Dragonstar

13

Uriens II was laid out in state in the great hall of the palace of Belmarie, the twelfth King of the House of Uwanë to lie thus. By sunset of the day of his death word went out to all the city of Bel that the King had been slain protecting the Lady Trey from the very demons against which he had warned the people the day before.

Even before the horrified Palace Guard brought in hurdles to carry away the corpse-wight that had slain the King, and the bier for the King himself, Gareth of Belmarie gave the order for the arrest of every man, woman, and child who had been resurrected by the mage Bliaud, or whose death had been attested by their families and who had later proved to be alive. This order given, he knelt for a long time on the watchroom floor beside his father’s body, and by the lifeless, untouched corpse of his wife, Trey. While Tourneval and his guards departed to carry out this command, the southern merchant Brâk and Bliaud’s son Abellus spread their cloaks over the King’s body, and Jenny Waynest sent various servants running for water and dressings for the wounded.

“My lord Thane.” Ector of Sindestray stood before the bench where John sat, as Jenny washed the wounds on his back and scalp. It was the first time the white-haired treasurer had given Aversin his proper title: In his uncouth peasant breeches and dirty jacket, blood and slime and hair dye trickling through two weeks’ worth of scrubby black beard, he looked like some kind of wight himself.

“Forgive me,” the councilor said. “I was deceived by the … the demons that possessed Her Ladyship.” He could barely bring out the words, but too many people had seen the demons slither out from between Trey’s lips. He himself had seen them whip past him in the corridor, and slither through the cracks in the stone wall. “I did you a terrible wrong, my lord, and would have done you a greater one had you not escaped. I can only plead that you will forgive an old man for putting the safety of the Realm, as he understood it, before the rights of any single man.”

It said a good deal, Jenny reflected, for Ector that he would make this apology in front of his own men.

“Gaw, no,” said John cheerfully. “You were doin’ your duty an’ doin’ it damn well. I’d’ve done the same thing meself, if it wasn’t me.” And he looked hugely embarrassed, when the white-haired treasurer knelt before him and kissed his hand.

Badegamus returned with more servants and two biers, and palls of velvet and brocade. Gareth kissed his father’s hands, and the lips of the dark-haired girl who had been his wife. Then he wiped his eyes and put his spectacles back on, and stood beside the Master of Halnath as servants bore the bodies away.

Only later, when John and Jenny were at last alone in the rooms to which Badegamus escorted them overlooking the Long Garden, did John say, “What the hell was that thing, Jen?”

“Did you kill it?” Servants had brought water for the bath, and made up the fires in the hypocaust beneath the green marble bath chamber. The whole suite smelled of soap and oils, the warmth of steam languorous on the air.

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.” John sat on the chest at the end of the bed, gingerly working his boots off. He’d rinsed the gore from his face and Jenny, as she knelt to help him—for his wounds were stiffening—saw in the curtained chamber’s lamplight how his ribs stood out under his flesh, and how small round scars marked his arms, that had not been there before. When she shed her plaids, and began to unlace her bodice, he asked, “Would you like a hand? Or would you like just to be alone, to have a bath and a rest?”

Her eyes met his, knowing what he was asking. And she smiled. “I’d like company in the bath, if you feel up to it.”

His answering smile, and the way his shoulders relaxed, told her his thoughts better than words could. He said, “Mind you, between one thing and another I can’t promise you anythin’ except that I’ll soap your back for you.…”

Rising, she put her hands on either side of his face and kissed his shorn forehead. “All this winter long,” she said, “I have thought how I would trade all the treasures of the gnomes and the spices of the South, only to have you soap my back.”

“That thing that killed the King, now.” John poured out the herbed tisane that a servant had brought, coffee being one of those things that was put aside during mourning. Under gray morning light the Long Garden outside looked wet and cold under a patchy blanket of pocked, half-melted snow, and Jenny could dimly hear the slow tolling of the death-knell for the passing of the King. Through the wrinkled panes of the window’s glass, servants and guards visible on the terrace across the garden all wore the black of mourning.

She turned back from the window, and drew around her the robe and the shawl that had come from the palace stores.

John handed her the steaming porcelain cup. “It had me, Jen. I thrust up at it at the last second, but I was stabbin’ blind, for it was right on top of me. But I’ll take oath it was fallin’ already when I stabbed it. That it was dead before it fell.”

