I can't leave her, he thought in despair. I've known her such a short time.

And miss Quo? the other half of his mind asked. And not speak with the A rchmage? Not have Ingold teach you the ways of power?

He closed his eyes. Like a tingling through his skin, he became aware again of the Dark and the building fury of them, riddling the night like the coming of an electrical storm. / have to go, he thought, with a sudden chill of panic. But still he stayed, paralyzed between his choices -Minalde on the one hand, Ingold and the Archmage Lohiro on the other.

He opened his eyes, and the image in the crystal changed again.

Small and distant, the stars were visible - more stars than he had ever imagined, filling a luminous sky that hung low and glittering over the endless roll of the blue-black sea. Their piercing brightness touched the curl of foam on the silver curve of the beach. Outlined against that burning sky, he thought he could make out the shape of a tower, looming storey on turreted storey from the trees that crowded an angular point of land thrusting out into the ocean. But the tower seemed strangely elusive, slipping his eyes past it, turning them again to the stars. He tried to look inland, but found his gaze eluded there, too. Half-guessed shapes of buildings clustered there, twining patterns of colour on stone columns muted by darkness, briefly visible and then swallowed by mists. Try as he would to focus on the land, he found his eyes coming back to the sand, the sea, and the midnight sky, as if in a gentle refusal to answer his questioning.

Against the dark bulk of that square knoll and half-seen tower, he glimpsed the sudden flash of starlight on metal, winking momentarily and then gone.