Edda was somewhat preoccupied sewing Mard’s arm up. But she was often at her most conversational while busy with needle and thread.

“Is it going to make her angry,” Prim asked, “perhaps to the point of going mad again, that we are going to have to fight and hack our way through?”

“Spring isn’t troubled by death,” said Edda. “On the contrary.”

“Where is she?” Querc inquired. “Did she ever take settled form again? Is she roaming around somewhere?”

“Probably the Eye of the Storm,” said Edda. “A place in these parts where she went with Eve, when Eve found her, and turned her away from the path of madness.”

Prim had avoided this until now, but finally forced herself to go and look at Mard’s arm. She had to know how bad it was. She expected wolf bites. Which indeed she saw; but the big wound that Edda was sewing up had been inflicted by a blade.

“It is a self-inflicted wound,” Mard admitted. “I pivoted round, thinking to help Lyne, and judged poorly the timing of it, and my arm came into the way of my sword already descending.”

At this news Prim was silent.

“You know not what to say,” Edda observed. “For such mishaps—though they happen all the time—are never recorded in legends and songs. The hero who falls because of a cramp in his hamstring is not sung of.”

More might have been said in that vein had Corvus not flown in and let them know that it would now be necessary to abandon nearly everything they had been carrying and run away.

They had been aware for some time that the howling of the wolves had been noted by other, larger, more solitary beasts; but they were not afraid of those. Several members of the expedition appeared to know that Prim could kill anything. Even if she elected for some reason to withhold that power, it was difficult to imagine anything standing up to Burr. So Prim was inclined for a moment to suppose it was only Corvus’s sense of humor at work. But only for a moment. His startling pronouncement had caused everyone to go still. And in that stillness they sensed the approach of something that seemed to come on like rain, in that it affected the whole of the forest instead of being in any one place. Supposing it was even alive, it must have been too numerous and spread out for even Death to be of much use against it.

“Mard can’t exactly run,” Lyne objected. For his kinsman had suffered bites to his legs as well as the cut to his arm. But Edda was already knotting a bandage over her unfinished seam. She slung Mard over her back as if he weighed approximately as much as a chicken, and in a few long strides vanished into the forest southbound.