Now and then a shift in the wind brought them the smells of wood smoke and raw human waste, and they knew there were ghouls-or perhaps bandits-dwelling somewhere in the weedy desolation along the canals.

Gil, her face discolored and aching in spite of all Ingold's spells of healing, fell asleep almost at once and slept heavily; wrapped in his fur surcoat, Ingold sat awake by the bead of their fire, listening to the dark.

This was how Gil saw him in her dream the second night, when she realized that he had to die.

They had made love, and she dreamed of making love to him again, in the cubicle they shared, a small inner cell in the maze of cells that were the territory of the Guards on the first level of the windowless Keep.

She dreamed of falling asleep in the gentle aftermath, her smoky dark wilderness of hair strewed like kelp on the white-furred muscle of his chest, the smell of his flesh and of the Guards' cooking, of leather oil from her weaponry and coat, filling her nostrils, smells for which she had traded the car exhaust and synthetic aromatics of a former home.

She dreamed that while still she slept, he sat up and drew the blankets around him. His white hair hung down on his shoulders, and under the scarred lids his eyes were hard and thoughtful as he looked down at her. There was no gentleness in them now, no love- barely even recognition.

Then he began, while she slept, to work magic upon her, to lay words on her that made her foolish with love, willing to leave her friends and family, her studies at the University of California, as she had in fact left all the familiar things of the world of her birth. He lay on her words that made her, from the moment of their meeting, his willing slave.

All the peril she had faced against the Dark Ones, all the horror and fire, the wounds she had taken, the men she had killed, the tears she had shed... all were calculated, part of his ploy. Taken from her with his magic, rather than freely given, love of him. The anger was like a frozen volcano, outraged, betrayed, surging to the surface and destroying everything in its path.