Before the Mask

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In the small patch of cold sunlight on the hill above the cape, the druidess L'Indasha Yman bent to the spring planting with a worn-out spade and a weary heart. For three thousand years, winters had ended in jubilation for her. When she set the season's first seed into the newly turned ground or found the first shoot of returning growth in her daylilies, she would forget utterly the cold, the storms, her hunger for green, for bloom.

But this year, the winter would not leave. This spring, there was little pleasure for her in the promise of the seeds, and her labor in the garden today was producing mostly scratches and blisters.

"There's the rub," she mused aloud, looking down at the splintering oak handle of the spade. "I should have mended you long ago. Five hundred years of gardens can be too much even for oak."

And too much for me, she thought. I will go on and on and keep the Secret and all the world will change, is changing-but in me now there is no change. My life is a removal. But I chose it full knowing.

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