“I saw a thing.…” Jenny hesitated. By the light it was the third hour of the morning, and even after the hot bath last night her muscles were board-stiff and ached. John had a whole new set of bruises to go with the old. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d fought full-out with a halberd as she had yesterday—probably not since the siege of Palmorgin in the summer, if then. “A flying shadow, that showed up against that flare of light. I thought at the time it was the demon leaving the King’s body.”

“No,” John said decisively. “I saw that one, a silver salamander like the others, whippin’ away covered in blood from where the corpse-wight threw him. Could the wight have been called by Goffyer, d’you think, to distract me—an’ everyone else in the room—an’ keep the King’s demon from bein’ killed?”

“Maybe,” Jenny said slowly. “Though I’d say it was likelier called into being by Adromelech, to break Folcalor’s power in Bel by destroying the tool he was using.”

“Could Adromelech have done that? At this distance, an’ trapped in the Henge as he is?” John lifted the silver lid from a tray of pastries: Mourning also forbade jams and confits, but there was, at least, butter and honey, which he attacked like a starving man. “An’ if that’s the case, why not do it earlier? Why just yesterday? Why take the risk when I was there with the demon-killer blade?”

Jenny only shook her head. “I don’t know what Adromelech knows,” she said. “Or how he knows it. He’s intelligent,” she said thoughtfully, remembering the gross shining thing as Amayon remembered him, the Lord of Hell who had both loved and tortured Folcalor. “Presumably he has agents in Folcalor’s camp, demons who are loyal to him playing lip service to Folcalor as well as those who are openly arrayed against him.”

“I dunno,” John said, licking melted butter off his wrist. In the North, most cows were dry at this time of year; butter in the wintertime, even plainly molded and without its customary southern decoration of flowers, was a delight and a treat. “There’s somethin’ about that whole fight that just felt … odd. As if what was goin’ on wasn’t quite what was goin’ on. Not,” he added, offering her a piece of cinnamon bread, “that I plan to share me suspicions with Ector, or anyone who’s likely to talk to him. It’s a change not to worry about which way I’m to run if someone speaks my name.”

They dressed in the somber garments that the servants had brought, Jenny remembering with a pang of grief how Trey had lent her a black and white gown the first night she had dined with the Court, lest she be mocked by Zyerne. John, who could look extremely respectable when he tried, washed the last of the lampblack out of his hair and shaved off his beard, and together they made their way to the great hall, to pay their respects to the King whose law John had all his life served.

“The people will be admitted at noon.” Gareth rose from the cushion where he’d knelt, according to custom, all night: Jenny couldn’t imagine he would have slept much, anyway. The great hall—the only portion of the original palace still incorporated into the new—was curtained now in sable hangings, and the warm yellow honeycomb tiles of its floors covered with rush-matting dyed black. Badegamus and the servants must have been busy as squirrels in autumn, thought Jenny, to have accomplished all this since noon yesterday. She would have to seek the old chamberlain out and compliment him on the deep respect his efforts showed to the King he had served for so many years. The chamberlain and the King had been boys together, and Badegamus had loved the King, she knew, very much.

“They’re gathering already before the gates. They’re very quiet.…”

“My lord?” Danae appeared at the doorway to the left of the dais where the twin biers lay. She, too, was dressed in mourning, her fair hair loosed over her shoulders as was the custom, and only half-hidden by a mourning veil. When she saw John and Jenny she salaamed and made to go, but Gareth signed her to remain, and led the way toward the doorway where she stood.

“The people are very quiet,” said Gareth again. “Those whom Tourneval and the guards went out to arrest yesterday? They’re dead.”

“What?” Jenny hadn’t expected that, though, she reflected, she should have. “All of them?”

“All the women, and such of the men as weren’t warriors. The men have simply disappeared.”

“Oh, that’ll make me sleep better at night,” John remarked dryly, and Gareth nodded.

“Brâk and Abellus are checking, speaking to everyone who might know of someone who was resurrected. But it seems to have been a clean sweep. In some cases the disappearances were inexplicable—from rooms that had no other way out, that sort of thing. The people don’t know what to make of it.”

“And what are you tellin” em?”

Gareth’s pale face colored a little, and he grinned. “Abellus and Polycarp are putting it about that the resurrection spells caused madness in men, and simply failed in others. That the missing men have simply run away, and will be sought. That we’ll do the best we can for them.…”

“But I venture to guess,” remarked Jenny, “that the prognosis isn’t good.”

