outer self, more so than anyone whose heart she listened to. She had grown to like him a good deal, though the reverse was not true.
“Ah,” said Earno’s face. Pregnant women: bad luck on a ship, said his heart.
“We’re not aboard the Stonebreaker now, Earno,” she replied, to his thought rather than his speech. Stonebreaker was the ship he had commanded in his youth, the one where he had fought and killed a dragon. He was usually thinking about it, even when he wasn’t talking about it, which he seldom did.
“Are you reading me now?” he asked, alarm coloring his face and all his thoughts.
She laughed at the question. She could remember when she, like Earno, would have had to go into some sort of trance to reach the level of sight that she experienced continuously, without effort, since her swim through the Sea of Worlds. She could remember it, but she didn’t really believe in it. Everyone walked in all realms simultaneously; most could not bring themselves to notice it, but they garnered knowledge from it unconsciously, as Earno now did, speaking in harmony with her unspoken thought, “I am afraid that the Sea of Worlds did you harm.”
“You think of the hole in my mind as a flaw. Why not a door?”
“In any castle wall, a door is a flaw,” he said solemnly. “Our minds are more like castles than like open cities—there is a danger to us if any stranger, any enemy can come upon us and enter our selves.” He said this partly because it was true and partly because he was afraid his farmer-mother would find out that he hated slaughtering animals. His mother had been dead for a century, and it had been more than two centuries since he’d fled the family farm and begun to work on the merchant ships that sailed the Sea of Worlds out of Anglecross Port. But the fear still jangled the song of his thoughts. Also, there was a stone there, weighing heavily down on the notes.
“You’re thinking of the Witness Stone,” she said.
He nodded. “There is danger for any witness on the stone, anyone who undergoes a forced rapport in any circumstance. But I fear this will be worse for you. I wish—” He wished there were some way he could protect her, she saw; he also wished there were some way he could hide from the contempt of his dead mother. “There will be seers of great skill and power present,” he said aloud. “They will not seek to harm you. But neither will they really try to protect you. Their goal will be to learn what you know of Merlin’s deeds in your world. If the inquiry harms you, they’ll shed no tears.”
She was strangely moved at his cold concern, the sympathy he betrayed when he said they instead of we. But she was not afraid, not until it was too late to do any good, if it ever would have done any good.
They came for her before dawn. The west-facing window of her bedroom was still dark when she found herself shaken awake by the grumpy doorwatcher. (He was not one of Merlin’s people. He’d been hired by the Graith to tend the tower while Merlin faced his trial, or whatever they called it—hired with whose money she had no idea. The sole comfort of being a prisoner is that money is someone else’s problem.)
She threw the doorwatcher out and dressed at a leisurely pace, keeping her eyes on the strange stars out her window. When she was ready, she threw a shawl over her head and went to meet her inquisitors.
There were eight Guardians waiting for her in the dooryard of the tower. Four wore long bloodred cloaks like Earno did. She knew (now) that this marked them as vocates—full members of the Graith of Guardians. The others wore short gray capes—that meant they were thains, mere candidates to the Graith, really. They were the most soldierly of the three ranks of Guardian, and these ones carried spears taller than themselves. They might have been mere ceremonial weapons; the shafts were ivory-pale and the gores glittered like ice. But the thains carried them lightly, as if from long practice, and they looked sturdy enough to do some damage at need.
“So!” laughed Nimue, pointing at the points. “You’ll poke me with those until I talk, eh?”
“Be quiet,” said one of the vocates, a furious white-faced, white-haired woman. “We don’t need you to talk.”
“God Avenger,