"We should reach Armida by, nightfall."  Colryn drew his horse to a walk in the neck of the narrow pass, waiting for the others to draw abreast of them, and looked across at Barron with a brief smile.  "Tired of travelling?"

Barron shook his head without answering.  "Good thing, because, although the Comyn Lord may want us to break our journey there for a day or two, after that we start into the hills."

Barron chuckled to himself.  If, according to Colryn, they started into the hills tomorrow, he wondered what they had been travelling for these past four days.  Every day since they had left the plains where the Terran Trade City lay, they had been winding down the side of one mountain and up along the side of another, till he had lost count of the peaks and slopes.

And yet he was not tired.  He was hardened now to riding, and sat his horse easily; and, although he would not have known how to say so, every inch of the road had held him in a sort of spell he did not understand and could not explain.

He had expected to travel this road filled with bitterness, resentment and grim resignation - he had left behind him everything he knew: his work, such friends as he had, the whole familiar world made by the men who had spanned great giant steps across the Galaxy.  He had been going into exile and strangeness.

Yet - how could he explain it even to himself? - the long road had held him almost in a dream.  It had been like learning a language once known but long forgotten.  He had felt the strange world reach out and grip him fast and say "Stranger, come; you are coming home."  It gave him a sensation, of riding through a dream, or under water, with everything that happened insulated by a curtain of unreality.

Now and then, as if surfacing from a very long dive, the old self he had been, during those years when he sat at the dispatcher's board in the Terran Trade City would come to the surface and sit there blinking.  He tried, once, to make it clear to himself.

Are you falling in love with this world, or something?  He would breathe the cold, strangely scented air, and listen to the slow fall of his horse's hooves on the hard-frozen road, and think, What's wrong?  You've never been here before, why does it all seem so familiar?  But familiar was the wrong word, it was as if, in another life, he had ridden through hills like these, breathed the cold air and smelled the incense that his companions burned in their campfires in the chilly fog of evening before they slept.  For it was new to his eyes, and yet - it's as if I were a blind man, newly seeing, and everything strange and beautiful and yet just the way I knew it would be....

During these brief interludes when the old Barron came to life in his mind, he realized that this sense of deja vu, of living in a dream, must be some new form of the same hallucinated madness that had cost him his job and his reputation.  But these interludes were brief.  The rest of the time he rode in the strange dream and enjoyed the sense of suspension between his two worlds and the two selves which he knew he was becoming.

Now the journey would break, and he wondered briefly if the spell would break with it.  "What is Armida?"

Colryn said "The estate of the lord Valdir Alton, the Comyn lord who sent for you.  He will be pleased that you speak our language fluently, and he will explain to you just what he wishes."  He looked down into the valley, shading his eyes with his hand against the dimming sunlight, and pointed.  "Down there."