as a shrine.' His grainy voice was almost gentle as he finished. 'They left carvings. You have seen them, when you scratched at the moss.'

    Sabin jumped up with her mouth opened like a fish. He had been carried into this house, unconscious. Ciondo had brought him through the front door. Someone might have mentioned her name in his hearing, but there was no way he could have seen the springhouse, or have known of her fondness for that ledge. Her aunt and uncle did not know, nor her own mother and father.

    'I am a Wayfinder,' he said simply, as if that sealed a truth that she realized, shivering, could not be other than magic. Her need to escape that room, and that compelling, mesmeritic gaze came out in a rush of speech. 'I have to go, now.'

    The Wayfinder let his head fall back on the pillow. At a word from him, she would have fled; she waited, tautly poised on one t:oot. But he made no sound. He closed his eyes, and curiosity welled over her fear and held her rooted. 'Still there?' he murmured after a while.

'Maybe.' Sabin put her foot down, but quietly.

    He did not open his eyes. 'You have a piece of the gift yourself, you know, Sabin.'

She quivered again, as much from anger. 'What gift!'

    His hands were not relaxed now, but bunched into whiteknuckled fists. One of his sores had begun to bleed from the pressure; he was trying her uncle's knots, and finding them dishearteningly firm. 'You came to the beach at my call.'

    She stamped her foot, as much to drive off uneasiness. 'You called nothing! I forgot my jacket. That was all.'

    ~No.' His hands gave up their fretting. 'You have given your jacket as the reason. But it was my call that caused you to forget it in the first place. When I asked the spirits for their help, you heard also. That was the true cause of the forgetfulness that drew you outside in the night.'

    'l've been scolded for carelessness all my life,' she protested, 'and my jacket was forgotten at twilight!'

'And so at that hour I called.' He was smiling.

    She wanted to curse him, for that. He seemed so smug. Like Juard had been when he teased her; and that remembrance called up tears. Sabin whirled violently toward the doorway and collided headlong with her aunt.

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