All these four days since the first snow the weather had followed a fixedpattern, with brief sunshine around noon, gathering cloud thereafter, freshsnow falling late in the evening and well into the night, andalways iron frost. Around Shrewsbury the snowfalls had been light and powdery,the pattern of white flakes and black soil constantly changing as the windblew. But as Cadfael rode south the fields grew whiter, the ditches filled. Thebranches of trees sagged heavily towards the ground under their load, and bymid-afternoon the leaden sky was sagging no less heavily earthwards, in swagsof blue-black cloud. If this went on, the wolves would be moving down from thehills and prowling hungrily among the haunts of men. Better to be an urchinunder a hedgerow, sleeping the winter away, or a squirrel holed up snugly withhis hoarded stores. It had been a good autumn for nuts and acorns.

Riding was pleasure to him, even riding alone and in the bitter cold. Thechance seldom came his way now, it was one of the delights he had given up forthe quiet of the cloister and the sense of having discovered his true place. Inevery decision there must be some regrets. He hunched his back solidly againstthe malice of the wind, and saw the first driven flakes, fine as dust, whirl byhim and outpace his horse, while he felt nothing in his shroud of cowl andcloak. He was thinking of the man who waited for him at the end of thisjourney.

Himself a monk, the messenger had said. Of Bromfield? Surely not. If he hadbeen one of theirs they would have named him. A monk loose and alone about theroads in the mid of the night? On what errand? Or in flight from what, beforehe fell into the mercies of robbers and murderers? Others must have rangedthrough the same countryside, in flight from the rape of Worcester, and wherewere they now? Perhaps this cowled wanderer had made his way painfully out ofthe same holocaust?