Toward Ecosophy

The kickstarter for MYTHIC Magazine, Founders House Publishing's magazine of original fantasy and science fiction, was successful enough -- three stretch goals hit! -- that publisher Shaun Kilgore is back again with another Kickstarter project that will be of serious interest to readers here. Here's the blurb: 

"Sudden disruptions in power and other major services sends a city into chaos. In the blink of an eye, the modern technological world fails. Is it a government plot? Experiment gone wrong? A foreign cyber attack? Alien invasion? A mystical incursion from beings beyond this dimension? Who knows? Now the noise and the bustle of the city has vanished and an eerie silence settles over the urban landscape. Within, there are stories of human violence, depravity, and desperation, but also heroism, selflessness, and sacrifice. SILENCE IN THE CITY is an anthology of speculative tales asking what happens when a city—and all of modern civilization—is plunged into darkness."SILENCE IN THE CITY will contain at least fifteen original short stories spanning the science fiction, fantasy, and even horror genres that will be written by popular and best-selling writers like Gini Koch (writing as A.E. Stanton), David B. Coe, Dean Wesley Smith, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Joshua Palmatier, Kevin J. McLaughlin, Alex Shvartsman, John Michael Greer, and many others." 

Yes, I've got a story in mind for this project, one that I've been mulling over for a while now. I think the whole project is going to be well worth reading. As for the Kickstarter, Shaun's got a stack of add-ons and stretch goals in place. Check out the details here -- while you've still got electricity...

I'm delighted to report that the fundraiser for Locust Creek Plant Haven, which I discussed in earlier posts here and here, is finished and has been a thumping success. They exceeded their goal with a donation total of $4889, so all the improvements to the endangered plant sanctuary and the establishment of a forest school for children are going ahead as we speak.  If you haven't visited the photo page for the fundraiser here, take a moment to do so. 

Meanwhile the Kickstarter subscription campaign for MYTHIC Magazine, which I also discussed in this earlier post, is heading into the home stretch, with just four days still to go. It's already met its minimum and passed the first of its stretch goals, and with $3,999 raised, it's got just a little more to go to hit the second stretch goal. Publisher Shaun Kilgore's mission here is one that ought to warm the heart of anyone who's ever dreamed of writing a story: he wants to pay his authors more. If you haven't contributed yet, or even if you have, please consider visiting the Kickstarter page here and making a contribution -- and if you know of any venues where you can let people know about the fundraiser or MYTHIC Magazine, please consider helping to get the word out. Thank you! 

***Update***--45 hours to go as I type this, and the fundraiser has met the second of its stretch goals. Thank you, everyone -- and if you haven't contributed yet, please consider doing so now!

***Further Update*** -- the fundraiser has closed, having hit three, count 'em, three of its stretch goals, and well over double the original amount Shaun asked for. Thank you, all of you!  I have the best readers on the internet, full stop, end of sentence. 

I'm delighted to report that the next (and next to last) of my Haliverse novels, A Voyage to Hyperborea, is now available for purchase in print and e-book formats. Here's the back cover blurb:  

***************

Most of two years ago, after brooding over several stories about really bad writing workshops and the like, I started work on the project of writing a novel in public. I was seven scenes into it -- a little more than one chapter -- when life intervened. On the one hand, I had the chance to get the entire sequence of novels in my series The Weird of Hali published with Founders House, provided that I could finish the sequence promptly. On the other, Llewellyn dropped several books of mine that they'd had in print for quite a while -- 20 years in one case -- and while I had a new publisher lined up in rather less than 72 hours, most of the books needed a certain amount of revision to get them ready for their new releases. Something had to give -- several somethings, in fact -- and The Road to Amalin was among those. 

That's another thing that happens quite tolerably often to writers. For one reason or another, you have to put something on the shelf for a while. That doesn't mean they're over and done with; it's almost always possible to go back to them later with fresh eyes, pick them up, and keep going. Now that The Weird of Hali is finished, the sequel to The Shoggoth Concerto is finished, the revisions to The Sacred Geometry Oracle, Inside A Magical Lodge, and The UFO Phenomenon are finished -- oh, and I also had to do a fast revision to A World Full of Gods, and now that's finished too...well, you get the idea. 

The point that's relevant is that I went back to those seven scenes, and found the next scene in my imagination promptly thereafter. You can find the earlier scenes here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And the next scene...

