She twisted the ring back outward on her finger and thrust her hand high in the air.

“Harm him not!” she cried, as sternly as she could. “I am the Seer of Brennin. I carry the Baelrath on my hand and a magegift vellin stone about my wrist!”

She was also hellishly weak, with a brutal pain in her side, and no idea whatsoever of how she could hold them off.

Ceriog seemed to have an intuition about that, or else was so goaded by the presence of the dwarf that he was beyond deterrence. He smiled thinly, through his tattoos and his dark beard.

“I like that,” he said, gazing at the Baelrath. “It will be a pretty toy to carry for the hours we have left before the rains come west and we all turn black and die. First, though,” he murmured, “I am going to kill the Dwarf very slowly, while you watch.”

She wasn’t going to be able to stop him. She was a Seer, a summoner. A storm crow on the winds of war. She could wake power, and gather it, and sometimes to do so she could flame red and fly between places, between worlds. She had two souls within her, and she carried the burden of the Baelrath on her finger and in her heart. But she could not stop a man with a blade, let alone fifty of them, driven mad by grief and fury and awareness of coming death.

Brock moaned. Kim felt his life’s blood soaking through her clothing as she held his head in her lap. She glared up at Ceriog. Tried one last time.

“Listen to me—” she began.

“While you watch,” he repeated, ignoring her.

“I think not,” said Dalreidan. “Leave them alone, Ceriog.”

The Eridun wheeled. A twisted light of pleasure shone in his dark face. “You will stop me, old man?”