23
The eight days passed like a single afternoon. They were pleasant days, all in all, filled with the kind of quiet introspection that Voran had had no time for during the last twenty years. In his youth, he had always been the kind of man to disappear for days in the wilderness, ostensibly for the hunt, but actually to breathe in the resinous air of a pine grove and to lie on a tree branch staring for hours at the slowly moving stars. But that sort of indulgence had not been his since the Vasyllian days.
So he tried to enjoy the hours now, even as they sped by him. But the spectre of death, and worse still, the need to accept it with joy, haunted him, even during sleep. He had dreams that began as ambles through fields of gold and ended with decapitation. By the third or fourth day, ev
