“Guide these charter-helms to the wizard’s abode and back again,” came the grave instruction.

“Lanterns?” Thal chirped.

“Nay, lad,” Gaerond replied quickly, “but we’ll pay fair coin for guiding us. If the way’s not long, nor will our business with the mage be. Our patron has ordered that no one else hear what we say or is said to us, but we’ll be done soon enough and can come right back here at your heels.”

Thal looked at the innkeeper for instruction, as if Gaerond hadn’t said a word, but the innkeeper merely nodded approvingly.

At that, the lad smiled, nodded, and marched past Gaerond, trailing a cheerful, “This way, saers.”

Malkym looked as if he wanted a tankard before walking anywhere else, but followed Gaerond in silence, Flamdar and the others trudging right behind.

The lad led them to the crossroads, which were no larger nor less muddy than Gaerond remembered, and took the road north, past some new steads already sagging into the bog they’d been built on. Beyond them the land rose, crowned by a seemingly impenetrable tangle of thornstar hedge that all manner of vine-choked wild trees had thrust up through. Storm Silverhand’s farm, it had once been … a century back, when there still was a Storm Silverhand.

You’d have thought at least one or two Harpers might have survived to settle the place, to keep bellies full on its profusion of pole-fruit and all, but mayhap folk thereabouts had run them off or run them through, and-

To Gaerond’s grunted surprise, the lad turned off the road down into the ditch near the north end of the wild hedge, well past where the farm gate had been-only to scale the far bank of the ditch and plunge through a dark hole in the hedge that looked like a boar run.

Huh. Smelled like a boar run, too; Gaerond laid one hand on his favorite longsark as he put his head down and shouldered after the lad, through crackling branches, leathery leaves, and the inevitable jabbing thorns.