Dream of Me/Believe in Me

one.”
    “Is there now? What a simple world ye live in. Must be nice sometimes … but I don't know, chances are I'd get bored right quick.”
    “Stop nattering and just tell me, what really happened to her mother?”
    “She was called to the sea.”
    Hawk paled. Suicide was anathema to the Church, utterly forbidden. If Krysta's mother had taken her own life … “What are you saying?”
    “I'm saying she was called to the sea.”
    “What does that mean? She … took her own life?”
    Thorgold sighed very loudly. “The sea abounds with life. Ye sail it enough to know that.”
    “For God's sake, you know perfectly well what I mean! No mortal woman can live in the sea.”
    Thorgold peered at him from beneath bushy brows. “Suppose she was a mortal woman but one with a rare gift, that of calling into this world beings from the other realm. But suppose the gift had another side to it, that
she
could be called from this world if the unhappiness she found here became too much for her to bear.”
    Hawk was silent for a long moment. He knew something about women with rare gifts who could suffer becauseof them. Yes, by God, he did know about that. Even so, he said, “People cannot go and live in the sea, no matter how much they might want to.”
    “Ah, but they don't want to, there's the thing, because they believe they cannot. They carry their bodies about with them from the day they're born an' they get to thinking there is nothing else fer them. But life …” Thorgold gestured to the surrounding trees thick with leaves soon to fall, to the river rushing by so swiftly no droplet of water could be seen for more than an instant, to the sudden shower of seeds borne on milk-white clouds that wafted past them and vanished as though it had not been.
    “Life is always transforming itself,” Thorgold said. “That's what life does, nothing more and nothing less. The trick is noticing.”
    Hawk's mind turned that over, turning and turning, getting nowhere. It was important somehow, he knew that, but the notion was like gossamer, uncatchable.
    “You spun this tale to make Krysta feel better,” he tried. It was logical, even compassionate. He couldn't blame the odd pair too much if that was what they'd done.
    “If you like.”
    “I don't like! But I think I understand. If she suspected the truth—”
    “Whose truth, what truth, truth's truth? Open yer mind, Hawk of Essex. It has wings ye've yet to unfurl.”
    And with that, Thorgold was gone. One moment he was standing there and the next he was not. Hawk looked around swiftly in all directions but not so much of a glimmer of the little man remained to be seen. However, listening closely, Hawk thought he caught the jangle of brooches and buckles, bangles and beads dancing on the air.

Chapter FIFTEEN

    D EEP IN THOUGHT, KRYSTA TOOK A WRONG turn after leaving the queen and found herself in a wing of the royal residence she had not seen before. It seemed set aside for servants' quarters and at this hour of the day it was deserted. She wandered for some time, trying to retrace her steps through a labyrinth of corridors, before finally finding a door that led out into a courtyard. There she spied a boy hurrying about some errand and managed to stop him long enough to ask her way back to the great hall. From there, she assumed she could find her quarters.
    “Through there,” he told her, scarcely slowing down, “turn left then left again, go straight aways and take the second—no, the third right. It'll still be a bit but you'll get there.”
    On that less than helpful note, he sped off, leaving Krysta struggling to remember what he had said.
    “Left …” she murmured as she followed his directions. A while later, “And left again, then straight—”
    She came to a long corridor lined with doors on one side and windows on the other looking out over yet anothercourtyard. From behind the doors, she heard voices reciting in Latin. One door stood partly open and through it she made out the scratch of pens on parchment and caught a glimpse of young men with their heads bent in study.
    From that she concluded that somehow she had worked her way around to where the royal school joined the king's residence. Which meant, if she was right, that she should be able to see the scriptorium from the windows up ahead.
    But no, she couldn't, and she felt exasperated. Perhaps if she turned around and went the other way? She was about to do so when a man emerged suddenly from a