your hands?' It was the first question to enter her confused mind.

'Syn?' He repeated the one word and drew back with a suddenly hostile air.

For a moment he seemed about to turn and run. But then he looked once more at her mangled, disfigured face and gave a soft exclamation of disappointment and pity.

Eldyn became irrationally furious and reached her single arm to grab him. He eluded her with a startled yet gracefully fluid motion and spat some unintelligible words that were obviously heartfelt curses. His hand moved ominously to a pocket in his wide belt.

Then all at once he crouched again, moving his head from side to side. She opened her mouth, but he clamped one glowing hand over it while the other went up in aas he towed her along.

It was a dream-scene where time had no meaning. It might have been minutes or hours. The throbbing of her headache diminished, leaving her drowsy.

The lemur-thing broke the spell by chattering excitedly. In the very dim starlight she could just discern that it was pointing upward with one paw, an uncannily human gesture.

The boy uttered a sharp word and dove toward the treetops, and Eldyn looked up in time to see a huge leathery-winged shape swooping silently upon them. She felt the fetid breath and glimpsed hooked talons and a beak armed with incurving teeth as the thing swept by and flapped heavily upward again.

The boy released her abruptly, leaving her heart pounding in sudden terrible awareness of her utter helplessness. She felt herself