I assessed the mood of the imperial nephew as Arthon and I bowed our way out of the throne room, and I decided that it might be a good time for me to leave Tol Honeth. As soon as the fellow regained his composure, the trees in the neighborhood were almost certainly going to flower with more of those posters. This was getting to be a habit.

I thought about that as I made my way toward Tol Borune. Ever since I’d abandoned my career as a common drunk, I’d been misusing my gift. The Will and the Word is a fairly serious thing, and I’d been turning it into a bad joke. Despite my grief, I was still my Master’s disciple, not some itinerant trickster. I suppose I could excuse myself by pointing to my emotional state during those awful years, but I don’t think I will. I’m supposed to know better.

I by-passed Tol Borune, largely to avoid any more opportunities to turn offensive people into pigs or to stick them up in the air just for fun. That was probably a good idea; I’m sure the Borunes would have irritated me. I’ve got a fair amount of respect for the Borune family, but they can be awfully pig-headed sometimes.

Sorry, Ce’Nedra. Nothing personal intended there.

At any rate, I traveled through the lands of the Anadile family and finally reached the northern edge of the Wood of the Dryads. The passing centuries have altered the countryside down there to some degree, but now that I think back on it, I followed almost exactly the same route as I did three thousand years later when a group of friends and I were going south on the trail of the Orb. Garion and I have talked about ‘repetitions’ any number of times, and this may have been another of those signals that the purpose of the universe had been disrupted. Then again, the fact that I followed the same route might have been due to the fact that it was the natural way south and also the fact that I was familiar with it. Once you get a theory stuck in your head, you’ll go to almost any lengths to twist things around to make them fit.

Even in those days the Wood of the Dryads was an ancient oak forest with a strange kind of serene holiness about it. Humans have a tendency to compartmentalize their religion to keep it separate from everyday life. The Dryads live in the center of their religion, so they don’t even have to think - or talk - about it. That’s sort of refreshing.

I’d been in their wood for more than a week before I even saw a Dryad. They’re timid little creatures, and they don’t really care to come into contact with outsiders - except at certain times of the year. Dryads are all females, of course, so they’re obliged to have occasional contacts with the males - of various species - in order to reproduce.

I’m sure you get the picture.

I didn’t really make an effort to find any Dryads. Technically, they’re ‘monsters,’ though certainly not as dangerous as the Eldrakyn or Algroths, but I still didn’t want any incidents.

Evidently, though, it was ‘that time of year’ for the first Dryad I encountered, because she’d laid aside her customary shyness and was aggressively trying to track me down. When I first saw her, she was standing in the middle of the forest path I was following. She had flaming red hair, and she was no bigger than a minute. She was, however, holding a fully drawn bow, and her arrow was pointed directly at my heart. ‘You’d better stop,’ she advised me.

I did that - immediately.

Once she was certain that I wasn’t going to try to run, she became very friendly. She told me that her name was Xana, and that she had plans for me. She even apologized for the bow. She explained it by telling me that travelers were rare in the Wood, and that a Dryad with certain things on her mind had to take some precautions to prevent escapes.

I tried to explain to her that what she was proposing was wildly inappropriate, but I couldn’t seem to get through to her. She was a very determined little creature.

I think I’ll just let it go at that. What happened next isn’t central to the story I’m telling, and there’s no point in being deliberately offensive.

Dryads customarily share things with their sisters, so Xana introduced me to other Dryads as well. They all pampered me, but there was no getting around the fact that I was a captive - a slave, if we want to be blunt about it - and my situation was more than a little degrading. I didn’t make an issue of it, though. I smiled a lot, did what was expected of me, and waited for an opportunity. As soon as I had a moment alone, I slipped into the form of the wolf and loped off into the wood. They searched for me, of course, but they didn’t know what they were looking for, so I had no trouble evading them.

I reached the north bank of the River of the Woods, swam across, and shook the water out of my fur. You might want to keep that in mind: if you take the form of a furred creature and you happen to get wet before you change back, always shake off the excess water first. Otherwise, your clothes will be dripping when you resume your real form.

