The servant nodded as he led them back through the hallways. “He has been raving about the eyes for the last two days. But before then, in fact, ever since he arrived here, he has been acting . . . nervously. As if he felt that something was watching him, but couldn’t see it. It is very strange. The Lord sent for him, and now, whatever it was he was supposed to do, he clearly can’t. That is why the Lord is in such a rage.”

“Well, he can be in a rage.” Bear shrugged. “Isn’t gonna change anything. That man is not going to do anything, and if he doesn’t go home, he may be that way forever.”

Suddenly Lena looked as if she had finally remembered what she had been trying to think of, and Mags could see she was fairly bursting with impatience to tell them. But she wasn’t going to do it in front of the servant. Only when the man left them at the exterior door, and they were safely out of earshot, did she burst out with it.

“I remember the eyes!” she exclaimed. “They’re vrondi.”

“They’re which-what?” Mags asked. He had read about a lot of things, but this was nothing that had shown up in any of the books he’d been going through so far. It sounded like a foreign thing.

“Vrondi. They’re in a song about Vanyel, how he made a spell to keep Valdemar safe.” She waved her hands around while she talked, excited now. “In the song, they are incredibly important to protecting Valdemar from supernatural threats.

They’re sort of little spirit-tattletales. They find people that aren’t Heralds or Bards or Healers that are doing—things—and they run and tell the Heralds about it.”

“All right,” Mags said, puzzled. “So how come I ain’t never been told about ’em?”

“I don’t know . . .” She shook her head. “I can look for more things about them, but I don’t know. But here is the other thing; they also watch the people that are doing those things until a Herald comes. And watch. And watch. You know how you can tell when someone is watching you? Well, imagine if there are dozens of invisible somethings watching you, all the time, and you can never get away. That’s the vrondi.”

“That’s crazy,” Mags said flatly as Bear stared at her. And it did sound incredibly silly, here in broadest daylight, with a perfectly solid building next to them, hard-packed snow under their feet, and enough of a chill wind to tease down the back of the neck as a reminder that winter was not over—oh no, not yet—and the coldest moons were yet to come.