His eyes tight shut, Cray said, "I wouldn't wantto underestimate anything about a sorcerer with so many demons. He knows we are dependent upon his good graces in this matter, and he knows that our purpose is most likely not to Everand's advantage. I think we should stop in the south for some of those exotic fruits that my mother likes so well, and then we might pick up a cask or two of the finest vintage that the cellars at Oldun can offer."

"Yes, he's obviously a man who enjoys food and drink. Perhaps it would not hurt to serve something more substantial in the way of refreshments, in addi-tion. It can't hurt to leave him with good memories of your hospitality." "No," said Cray. "It can't."

In the end, Gildrum, with the help of Delivev's cloth servants, provided an eight-course meal for Taranol, Cray, and the lady Helaine. Afterward, Taranol leaned back in his well-padded chair, belched softly, and praised his hosts for the excellence of their table. Then he drew the golden chain over his head, the chain that carried the ear, and held it out to Cray, saying, "I think you've waited long and patiently enough for this."

Cray took it gravely, with both hands, bowing deeply before he passed it to the lady Helaine. She carried it into the chamber of the pool, with the others following like some strange pilgrimage-Cray and Gildrum and Elrelet in the forefront, and Taranol trailing behind, surrounded by his miniaturized demons, like bees guard-ing their hive. While the Seer seated herself by the water, Cray and Gildrum set a comfortable chair on the white sand for Taranol. Then they all waited.

The lady Helaine cupped the ear in her hands, half submerging it in the chill water. She stared downward at the magically preserved fragment of flesh, stared at the slow ripples that glided outward from her caging fingers, stared into the unplumbable depths of the dark pool. After a very long time, she began to relate the story that she read in the ear.

Everand had been born an ordinary child. His par-ents were lord and lady, but not of the sorcerous breed; no, they ruled by the power of sword and lance over warriors who bore their colors and peasants who tilled their soil. The boy was the youngest of five brothers, his mother's favorite, uncommonly pretty, and spoiled by petting and sweetmeats. When he was old enough, he came to serve his father as a page, but his duties were light, and he spent most of his time in play. He was barely eight years old when the sorcerer visited their house.

Verdrinar was the sorcerer's name, and he was greatly feared in that country. When he entered the great hall, everyone bowed low before him, even Everand's parents. He had come to demand a certain handsome goblet, of gold intricately chased with silver, a recent gift from an ally. When the goblet had been handed over, he also asked-almost as an afterthought-for the boy.

Everand's mother wept, and his father pleaded, but in the end a demon carried the child away. Everand was frightened by the demon, and by the strange man who had so cowed his parents, but he was too proud to let that fear show.

Ten years he lived behind Verdrinar's spellbound walls, not stepping beyond them once in all that time, so that there was a gap in his life, a space that the lady Helaine could not fathom. But when those years were done, Verdrinar died, and the spell that had cloaked his castle crumbled along with its walls.

The youth Everand barely escaped with his life.

Bruised and bleeding, his garments half torn from hisbody, he stumbled away from the ruins and sat down heavily on a nearby boulder, to catch his breath and to watch the dust settle on his master's tomb.

He had brought nothing out of the castle with him but the clothes on his back and the knife at his belt.

Every other material thing that he had acquired in ten years with the sorcerer lay buried inside the wreckage. He didn't care. He was glad to be free. He found a spring and bathed his cuts and then drank deep before setting out on the long journey home.

He had only the vaguest notion of where home lay. To the south, he thought, remembering the sunset on his left as Verdrinar's demon carried him through the sky. The rolling hills, forest, and meadows looked very different from ground level, and he could not guess how far off his father's house might be, but he was confident that he would find it at last. That eve-ning he killed the first of the animals he would eat along the way, a rabbit that did not tumble into its burrow quickly enough. He stunned it from a distance, with an invisible magical blow, then hurried to wring its neck before it could recover. By magic, too, he kin-dled a fire, sparks raining from his fingertips to ignite the punk he had scooped from a dead tree. He was hungry and ate the rabbit rare and bloody. It was very tough.

Ten days' walk brought him to a village, where he convinced the inhabitants to give him their best horse by threatening to call lightning down from the sky and burn their village to the ground. He did not actually know how to call down lightning, but the sparks that showered from his hands frightened them sufficiently. They also provided him with food and fresh clothing. After that the days passed more agreeably.

Three months of wandering, of asking directions at small houses and great, brought him back to his fa-ther's gate. He was not surprised that none of the guards recognized him; he scarcely knew any of them. But he was surprised when he approached his parents in the great hall and they did not rush to embrace him. Instead they stood aloof, even backed off as he would have laid hands on them. His mother hid behind his father, and his father stared at him stiffly, as at a stranger.

