Carefully the druidess brushed at the blemished sur face of the ice, and she saw two broad paths through the mountains-one from Estwilde, the other from Gargath. Nothing else. And even that vision was fading, the ice now etched and buoyant.
He is nearby. He is almost here. I know it, she told herself. Ah. More than one of them, I think. L'Indasha's fingertips tingled and pricked. She drew up her shawl and bent lower over the bucket to see more clearly. Half a mile from the Nerakan road, wandering aimlessly north through the barren trees and the knee-deep snow, a man lurched into view.
Solamnic. She could tell by the insignia. Cloaked thinly against the terrible weather, dressed in useless armor. He was wandering, clearly lost, just far enough from the trail to be very near her cave.
The wind ripped through his robes. His beard, his gloves, and the leather lacings of his breastplate were crusted and stiff with ice, as though he had been carved from the mountain or born of the winter sky.
Solamnic, the druidess repeated to herself, lifting her eyes from the oracular ice. Probably searching for bandits. Following the sword and that pitiful code of his-bloody vows of honor and life. Let him go. She was no fool to meddle in the workings of pride and vainglory.
As she watched, the knight passed into shadow and cloud, lost at the edge of her auguries.
Let him go. Let him freeze in foolhardiness, along with his troops and followers….
Followers. Almost at once, she dismissed her scorn and resentment. No matter his foolishness and Solamnic vanities, she thought, it is a merciless night for them.
Then, as though her compassion itself had summoned them, the other two staggered into her view. Two smaller forms desperately followed the knight, their gilded, embroidered clothing already tattered by the rending wind. Then the ice abruptly cleared, the cinders dropped to the bottom of the bucket, and the vision went black.
The druidess reached for her cloak and, with a brief pass of her hand and an ancient, dry mutter, deftly lighted a torch. The green light flashed and rose and steadied in her grasp. It was a dim fire, scarcely a guide on a night like this, but the magic would keep it aglow in the terrible wind.
Daeghrefn turned to see where they were. The wind struck him full in the face, stinging the back of his throat and leaving him breathless.
In the swirl of snow and shadow behind him, he could see his family barely outlined-woman and boy, shadows against the dark sky. Abelaard was struggling bravely, of course. He guided the woman, coaxing and urging her, but the stiff wind staggered them both, and the woman stumbled, pulling the lad backward into the snow. A strange, cold peace passed over Daeghrefn as the wind switched directions, as the stragglers labored to their feet.
The woman is weakening. Upright or fallen, she is nothing to me now. If the gods will that she survive the storm, she will do so. But my son walks beside her, and he will live through this night. By Oath and Measure, that much is true. I shall see to it with the last of my own strength.
Daeghrefn tried to double his fists, but his frozen gloves would not crease. The screaming wind switched direction again-this time from due east, lancing from the top of the range down mountainside and foothill, rattling branches in the desolate Nerakan Forest and plunging straight into the path of the dazed and snow-baffled knight. He gasped and cursed, staggered again in the snow.
And then the torchlit form was in front of him, a dark outline of human or goblin or…
Clumsy as an old, besotted man, he groped with useless and disobedient fingers for his sword.
"No," said the voice at the heart of the shadow. "Come to shelter."
It was the voice of a woman, unfamiliar and young, strangely accented with the sharp, fluid music of Lemish.
"Begone!" the knight shouted.
"Don't be a fool!" the shadow urged, gesturing sweep-ingly in the blinding snow. Now she was motioning him somewhere… somewhere to the south… to shelter…
"No!" Daeghrefn roared. "He'll not have this victory as well!"
"Don't be a fool," repeated the shadow.
She extended her hand toward the struggling knight.
Again, Daeghrefn's hand grappled for the ice-crusted hilt of his sword. "Begone!" he hissed, the exclamation lost in the roar of the wind. He grunted and shouted as he tried to draw the blade, but the sword hung frozen at his belt, sealed to the sheath by an absurdly thick layer of ice.
He would have struggled there forever, until the snow took him or the shadow descended, had not Abelaard called to him over the clamoring storm.
"May we stop, Father?" the lad shouted, his voice thin and uncertain. "May we stop? We're very tired and cold."
It was a druidess, of course, who led them out of the blinding snow and into the warmth and shadow and dodging light of a nearby cavern. The heat from the fire smarted on Daeghrefn's storm-burned skin. Blinking stupidly in the sudden brightness, he glanced from wall to cavern wall, where cascades of dried lavender and rosemary hung amid comfrey and foxglove, alongside mush rooms as gnarled and black as severed hands. Two cats, lean and ancient, wrestled solemnly in a shadowy corner. The place smelled of forest, of the deep glades of Lemish and elf country.
He should have known the woman was a druidess, Daeghrefn told himself. Celebrant of the dead gods and the dead year. Instantly his caution magnified. If druidess she was, there was danger in her. They were never what they seemed, with their woodsense and muttering and their irritating mysteries. He had heard they stole babies. Now there was a thought.
"Why?" asked the druidess L'Indasha Yman, shaking the snow from her robes. She was younger than he expected. Quite lovely, for that matter-auburn-haired and tall and dark-eyed as well. The cave light did not reveal the finer details of her face, and his eyes were too frost- and wind-burned to study her clearly.
He crouched by the fire and extended his hands, regarding the druidess warily. His eyes played over the soft, dark skin of her neck, the purple pendant at her throat that filtered the firelight as stained glass catches the sun. He would not trust beauty such as this. It was entangling, beguiling…
L'Indasha noticed the stormcrow brooch, ice-encrusted, that held the man's cape uncertainly about his throat.
"You are Daeghrefn of Nidus," she noted, drawing a small iron kettle from a shadowy nook in the rocks. "The dayraven. The stormcrow. Your castle is not far from here. Why? Why do you travel on a night such as this? Where did you think you were?"
The woman cried out softly to Abelaard. The boy helped her closer to the fire.
Daeghrefn ignored them, his eyes fixed on the druidess. "You know already who and why and where," he muttered, "and you've augury enough to know more. Why ask?"
L'Indasha glared at him and stalked into the darkness, returning with the kettle brimful of water. "It would take more than augury to sound this foolishness," she said, soothing the man's wife with a soft brush of her hand. "Out in the Khalkists on the worst of winter nights, your wife and small son behind you like a straggling infantry. What could have…?" Like the melting of ice or the settling of ashes, a slow awareness seeped into LTndasha's mind. She tried to hide her face when the truth came to her, but Daeghrefn saw it.
"Ah," she breathed. "You've been cuckolded, haven't-" The druidess glanced down at the woman. The thin cloak had fallen and now revealed the source of the woman's crying. She was about to give birth.