The woman is weakening. Upright or fallen, she is nothing to me now. If the gods will that she survive the storm, she will do so. But my son walks beside her, and he will live through this night. By Oath and Measure, that much is true. I shall see to it with the last of my own strength.

Daeghrefn tried to double his fists, but his frozen gloves would not crease. The screaming wind switched direction again-this time from due east, lancing from the top of the range down mountainside and foothill, rattling branches in the desolate Nerakan Forest and plunging straight into the path of the dazed and snow-baffled knight. He gasped and cursed, staggered again in the snow.

And then the torchlit form was in front of him, a dark

outline of human or goblin or …

Clumsy as an old, besotted man, he groped with useless and disobedient fingers for his sword.

"No," said the voice at the heart of the shadow. "Come to shelter."

It was the voice of a woman, unfamiliar and young, strangely accented with the sharp, fluid music of Lemish.

"Begone!" the knight shouted.

"Don't be a fool!" the shadow urged, gesturing sweep-ingly in the blinding snow. Now she was motioning him somewhere … somewhere to the south … to shelter….

"No!" Daeghrefn roared. "He'll not have this victory as well!"

"Don't be a fool," repeated the shadow.

She extended her hand toward the struggling knight.

Again, Daeghrefn's hand grappled for the ice-crusted hilt of his sword. "Begone!" he hissed, the exclamation lost in the roar of the wind. He grunted and shouted as he tried to draw the blade, but the sword hung frozen at his belt, sealed to the sheath by an absurdly thick layer of ice.

He would have struggled there forever, until the snow took him or the shadow descended, had not Abelaard called to him over the clamoring storm.