"How do we know you are who you say?" his father said in a strained voice, and when the youth had given a hundred proofs from his memory, his wary expres-sion did not change. "You could be a demon sent to deceive us. Verdrinar is a wily man."

"Verdrinar is dead," said Everand, "and his de-mons have flown away. I am your son, come home."

"Ten years," said his father, shaking his head slowly. His hair was gray, and there were many new lines in his face, and age in his eyes. "Ten years ago I lost my youngest son to sorcery. Why would a sorcerer want to live among ordinary folk?"

"I am not a sorcerer," said the youth.

"After ten years?"

"Even so. I was never his apprentice, just his ... plaything."

Nervously, his father looked at his mother. "Are we to believe that after ten years of ... close association with one like Verdrinar that you have no powers greater than ordinary folk?"

Everand fell to his knees. "My lord and father, I am simply your child, nothing more, and I have traveled a very long way to come to you. Won't you at least offer me your hospitality-some bread and water and a place to lay my head?"

"Oh yes, of course. Immediately."

A sumptuous meal was laid out for Everand, and his parents sat with him as he ate, but they said nothing.

Silent men-at-arms stood about the table, too, eyeing the newcomer as if they had never seen a man in a travel-stained cloak before. Afterward, he was led to a well-cushioned pallet in a secluded part of the house, a small room all to himself, with three candelabra to light it and a carafe of wine to quench histhirst. He paced out its confines many times, unable to sleep, though he had ridden hard and long that day, to cover the final distance to his home.

In the quietest part of the night, his mother came to the room. One hand shielding her candle, she leaned in the half-open door and, seeing him still awake and dressed, she entered.

Taking the candle from her hand, Everand embraced her. She accepted his embrace but did not return it, and she stepped back from him as soon as he loosed her. She looked up into his face, obviously seeking some trace of her little boy in the young man who towered over her. Seeing the uncertainty in her eyes, he asked her to sit down with him on the edge of the pallet and, there, he took one of her hands within his own.

"Mother," he said, "this is a cold welcome for your favorite child. Have I truly changed so much that I seem like a stranger to you?"

Slowly, she nodded.

"I know we've lost all those years," he said, "but I never left off thinking of you and father and the boys, not for a moment. If I could have escaped and come back to you, I would have, believe me. But as long as Verdrinar wished it, I was his slave."

She pulled her hand away from his and, looking down at it, clasped it tightly with her other one. "My son," she said in a very low voice, "I am afraid of you."

He hardly knew what to say to that. He sputtered, "Mother, how can you fear your own son?"

"I don't know you," she said. "I don't know anything about you. Ten years with a sorcerer! How can you say that you are nothing more than my son? How can I believe that?"

"Oh, I know a trick or two," he said. "Nothing of any moment. Look, I'll show you-" He raised a hand and pointed toward the nearest wall, but before he could shower yellow sparks upon it, she gripped his arm with fingers like claws.

"No, don't show me, please!" Her eyes looked up into his like a wounded dog's. "Don't you understand? Whatever you learned from the sorcerer, however triv-ial it may seem to you-it frightens us.You frighten us. We never expected to have you back. We resigned ourselves to that. Now your brothers are all married and have given us grandchildren, and that is all we want, just the ordinary things of life.You are not ordinary, not after ten years with Verdrinar!"

"Mother, I swear to you-"

"No, swear nothing. How can you even understand an ordinary life by now? You were taken so young.

Please, Everand-I am the mother who bore you. No one could understand you better than I. You are changed. Not just by the years. There is a look in your eye; it makes me quail inside. You don't know how you seem to us."

Hesitantly, he touched her shoulder. "Mother, you'll grow used to me, surely. It's just that I left a child and I return a man. That's all it is."

She slid away from his hand and stood up abruptly. Her clasped hands were wringing each other now, as if she were cold, though the night was pleasant enough. "Please go," she said. "Everyone in the houseis afraid of you, and there will be no peace until you've gone."

He stared at her open-mouthed. "But this is my house. I belong here."

She shook her head. "You will destroy us. The peasants will run away and the men-at-arms desert their posts. The house will be empty. If you're truly my son, if you truly love your father and me, don't do that to us. Find some new sorcerer to serve. You'll be happier there, I know it."

"You don't know anything about sorcerers, Mother."

"Perhaps not. But I know about ordinary folk. Please, my son."

"You ask ... a great deal, Mother." He could feel the tears starting in his eyes, and he clenched his teeth against them.

