"Take off your boot," Arai told Lillandra. "Let me see your ankle."

"I'm fine."

"Let me see it," he insisted.

Sighing with annoyance, she limped over to him, sat down, and took off her boot...and before she could object, Arai picked up her leg, placed her bare foot in his lap, and began probing her ankle, feeling for breaks. She gasped when he touched her.

It was another one of those weirdly intimate moments, and Arai found himself marveling at the fact that just a few months ago, he had been prepared to kill this woman. Now he was worried about her. Now he was taking care of her.

He didn't feel any breaks, and he told her so: "I think it's just sprained," he said. "But you'll probably have to keep off your feet for a few days."

"I wish I had my Golden Apple," she muttered.

"Your what?"

"My Golden Apple. It was a zemi I made years ago, that could heal these sorts of injuries."

That certainly would have been useful. "What happened to it?"

"You threw it into the river, on the day we arrived in Addis." She withdrew her foot from him and put her boot back on.

"Ah. That's a shame."

"A shame," she agreed.

They sat there quietly for several moments, neither of them knowing quite what to say. "How long do you think it will take Shell to return?" Lillandra asked at last.

"I don't know. It took us about an hour to walk all the way out here, but we were taking it pretty easy. If she runs, she might make it back to the ship in half that time. I only hope nothing happens to her along the way."

She nodded. "I like Shell. I didn't at first; I thought she was just a thief." She glanced at Arai. "You saw something in her that I didn't."

He shrugged. "It's like you said. I try to see the good in people."

She snorted. "We're very different, aren't we?"

Maybe this was the time. Arai took a deep breath and said, "Tell me about Julien."

"I'd rather not."

"What happened to him?"

"He died."

"How?"

It took her several moments to answer. "He was murdered," she said quietly. "By Prince Ryal."

"By Prince..." Arai's eyes widened. Lillandra's lover had been murdered by Prince Ryal? No wonder she hated him so much; no wonder her eyes flashed with anger whenever Ryal or his father Reemus were mentioned. "What happened?"

He had tried asking her these things before, and she had never answered, but this time, she looked up at the hole they had fallen through, at that circle of blue sky, and said, "I've already told you where I came from. I was born in a small village in the Hardways, in the foothills below the Frozen Mountains. My father ran off before I was born and my mother ran off after him, and I was left to be raised by my grandmother. We lived on the edge of the village. My grandmother was a witch; she knew how to make a few simple zemi. That's how she made her living -- selling Chains of Strength to the loggers, and love philtres to their wives. When I was old enough, and when she saw that I had some potential, she began to teach me how to do magic as well. That's how I became a sorceress."

She obviously meant to tell him her whole life story here. "Go on."

"My grandmother died when I was nine. I was just old enough to take care of myself, and I knew enough magic to carry on my grandmother's work. The villagers were sure I needed looking after, though. One day the town drunk showed up at my grandmother's cabin, telling me that he was moving in, that he was going to make me his daughter." She snorted. "I used my magic to chase him off."

"What did you do to him?"

"I burned his hair off. Anyway, the villagers left me alone after that, but they were always suspicious of me. They stopped coming around to buy zemi, and they tried to cheat me whenever I went into the village to buy supplies."

"You were only a child."

"I was a sorceress," she said, "and I was growing stronger every day. I never did get the hang of casting, but I got very good at calculation. When I wasn't gathering firewood, cooking meals, or doing chores, I was calculating. I learned how to create more and more complex zemi. I realized that with enough time and effort I could do just about anything that I put my mind to." Her eyes fell from that circle of blue sky to the muddy floor at the bottom of the hole. "And when I was sixteen, I met him."

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"Him? Julien?"

She nodded. "He was a swordsman, like you. A student of the Three Waves school."

Arai blinked. A swordsman? And a student of the Three Waves school? This was interesting. The Three Waves school was one of the oldest schools of swordsmanship in either Velon or the Holy Empire; Arai's father had told him once that it had been around for about three hundred years. But the teachings were passed down to only a handful of students; Arai's father's teacher, or his teacher, might have actually crossed swords with this Julien.

"King Reemus had come to the Hardways to run off the Al'mud. Some of his troops were quartered in my village; Julien was one of them. He was...he was the only man who was ever kind to me. I fell in love with him."

"Ah."

"We spent almost six months together. You remember that bracelet? The one you sold in Kingsaile? That was a gift from him." Her expression was wistful. "Those were the happiest times of my life."

"But they didn't last."

"No. One day Prince Ryal showed up in the village with reinforcements from Hammersvik. Julien had gone to the village to buy some eggs for breakfast, but he was late coming back, so I went into the village to look for him." Her wistful expression turned troubled. "When I got there, I found the two of them fighting -- Prince Ryal and Julien. Ryal fancied himself a swordsman as well, and he had demanded a match with Julien. But it got out of hand. Ryal was injured, and humiliated. He had Julien put to death."