I was in Nyissa now, so I didn’t have to worry about Dryads any more. I started keeping a sharp eye out for snakes instead. Normal humans make some effort to keep the snake-population under control, but the snake is a part of the Nyissan religion, so they don’t. Their jungles are literally alive with slithering reptiles - all venomous. I managed to get bitten three times during my first day in that stinking swamp, and that made me extremely cautious. It wasn’t hard to counteract the venom, fortunately, but being bitten by a snake is never pleasant.

The war with the Marags had seriously altered Nyissan society. Before the Marag invasion, the Nyissans had cleared away large plots of jungle and built cities and connecting highways. Highways provide invasion routes, however, and a city, by its very existence, proclaims the presence of large numbers of people and valuable property. You might as well invite attack. Salmissra realized that, and she ordered her subjects to disperse and to allow the jungle to reclaim all the towns and roads. This left only the capital at Sthiss Tor, and since I’d sort of drifted into the self-appointed task of making a survey of the kingdoms of the west, I decided to pay a call on the Serpent Queen.

The Marag invasion had occurred almost a hundred years earlier, but there were still abundant signs of the devastation it had caused. The abandoned cities, choked in vines and bushes, still showed evidence of fire and of the kind of destruction siege-engines cause. Now the Nyissans themselves scrupulously avoided those uninviting ruins. When you get right down to it, Nyissa is a theocracy. Salmissra is not only queen, but also the High Priestess of the Serpent God. Thus, when she gives an order, her people automatically obey her, and she’d ordered them to go live out in the brush with the snakes.

I was a little footsore when I reached Sthiss Tor, and very hungry. You have to be careful about what you eat in Nyissa. Virtually every plant and a fair number of the birds and animals are either narcotic, or poisonous, or both.

I located a ferry-landing and crossed the River of the Serpent to the garish city of Sthiss Tor. The Nyissans are an inspired people. The rest of the world likes to believe that inspiration is a gift from the Gods, but the Nyissans have found a simpler way to achieve that peculiar ecstasy. Their jungles abound with various plants with strange properties, and the snake-people are daring experimenters. I knew a Nyissan once who was addicted to nine different narcotics. He was the happiest fellow I’ve ever known. It’s probably not a good idea to have your house designed by an architect with a chemically augmented imagination, however. Assuming that it doesn’t collapse on the workmen during construction, it’s likely to have any number of peculiar features - stairways that don’t go anyplace, rooms that there’s no way to get into, doors that open out into nothing but air, and assorted other inconveniences. It’s also likely to be painted a color which doesn’t have a name and has never appeared in any rainbow.

I knew where Salmissra’s palace was, since Beldin and I had been in Sthiss Tor during the Marag invasion, so I wasn’t obliged to ask directions of people who didn’t even know where they were, much less where anything else was.

The functionaries in the palace were all shaved-headed eunuchs. There’s probably a certain logic there. From puberty onward, the assorted Salmissras are kept on a regimen of various compounds that slow the normal aging process. It’s very important that Salmissra forever looks the same as the original handmaiden of Issa. Unfortunately, one of the side-effects of those compounds is a marked elevation of the Queen’s appetite - and I’m not talking about food. Salmissra does have a kingdom to run, and if her servants were functional adult males, she’d probably never get anything done.

Please, I’m trying to put this as delicately as possible.

The queen knew that I was coming, of course. One of the qualifications for the throne of Nyissa is the ability to perceive things that others can’t. It’s not exactly like our peculiar gift, but it serves its purpose. The eunuchs greeted me with genuflections and various other fawning gestures of respect and immediately escorted me to the throne room. The current Salmissra, naturally, looked the same as all her predecessors, and she was reclining on a divanlike throne, admiring her reflection in a mirror and stroking the bluntly pointed head of a pet snake. Her gown was diaphanous, and it left very little to the imagination. The huge stone statue of Issa, the Serpent God, loomed behind the dais where his current handmaiden lay.