She was not smiling now.

She was not smiling now. It was late, well after midnight, and her weariness was like a chain that would not let her go. She could not sleep and had come to walk in the Gardens, to listen to the night, to be alone with her thoughts, and to try to find some small measure of peace. But peace was elusive, her thoughts were small demons that taunted and teased, and the night was a great, hungering black cloud that waited patiently for the moment when it would at last extinguish the frail spark of their lives. Fire, again. Fire to give life and fire to snuff it out. The image whispered at her insidiously. She turned abruptly and began walking through the Gar- dens. Cort trailed behind her, a silent, invisible presence. If she bothered to look for him, he would not be there. She could picture him in her mind, a small, stocky youth with incredible quickness and strength. He was one of the Home Guard, pro- tectors of the Elven rulers, the weapons that defended them, the lives that were given up to preserve their own. Cort was her shadow, and if not Cort, then Dal. One or the other of them was always there, keeping her safe. As she moved along the pathway, her thoughts slipped rapidly, one to the next. She felt the roughness of the ground through the thin lining of her slip- pers. Arborlon, the city of the Elves, her home, brought out of the Westland more than a hundred years ago-here, to this . She left the thought unfinished. She lacked the words to complete it. Elven magic, conjured anew out of faerie time, sheltered the city, but the magic was beginning to fail. The mingled fragrances of the Garden's flowers were overshadowed by the acrid smells of Killeshan's gases where they had penetrated the outer barri- er of the Keel. Night birds sang gently from the trees and cov- erings, but even here their songs were undercut by the guttural sounds of the dark things that lurked beyond the city's walls in the jungles and swamps, that pressed up against the Keel, wait- ing.