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thought she mistook the clump thrown on a pile of crystal goblets. But it was real. She went over and picked up the bundle of threads. They sparkled in the lamplight, perfect, no damage at all. This one bundle was enough to repair broken Current threads throughout the village, and it was only one of several in the room.
    Turning to Maxard, she spread out her arms, the threads clutched in one fist. "This is-it's-is this ours?"
    He spoke in a cold voice. "Yes. It's ours."
    "But Maxard, why do you look so dour!" A smile broke loose on her face. "This could support Argali for years! How did it happen?"
    "You tell me." He came over to her. "Just what did he give you out there today?"
    He? She blinked. "Who?"
    "Havyrl Lionstar."
    Hai! So Maxard had heard. "I didn't know he was watching."
    "Watching what?"
    "Me swimming."
    "Then what?"
    Baffled, she said, "Then nothing."
    "Nothing?" Incredulity crackled in his voice. "What did you promise him, Kamoj? What sweet words did you whisper to compromise his honor?"
    Kamoj couldn't imagine any woman having the temerity to try compromising the huge, brooding Lionstar. "What are you talking about?"
    "You promised to marry him if he gave you what you wanted, didn't you?"
    "What?"
    Anger snapped in his voice. "Isn't that why he sent this dowry?"
    Kamoj stared at him. "That's crazy."
    "He must have liked whatever the two of you did."
    "We did nothing. You know I would never jeopardize our alliance with Ironbridge."
    Her uncle exhaled, his anger easing into puzzlement. "Then why did he send this dowry? Why does he insist on a merger with you tomorrow?"
    Kamoj felt as if she had just stepped into a bizarre skit played out for revelers during a harvest festival. "He what?"
    Maxard motioned at the storeroom. "His stagmen brought it today while I was tying up stalks in the tri-grain field. They spoke as if the arrangement were already made."
    It suddenly became clear to Kamoj. All too clear. Lionstar didn't want the ruins of an old palace, or the trees in their forest.
    He wanted Argali. All of it.
    Strange though his methods were, they made a grim sort of sense. He had already demonstrated superiority in forces: many stagmen served him, over one hundred, far more than Maxard had, more even than Ironbridge. With his damnable "rent" he had taken the first step in establishing his wealth. He even laid symbolic claim to her province by living in the Quartz Palace, the ancestral Argali home. Any way they looked at it, he had set himself up as an authority to reckon with.
    Today he added the final, albeit unexpected, ingredient-a merger bid so far beyond the pale that the combined resources of all the Northern Lands could never best it.
    "Gods," Kamoj said. "No wonder Jax is angry." She set down the light threads. "There must be some way I can refuse this."
    "I've already asked the temple scholar," Maxard said. "And I've looked through the old codices myself. We've found nothing. You know the law. Better the offer or yield."
    She frowned. "I'm not going to marry that insane person."
    "Then he will be fully within his rights to take Argali by force. That was how it was done, Kamoj, in the time of the sky ships. Do you want a war with Lionstar?" Dryly he added, "I'm not sure my stagmen even know how to fight a war."
    "There must be some way out."
    He spoke carefully. "The merger could do well for Argali."
    She stiffened. "You want me to go through with it?"
    He spread his hands. "And what of survival, Governor?"
    So. Maxard finally spoke aloud what they obliquely dealt with in every discussion about the province. Drought, famine, killing seasons, high infant mortality, failing machines no one understood, lost medical knowledge, and overused fields: it all added up to one inescapable fact, the long slow dying of Argali.
    With the Ironbridge merger, their survival might still be a struggle, but their chances improved.
    At worst, Jax would annex her province, making it part of Ironbridge. She intended to do her