The three brothers, Roric, and the housecarls leaned on the fence to look at the foals. Valmar was glad now that his father had not accompanied them. When Hadros reached here in another minute, he would find everything as it should be. Valmar had showed he could be trusted with the horses, and the housecarls had all obeyed him today without any of the humoring he sometimes sensed, the faintest suggestion that he was still a child.

“The mares should have all been bred to Midnight this year,” he said. “Father said that black colts have been doing especially well at market recently. So tell us, Roric,” with a elbow for his ribs, “where did those two sorrel foals come from?”

“Don’t ask me!” he protested. “I do not set my stallion at stud without charging for it!” In the middle of a laugh, his face changed abruptly.

Valmar whirled to look where he was looking. His father had ridden to within a dozen yards of the pen.

Except that it was not his father.

The housecarls and Valmar’s two younger brothers fled, kicking their horses wildly. But the mares in the pen went dead still, and the birds above them fell silent. Roric turned slowly to greet the rider. Valmar, behind him, was too frozen to move. This was a creature out of the recurring nightmare he had had as a boy, the nightmare he hoped he had finally outgrown, coming to meet him in broad day.

The rider had no back. He had a face, a front, but it was only a hollow shell.

But Roric did not seem to notice. “Have you decided then that you need me?” he asked the rider evenly.

“We want you, Roric No-man’s son,” said the rider, in a voice so deep it seemed to come from the earth. Valmar could see blue sky through the holes of his eye sockets.

“I shall be with you in half an hour,” said Roric. He suddenly tossed back his hair and grinned. “There is one other person who wants me.”