Deep in the grass, insects abounded, eating fallen seeds; birds and rodents came to eat the seeds as well, and to eat the insects too; and great grazing animals came in vast herds to slice or tear off the grass well above the matted sod. The predators—wolves and great cats—came to cull the lame and old and unprotected young from the herds. Here a mage of herding beasts and a mage of predators could equally find a home.

It was a place where a traveler could walk for days without any certainty that he had come any closer to his destination, or escaped any distance from the place where he began.

Yet somehow in this dry grassy wilderness, small villages of drowthers found a way to make their homes of cut-up sod, scratch their tiny farms out of the clay that they exposed, and one way or another eke out a living and store up enough strength to spawn a next generation, and then another. They did not hunt the herding beasts, for fear that they were watched over by a beastmage; nor did they wander alone, for fear that a mageridden predator would hunt them down for sport. They kept to themselves; they watched the weather on which their precarious lives depended; wariness kept them alive.

Wad gated from village to village, coming in as a stranger, but one who knew the language—for Wad could speak all the variants of Westil spoken in this world, or at least he never found one he couldn’t pick up in a few minutes. He dressed himself in clothing that made him seem to be a journeyman in search of work. He should have been far more acceptable than Ced in these little villages, yet Wad could see that they were lying to protect the windmage from Mittlegard.

“My friend would have come soon before or soon after the storm that stripped your fields and blew down your houses,” Wad said in village after village. “I have to find him—his wife is ill, and I must get him home for the children’s sake.”

But they never answered him except with a shrug or, if he forced the issue, a defiant stance, brandishing a stout stick and daring him to ask another question.

Somehow, though gales had torn roofs from houses and hail had ravaged the already scanty fields, these people took Ced as one of them instead of seeing that he was the one who had caused their misery.