft of a fake antique spear. That shaft was shiny with handling. "Besand would spot it in a minute," he grumbled.

He ground his teeth as his ulcer took a bite of gut. The closer the end drew, the greater was the danger. His nerves were shot. He was afraid he might crack at the last barrier, that cowardice would devour him and he would have lived in vain.

Thirty-seven years was a long time to live in the shadow of the headsman's axe.

"Jasmine," he muttered. "And call a sow Beauty." He flung the door-hanging aside, shouted downstairs, "What is it now?"

It was what it always was. Nagging unconnected with the root of her dissatisfaction. An interruption of his studies as a payback for what she fancied was his having misspent their lives.

He could have become a man of consequence in Oar. He could have given her a great house overstuffed with fawning servants. He could have draped her in cloth-of-gold. He could have fed her tumble-down fat with meat at every meal. Instead, he had chosen a scholar's life, disguising his name and profession, dragging her to this bleak, haunted break in the Old Forest. He had given her nothing but squalor, icy winters, and indignities perpetrated by the Eternal Guard.

Bomanz stamped down the narrow, squeaky, treacherous stairway. He cursed the woman, spat on the floor, thrust silver into her desiccated paw, drove her away with a plea that supper, for once, be a decent meal. Indignity? he thought. I'll tell you about indignity, you old crow. I'll tell you what it's like to live with a perpetual whiner, a hideous old bag of vapid, juvenile dreams…

"Stop it, Bomanz," he muttered. "She's the mother of your son. Give her her due. She hasn't betrayed you." If nothing else, they still shared the hope represented by the map on silk. It was hard for her, waiting, unaware of his progress, knowing only that nearly four decades had yielded no tangible result.