"I know, love. You looked so dark, so grim the day I arrived. I barely recognized you, with that frown, with those glowering eyes."

"A few days with you heals me of anything."

"And yet I think you are still not yourself entirely. Is it that you still have the Labyrinth too much with you? Or perhaps it's the desert that's depressing you. Or the ruins."

"No, I think not."

"What is it, then?"

He studied the landscape beyond the floater window, noting its increasing greenness, the gradual encroachment of trees and grass as the terrain grew more hilly. That should have cheered him more than it did. But there was a weight on his soul that he could not shed.

After a moment he said, "The dream, Carabella—that vision, that omen—there's no way I can rid my mind of that. Ah, what a page I'll have in history! The Coronal who lost his throne and became a juggler, and got back his throne, and afterward governed foolishly, and allowed the world to collapse into chaos and madness—ah, Carabella, Carabella, is that what I'm doing? After fourteen thousand years, am I to be the last Coronal? Will there be anyone even to write my history, do you think?"

"You have never governed foolishly, Valentine."

"Am I not too gentle, too even-tempered, too eager to see both sides of an issue?"

"Those are not faults."

"Sleet thinks they are. Sleet feels that my dread of warfare, of any sort of violence, leads me on the wrong path. He's told me so in almost so many words."

"But there'll be no warfare, my lord."

"That dream—"

"I think you take that dream too literally."

"No," he said. "Such talk gives me only idle comfort. Tisana and Deliamber agree with me that we stand on the brink of some great calamity, perhaps a war. And Sleet: he's convinced of it. He's made up his mind that it's the Metamorphs who are about to rise against us, the holy war that they've been planning, he says, for seven thousand years."

"Sleet is too bloodthirsty. And he has had an irrational fear of Shapeshifters since he was a young man.

You know that."

"When we recaptured the Castle eight years ago and found it full of disguised Metamorphs, was that just a delusion?"

"What they tried to do back then ultimately failed, did it not?"

"And will they never try again?"

"If your policies succeed, Valentine—"

"My policies! What policies? I reach toward the Metamorphs and they slide beyond my grasp! You know that I hoped to have half a dozen Metamorph chieftains by my side when we toured Velalisier last week. So that they could observe how we've restored their sacred city, and see the treasures we've found, and perhaps take the holiest objects with them back to Piurifayne. But I had no response from them, not even a refusal, Carabella."

"You were aware that the Velalisier excavations might create complications. Perhaps they resent our even entering the place, let alone trying to put it back together. Isn't there a legend that they plan to rebuild it themselves some day?"