“Abellus’s brother, Tundal, was one of the men who died,” said Gareth, more quietly. “As was his wife. Abellus is with their children now—he got them out of the household as soon as he began to suspect there was something amiss about the resurrections. They’re all right.”

In the withdrawing chamber to the right of the dais, Danae had brought coffee and plain rolls for Gareth, and she watched him with a combination of motherliness and worry while he ate. She did not appear to have slept herself, and when Gareth asked her only said, “I will. I didn’t like to leave Milla, as long as she was awake. But now she’s sleeping I’ll take some rest. My lord.” She knelt to John and kissed his hand. “Thank you for taking us out of the city. I don’t know what might have happened to Milla last night, if we hadn’t gone.”

“She was lucky to have a friend to care for her.”

When the woman had gone, John asked, “Any news of old Goffyer?”

“The man I sent to the Deep yesterday hasn’t returned. It’s several hours’ ride.”

Hesitantly, Jenny took one of the shallow porcelain cups from the tray Danae had brought and, filling it with clean water from the pitcher in the niche near the door, retired with it to a corner. It felt odd to try to summon power now, as if it were shaped differently within her than it had been before. Gareth’s voice and John’s faded from her mind. She found herself looking into darkness, as if the cup were filled with ink instead of water, ink that gleamed with pinpoints of flame.

Miss Mab smiled at her, and said, “Child?”

Her eyes were wise and bright and as they had ever been. She was in her usual chambers on the Ninth Level; Jenny could see past her to the terraces above the subterranean waterfalls where she meditated, and a table refulgent with lamps and scattered thick with scrolls. “Are you all right?”

“Thinkst thou a demon could trick an old gnome-wife into folly? We gnomes are like the stone that gives us birth, child—our memories are long. This Folcalor came in the guise of poor Goffyer and treated with Sevacandrozardus our King, telling all manner of tales of demons in Bel. But our King is wary of demons. How not, when he has had me imprisoned all this time, and under watch, just for aiding thy husband in his search for the Mirror of Ernine? When it was suggested by the Patriarch of my family that Goffyer be likewise incarcerated, and Rogmadoscibar his brother also who has been helping him here, both fled after slaying many warriors of the King’s guard. There is argument still, and those who have made money from the demons are spreading rumors about what has taken place in Bel, but I do not think thy little Prince need fear that in the end the gnomes will do anything but what they have always done: wait.”

When Jenny relayed this information to Gareth, he looked deeply relieved. “I’ve sent messengers also to Prince Tinán of Imperteng, asking his presence here in twenty days, to swear allegiance at my crowning. After his defeat in the summer there has been trouble there again, the mountaineers rising in rebellion.” He shook his head, and John asked something about the status of the disputed farmlands since last summer. Behind her Jenny heard their voices drift into talk of the rebels’ cause, and which clans in the Trammel Hills had gone to fighting with what hill-tribes, and to what end.

While they spoke, Jenny turned her attention back to the water bowl, and called to mind her elder son’s thin face, and the way his thick black hair fell over his forehead, and the bright lobelia-blue of his eyes.

Ian, she called. Ian …

Conjuring into her mind the ash-gray stone of Alyn Hold’s walls, against the white of the snow. The amber brightness of the kitchen fire in that huge stone hearth, black iron pokers and hooks and chains arrayed like weapons in an armory, and everyone sitting at the long oak table: John’s aunts and cousins and Sergeant Muffle. The howl of the wind around the walls. Ian …

But there was nothing. Her head began to ache, and she wondered if she had overextended already her slight powers. Or was there some other reason, some other danger …?

“If he doesn’t come to the crowning,” Gareth was saying, “it will be a declaration of war.”

“Aye, well,” replied John cheerfully, “if we haven’t settled Folcalor’s accounts in twenty days, I promise you a war with Imperteng isn’t going to be your biggest problem, anyway.”

Ector entered, and Badegamus, and other lords. John took Jenny’s hand and led her back to the hall, where the members of the Great Houses of the Realm were already being admitted, to walk past the biers of the King and the Lady Trey. Trey’s handsome brother was being led away, weeping: Jenny knew that the girl had been everything to him, as she had been to Gareth. He was not the only one to shed tears. What further rumors of yesterday’s events had gone about the city Jenny did not know, but the nobles of the Realm all salaamed profoundly as she and John took their places in the line, and afterward this nobleman or that spoke to them, people they had met when they had come south to free the land of the dragon, and who had later entertained them in the feastings that surrounded Millença’s naming.

