“Eat it,” she said. “I like the murgu meat as little as you do, but it keeps us strong.”

“It is not the meat,” he said, “but the snow. When do we get to the place you have told us about, where Kerrick is waiting?”

“I wish I knew . . .” She reached over and brushed his fine blond hair, noticing the drawn lines about his eyes. He was eleven years old, a strong boy, but they had been walking steadily for far too long. “Sleep now, we want to be fresh when we start in the morning.”

There was no snow that night, but the last fall still lay unmelted on the ground. The day was clean yet there was little warmth in the sun. The track lay along the river valley now and she was sure that she recognized this place. The sammads had camped here before, not far from the ocean. Armun even thought that she could smell salt in the air—she moved along strongly with the wind in her face.

Yes there it was, white breakers rolling up onto the sand, the shore just beyond the bluff. She had her head down, pulling on the poles with steady endurance, following the track. She stopped only when she heard Harl’s warning cry.

There was a turf hut ahead, built into the base of the bluff and sheltered by it, with a fur-clad hunter standing before it. Motionless, apparently just as startled by her arrival as she was. She started to raise her voice and call to him—then the words choked in her throat.

He wasn’t Tanu, what he wore was not right. And his face . . .

It was covered with fur. Not just a beard on the lower part of his face—but there was fur, soft brown fur over all of his face.

uposmelikfarigi ikemespèyilanè. uposmelikyilanè ikemespènèyil. eleiensi topaa abalesso.

YILANÈ APOTHEGM

A fargi lies down to sleep and one morning awakes a Yilanè. Since the egg of time a Yilanè who sleeps awakes always a Yilanè.

CHAPTER SIX

Vaintè looked at the activity in the port with great interest. Up until this moment Ikhalmenets had just been a name to her, sea-girt Ikhalmenets, almost always expressed that way and now she could see why. Ikhalmenets had grown along a curving natural harbor—the reason for the city’s existence. All of the other islands in this group were rocky and barren. But not this one. It lay on the shore, at the base of the high mountain that caught the moist winds, cooled them to cloud as they rose up, until heavily burdened they released their moisture as snow and rain. The snow tipped white the mountain top while the rain ran down the slopes until it was funneled into the city.