His gestures widened to dramatic sweeps, like an actor declaiming. The Icefalcon wondered if Linok sincerely believed that the Icefalcon had somehow missed these events or if he simply liked to hear himself talk, a failing common among civilized people who didn't have to deal with the possibility of death by starvation or violence as the result of ill-timed sound.

"The very Keeps themselves are no longer safe. Prandhays Keep, once the stronghold of the landchief Degedna Marina, was breached and overtaken by outlaws who nearly killed us when we came there seeking shelter. There is no trust to be found anywhere in this sorry and desolated world."

"Still," said Hethya softly, "it is not so bad as it was." Her voice altered, the broad dialect of the Felwoods lands transmuting into something else, her carriage changing, as if she grew taller where she walked at the donkey's head. "Nathion Aysas intios ta, they used to say: The Darkness covered the very eyes of God."

The Icefalcon tilted his head at the unfamiliar words, of no language that he knew or had ever heard.

There was the echo of dark horror in the woman's eyes, and her whole face, in its frame of cinnamon curls, grew subtly different.

"You mean in the days when the Dark Ones rose," he said.

Her laugh was soft, bitter, and strange, out of place in the lush-featured face. "Yes," she said. "I mean when the Dark Ones rose."

Around them in the open meadow a half hundred or so sheep fled bleating, and the dozen cows raised their heads to regard them with the mild stupid curiosity of bovine kind: all the livestock left to a community of some five thousand souls.

The pasturage had been shifted again, as the rubbery, alien growth called slunch spread into what had been the Keep's cornfields, and only a few of the fields themselves remained.

The ice storm that struck in the Summerless Year had accounted not only for most of the stock, but for all but a few of the fruit trees as well, freezing them to their hearts.