Some were missing, represented by anxious wives or brothers who spoke long to Polycarp in the corner. They left looking troubled still, but comforted. Abellus was there, too, pale-lipped in gorgeously cut black mantlings that seemed incongruous against the weary grimness of his eyes; without being obvious about it, Jenny went to him and looked long into the eyes of the two boys with him, but saw no trace of demons there.

“What will we do?” she asked softly as she and John walked the length of the somberly draped hall with the black-dyed rushes crunching softly underfoot. Between the sable curtains the windows showed only a gray light, and despite the fire that burned on the dais hearth, the huge chamber was icy as a cave. “It is sixteen days, until the Moon of Winds.”

“Sixteen days should be enough,” said John, “if all goes well.” And, when Jenny looked at him in surprise, he tapped the side of his nose and said, “I’ve got a plan.”

On the steps of the hall a man stood, slim and small with his black garments billowing around him in the wind, his long gray hair a spidery cloud. Diamond eyes went first to Jenny’s hand, locked in John’s, and then to her face, and she felt that he could see there the afterglow of last night’s loving, brazen as a love-bite.

Wizard-woman, said his voice in her mind, I did not think ever that I would say so—or feel so. Yet I rejoice with you.

He held out his hand to her, black gloves masking the curved black claws.

She greeted him, Dragonshadow. The word itself the reminder to her that he, too, had moved through the crossroad of possibilities they had shared, and into open country beyond.

“Dreamweaver.” He turned the kaleidoscope gaze upon John, who met his eyes, trusting as no other of humankind did. “I have heard ill report of you from the Black-and-Silver One, who has gone into hiding in the Skerries of Light. He says that you are an insolent mortal and without regard for the greatest mage and loremaster among dragonkind.”

“Made it there safe, did he?” John propped his spectacles with his forefinger, without releasing Jenny’s hand. “He has to know—the other drakes have to be warned—that in time the Hellspawn will come after them again. Human magic can defend against ’em, or will be able to, once the Dragonstar sets for the last time, but to be honest I don’t know about dragon magic. Dragons are magic, it’s the stuff of their bodies an’ bones. It’ll make ’em a target, once the demons start fightin’ amongst ’emselves. The great drakes, the old drakes, might be able to shut ’em out, but what about the young ones, that aren’t … aren’t what they’ll later become? You’d know about that. I don’t.”

“Nor do I, Dreamweaver,” the Dragonshadow said quietly. “Nor what danger those star-drakes will be in, who were possessed in the summer: Centhwevir, and Nymr, and young Mellyn, and the rest. For all Corvin’s claims of learning in the other world—about these crystals through which he channeled ether-magic, and about how comets are made, and these great all-knowing computers that he speaks of so frequently”—sarcasm curled in his voice—“still he knows no other answer than flight, and that answer, only for himself.”

“Well, it has the virtue of workin’, anyway,” remarked John. “Trouble is, when it stops workin’ you’ve still got your problem right there up your nose again. Let me get my notes, an’ Jen her catch-bottle—an’ I wish I’d had time to make a copy of the notes for Polycarp, but there’s pages an’ pages of ’em, an’ I’ll be years puttin” em straight … an’ then, if you would, I think it’s best we got back to the Hold as quick as we can. There’s someone there I need to talk to before the first thaw hits.”

First they journeyed to Ernine, on the far side of the Nast Wall, among the burned and ravaged woods. The savage explosions, and unquenchable fire, of Folcalor’s attack on the mirror chamber four nights previously had utterly destroyed the stair that had for over a thousand years ascended from the stream-bank to the Hill of the Moon: amid a sodden desolation of burned trees and frozen mud even the doorway that had led into Isychros’s chambers had been obliterated, so that Morkeleb had to descend like a black silk kite down through the cleft that had riven the hill above.

The mirror chamber was empty. Walls, floor, and what was left of the ceiling were black with fire, the golden constellations and the many-tailed comet smashed to rubble. Under a thin muck of snow, burned-out talisman jewels crunched beneath Jenny’s boots as she and John surveyed the devastated room.

Of the bricked-up archway behind which Jenny had found the catch-bottle, only a heap of broken stone remained. John knelt to scrape in the frozen slush with his fingers; this he did in two or three places before straightening his back and wiping the muddied fingers of his glove on his doublet’s leather sleeve.

