No other name. But it must be Alured the Black the Sea-Prince meant. Beyond the Eastern Ocean … was the memory of horror. Baron Sekkady. Kieri shuddered once, then reminded himself: he was free now. He had been free a long time. But … Alured there? And “not who he was”? Had Alured met Sekkady? Surely Sekkady was dead by now. His heir, though—surely he had had an heir, and his heir was like to be as vile as Sekkady.

The thought sprang into his mind in one vivid image: how Sekkady might outlive an aging body—how a magelord might outlive an aging body—as Dorrin had learned. Could Alured have been taken over by Sekkady? But why would Sekkady choose a pirate? If it could be, if Sekkady came near … for a moment the lust for revenge rose in him again, the thought of Sekkady at his mercy, a chance to kill, once for all, what had so tormented him.

Falk. Only the one word, but Kieri knew what it meant. Falk had never sought revenge on the tyrant who had enslaved him or the brothers who had lived in luxury while he suffered. To be Falk’s knight … Kieri touched the ruby he wore, and turned his attention to the message.

He plans a feint to the west, but will attack both over mountains and up the great river. I have sent word to Kostandan. The rest of the scroll was a crude map with a line across the mountains from a square marked “fort” to somewhere in southern Lyonya. The map showed the coastline of the Eastbight and north to the Honnorgat in careful detail, but inland only crudely. Aarenis was the wrong shape, and the Immer drainage nowhere near reality, with four cities marked at equal distances along it. The man must have drawn it from hearing it described, not from seeing it or any good map. But the “fort” lay north of the circle for Rotengre … Kieri’s mind leapt to Dwarfwatch.

Snow pummeled the windows, coated the courtyard, veiled the view beyond. Kieri tried to remember his own trip across the pass at Dwarfwatch when he was Aliam’s squire, but the wounds he’d taken getting Aliam out alive and the fever that had followed left him no clear notion where that pass came out. Not too far from Halveric Steading … where Estil and the family were alone, all the soldiers having come north with Aliam.

He could do nothing in the teeth of this storm. Aliam was days away in Riverwash. He could but hope that Alured had not sent any substantial force across the mountains before the pass closed.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Aarenis

Spring came early to the island, bringing the tangy fragrance of flowering white-bush, the bleating of newborn goats, the chink and scrape of hoes working house-gardens. Stammel, on his way to fetch water one morning, stopped short. Smoke. Not the village’s cookfire smoke, but a more acrid smoke from somewhere at a distance. He knew that smell. The smoke of war … death, destruction, ruin.