L'Indasha smiled. "I've missed you. How long has it been?"

"But a day," the lily replied. "You've just been listening to your own world-weary drone. I was here yesterday, but you didn't look at me. See that shriveled flower to my immediate left? I waited all day in there for you to sit down and stop moping. Two bees and a grasshopper came by, though."

The eye of the lily winked at the druidess, and then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

Whirling about and rocking backward, she looked full in the face of a kindly old man, white-haired and bearded, a silver triangle pinned to the crown of his broad-brimmed

hat. A gaudy purplish smear colored one side of his nose.

"Lord Paladine," L'Indasha began reverently. "You-"

The old man raised a finger to his lips.

"Hush," he breathed. "You'll wake the neighbors."

"I just wanted to tell you that-"

"Shh." The old man sat down on the freshly hoed furrow, his silver robes swirling with sun and shade. "A change has come," he announced quietly, smiling. "I'm sending you a companion. Some help."

"Some help?"

"Oh, not that there's aught wrong with the work you've done. I'm really very pleased. Thirty centuries, and Takhi-sis has not unmasked the rune. It's a splendid job, my dear. Worth enduring this long, wearisome immortality."

He held up the daylily bloom, now somehow missing its blue-purple center. He grinned.

L'Indasha cleared her throat. "Lord Paladine, I simply wanted to tell you …"

"Your helper is coming," he went on, "coming by a roundabout way. Well, very roundabout-twenty years in the doing. These things take time-growth-due season, you know. But that will be clear to you soon enough. And when help arrives, there will be important choices to make."