At around midday Grim called a halt. My arms felt like jelly, my back ached and I was all over sweat. “Enough for now,” he said. “Food, rest.” And, after a pause, “You did good.”

I didn’t ask him if he’d ever been a fighting man, though it seemed more than likely. If he wanted to tell me, he’d tell me. Not that there was much time left to tell anything.

• • •

Strange, how time seems to speed up when you most want it to slow down. The closer we got to that moment when I’d have to go up the tower, the less prepared I felt. Even with Grim drilling me in warcraft. Even with Geiléis telling me, often, that she truly believed I could do it. She praised my courage until I was sick of hearing it, and on one occasion she offered a generous payment in silver. I wanted to refuse. I wanted to say she should use her funds to help the struggling folk who had the misfortune to live within her borders. But Geiléis was hardly going to do what I told her, and besides, it would be useful for Grim to have something to keep him going when I left. I told her she could pay me—or him—when I’d actually broken the curse.

“Grim,” I said, after a second long day of training. “There’s something I want to ask you. Or get your opinion on.”

“Mm-hm?”

We were lying on our beds, ready for sleep. Grim had banked up the fire for the night; in the faint glow from its embers he loomed against the wall, a big dark shadow. A watchdog to keep enemies at bay. A guardian spirit to ward off evil. A listening ear. A shoulder to cry on. The voice of common sense. As familiar as a comfortable old cloak, which was not at all the way I’d intended it to be when I’d first encountered him on the road and agreed to let him walk on with me. It had just happened. A big nuisance, because all that was going to make it so much harder to walk away and leave him behind.

“What?” he asked, and I realized I had drifted off into my own thoughts.

“The story. The curse only giving Lily one chance every fifty years, and that part about her living to see Ash freed. Or to see the curse broken. Which was it?”

“To see him freed. That’s the way he told it. Flannan.” A pause. “You thinking it might be her? Geiléis?”

I sat up, surprised. Not that I should have been. Grim was quick at working things out. “So you thought of that too?”

“Did wonder. Only, if it’s her, Lily, why didn’t she say so from the start? When she came to court? Why tell all those lies?”

“She did say that she’d gone to a chieftain for help and that he’d thought she was crazy. She probably thought that if she said she was over two hundred years old, Oran would just laugh at her.”