find, fully cognizant now of what she had done. Before her, the
ravine stretched away, empty. Smoke and ash hung on the air.
Her throat tightened as she tried to breathe. She had not had a
choice, she knew-but the knowledge didn’t help. Eowen had
been one of them, brought to her death as Wren watched, her
own prophecy fulfilled. Though Wren had tried, she could not
change the outcome of the seer’s vision. Eowen had told her
once that her life had been built around her visions and she had
come to accept them-even the one that foretold her death.
Wren felt tears fill her eyes and run down her cheeks.
Oh, Eowen!
CHAPTER
21
AT SOUTHWATCH TIME DRIFTED away like a cloud across
the summer blue, and Coil Ohmsford could only watch
helplessly as it passed him by. His imprisonment con-
tinued unchanged, his life an uneasy compendium of
boredom and tension. His thoughts were unfettered, but led him
nowhere. He dreamed of the past, of the life he had enjoyed in
the Vale, and of the world that lay without the black walls of
his confinement, but his dreams had turned tattered and faded.
No one came for him. He began to accept that no one would.
He spent his days in the exercise yard, sparring with Ulfkin-
groh, the gnarled, scarred, taciturn fellow into whose care Rim-
mer Dali had given him. Ulfkingroh was as tough as nails and
he worked Coil until the Valeman thought he would drop. With
padded cudgels, heavy staffs, blunted swords, and bare hands,
they exercised and trained as if fighters preparing for battle,
sometimes all day, frequently until they were sweating so hard
that the dust they raised in the yard ran from their bodies in
black stripes. Ulfkingroh was a Shadowen, of course-but he
didn’t seem like one. He seemed like any normal man, albeit
harder and more sullen. At times, Coil almost liked him. He
spoke little, content to let his expertise with weapons do his
talking for him. He was a skilled and experienced fighter, and it
became a point of pride with him that he pass what he knew on
to the Valeman. Coil, for his part, made the best of his situation,
taking advantage of the one diversion he was allowed, learning
what he could of what the other was willing to teach, playing
at battle as if it meant something, and keeping fit for the time
when it really would.
Because sooner or later, he promised himself over and over
again, he would have his chance to escape.
He thought of it constantly. He thought of little else. If no
one knew he was there, if no one would come to save him, then
clearly it was up to him to save himself. Coil was resourceful in
the manner of all Valemen, he was confident he would find a
way. He was patient as well, and his patience was perhaps the
more important attribute. He was watched whenever he was out
of his cell, whenever he went down the dark halls of the mono-
lith to the exercise yard and whenever he went back up again.
He was allowed to spend as much time sparring with Ulfkingroh
as he wished and allowed as well to visit with the rugged fellow
to the extent that he was able to engage the other in conversa-
tion, but always he was watched. He could not afford to make
a mistake.
Still, he never doubted that he would find a way.
He saw Rimmer Dali only twice after the First Seeker visited
him in his cell. Each time it was from a distance, an unexpected
glimpse that lasted only a moment before the other was gone.
Each time the cold eyes were all he could remember afterward.
Coil looked for him everywhere at first until he realized it was
becoming something of an obsession and that he had to stop it.
But he never stopped thinking of what the big man had told
him, of how Par was a Shadowen, too, of how the magic would
consume him if he did not accept the truth of his identity, and