As Rod Everlar, spewing forth the contents of his heaving stomach, scrambled up from the stream-edge mud and sprinted along the water's edge, around its last curve before the clearing, so he could charge up one more forest slope, crash through more trees, yelling out incoherent fury, and burst out into the bright sunlight to confront it.

The Aumrarr was very dead. There was blood everywhere, and the reek of death was strong.

For the first time Rod realized just how much danger he might be in-and something else, too: he hadn't the faintest idea what he was going to do now.

The lorn lifted its head from the bloody ruin of the Aumrarr's face, and regarded him expressionlessly. Without a mouth, its face a gray skull-like mask, it couldn't do much else, yet somehow Rod felt that it was sneering at him.

This close, he could see how the lorn had been able to bite out an Aumrarr throat without a mouth, then devour her face: a lamprey-like, chewing throat tube drew back out of view, under its jaw. Revealing two saw-edged, curving horns-like giant beetle pincers-that were just emerging from under that same jaw.

Horns that thrust forward again, spreading wide, as the lorn took a step closer to Rod, casually throwing the limp corpse of the Aumrarr over one of its arms. And then another step.

Oh, shit.

Chapter Three

Ironthorn had long been a vale where the cold and careful courtesy of meeting and mingling only in certain neutral places-the market-moots in Irontarl, and at Har's Bridge and Blackstones Hill-kept the three rival lordly families of Hammerhand, Lyrose, and Tesmer from rising to bathe the valley in open red war.

Though vale-folk and traveling traders alike spoke of "the ever-brawling knights of Ironthorn," those frays erupted with fists and daggers in the taverns, between a hot-headed few, not from end to end of the valley with armies that slaughtered, pillaged, and burned.