The air above glacier and stone was still filled with light, the clouds streaked crimson, ochre, pink, and amber by the sunset, and the eternal snowfields picked up the glory of it, stained as if with liquid gold. Like a black glass rectangle cut from the crystallized bone of the mountain, the Keep of Dare caught the reflection, burning through the trees; a fortress built to guard the remnant of humankind through the times of darkness, until the sun should shine again.

Looking below it, beyond it, to the scant growth of wheat and corn in the fields along the stream, the white patches of slunch and the thinness of the blossom on the orchard trees, Rudy wondered if those ancient walls would be protection enough. Just my luck. I make it to the world where I belong, the world where I have magic, the world where the woman I love lives-and we all starve to death. It figures.

"The range of my tribe lay at the feet of the Haunted Mountain, between the Night River and the groves along the Cursed Lands, and northward to the Ice in the North." The Icefalcon slipped his scabbarded killing-sword free of his sash, set it where it could be drawn in split instants, and shed vest and coat and long gray scarf in a fashion that never seemed to engage his right hand. "Never in all those lands, in all my years of growing up, did I hear speak of this slunch."

Only a few glowstones dispersed white light in the Guards' watchroom. Most of the Guards' allotment of the milky polyhedrons illuminated the training floor where Gnift put a small group of off-shift warriors-Guards, the men-at-arms of the Houses of Ankres and Sketh, and the teenage sons of Lord Ankres-through a sparring session more strenuous than some wars.

Hearthlight winked on dirty steel as the incoming shift unbuckled harness, belts, coats; ogre shadows loomed in darkness, and across the long chamber someone laughed at Captain Melantrys' wickedly accurate imitation of Fargin Graw feeling sorry for himself. Rudy sighed and slumped against the bricks of the beehive hearth. "You ever ride north into the lands of the Ice?"