Goneril swallowed, and nodded, a bit shyly, and took his arm. "Is it normal?" she asked. 'Does it always happen? I...I think this is the way to the tower," she said, starting forward. "But things keep moving on me."

He chuckled, then walked with her. "There's an old poem, a very famous one, though you wouldn't have heard of it, that's all about how love is the most dread illness in the world, since the only cure for love is to be near the very thing that caused you to fall sick. The more you suffer, the more you need the cure; the more you take the cure, the more ill you become, and the longer you suffer, the less desire you have to be healed."

She grimaced. "I haven't known you long enough to call it love," she said. "I...I talked to my father. I told him this. I'm...not used to feeling things I can't control."

"Why?" he asked, curious. "Is it just because you don't understand them, or because you're afraid of them taking over and making you do something to look foolish, or . . . '

"I don't know," Goneril answered. "I think it's scary because I'm used to being in control of things, and thinking things because I follow some kind of logic. There's no logic to it; I can't rationalize it out."

He gave her a genuinely fond look. "You sound like me," he admitted. "I like being able to predict things. When I can't I get angry at them and . . . well, you saw me with Fiona." He shrugged a little. "I'm a little scared too. Perhaps not as much as you, but only because i've done this sort of thing before and experience blunts the edge a bit. But it never really goes away. I'd be disappointed, I think, if it really did go away as you got older."

"You're scared, too?" Goneril asked, blinking, her eyes, disbelieving. "How...why are you scared?"

"Scared of what might happen," he said. "Part scared of never seeing you again, and part scared that I will. Scared of what this might all mean. It's a bit like going down a path in the forest, you don't know where it will end up. And if you don't know where you're going, it sometimes seems easier to . . . to stay where you were. But then you don't go anywhere."

Goneril was quiet, and then nodded. She glanced sidelong at him, smiling slightly. "You're really scared not to see me again?"

He chuckled again. "I think you underestimate yourself. I do want to see you again," he said, sincerely. "So does Fiona. I think we'd both be . . . well, disappointed, if you just drifted off into the dusk and winked out like a will-o-the-wisp."