Chapter 4Farnor slept restlessly, though it seemed to him that he scarcely slept at all, so many times did he start awake violently. Yet sleep he did, he knew, for when he slept, he dreamed, or, more correctly, he slipped from the torment of his waking thoughts into the torment of nightmare.
Awake, he played fitfully with all that had happened, seeking to arrange the events of the past weeks into some form of order, seeking some kind of pattern within which he could find his place, and thence decide what he must do next. But no such pattern emerged. Everything that had happened had seemingly been wild and arbitrary: the silent arrival of the creature, heralded only by a few slaughtered sheep; the unexpected arrival of Nilsson and his men, and the confusion with the tithe gathering that ha