*************

She’d finished her business in a little hollow where pines screened the stone wall of the valley, and cleaned herself with dry grass, when she heard the voices:  two men by the sound of them, talking low as though fear hushed them.

“This is the place?” one said, and the other: “Aye. Unhallowed spots, you said, and you won’t find the like in all Raithwold.”

After a moment of shock, Embery crouched low against the stone, hoping they couldn’t glimpse her.

“What’s seen here?” the first voice asked.

“Seen?  Why, nothing’s seen.  Those who stray this way don’t come back, that’s all.”

That got silence for an answer, and finally:  “Has anyone been missed these last few days?”

“No, we’ve been favored lately.  Mind you, good brother, we say our prayers morning and night.”

“The Holy Law protects its own,” said the first voice, in a tone of self-satisfaction Embery knew too well.

“If you’d like to go further in—”

“No!”  Embery could hear the terror in his voice, and shame, as though he’d reached the limits of his courage sooner than he’d hoped. A moment later, with a forced calm:  “No, we’ve come far enough. You said there’s another such place by the river.”

“Surely. If you’ll come with me, good brother.” She heard footfalls fading out. After a long moment she shifted, peered out from the shadow of the pines. In the dim morning light, she couldn’t see them at first, spotted them a little later as they rounded a mass of fallen rock: two men, as she’d thought, one in ordinary trousers and shirt of homespun, the other in a monk’s black robe. She waited until they had passed out of sight beyond a stand of trees before she slipped out of her hiding place and hurried back to where she’d left Tay and the faun.

They were both there, Tay crouched behind a fallen boulder from the cliff above, Uldin gazing calmly out through the screen of trees. The moment she came in sight, Tay leapt up, flung his arms around her waist, and buried his face in her blouse, shuddering.

Embery put her arms around him, and to the faun said, “You heard them.”

“I saw them.” The great golden eyes turned toward her. “Some places are better for listening than others. Tell me what you heard.”

She repeated the words the men had said. Tay raised his face, looked up at her with wide eyes. When she was done, the faun said, “Well. It’s not common for monks to seek out such places.”

“I wonder,” Embery said unwillingly, “if they were searching for Tay and me.”

Uldin pondered that. “Maybe. We’ll be gone come evening.”

That was true enough, she thought, as they broke a loaf and shared out some rabbit-meat for their meal. The morning brightened, and she and Tay settled down in a hollow out of sight with their quilts around them for warmth. Before he settled down to sleep, Tay said in a low voice, “When I heard the voices I thought they’d caught you.”

She made herself smile. “No, they didn’t so much as see me. Sleep now; we’ve far to go.”

No strange dreams came to haunt her, and toward late afternoon she woke, looked around, saw the faun perched on a rock nearby, looking down the narrow valley, motionless as though he’d been carved of stone and left there to stand guard down the ages. When she sat up, though, Uldin glanced back at her, said after a moment, “Why the men came I do not know, but why they left so quickly I can tell you.”

“Why is that?”

“A cave,” he said, motioning along the valley. “And things in it not to be seen by monks or the king’s men.”

Then she understood, and broke into a smile. “Smugglers come here, then. We must be closer to the emperor’s lands than I knew.”

The faun pondered that. “I don’t know of an emperor or his lands. Tell me of them.”

“There’s an emperor in the southlands,” said Embery. “There has been for, oh, hundreds of years, maybe since before Brandel took Raithwold’s throne. He lives in a city called Olm on the river Jarl.” She tried to remember other things from her schooling, found nothing. “That’s as much as I know.”

Uldin nodded once when she was finished. “This thing the monks talk of,” he said then. “Do they trouble themselves with it in the lands of the emperor?”

It took her a moment to guess what he meant. “The Holy Law?  I’ve no notion.”

“We will learn. Our way leads south.” He turned suddenly, faced her, then moved away as though uncomfortable with her presence. “Wake the child,” he said. “We’ll leave soon. The ways from here lead where few people go.”

It took them a little while to be ready and to share another cold meal. Once that was done, Uldin showed the two of them the cave, and Embery pondered the stack of small wooden barrels and crates with words on them in a script and a language she didn’t know. Then it was up the side of the valley by a narrow trail and across the uplands beyond, following a narrow path that might have been left by deer or might not, with pale windswept grass bending around the track and gorse already dotted yellow by the year’s first blooms covering the higher ground to either side. Nothing moved but the wind, the grass, and a hawk that circled high and slow above them.

