"May I enter also?" said a voice out of the group of Pontifical officials.

It belonged to a thin-lipped gaunt man with strangely ashen skin, whom Valentine recognized after a moment as Sepulthrove, physician to the Pontifex Tyeveras. He shook his head. "I am grateful for your concern. But I think you are not needed."

"Such a sudden collapse, my lord—it calls for diagnosis—"

"There's some wisdom in that," Tunigorn observed quietly.

Valentine shrugged. "Afterward, then. First let me speak with my advisers, good Sepulthrove. And then you can tap my kneecaps a bit, if you think that it's necessary. Come— Tisana, Deliamber—"

He swept into his suite with the last counterfeit of regal poise he could muster, feeling a vast relief as the heavy door swung shut on the bustling throng in the corridor. He let out his breath in a long slow gust and dropped down, trembling in the release of tension, on the brocaded couch.

"Lordship?" Sleet said softly.

"Wait. Wait. Just let me be."

He rubbed his throbbing forehead and his aching eyes. The strain of feigning, out there, that he had made a swift and complete recovery from whatever had happened to him in the banquet hall had been expensive to his spirit. But gradually some of his true strength returned. He looked toward the dream-speaker. The robust old woman, thick-bodied and strong, seemed to him just then to be the fount of all comfort.

"Come, Tisana, sit next to me," Valentine said.

She settled down beside him and slipped her arm around his shoulders. Yes, he thought. Oh, yes, good!

Warmth flowed back into his chilled soul, and the darkness receded. From him rushed a great torrent of love for Tisana, sturdy and reliable and wise, who in the days of his exile had been the first openly to hail him as Lord Valentine, when he had been still content to think of himself as Valentine the juggler. How many times in the years of his restored reign had she shared the mind-opening dream-wine with him, and had taken him in her arms to draw from him the secrets of the turbulent images that came to him in sleep!

How often had she given him ease from the weight of kingship!

She said, "I was frightened greatly to see you fall, Lord Valentine, and you know I am not one who frightens easily. You say it was the wine?"

"So I said, out there."

"But it was not the wine, I think."

"No. Deliamber thinks it was a spell."

"Of whose making?" Tisana asked.

Valentine looked to the Vroon. "Well?"

Deliamber displayed a tension that Valentine had only rarely seen the little creature reveal: a troubled coiling and weaving of his innumerable tentacles, a strange glitter in his great yellow eyes, grinding motions of his birdlike beak. "I am at a loss for an answer," said Deliamber finally. "Just as not all dreams are sendings, so too is it the case that not all spells have makers."