And now Kero confused her still further by turning her in an entirely opposite direction to the one she expected. Westward, not southward, and away from the hunting lands and the main village.

She stopped, snorted again, and bucked a little. Kero held her head down, and she fought the reins for a moment more, then settled, shaking her head.

Poor baby, you don’t know what we’re doing out here in the middle of the night, do you? Kero let her stand for a moment until she stopped shivering, then loosened her reins and gave her a touch of the heel. Obedient, but still snorting a little in protest, the mare headed into the west, up to the least hospitable side of the valley, along a faint track that led to the border of the Keep lands.

Their road stayed a track only so long as it lay within the Keep’s borders. From there it turned into a goat path, then into a game trail.

Verenna didn’t like it at all; it was bordered by clumps of bushes that swayed and rustled alarmingly, and overhung by trees that made it difficult for either her or her rider to see the path. Any horse bred by the Shin‘a’in nomads could pick her way across uneven ground in conditions much worse than this, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Her ears were laid back, and Kero sensed by the tenseness of her muscles that the least little disturbance would make her shy and possibly bolt.

A spooky enough road for a visit to a witch. Kero kept looking sharply at every movement she caught out of the comer of her eye, and starting a little at every sound. She was just as bad as Verenna, when it came down to it. This was the way to her grandmother’s home, called “Kethry’s Tower.” Kero hadn’t been up this road very often, but she knew it well enough. As a child, she’d been taken here either pillion behind a groom, or on her own fat pony, and the visits had been at least once a month. Later, though, as Lenore became ill, she’d gone no oftener than twice a year—and since her mother’s death, she hadn’t gone at all. Not that she hadn’t wanted to, but although Rathgar hadn’t expressly forbidden it, he’d certainly made his disapproval known. Kero had her hands full running the Keep, and somehow there never seemed to be enough time to visit her grandmother. And Grandmother had never sent any messages urging a visit either, so perhaps she hadn’t wanted any visitors....

And maybe she still doesn’t. But that’s a chance I’ll have to take.

As Kero remembered it, the place wasn’t exactly a tower; it was more like a stone fortress somehow picked up and set into the side of a cliff. Kero scrubbed at her burning eyes with her sleeve, wishing that the Keep had been as impregnable as that Tower—it always looked to her as if it had been grown into the cliffside, or perhaps carved into the living rock, and the only access to it was along a steep, narrow stairway. Witch and sorceress her grandmother might be, but she took no chances on the possibility of having unfriendly visitors.