He had called her "younger sister," though, which
was an indication that he was pleased with her for
some reason. "Mostly you tell me I don't think
enough."
Standing in a clear spot amid the bushes was a
man, garbed in fighter's gear of deepest black, and
veiled. The ice-blue eyes, the sable hair, and the
cut of his close-wrapped clothing would have told
most folk that he was, like Tarma, Shin'a'in. The
color of the clothing would have told the more
knowledgeable—since most Shin'a'in preferred a car-
nival brightness in their garments—that he, too,
was Sword Sworn; Sword Sworn by custom wore
only stark black or dark brown. But only one very
sharp-eyed would have noticed that while he stood
amid the snow, he made no imprint upon it. It
seemed that he weighed hardly more than a shadow.
That was scarcely surprising since he had died
long before Tarma was born.
"Thinking to plan is one case; thinking to brood
is another," he replied. "You accomplish nothing
but to increase your sadness. You should be devis-
ing a means of filling your bellies and those of your
jel'suthro'edrin. You cannot reach the Plains if you
do not eat."
He had used the Shin'a'in term for riding beasts
that meant "forever-younger-Clanschildren." Tarma
was dead certain he had picked that term with
utmost precision, to impress upon her that the wel-
fare of Kessira and Kethry's mule Rodi were as
important as her own—more so, since they could
not fend for themselves in this inhospitable place.
"With all respect, teacher, I am ... at a loss.
Once I had a purpose. Now?" She shook her head.
"Now I am certain of nothing. As you once told
me—"
"Li'sa'eer! Turn my own words against me, will
you?" he chided gently. "And have you nothing?"
"My she'enedra. But she is outClan, and strange
to me, for all that the Goddess blessed our oath-
binding with Her own fire. I know her but little.
I—only—"
"What, bright blade?"
"I wish—I wish to go home—" The longing she
felt rose in her throat and made it hard to speak.
"And so? What is there to hinder you?"
"There is," she replied, willing her eyes to stop
stinging, "the matter of money. Ours is nearly gone.
It is a long way to the Plains."
"So? Are you not now of the mercenary calling?"
"Well, unless there be some need for blades
hereabouts—the which I have seen no evidence for,
the only way to reprovision ourselves will be if my
she'enedra can turn her skill in magic to an honor-
able profit. For though I have masters of the best,"
she bowed her head in the little nod of homage a
Shin'a'in gave to a respected elder, "sent by the
Star-Eyed herself, what measure of attainment I
have acquired matters not if there is no market for
it."
"Hai'she'li! You should market that silver tongue,
jel'enedra!" he laughed. "Well, and well. Three things
I have come to tell you, which is why I arrive
out-of-time and not at moonrise. First, that there
will be storm tonight, and you should all shelter,
mounts and riders together. Second, that because of
the storm, we shall not teach you this night, though
you may expect our coming from this day on, every
night that you are not within walls."
He turned as if to leave, and she called out, "And
third?"
"Third?" he replied, looking back at her over his
shoulder. "Third—is that everyone has a past. Ere
you brood over your own, consider another's."
Before she had a chance to respond, he vanished,
melting into the wind.
Wrinkling her nose over that last, cryptic re-
mark, she went to find her she'enedra and partner.
Kethry was hovering over a tiny, nearly smoke-
less fire, skinning a pair of rabbits. Tarma almost
smiled at the frown of concentration she wore; she
was going at the task as if she were being rated on
the results! They were a study in contrasts, she
and her outClan blood-sister. Kethry was sweet-
faced and curvaceous, with masses of curling am-
ber hair and startling green eyes; she would have
looked far more at home in someone's court circle
as a pampered palace mage than she did here, at
their primitive hearth. Or even more to the point,
she would not have looked out of place as someone's
spoiled, indulged wife or concubine; she really
looked nothing at all like any mage Tarma had ever
seen. Tarma, on the other hand, with her hawklike
face, forbidding ice-blue eyes and nearly sexless
body, was hardly the sort of person one would ex-
pect a mage or woman like Kethry to choose as a
partner, much less as a friend. As a hireling,
perhaps—in which case it should have been Tarma
skinning the rabbits, for she looked to have been
specifically designed to endure hardship.
