lady?”
Ciri sighed. “My knight, you are indeed brave,” she murmured. “So very brave.”
Matya noticed, however, that Ciri did not answer Trevarre's question.
*****
Matya awoke in the gray light before dawn. Ciri had provided her a bed. Trevarre slept
soundly on a bed of furs before the cottage's hearth. Matya looked around the cottage, but
Ciri was nowhere to be seen.
Just as well, Matya thought. This way she would not have to bid the strange young woman
good-bye.
Matya knelt beside the sleeping knight before she left. His careworn face was peaceful in
slumber, his brow untroubled.
“I hope you find your honor truly reward enough, Knight,” she whispered softly. She
hesitated a moment, then reached out a hand, as if to smooth his mouse-brown hair over the
bandage on his head. He stirred, and she pulled her hand back. Quietly, Matya slipped from
the cottage.
“Trevarre has what he wants,” she reminded herself, “and so do I.”
The ruddy orb of the sun crested the dim purple mountains to the east as Matya made her
way through the village. A few folk already were up at this hour, but they paid her no
heed as they went about their business. Once again, Matya had the feeling there was
something peculiar about this village, but she could not quite fathom what it was. She
hurried on toward her wagon and the restless Rabbit.
Then it struck her. “The shadows are all wrong!” she said aloud. Her own shadow stretched
long before her in the low morning sunlight, but hers was the only shadow that looked like it was supposed to look.
The shadow cast by a two-
story cottage to her left was short and lumpy - much shorter than she would have expected
for a building so high. She looked all around the village and saw more examples of the
same. Nowhere did the outline of a shadow match that of the object that cast it. Even more
disturbing were the villagers themselves. None of them cast shadows at all!
Her sense of unease growing, Matya gathered up her skirts and hurried onto the stone
bridge. She suddenly wanted to be away from this troubling place. She was nearly across
the bridge when something - she was unsure exactly what - compelled her to cast one last
glance over her shoulder. Abruptly she froze, clapping a hand over her mouth to stifle a
cry.
The village had changed.
Well-tended cottages were nothing more than broken, burned stone foundations. The smithy
was a pile of rubble, and there was no trace of the mill except for the rotted remains of
the waterwheel, slumped by the bank of the stream, looking like the twisted web of some
enormous spider. There were no people, no horses, no dogs, no chickens. The dell was bare.
The dark ground was hard and cracked, as if it had been baked in a furnace.
Matya's heart lurched. She ran a few, hesitant steps back across the bridge, toward the
village, and she gasped again. Tambor looked as it had before, the villagers going about
their business. Blue smoke rose from a score of stone chimneys.
Perhaps I imagined it, she thought, but she knew that wasn't true. Slowly, she turned her
back to the village once more and walked across the bridge. She looked out of the comer of
her eye and again saw the jumbled ruins and blackened earth behind her. Slowly, she began
to understand.
Tambor HAD been destroyed in the Cataclysm. The people, the bustling village, were images
of what had been long ago. It was all illusion. Except the illusion was imperfect, Matya
realized. It appeared only when she traveled TOWARD the village, not AWAY from it. But how
did the illusion come to exist in the first place?
Resolutely, Matya walked back across the bridge. She found that, if she concentrated, the
illusion of the bustling village would waver and grow transparent before her eyes, and she
could see the blackened ruins beneath. She walked to the center of the village, toward the single