"For beating him in a sparring match?"

"I told you before, you have no idea what Prince Ryal was like. He was a monster in a human form. He treated people like toys. He tortured people, had them put to death for the most trivial offenses. And King Reemus wasn't much better."

Arai struggled to accept this. The history he had received, from his father and others, was that Reemus had been a good king, and that Ryal had been the perfect prince, but that both had been killed by the villainous Night Queen. "And then what?"

"Half the village witnessed Ryal's fight with Julien. A couple of them may have laughed when Julien beat him. He was angry and embarrassed. So when King Reemus returned from an expedition in the Frozen Mountains, Ryal accused the villagers of having collaborated with the Al'mud, and Reemus had the village put to the torch."

Arai stared. "That's insane."

"That's what happened."

"Ryal had an entire village destroyed because he was embarrassed? And King Reemus went along with this?"

"Yes."

"I find that hard to believe."

"I'm sure you do. I'm sure you've heard all kinds of stories about Reemus and Ryal. A great king, and his promising heir, cut down in the prime of their lives by the evil witch." She laughed bitterly. "But they were murderers. Both of them."

"So you took your revenge on them."

She nodded. "They killed the villagers, and destroyed their homes, but they spared my cabin -- it was half a mile from the village, in the middle of the woods; they may not have known it was there. As soon as I made it home I started making a Dragon's Bit."

The Dragon's Bit was a zemi that gave the wielder power over monsters. "How long did that take?"

"Most of a year. I made other zemi, too, and when I was ready, I called Catalyus out of the Frozen Mountains, along with an army of ape-men and rock-bears, and I marched on Harbor Town. The city fell immediately. No one could stand against Catalyus. And then I continued on to Hammersvik. King Reemus raised an army of his own to try to stop me, but I had more monsters than he had men, and I had caught him by surprise besides. I captured him and Prince Ryal at Fort Drakness."

"And you killed them."

"I killed Prince Ryal," she clarified. "Well, Catalyus did, at any rate. But I didn't actually kill King Reemus. It was Lord Pierce who did that, out of my sight."

"The first Lord Pierce," Arai mused. "The first Lord Protector."

"He had some kind of disagreement with the king. He agreed to join forces with me shortly before I captured Fort Drakness. I rewarded him afterwards by making him the Lord Protector." She frowned. "It all happened so fast. I never really meant to take over Velon, you know -- to make myself the Night Queen. All I wanted, at first, was to get rid of Reemus and Ryal, to avenge Julien. But Hammersvik was in ruins, and the Holy Empire was massing troops along the Tuv. Lord Pierce suggested I make myself queen, while he took over the reins of government. That was fine with me. I thought I could do better than King Reemus anyway. So..." She shrugged.

"So you became the Night Queen."

"Lord Pierce suggested I create the Night Queen persona to frighten people, to keep them in line. I went along with it. How else could I stay in power? I needed the people to fear me, to respect me. Who could possibly be afraid of a sixteen-year-old girl?"

"You didn't have to agree to any of that, though," Arai pointed out. "You had your revenge. You could have just walked away after Reemus and Ryal were dead."

"I suppose I could have," she admitted. "But I didn't see the harm in going along with Lord Pierce's plan. And anyway, I needed his help, to secure the Nightfall."

Arai didn't follow. "The Nightfall? I don't understand."

She gave him a sad smile. "Haven't you ever wondered what I've been doing for the last hundred years? Haven't you ever wondered why I shut myself up in that tower, why I cut myself off from the world, why I spent more than a century gathering magia at the Nightfall?"

It did strike him as strange, now that he thought about it. Lillandra had overthrown Velon's king, but instead of ruling from the Waterglass Palace, she had handed the kingdom over to Lord Pierce, while removing herself to the Nightfall, that ancient tower outside of Hammersvik. Clearly, she was not interested in power for its own sake. But what had she been doing at the Nightfall?

"I knew I would have to spend most of the next century sleeping," she said, "and I couldn't allow anyone, or anything, to interfere with my work. Lord Pierce agreed to secure the tower for me, to keep people away from it, to place guardians all around it to defend me while I slept."

"But what were you doing there?"

"I was trying to bring Julien back to life."

Arai blinked. "You what?"

"You heard me."

"But that...that's impossible."

"Not for me."

"No one can resurrect the dead. The most powerful sorcerer in the world couldn't do it."

She shook her head. "I've spent the last hundred years transforming the Nightfall -- the entire tower -- into a gigantic zemi, a zemi capable of bringing Julien back to life. It's the single greatest calculation in human history, I'm sure, but as I told you before, with enough magia, and enough patience, a sorceress can do virtually anything."