"Quarry is what you catch when you go hunting." Rudy gazed into the hearth, wondering how long it had been since black egrets had haunted the marshlands below the royal city of Gae. A hundred years? Two hundred? It was part of his wizardry to know, but at the moment he couldn't remember.

Ingold could have provided the information out of his head, along with a mild remark about junior mages who needed their notes about such things tattooed on their arms-along with their own names-for lagniappe. "Sounds like a mean boy to me, Pugsley."

"He was." Tir's eyes slipped shut again, but his face was troubled now, as he picked and teased at the knot of deep buried memories, the recollections of another life. "He was mean because he was scared all the time. He was scared... he was scared..." He groped for the thought. "He thought everybody was going to try to hurt him, so they could make somebody else king and not him. His daddy's brothers, and their children. His daddy told him that. His daddy was mean, too." He looked up at Rudy, who had an arm around his shoulders where they sat side by side on the sheepskin rugs of the cell floor. Even the royal chambers of the Keep of Dare were mostly small and furnished simply with ancient pieces found in the Keep, or with what had been hewn or whittled since the coming of the remnant of the Realm's people.

The journey down the Great South Road, and up the pass to the Vale of Renweth at the foot of the still higher peaks, had been a harsh one. Those who'd gone back along the route the following spring in quest of furnishings thrown aside to lighten the wagons had found them not improved by a season under mud and snow. "But why would being scared all the time make him be mean?" Tir wanted to know. "Wouldn't people be nastier to him if he was mean?"

"If they were his daddy's servants, they couldn't be mean back," pointed out Rudy, who'd learned a good deal about customary behavior in monarchies since abandoning his career as a motorcycle painter and freelance screw-up in Southern California. "And maybe when he was mean he was less scared."