Looking at the sun, the morning was beginning its tenth hour. The valley where we had spent the night was now vibrating with a clear light. A myriad of playful rays danced through the intertwined branches to land delicately on the murky wave of the stream. The muddy water bubbled, set with prismatic gems. I sat up slowly, confused and disoriented. A few spans away from me, the fire was nothing but a sad, wet pile of coal. I took a few random steps, my eyes squinting. Apart from my blanket, my chain mail and the clothes I had slept in, there was nothing left of the camp. The horses were gone, our gear was gone, Ulrick was gone, and I was alone. A robin whistled through the brambles on the other side of the stream and flew into the chestnut grove. The rustle of its wings blended with Vaw's voice like a discreet rumor, while, puzzled, I scanned the surroundings. There was no indication that the day before I had come to this place with a val-warrior named Ulrick, that I had tended his horses, greased his weapons and slept beside him. Uncertain, I sat down on a stump drier than the others, waiting for everything to become clearer.

My initial embarrassment gave way to a fluctuating mixture of fear and anger.

I thought of a joke, which didn't make me laugh at all, before I let myself go to a state of total panic and the idea that, perhaps, Ulrick had simply abandoned me, like everyone else before him. It took me almost an hour to get rid of my emotions, to tame my distress and to kill this lingering hope that the Val would come back for me. I finally managed to take a deep breath. I was facing a problem, the first real problem I had faced alone in a very long time.

For two years the Val had been teaching me the obscure methodology of his philosophy, so I decided to approach it from that angle. I decided to put into practice what I knew of the Padekke.

Ulrick had covered his tracks, and the horses' tracks. I immediately concluded that he didn't want me to follow him, and panic froze my veins again before I remembered my lessons. "We have to admit that we don't know and act accordingly." I snorted. The Val certainly didn't seem to want me to follow him, but I shouldn't speculate on his motives. Maybe it was a joke or a test of my skills. For lack of a better word, I decided to explore the latter. Eyes fixed on the ground, attentive to the slightest crumpled leaf, I tried to find the horses' trail. Logically, even if Ulrick had taken his time, he would not have been able to completely hide the print of the heavy hooves of our mounts on the soggy humus of the forest. So I headed for the stream looking for clues. Around noon, my stomach clenched with hunger, I stumbled upstream to a suspicious scratch in the clay and followed other stealthy tracks through the woods, which finally fell back in a semicircle to their starting point. Tired and irritated by the prospect of the Val playing games with me, I considered my other options.

The rivulet must certainly have joined the Gor downstream: if I wanted to reach Gorwill, I could always follow its course to the river, then go upstream towards the north. Perhaps this was what Ulrick expected of me: that I find the direction of the ferry without his help. So I turned back, rehearsing the long list of insults I was going to drown him in when I would finally find him. To my great disappointment, after two hours of walking, the creek became diluted in a large area of peaty swamps. Despite the swarms of mosquitoes and bushy gorse taller than me, I tried to push forward a little more. I was soon covered in stinging pimples and stinking mire, and nearly lost a boot when I got stuck in the black mud. Faced with the fear of getting lost or being swallowed up by the swamp, I gave up and headed back to the woods.

The fear was starting to come back in waves: I was hungry, and very thirsty, and I was absolutely lost. I swallowed some berries while wandering randomly between the trees, before sitting down to take my marks. The idea that the Val had abandoned me kept nagging at me. I racked my brains trying to remember what I had said or done to deserve such a fate and it only made me more desperate. That he would devote two years of his life to me and then abandon me seemed absolutely incomprehensible and, therefore, perfectly coherent. On the verge of tears, I was cursing Ulrick, trying to understand why he was leaving me to die in the forest, when it finally hit me.

Obviously, it was another lesson. I ran my hand over my eyes to rub my temples. After a few moments of meditation, defeated, I screamed loudly :

"I learned that I don't know where I'm going! Ulrick! I learned that I should know where I'm going!"

For what seemed to me a very long time, nothing happened. Then I suddenly saw the massive silhouette of the Val appearing between the trunks of the large, twisted oaks, and he moved towards me with a nonchalant step. I oscillated between the desire to break all his fingers one after the other and a relief both enormous and shameful. When he reached me, his mouth contorted with disgust, he stared at my mud-covered breeches, my soaked boots, and the swollen stings that dotted my face. He finally threw his skin at me, which I opened with a trembling hand.

"That's the last thing I wanted you to understand before we joined the vaïdoerk," he said in a neutral voice as I drank fiercely. "You will be fighting alongside men who believe it's everyone's duty to think for themselves. If you care about a situation, then you better do everything you can to understand it. No one else should have to do it for you." I drank from the waterskin while trying to assemble the most insulting litany my vocabulary could muster. I took a deep breath, before backing down, because, in the end, Ulrick was right. "It was a good lesson," I conceded, as humbly as I could.

The Val had a faint smile, and he ruffled my hair, his eyes glowing.

"I had a good laugh when you slipped in the bog," he chuckled playfully. "But you've made great progress in tracking. I even had to move the horses at one point because you were so close. Iss finne, Fyss. Very, very good." I looked up, still not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and Ulrick spat as he looked at the woods around us. "Go wash up in the creek," he continued without looking at me. "I'll be back with the horses."

"Wait," I said as the Val was about to turn around. "You haven't told me how we're going to Gorwill." Ulrick smiled again." Due east to the road of Vaw. Then three or four hours at walking pace." I nodded, before heading towards the rivulet with a heavy but determined gait. Night was falling when we finally left the darkness of the forest.

