stallion who grazed content in tall grass. Trionn sat outside the fence, his lap encumbered by sleeping cats. His hand caressed the bone handle of the butcher's flensing knife, stolen after dark from the closet. Over and over, Trionn stroked the blade's edge, checking its razor keenness. He turned the weighty steel in his hands, and remembered the kick of a pig held pinned in his arms as it died. He licked dry lips, and sighed as he tested the resolve he had made in desperation, and found himself wanting. He lacked any kind of brash courage. The fate of the horsebreaker did not haunt him, nor fear for his own life and limbs. He simply knew. When the dun stallion bent his knees and laid down to rest, Trionn had no will to creep through the fence and cut the creature's throat to forestall its misery. Whatever freedom death might offer could not compensate for the pound of wild hooves, or the ripple and play of muscles burnished like shining silk under sunlight. The stallion would live to be broken, for Trionn did not have in him the requisite hardness for murder.

    He sat in the calm of the night, surrounded by cats and the chirp of crickets, and miserably wished he were bold enough to run away. Yet far as a lifetime of travel, though he crossed the rocks of the mountains beyond the sands, the memories and the visions would follow him, locked inescapably in his mind. The gypsy caller's powers would sting him, no matter where, and he would ache for the stallion's lost spirit. kike the cling of the cats, the persistence of his dreams could not be shed.

    The deepest and worst of his misery was that he could not even turn the steel upon himself. The pain did not deter him, nor the dying, but the strange, insistent surety that the cats would be left bereft. Wise as the creatures could be, they would not understand why he should desert them for the sake of one horse's lost liberty.

The butcher recovered the purloined knife after Enith, returning from her nightly tryst in the hayloft, caught Trionn in the yard by the kitchens. Particular to a fault when it came to his cutlery, the butcher's shouted obscenities progressed to extra work as punishment. Trionn was assigned the task of sharpening every tool left dull in the course of shearing Silverdown's weeds and grass. Left wary after the slaughtering that Trionn was practiced at

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