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Excerpts

Once clear of the farm buildings and pens, Heriot Tarbas skirted two wide fields, each with its own name, then crossed another diagonally, scrambling through well-known holes in hedges or hoisting himself over dry stone walls. The fields grew steeper as he climbed the hill, and he was out of breath as he climbed the last fence and reached the top at last, clapped his hand over his confused eye, and looked past his little finger to the view on the other side of the hill.

The whole world seemed to tilt. The stretch and sigh of the sea seemed to swell toward him, while the sound of his own hard breathing was briefly swallowed by the greater breath of breaking waves.

Dominating the horizon, dark with forests on its landward side, was an island...Cassio's Island, the home of the Hero of Hoad and Revenger of Senlac, one of the rulers of the people Heriot's family called "Secondcomers." There were towns and a castle and a whole busy life on Cassio's Island, but none of this could be seen from Heriot's hilltop. From there the island looked completely empty.

Still, it was not drifting; it was firmly tethered to the mainland. Many years ago the same people who had once lived in the ruins of the castle that now held Heriot's home had built the causeway...a road over which traders and messengers could bring goods and information from the King to the Hero and back again. And every now and then the Lords of the counties of Hoad, along with the King and his family and other Secondcomers, gathered on Cassio's Island to watch men fight to the death for the right to be Hero. Heriot had never set foot on the causeway. His only travels were to the nearest village with Radley or his cousin Wish, for Great-Great-Aunt Jen discouraged any of her family from wandering, and Heriot most of all.

"In many ways it's best not to be seen out in the world," she had told him over and over again in her calm, dry fashion. "Work hard, keep your head down, and don't let the Secondcomers catch sight of you...not even Lord Glass, though he's a kind man compared with a lot of them. Take it from me, the Lord's eye is the King's eye! So keep out of sight."

Just down the hillside Nesbit, Wish, and Heriot's brother, Radley, were carrying stones to block a big gap in the wall, washed out during the previous winter. Shouting and waving, Heriot admired Radley's wonderful shoulders and back, and the way the sea air had persuaded his shoulder-length hair into ringlets. If Heriot had a single ambition in the world, it was to look and live exactly like Radley, who was swinging rocks as easily as he swung his baby in the courtyard at home.

"Don't tell me!" he said as Heriot came up. "She wants us home! Is it because of the storm?" He nodded at a solid bank of cloud, which was moving toward them, gray at its leading edge but billowing blue-black on the horizon.

"She wants you home because the Travelers have arrived," Heriot said, watching Radley set the stone in place as precisely as if it were a chessman on a board.

"Which tribe?" asked Wish, but Heriot didn't know.

The three men stopped working, straightened up, and began to wander up the hill, joking and laughing with one another, but for some reason Heriot didn't want to go back to the farm. He hesitated, watching them climb, half expecting Radley at least to turn and call him to heel. But they went on and up, past Draevo and out of sight, talking all the time without noticing he wasn't tagging along behind.

Heriot turned toward the sea and the dark forests of Cassio's Island. He didn't want to see Azelma again or hear her suggest he was different from everyone else in his family. He didn't want to be forced into thinking of himself as anything but plain and mostly invisible.

Somewhere on Cassio's Island was a port where ships put in, and somewhere beyond the forests was a city that held the castle of the Hero -- one of the two great spirits of Hoad -- at present alive in the person of Carlyon of County Doro. Somewhere on that island lived a whole population of men and women who were loyal to the Hero first and the King second. This was not only allowed, it was an ancient rule.

"It keeps the King just a little humble," Great-Great-Aunt Jen had once declared. "Once the Kings of Hoad used to be the Heroes as well, but it's too much glory for one man to have both Hero and King alive in him at the same time. Sometimes they're contrary spirits. They might tear him apart."

The causeway was still green, a quick arrow pointing out to the island. On a day like this, a fine day when usual events were yielding to strange ones, someone might walk along the causeway and step onto Cassio's Island and stand just for a little while in a place that was almost another country. It was not forbidden; it was just something no one in the Tarbas family had ever done...at least not as far as Heriot knew.

Two years earlier he had stood on that hilltop with his family, looking down on the causeway at glittering columns of men and women. According to the customs of Hoad, a young man called Carlyon had challenged the Hero, Link, and the King and his court were carrying him to combat in the Hero's Arena. To Heriot, looking down from above, the parade had seemed more than royal. It had seemed to him not a company of mere Kings and Princes, but one of sun bears, centaurs, and strange, stalking birds as beautiful and passing as dreams. Three days later they had returned, carrying Link's body in great splendor, leaving young Carlyon, Hero by conquest, to discover the island on his own and take possession of his hidden city. Heriot had believed the whole world was being paraded past the farm in a glittering thread so he could take note of it, but by now brambles and wild grasses were pushing in on either side of the narrow road, which on this particular day, at this particular time, was totally deserted.

And now, as he walked along the causeway, with his whole family left behind him on the other side of the hill, Heriot was seized with a lonely elation and began to run and leap and to fling up his arms, chanting under his breath, spinning wildly, shouting wordlessly. Feeling he could twist all the way to the island, he turned cartwheels, until he toppled over, laughing as he fell, only to sit up in the middle of the road, staring wildly around him.

Then he relaxed, laughed at himself yet again, and breathed deeply, taking conscious pleasure in the smell of salt and seaweed and in the lap and rattle of water in the rocks on either side. The thought that the sound went on and on like that (water on rock, rock on water), whether there was anyone to listen to it or not, gave him a sort of relief. Free at last, he thought, without having the least idea just what it was he had been freed from, and set off once more along the wild road...the central seam of the causeway.

Directly before him at the end of the road was a stone arch.

At first it seemed enormously far away, and insignificant compared with the wide expanses of sea and sky, but suddenly he found he could not look around it or over it anymore. Suddenly it had become the only thing the world had to show him.

A great fountain of seawater erupted beyond it, and then another and another. Heriot approached it warily. Increasingly the arch seemed to drain color and shape out of everything around it, even the water and the autumn air.