"Yes. I want nothing from Kall."

"Why did you come back?"

Aazen would never know why, just as he had never understood the desire that clawed him from the inside. The galling need to please his father, to win approval from this man, this thing who might kill him with a misplaced blow—the need would destroy him one day. He knew that, accepted it, because he could not do otherwise.

He tried to hide the helplessness he felt, but his father saw, and he smiled—a small, satisfied expression. Satisfied because he still had a loyal son, or because he had a pawn he could twist and control? Aazen wondered. Deep down, he knew it was the latter, and for one burning instant, he hated his father as he had never hated anything in his life. Then the feeling was gone, fading to ash as Balram put a hand on his shoulder.

"We will talk more of this later. For now, all that matters is you chose to return."

"Yes, Father," Aazen said. Resignation drained the anger as it had long ago drained the fight out of him. He barely registered the change in pressure at his shoulder, the alteration from affection to purpose—his father's hand slowly turning him to face the wall.

Then there was only pain.

* * * * *

Kall awoke to the sound of a falling tree.

He scrambled up and around Alinore's grave as the sun disappeared, blotted out by the falling trunk. It struck the forest floor with a deafening thud.

Forest.. . Kall's head whipped around. Trees surrounded him, and in the distance, a cap of mountains graced the southern sky. Haig's horse was gone, and so was the cemetery. All that remained were the bundles he'd been clutching against his chest and Alinore's grave.

Wrong . . . wrong, all wrong. Was he dreaming? Then ...

"Watch out, you!" A terrific weight slammed him from behind, knocking him to the ground as another trunk fell past his vision.

"That the last of them, by the bloody gods?" shouted a second, muffled voice.

"All clear." The crushing weight fell away, and Kall saw a man peering down at him, haloed by a sea of leafy green. The man's eyes were large and startlingly blue against a dirt-smothered face, and his ears curved as if the tips had been threaded through a needle. On rare occasions, Kall had seen half-elves in Esmeltaran, but never one so large as the figure staring at him now.

"Six young oaks! Six of Nine Hells, that's what you're in for," said the muffled voice again, this time at Kall's elbow.

Kall shrieked as a head burst up from the loose dirt where only a few breaths ago a tree had swayed. A hand followed to wipe the dirt out of a black beard on a pitted, distinctly human face.

"Garavin drew the map," the half-elf said, a bit defensively.

The head and the arm weren't having any of it. "Which you strayed from by a full thirty steps! Look, you." The human's other arm burst up, spraying Kall with more dirt. He flapped a crude drawing in front of the half-elf's blue gaze. "Any more off and you'd have taken the Weir!"

As the pair continued to argue over him, Kall started to slide backward, groping for a weapon, a stick, a rock, anything.

His hand closed on a branch that had been torn away from one of the falling trees. He raised it, and fire licked along his ribcage. Gasping, Kall dropped the branch and fell back, clutching his side.

Immediately, the half-elf crouched over him, his hands probing along Kall's flank. Feebly, Kall tried to push him away, but the man only grinned and muttered, "Cease." His brow furrowed as he examined Kall's wounds. "Get Garavin," he said to his companion. "I think the boy slipped through Alinore's gate."

"Wouldn't be the first," the bearded man grumbled. Instead of hauling himself the rest of the way out of the dirt, the man disappeared back into the earth, pulling his drawing with him.

"What is your name?" the half-elf asked when they were alone. "Who attacked you?"

"Kall," Kall said before he thought better of it. He jerked his head to the south, but kept his eyes fixed on the stranger. "The mountains—they're in the wrong place."

The half-elf nodded. "If you were lying in Esmeltaran's countryside last night, I daresay they are. Those are the Marching Mountains, not the Cloud Peaks. You've come a long way in a short sleep, Kall."

The Marching Mountains—Kall summoned a mental map. He'd crossed the lake, the Wealdath . . . the Starspires, by the gods ... all those miles. His mind boggled. "How?" he asked.

"My sister's fault, entirely," said a new voice, rough and engulfed by a deep, canine bark.