Cashel had gone to those places, and he'd gone to places that weren't in this world at all. He recalled how he'd felt scarcely a year ago when he'd first seen the crumbling walls of Carcosa. They'd been built during the Old Kingdom and used as a quarry by the city's remaining population for all the thousand years since the Old Kingdom fell. He'd been awestruck by the ruins that remained, almost unable to accept that so great a mass of stone had been created by men. Nothing in Cashel's previous life compared with those walls save for the sky overhead and the sea reaching eastward to the horizon from the shore of Barca's Hamlet.

But marvelous as Cashel'd found the places he'd gone and the folk he'd met there, none of them were as wonderful as the fact that Sharina loved him and had allowed him to love her. Her father Reise was the innkeeper, a wealthy man as the borough weighed such things and a learned one by any judgment. He'd come to Barca's Hamlet from Carcosa, where he'd been Countess Tera's chamberlain; and before that he'd served the king himself in Valles.

Reise had taught Garric and Sharina to read and to love the great writers of the Old Kingdom. They'd learned so well that Lady Liane had found the education she'd received at a school for the daughters of the wealthy made her no more than the equal of the innkeeper's children she met in Barca's Hamlet.

Reise's daughter was far too great a person to wed an orphan like Cashel who couldn't write his name and who'd never handled a silver coin in his life… and besides that, Sharina was a long-legged beauty with blond hair as fine as spiderweb. Every year at the borough's Sheep Fair there'd been drovers and wealthy merchants who offered Sharina riches past a peasant girl's imagining if she'd come away with them.

A thundercloud of memory shadowed Cashel's face. Sharina had told them 'no'. The ones who didn't like the answer were told it again, by Sharina's muscular brother Garric and her even more muscular friend Cashel. If they had bodyguards-and they generally did-so much the worse for them. A swordsman in an open courtyard hasn't a chance against a strong man with seven feet of iron-shod hickory and the skill to use it.