Zalasta howled again and clawed at his beard with his long fingernails. Then he turned quickly and ran off down the street.

Krager straightened, and his seeming drunkenness slid away. ‘You took an awful chance there, you know,’ he said in a cautious tone.

Scarpa looked sharply at him. ‘Very good, Krager,’ he murmured. ‘You played the part of a drunkard almost to perfection.’

‘I’ve had lots of practice,’ Krager shrugged. ‘You’re lucky he didn’t obliterate you, Scarpa – or tie your guts in knots again.’

‘He couldn’t,’ Scarpa smirked. ‘I’m a fair magician myself, you know, and I’m skilled enough to know that you have to have a clear head to work the spells. I kept him in a state of rage. He couldn’t have worked up enough magic to break a spider-web. Let’s hope that he does kill Sephrenia. That should really scatter Sparhawk’s wits, not to mention the fact that as soon as the desire of his life is no more than a pile of dead meat, Zalasta’s very likely to conveniently cut his own throat.’

‘You really hate him, don’t you?’

‘Wouldn’t you, Krager? He could have taken me with him when I was a child, but he’d come to visit for a while, and he’d show me what it meant to be a Styric, and then he’d go off alone, leaving me behind to be tormented by whores. If he doesn’t have the stomach to cut his own throat, I’d be more than happy to lend him a hand.’ Scarpa’s eyes were very bright, and he was smiling broadly. ‘Where’s your wine barrel, Krager?’ he asked. ‘Right now I feel like getting drunk.’ And he began to laugh, a cackling, insane laugh empty of any mirth or humanity.

‘It’s no use!’ Ehlana said, flinging the comb across the room. ‘Look at what they’ve done to my hair!’ She buried her face in her hands and wept.

‘It’s not hopeless, my Lady,’ Alean said in her soft voice. ‘There’s a style they wear in Cammoria.’ She lifted the mass of blonde hair on the right side of Ehlana’s head and brought it over across the top. ‘You see,’ she said. ‘It covers all the bare places, and it really looks quite chic’

Ehlana looked hopefully into her mirror. ‘It doesn’t look too bad, does it?’ she conceded.

‘And if we set a flower just behind your right ear, it would really look very stunning.’

‘Alean, you’re wonderful!’ the Queen exclaimed happily. ‘What would I ever do without you?’

It took them the better part of an hour, but at last the unsightly bare places were covered, and Ehlana felt that some measure of her dignity had been restored.

That evening, however, Krager came to call. He stood swaying in the doorway, his eyes bleary and a drunken smirk on his face. ‘Harvest-time again, Ehlana,’ he announced, drawing his dagger. ‘It seems that I’ll need just a bit more of your hair.’

Chapter 6

The sky remained overcast, but as luck had it, it had not yet rained. The stiff wind coming in off the Gulf of Micae was raw, however, and they rode with their cloaks wrapped tightly about them. Despite Khalad’s belief that it was to their advantage to move slowly, Berit was consumed with impatience. He knew that what they were doing was only a small part of the overall strategy, but the confrontation they all knew was coming loomed ahead, and he desperately wanted to get on with it. ‘How can you be so patient?’ he asked Khalad about mid-afternoon one day when the onshore wind was particularly chill and damp.

‘I’m a farmer, Sparhawk,’ Khalad replied, scratching at his short black beard. ‘Waiting for things to grow teaches you not to expect changes overnight.’

‘I suppose I’ve never really thought about what it must be like just sitting still waiting for things to sprout.’

‘There’s not much sitting still when you’re a farmer,’ Khalad told him. ‘There are always more things to do than there are hours in the day, and if you get bored, you can always keep a close watch on the sky. A whole year’s work can be lost in a dry-spell or a sudden hailstorm.’

‘I hadn’t thought about that either.’ Berit mulled it over. ‘That’s what makes you so good at predicting the weather, isn’t it?’

‘It helps.’

‘There’s more to it than that, though. You always seem to know about everything that’s going on around you. When we were on that log-boom, you knew instantly when there was the slightest change in the way it was moving.’

‘It’s called “paying attention”, my Lord. The world around you is screaming at you all the time, but most people can’t seem to hear it. That really baffles me. I can’t understand how you can miss so many things.’

Berit was just slightly offended by that. ‘All right, what’s the world screaming at you right now that I can’t hear?’

‘It’s telling me that we’re going to need some fairly substantial shelter tonight. We’ve got bad weather coming.’

‘How did you arrive at that?’

Khalad pointed. ‘You see those seagulls?’ he asked.

‘Yes. What’s that got to do with it?’

Khalad sighed. ‘What do seagulls eat, my Lord?’

‘Just about everything – fish mostly, I suppose.’

‘Then why are they flying inland? They aren’t going to find very many fish on dry land, are they? They’ve seen something they don’t like out there in the gulf and they’re running away from it. Just about the only thing that frightens a seagull is wind – and the high seas that go with it. There’s a storm out to sea, and it’s coming this way. That’s what the world’s screaming at me right now.’

‘It’s just common sense then, isn’t it?’

‘Most things are, Sparhawk – common sense and experience.’ Khalad smiled slightly. I can still feel Krager’s Styric out there watching us. If he isn’t paying any more attention than you were just now, he’s probably going to spend a very miserable night.’

Berit grinned just a bit viciously. ‘Somehow that information fails to disquiet me,’ he said.

It was more than a village, but not quite a town. It had three streets, for one thing, and at least six buildings of more than one story, for another. The streets were muddy, and pigs roamed freely. The buildings were made primarily of wood and they were roofed with thatch. There was an inn on what purported to be the main street. It was a substantial-looking building, and there were a pair of rickety wagons with dispirited mules in their traces out front. Ulath reined in the weary old horse he had bought in the fishing village. ‘What do you think?’ he said to his friend.