"This is Verdrinar's evil," she said. "Blame him."

"That does me little good." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and a single teardrop escaped his lids, falling to make a tiny spot of moisture on the smooth stone beneath his feet. "I dreamed of this homecoming, all the long way here, walking, riding. I dreamed of your faces. And what have I gotten for my pains-turned out by my own mother."

"Perhaps you can find someplace where they don't know who you are," she said. "Perhaps you can still lead an ordinary life, if you really want one."

He rose to his feet. "You don't care what happens to me, do you? As long as it never brings me back to this house."

"I care," said his mother, still wringing her hands. "I do love you, my son. But I fear you more."

He gathered up his cloak. "Bring me food for my journey, the best horse in the stable, and a few pieces of silver. I ask no more."

"Thank you," whispered his mother, and she turned and hurried off.

At first he wandered aimlessly, the distance be-tween himself and his father's house ever increasing, till at last he reached lands where no one knew his father's name. He stayed in one place or another, chopping wood for peasants or helping them harvest their grain, serving in the kitchens of a few great houses as butcher or scullery servant, once even enlist-ing in the ranks of a prince's men-at-arms. But these things never held him long; always he wandered on, restless, unhappy. And no one ever seemed sorry to see him go.

At last he came back to the ruined castle.

Looking at the place, at those crumbled walls and fallen towers, he felt he had come home. He led his horse inside the shattered archway that had once been a gate and tethered it to a small bush growing amid the rubble. Then, using a bough trimmed of its twigs and leaves, he began to lever the fallen stones aside to make room for his shelter. He cleared a space five paces wide that day and, using the bough as a tent pole, put up his roof of canvas and slept where once sorcery had held sway, but no more.

The next day he began to dig in the keep. One man, with only the tools he could shape with his knife, helabored for two months and more before he uncovered Verdrinar's study, where the sorcerer had kept his books, and where he had died.

The body, which had been so freshly out of breath, so warm and ruddy when last he saw it, was a pile of dust now, the common fate of sorcerers. The books were intact, though much scattered by the collapse of shelves and cabinets under the weight of the roof and upper floors. He took them to his tent, and he began his studies.

He was diligent, but diligence was not enough. Sometimes he was not even sure of what the books were telling him, though he practiced the passes and the words anyway. He lost patience a thousand times and swore to leave the ruin, never to return, but the few times he actually tried it, he could scarcely bear to lose sight of the place before turning back and resuming his labors. He did learn some small skills, how to make the clouds whip about to cause a storm, how-at last-to call the lightning to him, unless the sky was very clear. His small skills eventually attracted the attention of another sorcerer, one who had thought the ruins deserted and who sent a demon to investi-gate the activity he sensed there. Everand asked the demon to petition its master for him; he wished to become an apprentice. But the demon conveyed only its master's laughter-what mad fool would take an ordinary human as apprentice? he asked. Out of some whim, the sorcerer relayed Everand's request to oth-ers of his kind, but the answer was always the same, reported by the same demon-no, no, a dozen times no. Generations before, the first sorcerers had been ordinary humans, folk of small power, but those days were gone, and now the breed was well established and scorned anyone unlucky enough to be born of ordinary parents. If Everand was to become a sorcerer in truth, he had to do so without their help.

The years passed, and Everand was fortunate enough-he thought-to discover the spell of longevity, and so he gave himself extra lifetimes for his studies. Yet even so, even a hundred years after his original span should have ended, he had to admit to himself that time alone was not enough. To become truly power-ful, he needed the guidance of someone powerful. Without it, he had learned as much as he could from Verdrinar's books, and still he was constantly disap-pointed in himself. Comparing himself to Verdrinar made him want to cry out against the unfairness of the universe; he knew how contemptible his few powers were. And he envied other sorcerers. He envied their power, their wealth, their lives of ease, demon-served. And envy brought with it, eventually, resentment and hate. But what could his hate mean to a sorcerer, his petty, powerless hate? Knowing that, he hated more strongly still.

A brief liaison with a peasant woman from the vil-lage ten days' walk away left him with a daughter, and her he tried to raise as a real sorcerer would. She was scarcely more than a baby when he began to teach her sorcery, and she became proficient at everything he knew so quickly that he was astonished.

He began to hope. He began to think that perhaps through his daughter, if not through his own efforts, he could come at last to have at least the material trappings of power, the wealth and slaves, the appearance of great sorcery. He began to hope that he could even have the ruin rebuilt someday. He guided her through Verdrinar's books, and he saw that she understood all of them more readily than he, more thoroughly, and with greater strength. By the time she was fourteen summers old, she knew everything that he knew, and more. He again petitioned the sorcerers that had refused him, this time on behalf of his daughter, to whom sorcery seemed as natural as air.