For once, though she knew too well what lay behind her and knew nothing at all about what lay ahead, Embery could let herself feel secure. Tay held her hand, the faun led the way without hesitation, and the land itself gave her comfort. She could easily enough imagine mighty Eremon striding through some such meadow on his way up Druan Mountain, or Dreela sitting on that very stone beside the trail, plaiting grass for a basket, filling the long hours while the curse on the house of Kendath wound to its end. The thought cheered her.

Not long before the last light guttered in the west and the pale stars spread over the sky, Uldin led them to another hiding place, a hollow half covered by gorse and shielded by the shape of the ground. A meal, sleep, another meal, and a journey in the gray dawn as the birds began singing: that was the way of it, a rhythm Embery sensed she could learn to live with.

They stopped in another sheltered place as the day brightened. They had finished the last of the bread, and the uplands had little to offer those who couldn’t feed on grass like sheep, but Uldin said, “We’ll be on lower ground soon. The hills come to an end further on, and the way leads down into forest and then meadows by the river. There were farms there once, and food will be easy enough to find.”

“Uldin,” said Embery, once Tay had drifted off to sleep, “you know the way to Amalin.”

He looked away, said nothing.

“Why didn’t you go back a long time since?”

A long silence passed, long enough that she was sure he would not answer, but he finally said, “When Eremon went to the faun to seek counsel, the faun told him how to cross the mountains and find the golden berries of the Sun. The faun never tasted those berries, not before, not after. But he knew.”

Embery thought about that. “But you’re willing to go with us.”

“It has been so very long,” said the faun in a low voice. “I am old now, and I am ready.”

She would have said something else, but all at once his head rose, as though he’d heard something. She listened. After a few moments, she heard it too: the drumming of hooves in the distance, drawing closer.

Uldin bent, crouching close to her. “There is a road close by,” he said in a voice so low she could just make it out. “Come. There is a place where we can see it.”

He moved, low and scuttling, and she followed him. A few paces away, up under a mass of heather, a narrow place allowed an unexpected glimpse toward a brown curving road not far off. They watched as the sound of hooves grew louder.

Then two riders came into sight, riding hard: troopers in buff coats and steel helmets, long pistols at their saddlebows. Behind came a magister in black, and behind him two others, one in a monk’s black robe, the other in a black coat but brown trousers, both sitting astride their horses as though they didn’t quite know how. A banner-bearer with black banner raised rode behind them, black-clad members of the household behind him, and two more troopers in buff and steel at the back. They rode past, and Embery caught a glimpse of their hard intent faces as they went. It was only a glimpse, but it was enough.

Once they were gone and the morning noises had come back, Uldin gestured, and the two of them crept back down to the hiding place where Tay slept. When they were there, the faun turned to her and said, “I don’t know what manner of men those were.”

“A magister,” said Embery. She felt cold, cold to her bones, though the morning was warm. “A teacher of the Holy Law, with men of his household and four of the king’s soldiers.” It took an effort to go on. “And two others. I don’t know the monk, but the other—the other was the doctor I told you of, the one who went carrying tales to the monks. They’re—they’re following us.”

The faun considered her, nodded slightly. “We will go by hidden ways.” Then, motioning toward where Tay slept: “We have far to go tonight, and the moon will be up. Rest if you can.”

My epic fantasy with tentacles The Weird of Hali hasn't gotten a lot of reviews yet, but one of them -- a favorable review of Dreamlands on the Ashtar Command Book Blog -- has me thinking.  The reviewer liked the book, and managed to catch some of the less obvious bits such as the reference to JRR Tolkien. He commented in a bemused tone, though, on the fact that the characters in Weird of Hali aren't special. They're ordinary people -- in the case of Dreamlands, of course, the main character is an elderly college professor with terminal cancer, and the rest of the cast includes a gay Bostonian writer from the 1920s, an assortment of other professors and grad students, and a rat-sized prosimian (a primate related to lemurs and tarsiers) of a species unfamiliar to science but quite familiar to anyone who's read H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch-House."  (Okay, I grant that an otherwise unknown species of primate is a bit exotic, but she's not noticeably more so than, say, a pet monkey.) 

Now of course that's part of the point of the series, but it got me thinking. 

