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dyed a blue not quite that of woad; and ankle-length brown leather boots. A scabbarded sword hung on his left hip, a sheathed knife on his right.
    “Well, heaven knows I’ve seen worse,” Berthrada murmured when he was still a little too far away to hear her.
    “He’s too old for you, dear,” Ethelind said, also softly. She freighted the last word with poisonous sweetness.
    No matter how catty that made her, it didn’t make her wrong. The stranger’s fair hair—so far, telling how much gray it held was hard—receded at the temples. Harsh grooves scored his forehead and the skin between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. When you got a good look at it, his nose had a distinct dent.
    When Alianora got a good look at that dent, it was as if someone had punched her, hard, on the point of the chin. She sagged. Her hands slipped off the crank. It spun backwards, and almost did clip her in the face. She wondered if she would even have noticed. She’d already been hit harder than that.
    “Holger,” she said, and groped for the stone wall around the well to help steady herself.

    His eyes snapped sharply toward her. They were blue as she remembered, blue as a deep lake seen from the sky when she soared above it in swan’s guise. But he had not known her till she spoke his name. Grief flamed within her for that.
    “Alianora?” he said. “Is it really you at last?” Blood drained from his weathered face, leaving it lich-pale.
    “Aye,” she answered. She’d told him she loved him, there in the ruined church of St. Grimmin’s. And he’d taken the sword Cortana, which he’d found hidden there, and he’d ridden forth on his great black horse, and he’d broken the forces of Chaos, for they could not stand against him and what he bore.
    And that was thirty long years ago now, even if it sometimes seemed like yesterday. It might seem so, but seeming was not reality.
    “My dear,” he said. “My love.” He took a step in her direction. The village women stared avidly, their eyes wide as saucers. Even Berthrada’s twins peeped out from behind their mother’s skirts.
    Alianora straightened. It was like taking a wound. Once the first shock passed, you steadied—if it wasn’t mortal, of course. “You never came back to me,” she said, as if that were all the explanation she needed. Perhaps it was. No one died of a broken heart, regardless of how many people wished they could.
    Holger’s hands dropped. He had started to get his color back. Now he whitened again. “I couldn’t, dammit,” he mumbled, staring down at the grass and dirt between his feet. “The magics that brought me here swept me back to the world where I’d lived before. I was needed there, too, it turned out.”
    She believed him absolutely. That more than one world might require the services of such a hero . . . Well, who could doubt it? In the end, though, what difference did it make? Two worlds might need Holger, but so had she—then. “You never came back to me,” she repeated, this time adding, “I thought sure I would never see you again.”
    He cocked his head to one side. A small, tight, crooked smile came and went. “You don’t talk the way you used to,” he said, sliding away from what she’d told him.
    She knew what he meant. When he’d known her before, she’d had a thick back-country burr. It wasn’t the way folk in the villages around here spoke. To fit in better, she’d softened the burr as much as she could.
    “I’ve dwelt in these parts a long time now,” she said, talking the way she talked.
    “I know. I’ve been trying to get to these parts for a long time now.” Holger stared off toward the horizon, and toward the blue Faeries gloaming darkening one stretch of it. “I’ve been to a lot of places—a lot of worlds. But Something or Somebody kept holding me away from this one. I can make a pretty good guess Who, too.”
    Alianora could make that same guess. If the Powers Holger had bested here had