It would burn after a fashion but grew back within days, even if the dirt it had grown upon were sown with salt, soaked with oil of vitriol at any strength Ingold could contrive, or dug out and heaped elsewhere, the slunch grew back both in the dirt heap and in the hole. It simply ignored magic. It grew. And it spread, sometimes slowly, sometimes with alarming speed.

"How about asking me something simple, like why don't we get rid of rats in the Keep? Or ragweed pollen in the spring?"

"Don't you get smart with me, boy," Graw snapped in his flat, deaf man's voice. "You think because you sit around reading books and nobody makes you do a hand's turn of work you can give back answers to a man of the land, but..." Rudy opened his mouth to retort that until the rising of the Dark, Graw had been a man of the paint-mixing pots in Gae-his wife and sons did most of the work on his acres down in the River Settlements, by all accounts, as they'd done here in the Vale before the nine hundred or so colonists had moved down to the river valleys to found settlements three years ago.

But Alde said, still in resolutely friendly, uninflected tones, "I think what Rudy is trying to say is that there are some problems, not amenable to any remedy we know,

which have been with us for thousands of years, and that slunch may turn out to be one of them." The glass-thin breeze from the higher mountain peaks stirred tendrils of her long black hair, fluttering the new leaves of the aspen and mountain laurel that rimmed the woods, a hundred yards from the Keep on its little mound. "We don't know."

"The stuff's only been around for three years," pointed out Rudy, upon whose toe Alde had inconspicuously trodden.

"And in those three years," Graw retorted, "it's cut into fields we've sweated and bled to plant, it's killed the wheat and the trees on which our lives and the lives of our children depend." One heavy arm swept toward the farms downslope from the Keep, the fields with their lines of withe separating one plot holder's land from the next. Like puruIent sores, white spots of slunch blotched the green of young wheat in three or four places, the wrinkled white fungus surrounded by broad rings of brown where the grain was dying.