the rocky path.
Hwilli stood on the first terrace and watched until the last figure, the last wisp of dust, had faded from sight. By the time she returned to the fortress, she’d managed to stop weeping.
A few nights after the refugees had started their trek to Rinbaladelan, the first snow fell, but it stayed up high on the mountains. The fortress itself received an icy rain that froze only in the deepest shadows. As soon as the sun climbed half-way to zenith, the frost melted again, but winter had arrived in a swirl of north wind as cruel as thrown knives. Hwilli worried about her mother and Nalla incessantly. Not even Rhodorix could lift her spirits.
‘I feel an evil wyrd coming,’ Hwilli told him one night. ‘I don’t know what, but I can feel it deep in my heart.’
He said nothing, merely stroked her hair, twining it lightly around his fingers, then releasing it.
‘Do you feel it, too?’ Hwilli said.
‘I don’t.’ He smiled at her. ‘In the spring, now, when the Meradan are on the move again, then mayhap I will. But we’ll have a winter here first.’
For his sake she voiced nothing and let his kisses distract her. The spring will come too soon, she thought. Far far too soon.
With Nalla gone, Master Jantalaber took over the task of teaching Hwilli her first lessons in dweomercraft, which amounted to her learning proper words and definitions. The universe, it turned out, encompassed far more than the world Hwilli had always seen, and each of these worlds contained their own proper order of beings and creatures. At times, the lesson over, Jantalaber would talk of his dream of building a place of healing as well, particularly when Paraberiel joined them.
‘I’d thought of building it of stone in the usual way,’ Jantalaber said one evening. ‘Down by the Lake of the Leaping Trout, I thought.’
‘That’s a lovely place,’ Paraberiel put in. ‘Very restful, if someone was ill.’
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