THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER
somehow or other their mad minds knew his purpose more swiftly than sane intuitions. Had he not Niv’s prophecies to guide him, and the things that Zend had been told on oath by the full moon?
Alveric came to the houses of men, and of the folk he questioned few would speak at all of things that lay to the East, and if he spoke of the lands through which he had wandered for years they: gave as little heed as if he were telling them that he had pitched his tent on the coloured layers of air that glowed and drifted and darkened in the low sky over the sunset. And the few that answered him said one thing only: that only the wizards knew.
When he had learned this Alveric went back from the fields and hedgerows and came again to his old grey tent in the lands of which none thought; and Niv and Zend sat there silent, eying him sideways, for they knew he mistrusted madness and things said by the moon. And next day when they moved their camp in the chill of dawn Niv led the way without shouting.
They had not gone for many more weeks upon their curious journey when Alveric met one morning, at the edge of the fields men tended, one filling his bucket at a well, whose thin high conical hat and mystical air proclaimed him surely a wizard. “Master,” said Alveric, “of those arts men dread, I have a question that I would ask of the future.”
And the wizard turned from his bucket to look at
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