:I don’t know, Chosen,: his Companion replied grimly. :But whatever it is . . . there is something it wants here. Something . . . or someone.:

Mags poked listlessly at the remains of his stew, and listened to three of the most senior Heralds in the Circle debate what he had felt over his head. They had cleared everyone else out of this tiny room as soon as he had recovered enough to get what he had sensed out in coherent sentences, and Herald Caelen had sent for Nikolas and a third man, who evidently had been in the Palace, doing some searching of his own. From all Mags gathered, he was as strong a Mindspeaker as Mags, and a great deal more practiced and disciplined. He had “gone looking” for what Mags had sensed, and had come up with nothing. He looked enough like Nikolas to have been his father, although there was nothing in their manner to indicate that was the case.

Now here Mags was, sitting on a cushion on the hearth, head aching, body feeling as if he had been beaten black and blue, utterly exhausted. In that sense of unreality that comes with exhaustion, he was feeling less and less with every passing moment that he had ever sensed anything at all that wasn’t some dream-fragment out of his own mind. After all, if it couldn’t be verified . . .

“Stop that,” came a calm voice to his right. He turned and stared at the Herald, the Mindspeaker.

“Sir?” he managed, meeting those calm gray eyes. He wished he felt like that, so calm, so sure of himself.

“Stop second-guessing yourself. You sensed something. Your Companion, who was snug in his stable and not half frozen and having hallucinations, also sensed it. All we are trying to do is figure out what it was that you sensed.” The Herald smiled at him. “Storms like this can do some peculiar things. I have heard, although I have never seen it myself, that they can carry with them the echo of thoughts from incredibly far away.”

“Ye thin’ that’s what I got?” Mags asked hopefully. He really did not want to think that there was something with a mind like that snowed in or near the Collegia. Truly, he did not. He would never be able to close his eyes again.

“It certainly corresponds to what I felt near a colddrake, long ago,” the older man said cautiously. “And according to the theory, since they are very powerful, mentally, it is certainly possible for a colddrake’s thoughts to have been carried on a storm like this one. Especially if the drake was anywhere about where it started.”

Mags nodded and finished his stew, conscious that there must be no wasted food for as long as they were all snowed in.