The sun was climbing the east, and on another day Niun would have been out about the hills, walking, hunting, practicing at arms, all other such things as he used to fill the solitary hours and relieve the sameness of his days.

But on this day nothing could have persuaded him from the vicinity of the edun.  He haunted the communicationtion in the top of the Sen tower, where, in an edun grown informal by reason of its small size, he was permitted to be on occasion; he hovered about the main entrance; and finally consumed by his impatience, he went to the rock at the top of the causeway, to stare into the growing glare off the white flats and strain his eyes for any movement from the direction of the port.

He had for so very, very long had nothing good to anticipate.  Now he savored the feeling, hating the waiting, and yet relishing the feeling of waiting: with mixed feelings about the meeting, and yet longing desperately for the comradeship it promised.  He had not loved Medai.  He remembered the rivalry with his cousin, his - he could be honest with himself after so many years - jealousy of his cousin; and he strove to forget any such feelings he had ever cherished: he wanted Medai's presence, wanted it desperately, fervently.  was better than this long loneliness, this knowledge thit edun was slowly, irrevocably perishing.

And there was, at the foundation of all the thoughts, the least stirring of hope, the suspicion that Medai had bees summoned, that be was the first of many to come - that the she'pan had stirred to action, and that something was moving in the future of the People.

On a thousand previous days, he had sat as he sat  now, seeking any tiny deviation in events to occupy him, the struggles of an insect, the slow, perilous blooming of a windflower, the rise or descent of ships at the port - ill-wishing such ships, imagining disasters, imagining important arrivals that would somehow the pattern of his existence.  He had done this so often that it was hard to realize that this time it was real, that the game was substance on this morning so like a thousand other mornings.  The very air seemed alive.  His heart beat so strongly, his muscles were so taut that his chest and stomach hurt, and he almost forgot to breathe whenever his eyes would deceive him into believing that he had seen movement below.

But in the full light of noon, there was a plume of dust on the flats, at the beginning of the causeway, a line of dark figures moving slowly upward.  He sat upon his rock at the top of the causeway and lowered his visor to remove the haze of daylight, trying to discern the figures individually.

He had seen vehicles come up the road years before.  Judgeing the distance and the size of the objects and the amount of dust, that was what it looked to be.  A sense of wrongness grew in him, a weight in his stomach counterpoised against the beating of his heart.  He clenched his limbs together, long arms wrapped about his knees, and watched, unwilling to run and tell the others.  Regul. Regal were coming up.

Once he would have been delighted at such an unaccustomed visitation; but he was not so on this morning of all mornings.  Not now.  Not with mri business afoot that was more important than regul.

Not with mri business in the working, in which regal might seek to interfere.

Of a sudden he realized that the she'pan desperately needed to know what was coming up the hill: he made them out - six vehicles and a moving dot further back that his eyes could not resolve; but it looked to be a seventh.

No such number of regul had ever called on the edun in his memory.

He slid down from his rock and started downhill, his long strides carrying him at what swiftly became an uncontrollable run, undignified, but he was too alarmed to care for appearances.  He raced toward the edun, breathless.