“Too warm all winter,” said Hathui. “Too dry in the south last year, when we were down there. A terrible drought, so bad every blade of grass was brittle. Up here, everything is soggy. I’ve got mold on my feet!”

Everyone laughed, and for a while they talked about how their feet itched and how their clothes and tents stank of mildew. Everyone had mold on their feet except Liath, who was never sick and never plagued by fleas or lice or rashes. She sat as usual in the back. The other Eagles were accustomed to her presence in a way no one else could be. They ignored her. For her part, she braided fiber into rope as Eldest Uncle had taught her. At intervals she played surreptitiously at setting twigs to burn, honing her ability to call fire into smaller and smaller targets. Mostly, she listened to their news and their gossip and their conclusions as well as the information they had gleaned speaking to the locals. She listened to Ernst’s earnest report of conditions in Wendar over the last six months or more, ever since that windstorm had swept over them. Folk even so far north as Wendar had felt and feared and marked this unnatural tempest, although they had no way of knowing the truth.

The Eagles with Henry’s army had seen, and witnessed. Yet even they did not know the whole.

“I wonder,” she said aloud, and noted how they all stilled and started and turned, then waited for her to speak. She smiled as she realized in what manner she fooled herself, wanting to believe they did not scrutinize her every least movement and word for hidden meanings. She was no longer an Eagle. That part of her life was gone.

“I’m just wondering,” she said into their silence, “if the strange weather is an artifact of Anne’s spell. It might even be an effect of the spell woven in ancient times under the Bwr shaman’s supervision that rebounded on us. The Bwr shaman are tempestari, so the legends say.”

“So we observed ourselves,” said Hathui. “It was her magic that stemmed the blizzard that swept over us when we were in the east.”

“Or created that blizzard.”

Because she had power over the weather.

In a still forest, an unexpected wind may agitate the leaf litter, unearthing hidden depths and items long concealed by layer upon layer of detritus. She rose, tucking fiber and the short length of rope into a pouch. Thoughts skittered like mice fleeing across a church floor suddenly illuminated by a lamp. There was a pattern there, a plan, a potential action. All at once she was too restless to sit, troubled and stimulated by a hundred threads any one of which, teased out to its end, might give her an answer.

“I’ll come with you,” said Hathui.

Liath laughed as they crossed out into the drizzle, which was already fading into spits and kisses. “Did Sanglant set you on me, to be my guard?”