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pain.
    “God must be listening to my prayers,” Erik said.
    Amber made a questioning sound. “I need skilled warriors,” Erik said. “The Scots Hammer is only the first problem I must face.” “What else?” Amber asked, concerned. “Norsemen have been seen just north of Winter-lance. And my dear cousins grow restless once again.”
    “Send them to fight the Norsemen.” “More likely, they would ally themselves and attack my father's estates,” Erik said, smiling thinly.
    Amber forced herself not to look at the stranger. Having a warrior such as Dominic le Sabre or the Scots Hammer fighting with Erik rather than against him could easily make the difference between peace and prolonged war for the Disputed Lands.
    Yet she could as well wish to pour sunlight from hand to hand like water as wish the great Norman lord or his Scots vassal to ally with Lord Robert of the North.
    “What is my new warrior's name?” Erik asked.
    “I'll ask him when he wakens,” Amber said.
    “Why did he come to the Disputed Lands?”
    “That will be the second thing I ask him.”
    “Where was he going?” Erik asked.
    “That will be the third.”
    Erik grunted. “You didn't learn much when you touched him, did you?”
    “No.”
    “The stranger's sleep isn't natural.”
    Amber nodded.
    “Is he spellbound?” Erik pressed.
    “No.”
    Erik's eyebrows rose at the quickness of her response.
    “You sound quite certain,” he said.
    “I am.”
    “Why?”
    Frowning, Amber probed her memory. The certainties that had flowed from the stranger into her were unlike any she had ever discovered by touch in the past. His basic nature—fierce, proud, generous, passionate, determined, bold—had been frighteningly easy to discover.
    Yet there were no shifting, chaotic images of the hours or days or weeks or years before he came to the Stone Ring and the sacred rowan. There was no bright sense of purpose stitching like lightning through darkness. There were no faces beloved or hated.
    It was as though the stranger had no memories.
    Without realizing it. Amber reached out to the man again. She willed herself to ignore the pleasure as she once had taught herself to ignore pain. Peeling away petal after petal of beguiling sensation, she searched for the stranger's memories.
    There were none. There were only faint, fading glimmers of light that retreated even as she pursued.
    The man was as though newly born.
    “I don't sense anything corrupt gnawing away inside him,” she said finally. “It is like touching a babe.”
    Erik snorted. “A babe? God blind me, but he is the biggest babe I've ever seen!”
    Amber withdrew her hand.
    “What else can you tell me?” Erik asked.
    She laced her fingers together so tightly that they ached. She didn't want to share her fears with Erik, yet his questions were circling closer and closer to the core of her unease, a fear she acknowledged each time she denied it.
    Great warrior, deadly enemy, and soul mate in one.
    Nay! I don't know who he is!
    I know only that he is a man with no name who is supremely confident of his own fighting skills.
    “Normally you ask the question, the person I'm touching answers, and my touch tells me if the truth was spoken,” Amber said slowly. “This time was… different.”
    Erik looked from the senseless stranger to Amber, who seemed almost a stranger herself at the moment.
    “Are you well?” he asked softly.
    She jumped. “Aye.”
    “You seem dazed.”
    A smile was difficult to manage, but Amber did.
    “ Tis the touching,” she said.
    “I'm sorry.”
    “Don't be. God sends us nothing that we can't endure.”
    “Or die trying,” Erik said dryly.
    Amber's smile slipped as the words of the prophecy rang once again in her mind.
    Death will surely flow.
    2
    THE smell of timeless evergreens permeated Amber's cottage. Candles flickered in holders above the bed. They cast a shivering golden light over the man with no name. A man who lay captive in a sleep that had no