My one great hope is to be free of the Stork, to live a normal existence, to have children and raise them strong and healthy.

And that one great hope lies in the Walk of Clouds and nowhere else.

Is it enough to have the hope, even if it is never realized? Would that be a better existence than discovering ultimate futility, that there is no hope? Perhaps that is the secret-the hope-for me and for all men. I hear the dreams of so many of the folk, their claims that one day they will go and live quietly in a peaceful place, by a stream or a lake or at the edge of the mighty Mirianic. So many claim those dreams throughout their lives, yet never actually find the time to execute their plans.

Are they afraid, I wonder, as I am afraid? Is it better to have the hope of paradise than to pursue it truthfully and find that it is not what you expected?

I laugh at the folly and preposterousness of it all. Despite all of my worries, I am happier than I have ever been. I walk beside Cadayle and her mother Callen and am warm and in love and loved.

My road at present is west and north. Not to Ethelbert dos Entel. Not to Behr. Not to the Walk of Clouds.

– BRANSEN GARIBOND

ONE

The Would-Be King

Small and thin, Bransen nevertheless walked with the stride of a confident man. He wore the simple clothing of a farmer, breeches and shirt and a wide-brimmed hat under which sprouted tufts of black hair. He carried a thick walking stick, too thick, it seemed, for the fit of his fine hands. But it, like the hat-like the man himself-concealed a great secret, for within its burnished wood was a hollow, and within that hollow a sword, a fabulous sword, the greatest sword in all the land north of the Belt-and-Buckle Mountains.