Slowly, Dalreidan nodded his head. “I know nothing of the former and too much of the latter,” he said, “but I think you will know that I had no desire for Ceriog’s death, and none at all to take his place. I will be gone from this place. I will be gone from this place within the hour.”

There was another stir at that. “Does it matter?” young Faebur asked. “You need not go, not with the rain coming so soon.”

And that, Kim realized, brought things back round to her. She had recovered from the shock—Ceriog’s was not the first violent death she’d seen in Fionavar—and she was ready when all their eyes swung to where she sat.

“It may not come,” she said, looking at Faebur. The Baelrath was still alive, flickering, but not intensely so.

“You are truly the Seer of Brennin?” he asked.

She nodded. “On a journey for the High King with this Dwarf, Brock of Banir Tal. Who fled the twin mountains to bring us tidings of the treachery of others.”

“A dwarf in the service of Ailell?” Dalreidan asked.

She shook her head. “Of his son. Ailell died more than a year ago, the day the Mountain flamed. Aileron rules in Paras Derval.”

Dalreidan’s mouth crooked wryly. “News,” he said, “is woven slowly in the mountains.”

“Aileron?” Faebur interjected. “We heard a tale of him in Larak. He was an exile, wasn’t he?”

Kim heard the hope in his voice, the unspoken thought. He was very young; the beard concealed it only partially. “He was,” she said gently. “Sometimes they go back home.”

“If,” the older Eridun interposed, “there is a home to go back to. Seer, can you stop the rain?”

She hesitated, looking beyond him, east to where the clouds were piled high. She said, “I cannot, not directly. But the High King has others in his service, and by the Sight I have I know that some of them are sailing even now to the place where the death rain is being shaped, just as the winter was. And if we stopped the winter, then—”