Salla Old Town became septarch, would not the drainer then enter that mystic procession of kings, and Stirron be relegated to the dust? And would not that drainer’s sons become blood-proud, even as I had been, although their father had been nothing for most of his life, and their grandfather less than that? I know, I know, the sages would say that the kiss of the gods had fallen upon that drainer, elevating him and all his progeny and making them forever sacred, yet as I felled trees on the slopes of the Huishtors I saw kingship with clearer eyes, and, having been cast down by events myself, I realized that I was no more than a man among men, and always had been. What I would make of myself depended on my natural gifts and ambitions, not upon the accident of rank.
So rewarding was that knowledge, and the altered sense of self it brought me, that my stay in the mountains ceased to seem like an exile, but more like a vacation. My dreams of fleeing to a soft life in Manneran left me, and, even after I had saved more than enough to pay my passage to that land, I found myself with no impulse to move onward. It was not entirely fear of arrest that kept me among the loggers, but also a love of the crisp clear cold Huishtor air, and of my arduous new craft, and of the rough but genuine men among whom I dwelled. Therefore I stayed on, through summer and into autumn, and welcomed the coming of a new winter, and gave no thought to going.
I might be there yet, only I was forced into flight. One woeful winter afternoon, with the sky like iron and the threat of a blizzard over us like a fist, they brought the whores up from town for our regularly appointed night of frolic, and this time there was among them a newcomer whose voice announced her place of birth to be Salla. I heard her instantly as the women came cavorting into our hall of sport, and would have crept away, but she spied me and gasped and cried out on the spot: “Look you there! For sure that is our vanished prince!”
I laughed and tried to persuade everyone that she was drunk or mad, but my scarlet cheeks gave me the lie, and the loggers peered at me in a new way. A prince? A prince? Was it so? They whispered to one another, nudging and winking. Recognizing my peril, I claimed the woman for my own use and drew her aside, and when we were alone, I insisted to her she was mistaken: I am no prince, I said, but only a common logger. She would not have it. “The Lord Kinnall marched in the septarch’s funeral procession,” she said, “and this one beheld him, with these eyes. And you are he!” The more I protested, the more convinced she was. There was no shifting her mind. Even when I embraced her, she was so awe-smitten at opening herself to a septarch’s son that her loins remained dry, and I injured her in entering her.
Late that night, when the revelry had ended, my employer came to me, solemn and uneasy. “One of the girls has made strange talk about you this evening,” he said. “If the talk is true, you are endangered, for when she returns to her village she’ll spread the news, and the police will be here soon enough.”
“Must one flee, then?” I asked.
“The choice is yours. Alarms still are out for this prince; if you are he, no one here can protect you against the authorities.”
“Then one must flee. At daybreak—”
“Now,” he said. “While the girl still lies here asleep.”
He pressed money of Glin into my hand, over and beyond what he owed me in current wages; I gathered my few belongings, and we went outside together. The night was moonless and the winter wind was savage. By starlight I saw the glitter of lightly falling snow. My employer silently drove me down the slope, past the foothills village from which the whores came, and out along a back-country road which we followed for some hours. When dawn met us we were in south-central Glin, not overly far from the River Huish. He halted, at last, in a village that proclaimed itself to be Klaek, a winter-bound place of small stone cottages bordering on broad snowy fields. Leaving me in