We have been journeying by guess, and it is high time we admitted it. Thus I admit it here. All things considered, we have been fortunate; but unless we are favored by the Vanished Gods of Blue far above most, it cannot continue.

In this third book, which will surely be the last, I will begin by saying that, and telling you who we are; but first I should mention that the bandits are all dead, and that I, rummaging through their loot, have discovered this paper-an entire bale-and am making haste to use it.

His thoughts seemed to have nothing to do with the dead woman, her coffin, or the hot sunshine streaming through the open door into the poor little room. There was a pattering, as of rain; moisture splashed his ankles, and he looked down and saw blood trickling from his fingers to splash into a small pool at his feet.

His son had deserted him.

He was wounded. (No doubt the blood was from that wound?)

He lay in the medical compartment of a lander, though he was standing now, his blood dripping on worn floorboards. The bier was for another, it seemed, and the other was a middle-aged woman, and was already dead.

A knife with a worn blade and a cracked wooden handle lay at his feet. Reflexively, he bent to pick it up, and recoiled from it as if from a coiled snake. Something screamed in the emptiness, something deeper than resentment and thoughts of water, food, and healing.

He backed away from the knife and stumbled through the open door into the darkest night ever known.

We are four, a number that includes Oreb but excludes our four horses and Jahlee's white mule. Oreb is my bird and often a nuisance, as he is at this moment, trying to wrest one of his old quills from my fingers. "It's no use, Oreb," I say. "I want to write-have just started a new book-and I won't play with you at all unless you behave yourself."