“No glass,” he said thoughtfully. “They said the mirror bein’ made of thunderstone would keep it from destruction, an’ it looks like they were right. It was too strong for Folcalor, anyway. Looks like he’s carried it off whole, to smash when he’s taken Adromelech’s powers into himself.”

“Leaving only Aohila herself,” Jenny said softly, “at large in the world.”

John raised his eyebrows. In the sickly snow-light the silver curves of Aohila’s spell-lines glinted on his throat. “God knows that’s trouble enough.”

They slept the night in an empty manor house in Farhythe, not because Morkeleb was at all weary of flight but because in the high sooty roil of cloud the cold and wet were too bitter to be borne by his two passengers. Whether the inhabitants of the manor had gone to Bel for the assembly of the King’s Council, or had fled because of the plague, Jenny did not know. The beds had been stripped from the bedsteads and the windows were fitted over with wooden shutters in place of the expensive glass; it hadn’t been precipitate flight. Wood lay cut ready in the shed behind the kitchen, and John made up fires; they ate the remains of the palace luncheon that John—ever mindful from long years of Winterlands patrols—had wrapped up and tucked into the bundles of their clothes. In a bedroom Jenny found a small harp swathed in velvet. It had been untuned to spare the frame, and she could find no key for its pegs. But her hands, a few months ago stiff and twisted claws, flexed almost easily as she ran them over the inlaid pearwood of the soundbox; she met John’s eyes and smiled.

On the borrowed sheets she dreamed again of her children, and waking, stole softly out of doors. Fog from the Snakewater and the marshes covered the whole of the land, making the night black as pitch, and even Jenny’s mageborn sight had trouble penetrating it. From the cloister that looked out upon the kitchen garden she could see only the dim outlines of first bare hedges, but a voice in her thoughts said, Keep your feet dry, Wizard-woman, and stay where it is warm. In the darkness she saw the diamond glint of eyes, and the moving flicker of the jewels on the ends of his antennae. What brings you from your bed?

In the music of his thoughts she would have heard jealousy or sarcasm, had there been any; anger that she shared that bed with a mortal man, when she could have been the dragon consort of a dragon.

There was none. His joy for her reunion with John had been real.

My friend, she said. And then, I dreamed of my children, and my power is not such that I can see yet into the North. Can you listen so far, to see if all is well in the North Country?

Wizard-woman, I can listen unto the ends of the earth, if so be I dream deeply enough, and long enough. When all this trouble with demons is done with, and the world sleeps in peace once more, I will teach you how this is done. For I think that having once been a dragon, you are capable still of dragon dreams. Their secret is this: that you do not think, ‘I will seek the sounds of bandits, that I may learn if my husband’s hold is in danger,’ or, ‘Where do the rabbits feed, that I may know if demons are near?’ To dream as a dragon dreams is not to seek, and not to expect. It is merely to observe all, with no one grass blade more important than any other grass blade, nor any meaning attached to anything. Only being, throughout the whole of the universe and all of time.

Jenny thought about this, about the stillness of the fog-shrouded night, and the invisible friend hidden in the darkness.

She said, You are not of this world, are you? The dragons. You came from one of those other worlds, that John traveled to, lying somewhere beyond beyond. You traversed Hells, and realms that have no existence beneath the sun and the stars that I know; perhaps you came from one of the many Hells, and not a true world at all.

All worlds are true worlds, my Jenny, said the Dragonshadow.

And the Dragonshadows, who have outgrown their bodies and their magic … what are they?

Morkeleb said, I do not know.

Even though you are one? When you crossed over into that being, did they not tell you?

He said, No. Since I became a dragonshadow I have spoken to no other of my kind, and before, when they still inhabited the Birdless Isle, I thought I knew what they were, and did not ask. It is no unusual thing for them to be gone for a time, though they have been gone now longer than ever I can remember before. I can only be as I am, until upon their return I can ask them what they are.

Are they gods? she asked, and again he said, I do not know. But as for your children …

And in her mind Jenny saw as if in a dream the stumpy tower of Alyn Hold, sticking up on its hill above the grubby ring of its dilapidated walls. The wind scoured the walls with snow in the darkness, and no light shone, but Jenny was aware of the repaired thatch on the kitchens and stables, the new plaster over the places where Balgodorus and his slavetrading bandits had burned, earlier in the winter.

