The ex-High Fist straightened in his chair. ‘Ho? What’s this?’

Jute squinted out to the very mouth of the channel. Something dark was moving there amid the drifting chunks of frosty-blue ice.

‘Looks like a visitor,’ Cartheron observed.

It was still too far away for Jute to identify, but its general size and cut appeared encouraging.

‘Looks three-masted,’ Cartheron affirmed.

Crew were poling aside the ice as the vessel came on. Recognition came to Jute as the lines of its hull and the arrangement of its sails resolved into familiar lines. It was the Silver Dawn.

He waved frantically from the cliff’s edge. They drew nearer; sails were reefed and sweeps emerged. The Dawn advanced warily up the centre of the channel. It neared the wreckage of the docks and fallen lumber of the stairway in the waters at the base of the cliff.

Jute continued waving, one-handed, as his off-arm was still too stiff to raise.

And from the stern, next to the long tiller arm, though he knew she did not possess normal vision to see him as others did, a figure there returned his wave. His beloved Falaran sea-witch.

*

In the end, the ferocious relentless wind drove them to seek shelter at the Jaghut matriarch’s dwelling amid the bare rock of the peaks. It was no more than a heap of stones, a tomb rather than a home. He and Fisher took turns fetching wood for the meagre fire they kept.

Of the Matriarch they saw little; she invited them in yet quit the dwelling herself. Kyle felt uncomfortable for having driven her from her own home, yet he was also thankful for her absence, as the slim cave was hardly large enough for him and Fisher.

The bard passed the time composing on the kantele. Kyle listened with one ear while he scanned the lifeless windswept rocky slopes, his legs out, half asleep. One morning he overheard the bard singing faintly to himself as he strummed.

‘In these rows there are tales

For every line, every broken smile

Draw close then

And dry these tears

For I have a story to tell’

He also heard lines concerning ancient races of giants, hidden valleys, maidens of war, and powerful weapons whose curses doom their bearers. These last phrasings made him eye the bard sidelong.

By the fourth night he’d started wondering how to broach the subject of moving on when a huge dark shape emerged from the gloom. The Matriarch announced: ‘Someone is coming.’

Fisher eased the instrument back into its satchel and Kyle tightened his bear-hide cloak about his shoulders. They set out, leaning away from the slicing winds.

The bare broken rocks clattered and grated beneath their boots as they slowly ascended. They sought the place the Matriarch had told them was beneath where the Forkrul came and went. It was a hike of a few leagues from her dwelling.