Oddly enough, it was Kethry who had taken to
this trip as if she were the born nomad, and Tarma
who was the one suffering the most from their
circumstances, although that was mainly due to the
unfamiliar weather.
Well, if she had not foreseen that becoming
Kal'enedral meant suddenly acquiring a bevy of
long-dead instructors, this partnership had come as
even more of a surprise. The more so as Tarma had
really not expected to survive the initial confronta-
tion with those who had destroyed her Clan.
"Do not reject aid unlooked-for," her instructor
had said the night before she set foot in the ban-
dit's town. And unlooked-for aid had materialized,
in the form of this unlikely sorceress. Kethry, too,
had her interests in seeing the murderers brought
low, so they had teamed together for the purpose of
doing just that. Together they had accomplished
what neither could have done alone—they had ut-
terly destroyed the brigands to the last man.
And so Tarma had lost her purpose. Now—now
there was only the driving need to get back to the
Plains; to return before the Tale'sedrin were deemed
a dead Clan. Farther than that she could not, would
not think or plan.
Kethry must have sensed Tarma's brooding eyes
on her, for she looked up and beckoned with her
skinning knife.
"Fairly good hunting," Tarma hunched as close
the fire as she could, wishing they dared build
something larger.
"Yes and no. I had to use magic to attract them,
poor things." Kethry shook her head regretfully as
she bundled the offal in the skins and buried the
remains in the snow to freeze hard. Once frozen,
she'd dispose of them away from the camp, to avoid
attracting scavengers. "I felt so guilty, but what
else was I to do? We ate the last of the bread
yesterday
, and I didn't want to chance on the hunt-
ing luck of just one of us."
"You do what you have to, Keth. Well, we're able
to live off the land, but Kessira and Rodi can't,"
Tarma replied. "Our grain is almost gone, and we've
still a long way to go to get to the Plains. Keth, we
need money."
"I know."
"And you're the one of us best suited to earning
it. This land is too peaceful for the likes of me to
find a job—except for something involving at least
a one-year contract, and that's something we can't
afford to take the time for. I need to get back to the
Plains as soon as I can if I'm to raise Tale'sedrin's
banner again."
"I know that, too." Kethry's eyes had become
shadowed, the lines around her mouth showed strain.
"And I know that the only city close enough to
serve us is Mornedealth."
And there was no doubt in Tarma's mind that
Kethry would rather have died than set foot in that
city, though she hadn't the vaguest notion why.
Well, this didn't look to be the proper moment to
ask—
"Storm coming; a bad one," she said, changing
the subject. "I'll let the hooved ones forage for as
long as I dare, but by sunset I'll have to bring them
into camp. Our best bet is going to be to shelter all
together because I don't think a fire is going to
survive the blow."
"I wish I knew where you get your information,"
Kethry replied, frown smoothing into a wry half-
smile. "You certainly have me beat at weather-
witching."
"Call it Shin'a'in intuition," Tarma shrugged,
wishing she knew whether it was permitted to an
outland she'enedra—who was a magician to boot—to
know of the veiled ones. Would they object? Tarma
had no notion, and wasn't prepared to risk it. "Think
you can get our dinner cooked before the storm gets
here?"
"I may be able to do better than that, if I can
remember the spells." The mage disjointed the rab-
bits, and spitted the carcasses on twigs over the
fire. She stripped off her leather gloves, flexed her
bare fingers, then held her hands over the tiny fire
and began whispering under her breath. Her eyes
were half-slitted with concentration and there was
a faint line between her eyebrows. As Tarma
watched, fascinated, the fire and their dinner were
enclosed in a transparent shell of glowing gold mist.
"Very pretty; what's it good for?" Tarma asked
when she took her hands away.
"Well, for one thing, I've cut off the wind; for
another, the shield is concentrating the heat and
the meat will cook faster now."
"And what's it costing you?" Tarma had been in
Kethry's company long enough now to know that
magic always had a price. And in Kethry's case,
that price was usually taken out of the resources of
the spell-caster.
Kethry smiled at her accusing tone. "Nowhere
near so much as you might think; this clearing has
been used for overnighting a great deal, and a good
many of those camping here have celebrated in one
way or another. There's lots of residual energy here,
energy only another mage could tap. Mages don't
take the Trade Road often, they take the Courier's
Road when they have to travel at all."
