They were alone, Barrick and Saqri, or as alone as they could be: three armored, manlike figures stood at the foot of the path watching every step their queen took. These were Ice Ettins, Barrick could not help knowing, part of a clan called The Whitewound, from Bluedeeps in the north. He knew their names, too, or at least the gestures they made for their names-despite all their potential for violence, the Ice Ettins were a quiet and secretive race. He knew that their dully shining armor was nothing a smith had forged, but a part of their skins, as nerveless as nails or hair; he also knew that though none stood much taller than a mortal man, each Ice Ettin with his heavy bones and horny plates would weigh at least as much as three large men. These creatures were bound to the Fireflower by their clan oath, and each had earned a place in the queen's guard through victory in one of the murderous ceremonial games that The Whitewound always conducted in icy darkness.

Barrick knew all this as well as he knew his own name and the names of those who had raised him through childhood-but in a completely different way: all this new knowledge, countless histories and namings and connections and even more subtle things that could not be named but simply were, all these delicate understandings shouted and muttered in his head-shouted, but without noise. Barrick could not look at anything, even his own hand, without a thousand intricately foreign Qar ideas battering his thoughts like a sudden hailstorm-bits of poetry, scholarly associations, and countless far more meaningless and mundane memories. But these storms of knowledge were as the balmiest spring weather compared to the swelling of imagination and memory that crashed over him when he looked at anything significant-the towers of Qul-na-Qar or the distant peak of M'aarenol, or, worst of all, at Queen Saqri herself.