“We will go home by way of the Shrine,” she explained to the others—and to Banner, who saw and heard and even felt what she did, through the collar around her neck. Had she wished to address the human unheard by anybody else, she would have formed the words voicelessly, down in her throat.

The alien tone never came to any hearing but Yewwl’s; Banner had said the sound went in through her skull. Eighteen years had taught Yewwl to recognize trouble in it: “I’ve seen pictures lately, taken from moon-height. You would not like what you found there, dear.”

Fur bristled, vanes spread and rippled, in sign of defiance. “I understand that. Shall the Ice keep me from my Forebear?” Anger died out. For Banner alone, Yewwl added softly, “And those with me hope for a token from her—an oracular dream, perhaps. And … I may be an unbeliever in such things, because of you, but I myself can nonetheless draw strength from them.”

Her band rode on. Night faded into hours of slowly brightening twilight. The storminess common around dawn and sunset did not come. Instead was eerie quiet under a moon and a half. The nullfire hereabouts did not grow tall, as out on the veldt, but formed a thick turf, hoarfrost-white, that muffled the hoofbeats of the onsars. Small crepuscular creatures were abroad, darters, scuttlers, light-flashers, and the chill was softened by a fragrance of nightwort, but life had grown scant since Yewwl and Robreng were young. They felt how silence starkened the desolation, and welcomed a wind that sprang up near morning, though it bit them to the bone and made stands of spearcane rattle like skeletons.

The sun rose at last. For a while it was a red step pyramid, far and far on the blurry horizon. The sky was opalescent. Below, land rolled steeply upward, cresting in a thousand-meter peak where snow and ice flushed in the early light. That burden spilled down the slopes and across the hills, broken here and there by a crag, a boulder, a tawny patch of uncovered nullfire, a tree—brightcrown or saw-frond—which the cold had slain. A flyer hovered aloft, wings dark against a squat mass of clouds. Yewwl didn’t recognize its kind. Strange things from beyond the Guardian Range were moving in with the freeze.