"You were fools not to come to the Keep when first you entered the valley." The Icefalcon glanced back at them, man and woman, for the first time taking his eyes from the surrounding woods. "Where were you bound? You must have seen it."

"Now listen here, boy-o," began the woman Hethya, apparently indignant at being called a fool, though the Icefalcon would have been hard put to devise another term that covered the situation.

"No, niece, he's right," Linok sighed. "He's right." He straightened his bowed back-he was a little, round-faced, stooped man, with blunt-fingered hands clinging to the ass' short-cropped mane-and looked back at the Icefalcon walking behind them, long, curved killingsword still in hand.

"A White Raider, aren't you, my boy? And clothed as one of the King's Guard of Gae."

Civilized people, the Icefalcon had discovered, loved to state the obvious. In the improbable event that a man of the Realm of Darwath-and they were a dark-haired people on the whole-had been flax-blond and grew his hair long enough to braid, it was still unlikely in the extreme that he'd have had dried hand bones plaited into the ends of it.

The bones were those of a man who had poisoned the Icefalcon, stolen his horse and the amulet that guarded him from the Dark Ones, and left him to die. The Icefalcon saw no reason for civilized people to be shocked about this, but mostly they were.

"Had you journeyed as far as we have, young man," Linok went on, shaking a finger at him, "in such lands as the Felwoods have become in the seven years since the coming of the Dark, you'd beware of anyone and anything you don't know, too. Cities that once were bywords of law and hospitality are nests now of ghouls and thieves..."