The hero of the first fantasy novel that really had me staring in awe at nothing in particular for days afterwards is perhaps the most ordinary character in all of literature. Yes, that would be Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit of respectable family who spends most of The Hobbit in a state of confustication and bebotherment (his terms), having been flung into the middle of a madcap adventure involving dwarves, wizards, trolls, goblins, elves, and a bona fide dragon. He's far from the only relentlessly ordinary character in classic fantasy. Go all the way back to the first fantasy novel ever written -- William Morris' The Wood Beyond the World -- and you've got Walter, a guy who walks away from a disastrously failed marriage via the first available boat. Yes, he's as ordinary as that sounds, even though he rises to the challenge of a series of astonishing adventures and ends up becoming a king. 

That was pervasive in classic fantasy. Even Conan the Cimmerian started out as another dumb kid from the barbarian North before a taste for adventure and a lot of heavy challenges turned him into the iron-thewed thief, warrior, and (eventually) usurping king he became. Somehow, though, that got lost, and a large amount of fantasy got sucked into a single narrative -- the story of a special snowflake, uniquely talented at whatever, who's marked out for a Really Shiny Destiny because (s)he's, well, just so special. Or has super-powers, or super-duper-powers, or super-duper-pooper-powers, or what have you. 

That kind of thing bores the bejesus out of me. Back when I was into comic books -- he're we're talking a long, long time ago! -- I liked characters like Batman and Green Arrow because they didn't have super-powers -- just courage, motivation, some nice technogimmicks, and a really robust exercise routine. My favorite characters in fiction, from childhood faves right up to the present, are ordinary people; even if they have one unusual feature (say, a talent for music like Brecken Kendall, or tentacles for legs like Laura Marsh), that doesn't keep them from being ordinary in every other sense, and having to scramble to deal with fantastic challenges the way you and I would have to do. They rise to the occasion -- that's what makes them protagonists -- but it doesn't come naturally and they have to give it everything they've got -- that's what makes them interesting. 

Is this purely a quibble of mine, or is this something other people have noticed too? Inquiring prosimians want to know. ;-)

...is now available for sale from Founders House Publishing, and sellers of eldritch tomes everywhere.  Here's the cover blurb: 

 I'm pleased to announce that one of my forthcoming titles is now available for preorder, and one of my backlist titles is available again in a new, updated edition...

The Shoggoth Concerto is a fantasy set in the same fictive universe as The Weird of Hali -- the Haliverse, as some of my readers have taken to calling it. Here's the publisher's blurb:

...and the fourth volume of The Weird of Hali is now in print, in paperback and e-book editions. Three more to go! Here's the cover blurb for this volume: 

Interested? Copies can be ordered direct from the publisher here. 

I'm delighted to announce that several fiction projects in which I've been involved to one degree or another are now available. First of all, Vintage Worlds -- an anthology of SF tales edited by me and the indefatigable Zendexor, set in the Old Solar System, the wholly imaginary but utterly entrancing realm of classic science fiction -- is now available in both print and e-book formats.

Think of it as space fantasy: tales of two- (or more-) fisted adventure set in a solar system that's chockfull of intelligent species, inhabitable worlds, and spaceships that look like something other than random collections of hardware -- yes, we're talking tail fins here. The mere fact that we turned out to inhabit a much less interesting solar system doesn't take anything away from the delight readers still get from the solar system tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, and the other great authors of science fiction's Golden Age, and there's no reason not to set new stories there -- after all, how many people quibble about the fact that Middle-earth and Narnia don't exist? 

This collection includes seventeen stories, including my "Out of the Chattering Planet," and amounts to 120,000 words of interplanetary adventure. You can pick up your copy here. 

There's also good news for readers of fantasy. The first two volumes of my epic fantasy with tentacles, The Weird of Hali, are heading into print in new paperback and e-book editions, with the others scheduled to follow over the course of the next year. The first volume, The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth, is already available in e-book format and can be purchased here, and the paperback edition is in press -- it can be preordered now (use the same link) and will be in print on December 17. The second volume, The Weird of Hali: Kingsport, will be released in print and e-book editions that same day; it can be preordered here. 

Those of you who haven't been following this end of my writing may want to know that, while these novels use the tentacle-ridden horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft as raw material, they're not horror fiction. Lovecraft was a brilliant fantasist as well as a capable horror writer, and I've long felt that the fantastic end of his work has been neglected for far too long; the worlds of his imagination are also just too tempting a venue for fantasy for me to pass up.

