"'The Brown Girl she has houses and lands…,'" Chalcus sang in his clear tenor. His eyes continued to smile at Ilna till she leaned around to look at the sky again while her fingers wove. "'Fair Tresian has none…'"

Chalcus had sailed with the Lataaene pirates in southern waters. He didn't talk about those days or other days of the same sort he'd lived in the course of collecting the scars on his body. Ilna supposed Chalcus had as much on his conscience as she did on hers, though he carried the burden lightly as he did all things.

"'The best advice I can give you, my son…,'" Chalcus sang, his voice shining like a sunlit brook, "'is to bring the Brown Girl home."

Ilna didn't ask whether Chalcus was a good man or a bad one. He was her man, and that was enough.

Something rippled and seethed behind the sky's curtain of thin clouds. Ilna's fingers worked, weaving contentment for people she didn't know through ages she couldn't guess. Her patterns would last for the life of the wool, and that could be very long indeed.

Ilna'd always had a talent for yarns and fabric that went beyond mere skill. She could touch a swatch of cloth and know where the flax had grown or the sheep had gamboled; and she knew also what'd been in the heart of the one who wove it.

By the time she was twelve everyone in the borough knew that Ilna os-Kenset wove fabrics softer and finer than anyone else around. Before she left Barca's Hamlet at eighteen, two years past, merchants came from Sandrakkan and even Ornifal to buy her subtly woven cloth.

"'He dressed himself in scarlet red…,'" Chalcus sang. TheHeron 's crew, sailors as coarse as the hemp of the ship's rigging, listened to the lovely, lilting voice. Other men lined the near rail ofThe Shepherd of the Isles. "'He rode all o'er the town…'"

Ilna's road had led from Barca's Hamlet to Carcosa, the ancient capital on the other coast of Haft; and from Carcosa she'd gone to Hell where at the cost of her soul she'd learned to weave as no human could. She'd used her new skills in the service of Evil and in her own service, because she'd returned from Hell as surely an agent of Evil as any demon was.