Another thought came to him. 'Ingold? When you said that the Dark Ones are -"alien intelligences" - you meant that humans can't understand their essence, didn't

you? And because of that, we can't comprehend the source of their magic?*

'Exactly.'

'But if - if you took on the being of the Dark, if you took the form of a Dark One, then wouldn't you understand them? Wouldn't you know then what they are and how they think?'

Ingold was silent for such a long time that Rudy began to fear he had offended the old man. But the wizard only stared into the fire, drawing the stem of a dried stalk of grass through his restless fingers, the flame repeated a thousandfold in his eyes. When he spoke, his soft, scratchy voice was barely audible over the keening of the winds. 'I could do that,' he said. 'In fact, I have thought of it many times.' He glanced over at Rudy. Gleaming from the wizard's eyes, Rudy could see the overwhelming temptation to knowledge, the curiosity that amounted in the mageborn to an almost unslakable lust. 'But I won't. Ever. The risk would be too great.' He dropped the grass stem he held into the fire and watched it idly as it curled and blackened in the veils of burning gold like a corpse upon a pyre. 'For you see, Rudy - I might like being a Dark One.'

Chapter 4

'I never thought it would come to this so soon.' Gil lobbed a hunk of snow down at the trampled muck of the valley road below.

Seya set down her bow and quiver, shook the powdered snow from her black cloak, and gave a perfunctory glance at the dark pine woods that rose behind the little watch-post. 'Come to what?' she asked.

Gil got to her feet, cramped from her long watch in the icy afternoon. 'Come to guarding the road against our own people.'

Seya said nothing.

'I've been watching the smoke of their campfires,' Gil went on casually, gathering up her own weapons, bow and sword and spear.