The twist, of course, is that we're not getting your standard tale of how tentacled horrors out to devour the world, with the aid of their sinister human cultists, get stopped at the last minute by some combination of square-jawed investigators and sheer dumb luck. (That's been done not merely to death but out the other side into a couple of further reincarnations.) Au contraire, there's always at least two sides to any story; these tales are from the point of view of those awful cultists -- the ordinary men and women, that is, who discover the forbidden truth about those tentacled horrors (aka the old gods of nature) and get drawn into the ancient and terrible struggle between archaic gods and their all too modern, efficient, and up-to-date adversaries. It's a conflict on which the fate of the world does indeed rest, but, ahem, it's not the old gods of nature who are seeking to turn the living Earth into a smoldering, lifeless waste strewn with plastic trash...

So here are the first two volumes -- the stories, to be precise, of how the two main characters of the series find their way into a wider and more eldritch world. The third volume, The Weird of Hali: Chorazin, which launches those characters and several others on a desperate quest to awaken a sleeping goddess, will be out early in the new year.  The others -- The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands, The Weird of Hali: Providence, The Weird of Hali: Red Hook, and The Weird of Hali: Arkham -- will be in print by the end of 2019. Stay tuned for more announcements! 

 ...and this one is waaaaay behind schedule, due to a flurry of other commitments and a different project suddenly taking shape. At any rate, Embery, Tay, and the faun are back on track, and here's the latest...

********************

They would have to travel by dusk and dawn, so the faun said, until the village by the monastery was far behind and they reached wild country watched by fewer eyes. “Sleep now,” he told them. “Sleep if you can.”

The quilts were still wet from the morning dew, so Embery hung them over rocks to one side of the cave, hoping they’d dry a little before nightfall. The faun watched with unreadable eyes. Then, lacking any better option, she and Tay curled up in their clothing in a corner of the cave on a heap of dry reeds. Sleep felt far away, farther than Amalin itself, but all at once she was blinking awake, stiff from hours asleep without moving. She sat up slowly. Outside the cave mouth, long shadows of late afternoon stretched away.

“They came by twice,” said the faun: Uldin, Tay had called him. Embery gave him a worried look, and he went on: “Men in black robes. Monks. Two the first time, six with a gaggle of villagers the second.” His high-pitched laugh splintered against the stone walls of the cave. “Well for them I did not let them find me.”

Embery wondered what he meant by that. The stories she’d learned from old Neely had little enough to say about fauns, and not much more about any of the beings of Amalin other than gods and goddesses, men and women.  Eremon had gone to speak to the faun before the last of his eight great quests, to be sure; there was the faun whose riddle in the woods set Cademalis on the road to his destiny, and there was the faun that Amtar met on the road to Tabris, who blessed the Four Hundred when they marched to what they thought was certain death and turned out instead to be a victory beyond hope—but none of that gave her any hint of what one faun might do to six monks and a gaggle of villagers.

She considered asking him, but he turned and scuttled to the back of the cave before she could find the words. With that option closed, she turned back toward the heap of reeds, watched Tay as he slept. Some while passed before she could find the will to wake him.

Evening took its time coming, lingering behind the eastern hills while the sun crept westwards and the sky soared up to the edge of forever.  By the time the sun set and the dim harsh sound of the monastery bell came whispering up the valley, calling believers in the Holy Law to prayer, she’d shared out the last of the loaves they’d brought with them.  Uldin matched the gift and more with strips of dried rabbit-meat and cups of berry wine: good fare, Embery thought, for what might be a long evening’s journey. She and Tay got the quilts rolled and tied again for slinging over shoulders, picked up their satchels. All the while Uldin sat near the cave’s mouth and watched them with golden inscrutable eyes.

“Soon, I think,” he said at last. “We have far to go.”

“Aren’t you going to bring anything?” Tay asked him.

The faun glanced at Tay as though the thought hadn’t occurred to him. “No,” he said. Then, after a moment: “You can take anything you wish.”

Tay beamed, darted to the back of the cave, came back a moment later with more of the dried rabbit-meat and two of the faun’s coarse brown loaves, which he tucked into his satchel. “That’ll keep us fed for a day,” he said.

The faun shrugged, turned to go. “You really don’t want to take any of your things?” Embery asked him.

“Things pass away,” said the faun. “You might as well try to clutch the wind.” He ducked out through the cave mouth, glanced around, motioned with his head for them to follow.

Outside, evening’s chill had just begun to spread. In silence, Uldin started south along Mollory Edge, away from the three rocks and the faint wisp of rising smoke that told of Gellen’s farm, and Tay and Embery followed. There was another village two days south, Embery recalled, if you followed the Edge and then turned west once it ended. Beyond that? She’d never traveled that way, knew only rumors.

