Balinar;
The light falls out of the sky an hour before dawn.
I'm sitting in the ruin of a herder's hut with a map across my knees, and a fire so small that it wouldn't keep a cat warm. I don't need warmth. I need the three men outside the door to stop coughing. They've been on the pass for six days with no hot food, and they've started to look at me the way dogs look at a master who has stopped feeding them.
That's the trouble with fear. It runs out.
Suddenly, the walls turn blue.
I'm on my feet before I've decided to move. Through the gaps in the stones I see it, a streak of pale fire that begins somewhere high above the mountains and drops, slow and silent, toward the valley below the Emberhide border. It doesn't burn out. It doesn't scatter. It falls the way a feather falls, turning over and over, till it settles somewhere beyond the next ridge and goes dark.
I stand there for a long time.