For more than two weeks, we had become accustomed to having only limited visibility, and the road of Vaw, that long pale ribbon that our eyes could travel all the way along, filled me with a strange hope. The moon was full that evening, rising straight behind us, and its ghostly glow reverberated off the clay planks of the main road under the opacity of the trees. The air was cool and invigorating, the clouds sparse and white, and my attentive ears were saturated with the melodies and bellowing of the creatures of the night. The horses hobbled along at a leisurely pace not unhappy to be walking on a flat, stable surface.

Gradually, the nocturnal voice of Vaw was replaced by a less wild litany. I could distinguish all around the muffled glows of the farms and houses that trembled in the night like timid fireflies. The flow of the Gor, swollen by the autumn rains, hummed peacefully in the darkness beyond. This was not the Brown, and yet this slow, deep rhythm, so similar to the one that had rocked my childhood, brought back many memories. I remembered the fillets of carp and the fricassees of brookfish that made my mouth water. When we finally arrived in sight of Gorwill, I pondered the memory of the dead man and the catfish.

We soon crossed a wide wooden bridge under which flowed the Vuse, that small stony river which rises within the walls of Vaw, and which cuts the country with a series of gorges before flowing into the more placid waters of the Gor. Lost in my thoughts, I hardly noticed the first militiamen in their watch-house, and their words were carried away by the raging roar of the affluent. A few fires were burning along the road. On muddy mounds, filthy tents were piled in disorder. Ulrick explained that they were probably filled with refugees who had been denied access to the city, but I only listened with a distracted ear. It was only when Pike had stopped on his own that I really came to my senses.

We had stopped in front of the high wooden stockade that ringed the city all the way to the river, and Ulrick nimbly left his saddle to go bang on the closed gate. He had put on his nasal helmet, and each of his movements made the mail and scales of his heavy lamellar armor rattle. The flames of the resin torches that had been hung on the trunks of the stockade rippled over his figure in shadowy patterns. Someone finally opened a trap door at our height and, after a brief and direct exchange, followed by the tinkling of a few coins, the gate swung over us like a portcullis, creaking on worn hinges. Pike followed Berda, and we slowly walked into a modest walled enclosure, under the watchful eye of Gorwill's guard. On the watchtower, invisible archers conversed nervously under the shelter of the blackened wooden battlements, and I saw a wary face leaning over us as we passed. Two soldiers argued over the coins, then Berda sneezed loudly, which startled the armored man who was escorting us through the enclosure.

It was him who opened the second door, the one that led to the city. He was a well-built young man, with the badge of a militia corporal on his shoulder and his eyes a little too close together. He was giving us sidelong glances. "We wouldn't have minded three or four Val companies to help us with the Leafies," he spouted, his vawan accent horribly caricatured, as he stepped aside to let us pass. "Is it the ktoï wizards that scare the crap out of you?" There was something ambiguous in his voice, as if he didn't know himself whether he was asking a question or making a reproach, and he sounded slightly drunk to me. Ulrick didn't answer him and I simply gave him a friendly smile. As we stepped onto the main street and the second door swung open, I heard the soldier whisper behind us. "If the Ktoï are scaring the Vals, what should the rest of us think..." Ulrick ran his tongue over his lips, but he didn't say a word and we continued on our way.

To my great disappointment, I was unable to discover much of Gorwill that night. Ulrick had told me about a pretty castle in the middle of the city, surrounded by an ingenious system of moats diverted directly from the Gor, where the channels cut the city into small lakeside districts. We did cross a few vaulted stone bridges that linked dark, abandoned streets, and there were also the occasional scents of fresh sawdust and tannin that reached my nostrils. However, what struck me the most was the heavy atmosphere and the incessant patrols. The canton of Gorwill had been one of the hearts of the last leafy rebellion, and even though it was a century ago, no one, it seemed, had forgotten it. The sound of nailed boots echoed off the cobblestones of the damp alleys, to bounce back and forth between the tall, half-timbered buildings. Some of the houses gave the oppressive impression of bending on either side as we passed.

Throughout the entire trip, the only entertainment I could distinguish came from a drinking den on the other side of one of the canals, where, by the light of the lanterns, a score of soldiers bearing the Whitewood coat of arms, a pale willow under the great black pine of Vaw, had settled down on the street. Most of them seemed to have had more than enough to drink, and they laughed loudly at each of the simpering of this handful of prostitutes who had come to mingle with them. Obviously, Ovie Vilan had wasted no time in reinforcing her northern cantons, and I did not envy the inhabitants who would have to deal with so many idle and worried soldiers.

Eventually we reached the black water of the Gor, and after Ulrick had made a few round trips to the sleeping docks, a passing patrol told us where to find the boatman's shack. I guarded the horses while the val-warrior negotiated our passage in exchange for his last copper coin. I was enjoying the scent of salted fish, the creaking of the small moored boats and the lapping of the water under the pilings, when Ulrick returned with a man in a bad mood, but obviously eager not to anger a hurried vaïdogan. As the boatman prepared his ferry, half tangled in his wet ropes, the Val took me aside : "He made them pass a week ago" he said in a low voice. "I hope we can catch up with them before the waddan rearguard leaves Garnear." I shrugged. "Two days," I said casually, because I could see how much Ulrick wanted to join his comrades in arms. "If the roads are as good as you say," I added cautiously.

The ferry sank into the night, and we left the lights of Gorwill behind us. When we found ourselves alone on the hollowed-out wood of the opposite landing, Ulrick smiled faintly. "Listen," he said, raising his hand. I shook my head, unable to make out anything but the burbling of the river. "The voice of Vaw," he said softly. "You won't hear it anymore in a few miles." I breathed in the fresh air, listening to the strange sounds of the night that were no longer so strange to us. I thought briefly that I had never been so far from home, before remembering that I hadn't had a home in a long time.

Maybe I never even had one. Ulrick hurried Berda forward and I followed him, my mind buzzing, feeling uneasy. My intuition didn't deceive me. The night had one last surprise in store for me.