The sorcerous breed were kinder to the daughter than they had ever been to the father. Several had their minions bring her to them for interviews. Finally one, who already had a young man as apprentice, agreed to take her for a trial period. Everand sus-pected that her person appealed to the sorcerer as much as her intelligence, but he thought that she would profit from the association anyway. He had not counted on the other apprentice, a rather plain young man, slow, only apprenticed because he was a child of the house. He had not counted on the two young people finding each other more interesting than sorcery.

Within a few short months, their master was angry enough at their negligence to throw them both out, andEverand's daughter came home with her lover. Everand railed at her for tossing away the greatest opportunity of her life, but she paid little attention to his anger. She and her young man were too happy with each other. They let their sorcerous studies lapse completely and spent most of their time in the woods, together.

They had a child, Aliza.

His daughter was a failure-Everand resigned himself to that. But with her child he could start over, try again. But when he voiced his desire to begin teaching the baby, he was astonished to discover that her par-ents did not wish it. They had, in fact, decided to give up sorcery entirely and to live as ordinary mortals. They would not listen to his protests, to his anger, to his pleading. Aliza was scarcely old enough to walk when they left the ruined castle, taking with them only her and a few tools with which to start their new life.

Everand followed them stealthily. For five days he lurked behind them, hiding himself when they looked back. For five days they traveled through the rolling forested landscape, and on the sixth, the young people halted and began taking turns felling trees with their single ax. Everand watched them lay the first logs of a small cabin in a clearing just below the crest of a hill, in a place where there was water and game in plenty, a place where no human being would bother them. As they worked, they laughed frequently, and the child laughed, too, playing about them in the sunshine, like any ordinary mortal.

Everand went home and brooded over Verdrinar's books, his only legacy from the man who had made him unfit for the society of ordinary mortals, who had shown him what might be, but never helped him toward that goal. Once more he immersed himself in those volumes, hoping to glean some scraps of knowledge that he had somehow overlooked before. And every night he cursed his own incapacity, cursed his parents, cursed the sorcerers who had not been willing to take him as apprentice. Two years he spent so, though they seemed more like two centuries to him.

One morning, red-eyed from late and fruitless study, suffused with frustration and anger, Everand donned his worn woolen cloak, packed a few days' provisions in an old sack, and set off through the woods. Though he had gone that way only once, the route was engraved in his mind like silver chasing on a golden goblet. He scarcely slept along the way, and when he did, he woke soon, his limbs shaking with anger from dreams of formless impotence. It was night when he came to the cabin, but the full moon and all the stars shone down to illuminate the place. A few clouds scudded across the moon, a thin veil to its mellow light. The season was full summer, the night pleasantly warm.

Everand looked up toward the moon, toward the wispy clouds, and he raised his hands to them, his fingers clawed, and he called in a harsh whisper for the clouds to obey him. Slowly, very slowly, they thickened, as cloudlets from beyond the horizon came to join them. Slowly, very slowly, they blotted out the pale moonlight until only the cool stars shone down in the warm night.

Silently, Everand worked his way close to the cabin. It was very small, no larger than the first shelter he had built himself in the ruined castle. Its walls were made from the boles of young trees, each log no heavier than two people alone could lift and sealed to its neighbor by mud and turf. Its peaked roof was shingled with bark. There was a stone chimney on one wall, but not a trace of smoke escaped it. The cabin had no windows and only one door; testing the door gently, Everand found it barred from the inside.

He retreated a dozen paces, and with a convulsive gesture he called down lightning from the clouds. It struck where he pointed, squarely in the middle of that stout, barred door, and with a deafening crash split the wood asunder. Everand leaped through the gap, one shoulder striking the charred and smokingedge of the doorway, flinging blackened fragments of wood ahead of him. Behind him, lightning struck again-the ground this time-and illuminated the inte-rior of the cabin well enough for him to get his bear-ings. His daughter and her lover were on a pallet to his left, she sitting bolt upright, transfixed in the ghastly light. The child lay in a small bed beside them, a stuffed toy clutched in her arms. Everand scooped her up and leaped back through the doorway. He had barely cleared it when he nodded sharply for lightning to strike it again. And again. He ran, and he did not look back until he reached the bottom of the hill.

No one was following him. The cabin was well lit now, but not by lightning. It was afire.