Impossibly, above the screaming of the wind, she heard the breathing of the sleepers within those walls: Ian and Adric, huddled together in their tower bedroom; little Maggie in her cot beside Cousin Dilly, who acted as her nurse. Sour grim Aunt Jane in her cramped room off the kitchen, and Aunt Rowe in the trundle bed beside hers, as if the two sisters of old Lord Aver were young girls still glaring around the corners at their brother’s unwanted beautiful witch-wife mistress. For a few moments—or a few hours—Jenny was conscious of every sleeper within those walls, of Bill the yardman and his wife, Betne, of Peg the gatekeeper and her children, of old Cowan in the stables and Sergeant Muffle in the room he’d taken with his wife and children behind the forge. Of scullery-maids and grooms and the half-dozen militiamen dossing on the hall floor around the firepit among straw and rushes that smelled of month-old smoke and dogs. A kind of gentle glow, like the embers of a banked fire, rose to Jenny from their dreams.

And as Morkeleb’s consciousness widened, she became aware of the sleeping village outside the walls. Of Father Hiero the priest in the attic loft above the broken-down and disregarded village Temple. Of her own younger sister, Sparrow, and Sparrow’s husband and children, and all those other families near whom Jenny had grown up. Of the cows in the byres and the horses in the stalls, and all those near and far whose holdings and families were under the protection of the Thane of the Winterlands, who looked to John Aversin to protect them and be answerable for them, even at the cost of his life.

Farther off she was aware of the bleak woods, deep in snow and thrashing beneath the flail of the wind. Of muskrats in their holes and squirrels rolled tight in the hollows of trees, surrounded by the plunder of the autumn on which they’d been living for months. Of deer in the thickets and fish sleeping in the darkness of the frozen streams, of turtles in the mud and bandits far off in the ruined huts and manors that they’d made into hideouts, scratching fleas and snuffling in drunken sleep. Of the degraded Meewinks in the marshes picking over the bones of the travelers they’d killed, and even the whisperers peeping to one another in the slick-frozen ice of the haunted Wraithmire, frozen themselves and singing keening songs of the comet that hung low and smoldering somewhere beyond the hammering storm.

And in all that dark and storm and sleep, gradually Jenny saw, and heard, and felt something moving, something that crept among the torn-up snow of the woods. She felt the rabbits in their holes startle hammer-hearted from sleep at its smell, and curl down tight into the darkness until it went past. Felt the deer grow still in the thickets, ears pricked forward at the staggering, crashing stride. Like a clumsy shadow it moved, frozen flesh tearing unheeded on broken twigs. A fox sniffed at the drip of black fluid that came away on the spearpoint shards, and hastened the other way.

In the village stables a cow flung up her head and lowed in fright. Behind the church, Father Hiero’s dog threw himself to the limit of his chain and barked.

The thing did not enter the byre, nor attempt to come near the church. It had no need of warmth in this bitter night. But Jenny dreamed of it circling the walls of the Hold, circling patiently, and now and then coming close enough to scratch at the gates and at the stones.

She woke, losing her balance and stumbling against the doorframe of the old manor house where she stood. Her feet were numb within her boots. Across the bare kitchen-garden in the fog, Morkeleb, a shadow himself, lay invisible between the bare, invisible orchard trees.

Your children sleep safe, my Jenny. In the dragon’s speaking she felt his odd tenderness, and his quest as to what her love was, and why the destinies of these three children—and of all who slept in and about the Hold—drove her so. Since surrendering his magic he had become, she knew, curious about all manner of things that were not things of dragons. But as you see, all is not well in the Winterlands.

They reached Alyn Hold the following day at noon. Morkeleb descended, unseen, through the rending howl of the storm winds to the lane before the Hold’s main gate, but had he come down in all his glittering midnight splendor Jenny doubted there would have been anyone outside their houses to see. It was the last night of the Moon of Ice, the time of year when even bandits and Iceriders lay low. Every one of the fifty or so families of Alyn Village would be huddled around their hearths in kitchens crammed with wood, whittling or sewing or mending harness or chairs, doing all those things for which there was little time in the short gorgeous Winterlands summers. Every shutter in the village was bolted tight, and John had to pound on the gate and shout before Peg put her head out the window above it to see who was there.

“All the dear gods, where did you spring from?” gasped the gatekeeper, hanging hard onto the postern door to keep it from being slammed out of her grip by the wind. “How did you get here, in all this storm? You must be that frozen! Where are your horses?”

“Never you mind. We’re back now, safe and mostly sound.…” John shook back the hood from his head and looked past Jenny out into the sleety rain, but in the gray half-visible whirl of the village street, no sign of Morkeleb was to be seen.