But the throbbing pain in his head was no dream. He tried to raise his hand toward his temple and discovered by the attempt that his sitting body was bound in a chair.
Fear and memory pounced together upon Nelson's mind. He made a convulsive effort and opened his eyes. Brilliant sunlight from an open window caught his eye first and then the detail of the room focused slowly.
It was a high-ceilinged, long gallery with pale blue glassy walls. The sunlight danced and quivered and shimmered off those walls, sunbeams seeming to play around the room.
Nsharra sat in a chair six feet from him, and the great wolf, Tark, crouched like a dog beside her. Both were watching him. Subconsciously, he'd expected it. He'd remembered their disputing thought-voices as he had heard them at Yen Shi. He knew he'd heard them more clearly now because he still wore the thought-crown.
"Yes," said Nsharra quietly. "You are in Vruun, where you wished to come, Eric Nelson."
It was strange to hear his name from her lips and to remember that night in Yen Shi when he had told it to her between kisses. And it was stranger, to Nelson, to see her here sitting in her chair like a gray-eyed young princess in white silk and to realize that this was the singsong girl of that faraway night.
"Lefty?" he said. He said it without hope and the girl nodded her dark head slightly.
"Tark was forced to kill him. It was courageous of you to turn back for him. If you had not you too might have—"
She stopped. But Nelson, every sense sharpened to acuteness by his situation, seized on the unfinished sentence.
"I too might have escaped, you were going to say? Then Shan Kar did escape?"