From the shelter of the trees, he watched it burn, and he saw no one emerge, heard no one cry out. By morning it was a charred ruin, and without the support of the walls, the chimney at last collapsed. The child, who had cried for a time, was asleep by then, and Everand slung her over his shoulder like a sack of meal as he began the long walk home.

She was quicker than her mother had been, or per-haps Everand had learned something about teaching since then. Or perhaps he was simply more desperate to impart information these days. Whichever was true, he found himself greatly pleased by her prospects. But this time he began casting about for a sorcerous mas-ter much earlier; he thought that by apprenticing her while she was very young he would avoid the human entanglements that had so swayed his daughter from her proper path. And this time, too, he would not clutch at the first sorcerer to say yes if that one already had another apprentice. He reasoned that sorcerers so rarely took apprentices, surely that would not be a problem again.

On the contrary, the problem this time was that no one would take the child. Word of Everand's daugh-ter's laxness had spread through the sorcerous commu-nity, and no one to whom Everand appealed would take his granddaughter and chance the same. Apprenticeship, they told him, was not to be wasted on the idle.

If he had cursed them before, those curses now seemed as nothing to him. He raged, he railed, there in the ruins where he had built a meager sorcerous existence for himself; his fury would have been terri-ble if he had had the power to express it. Instead, he could only fell a few trees with lightning, crack a few rocks, terrorize a few animals. Even the child Aliza was not frightened, for she had quickly become accustomed to his skills, and she, too, could call down lightning from a cloudy sky, though it was still only strong enough to make a bucket of water steam.

Everand stood by the parapet of the ruined wall, stood by the part of it that was least damaged, so that if he looked outward from there he could almost en-tertain the illusion that behind him the castle was whole and sound. How many times had he yearned to make that structure so? How many times had he wished to move these stones by the power of sorcery, by the wave of a hand and the intonation of a few words?

How many times had he tried to imagine the sight of his own fingers ornamented by rings whose creatures would obey his slightest whim? He pounded his fists on the sun-warmed stones, and they felt cool com-pared to the hot rage that bubbled inside him. He needed help, and the world denied him.

It was then, at that very moment, that he decided to beg. He spent almost a year in finding someone who would answer his plea. And then, when he found charity, or as close to charity as any sorcerer would come, the price was his ear.

The Seer lifted her cupped hands from the pool and carefully dried the ear and its chain on her skirt.

Then she handed them back to Taranol.

He slipped the chain over his head. "He told me he wanted the demon as a tutor for himself and hisgranddaughter. I saw no reason to doubt that. And I knew that Regneniel would be no great servant in any case-it seemed something of a joke to me, to give him such an untalented creature in exchange for power over him. Perhaps if I had understood how much he hated us all, I wouldn't have agreed to the trade. I laughed at him, though not to his face. Actually, I pitied him. He pleaded so humbly. I never realized what a mask it was. I'm almost tempted now to give him a taste of real enmity." He fingered the ear for a moment. "Almost."

"He murdered her parents," said Cray.

Taranol shrugged. "That's nothing to me. They stood in his way."

"His own daughter."

"I don't care much for my own children, to be honest. But I was one of those, one of the many, who refused his granddaughter an apprenticeship. He was cursing me." He closed both hands about the ear.

"I've teased him over the years, not in malice, but just for amusement. He's had to close up the gaps in his walls and put bars on his gate against certain wild animals that keep trying to get inside. He doesn't know that I sent them. His spell is too weak to keep them out, you see; it's only good for humans and demons. But that's just a petty annoyance to him, just my little joke. I could do far worse if I wished."

Then he smiled slightly. "But I suppose I must realize that ordinary humans always hate the powerful, be they sorcerous or no. And he's truly just an ordinary hu-man still, and a pitiful one. He has tried so hard to be one of us, and failed so dismally. What a shame he gave himself such a long life in which to be so unhappy."

Cray clasped his hands behind his back and turned away from the others, away from the pool and the Seer, from Gildrum and Taranol and his flock of tiny demons. "Thank you for the loan of the ear, my lord Taranol. It has been extremely helpful."

"Has it?" said Taranol. "And what will you do with all it has told you, Master Cray?"

"I don't know yet. You must excuse me now. I have to think."

"Let me show you out, my lord," said the lady Helaine, rising from the rim of the pool. "I know you understand that we must consider this information in private."

"Oh, of course, of course. But you'll give me a hint, won't you, when you decide? I really must know, to be sure that I get full value from the ear."

"Full value?" said the lady Helaine.

"Well, of course-if you decide to kill him, I want to be ready to conjure my demon back. A dead man's ear won't be any use to me."

"You presume too much, my lord. We seek to un-derstand, not to destroy."