They followed the Edge all the way to its end but didn’t turn west. Instead, Uldin led the way up into the hills, following winding paths that stayed off the ridgelines, out of sight of casual eyes. As the last light guttered out in the far west, he clambered through a gap between boulders. On the far side was a sheltered hollow half roofed with gorse-bushes, as safe a place as Embery could have hoped for. “You need sleep,” said the faun, a dim shadow among shadows. “I do not. We will go further when the light begins to stir.”

Night deepened. The quilts held off only part of the chill, but sleep came anyway, bringing dreams in its wake. In her dream, Embery walked down a long slope into blackened desolation. The half-burnt corpses of trees loomed up here and there into a sky the color of iron, but no blade of grass broke the hard surface of the soil. She passed tumbled squared stones, scorched as well, that might once have belonged to a building a long age before. Then, up ahead, a living presence:  a tall figure, human or humanlike, wrapped in a hooded cloak so black it made the waste around it look pale. The figure stood facing away from her, though it seemed to glance back over its shoulder at her as she approached. No sign of a face appeared beneath the shadow of the hood.

She slowed as she came alongside the figure, glanced up uncertainly at it.

“Look.” The voice, little more than a whisper, strained beneath a burden of bitterness and wasted toil. “Look around you.”

She looked. Everywhere the scorched silent wasteland reached away to the edge of sight.

“This is Amalin,” the voice said.

Shuddering, Embery blinked awake. The faint gray light of earliest dawn filtered down through the gorse-bushes above her. Tay lay nestled against her, making slight motions that echoed some dream of his own; dew dampened the quilts; off near the gap between the boulders, Uldin sat, head tilted to one side, listening to the first tentative birdsong of the morning.

By the time she’d extracted herself from the quilts and tucked them back around Tay, the faun had noticed her. “Wake him,” he said with a quick motion at Tay. “We’d best be going before the day’s too far along.” Before she could gather her thoughts; “Food, drink, those will wait. There are too many eyes yet in this country.”

That seemed uncomfortably likely, so she shook Tay awake, got the quilts done up again as blanket rolls, shouldered her share of their burdens and followed the faun out through the gap between the boulders. From then until the sun burnt on the edge of the hills to eastward, they picked their way hurriedly through rugged country. Uldin had gestured for silence and kept it, giving directions only with quick motions of his hands, and so Embery had nothing to keep her mind off the troubling dream she’d had. More than once she’d tried to turn her thoughts to one of the old stories, only to find herself brooding again over the desolation in her dream.

Hours on, when hunger had begun to pinch and certain other needs were making themselves felt, Uldin led them down into a narrow valley where a thicket of gnarled pines huddled in a gap between walls of stone. “Here,” Uldin said, breaking his silence at last. “We’ll stay until evening. Food, water, rest, it’s time for those if you wish.”

Tay gave his mother an uncomfortable look. “Can I—”

“That also,” said Uldin. With a little ironic noise in his throat: “Humans weren’t always so shy about having bodies.”

That got a choked laugh from Embery. When Tay had scurried away to a private place to relieve himself, she said, “It’s the Holy Law.”

The faun gave her a blank look, and then said, “Something that the monks talk about.”

“Much too often.”

“Then leave it for them to speak of.” With a sidelong glance: “In Amalin there is no such thing.”

The faun’s words stirred the wild longing she’d felt before, but it also roused memories of the dream. “Uldin,” she said, “when you left Amalin, was it green and golden as the stories say?”

His golden eyes regarded her, inscrutable. “I left Amalin a long time ago,” he said. “And I do not know which stories you mean. Was Amalin green and golden when Dreela was beaten with rods of iron and cast out upon the snow to die?”

“No,” Embery said after a moment. “But the stories say it was when she came down from the mountains to sit on Kendath’s high throne.”

“I was not there,” said the faun. “In those days I lived in the hills beyond Altessa, where gray stone rose sheer from narrow valleys and gray fogs swept in from the sea.”

She was trying to figure out how to bring the conversation back around to the thing she wanted to know when the soft quick sound of Tay’s footsteps on stone drew her attention. A glance back at the faun caught something elusive in his face, left her all but certain he wouldn’t answer her question in any way that mattered. She went the way Tay had gone, patting him on the shoulder as their paths crossed.