The Hallows’ Hunt was, my father had opined, a way for people to comprehend the unexpected nature of death. The old tale had not spoken of blood and chains. Had the Wild Hunt always hunted blood to feed the courts? Not according to the old tales. Likewise, had young women always walked the dreams of dragons? For it certainly seemed that dragons had somehow planted a seed whose fruit had become dragon dreamers.

Had the worlds always been one way, or did the worlds also change, shifting and transforming?

A hammer’s pounding started up at the forge.

“Maybe we’d better go back,” I said.

“Blacksmiths have no love for cold mages, it’s true,” said Vai, “but we can use this to our advantage.”

“How is it to our advantage to have a blacksmith have no love for you, Andevai?” Bee asked.

“Why would you give speeches to gatherings of people, Beatrice,” he responded in exactly the same tone, “when so many are hostile to what you have to say?”

“Because I may change their minds if only they hear and understand the important things I have to tell them!”

“Just so,” he agreed.

Folk gathered to watch us approach the forge. Inside, the bellows kept pace, and the fire kept burning despite Vai’s halting twenty paces away. That was part of the blacksmith’s magic. A white-skinned man with a burn-scarred face and work-marred hands emerged, wiping his palms on a cloth. He spoke with a rough dialect, but I was beginning to get an ear for it.

“Ye is a magister,” the man said. “We like not having truck with yer kind, mage. Some of them mage House soldiers was a-coming through here yesterday. They carried the banner of Five Mirrors, but they had riding with them some men wearing tabards marked with the four phases of the moon.”

Vai showed no emotion, but it was all I could do not to react to the mention of soldiers from Four Moons House. The courier simply could not have gotten there and back so quickly.

“We thanked them kindly and showed them the road out of here. Yet they still went a-taking a lass and a lad and four stout sacks of turnips with them, as they are having the right to do. So if ye must take anything from our peaceful village, take it, and then with our favor, ye may walk out that road likewise, and be quick about it.”

“Perhaps I am the one the soldiers are looking for,” said Vai.

The blacksmith looked him up and down, for he was wearing his laborer’s clothes, having packed away the precious dash jackets. “Ye is a workman’s son, not a fancy magister.”

“I am a village-born lad, but I am a cold mage likewise. You know how it is with the mage Houses. They take what they want and bind it to them.”