"So?"
"So there's more than enough energy here not
only to cook dinner but to give us a little more
protection from the weather than our bit of canvas."
Tarma nodded, momentarily satisfied that her
blood-sister wasn't exhausting herself just so they
could eat a little sooner. "Well, while I was scroung-
ing for the hooved ones, I found a bit for us, too—"
She began pulling cattail roots, mallow-pith, a
few nuts, and other edibles from the outer pockets
of her coat. "Not a lot there, but enough to supple-
ment dinner, and make a bit of breakfast besides."
"Bless you! These bunnies were a bit young and
small, and rather on the lean side—should this stuff
be cooked?"
"They're better raw, actually."
"Good enough; want to help with the shelter,
since we're expecting a blow?"
"Only if you tell me what to do. I've got no
notion of what these winter storms of yours are
like."
Kethry had already stretched their canvas tent
across the top and open side of the enclosure of
rocks and logs, stuffed brush and moss into the
chinks on the inside, packed snow into the chinks
from the outside, and layered the floor with pine
boughs to keep their own bodies off the snow. Tarma
helped her lash the canvas down tighter, then
and what rocks they could find.
As they worked, the promised storm began to
give warning of its approach. The wind picked up
noticeably, and the northern horizon began to darken.
Tarma cast a wary eye at the darkening clouds. "I
hope you're done cooking because it doesn't look
like we have too much time left to get under cover."
"I think it's cooked through."
"And if not, it won't be the first time we've eaten
raw meat on this trip. I'd better get the grazers."
Tarma got the beasts one at a time; first the
mule, then her mare. She backed them right inside
the shelter, coaxing them to lie down inside, one on
either side of it, with their heads to the door-flap
just in case something should panic them. With the
two humans in the space in the middle, they should
all stay as close to warm as was possible. Once
again she breathed a little prayer of thankfulness
for the quality of mule she'd been able to find for
Kethry; with a balky beast or anything other than
another Shin'a'in-bred horse this arrangement would
have been impossible.
Kethry followed, grilled rabbit bundled into a
piece of leather. The rich odor made Tarma's mouth
water and reminded her that she hadn't eaten since
this morning. While Kethry wormed her way in
past her partner, Tarma lashed the door closed.
"Hold this, and find a comfortable spot," the
mage told her. While Tarma snuggled up against
Kessira's shoulder, Kethry knelt in the space re-
maining. She held her hands just at chin height,
palms facing outward, her eyes completely closed
and her face utterly vacant. By this Tarma knew
she was attempting a much more difficult bit of
magery than she had with their dinner.
She began an odd, singsong chant, swaying a lit-
tle in time to it. Tarma began to see a thin streak of
weak yellow light, like a watered-down sunbeam,
dancing before her. In fact, that was what she prob-
ably would have taken it for—except that the sun
was nearly down, not overhead.
As Kethry chanted, the light-beam increased in
streng
th and brightness. Then, at a sharp word
from her, it split into six. The six beams remained
where the one had been for a moment, perhaps a
little longer. Kethry began chanting again, a differ-
ent rhythm this time, and the six beams leapt to
the walls of their shelter, taking up positions spaced
equally apart.
When they moved so suddenly, Tarma had nearly
jumped out of her skin—especially since one of
them had actually passed through her. But when
she could feel no strangeness—and certainly no harm
from the encounter—she relaxed again. The ani-
mals appeared to be ignoring the things, whatever
they were.
Now little tendrils of light were spinning out
from each of the beams, reaching out until they met
in a kind of latticework. When this had spread to
the canvas overhead, Tarma began to notice that
the wind, which had been howling and tugging at
the canvas, had been cut off, and that the shelter
was noticeably warmer as a result.
Kethry sagged then, and allowed herself to half-
collapse against Rodi's bulk.
"Took less than I might think, hmm?"
"Any more comments like that and I'll make you
stay outside."
"First you'd have to fight Kessira. Have some
dinner." Tarma passed her half the rabbit; it was
still warm and amazingly juicy and both of them
wolfed down their portions with good appetite, nib-
bling the bones clean, then cracking them and suck-
ing out the last bit of marrow. With the bones
licked bare, they finished with the roots of Tarma's
gleaning, though more than half of Tarma's share