Mercedes Lackey: Winds Of Fate

"I think so," she replied, closing her eyes and leaning back against the outer wall of the shed. The others had arrived to find her on her hands and knees in the grass, covered in blood-not her own-with Gwena standing over her protectively as she emptied her stomach into the bushes.

Her stomach still felt queasy, as if she might have another bout at any moment. No matter that she had seen death before-had even killed her share of the enemy in the last war with Hardorn-she'd taken down Lord Orthallen with her own two hands and one of Skif's throwing nives. that wasn't close, not this close. I was dropping arrows into people from a distance. I threw a knife from across the room. Not like this, where he bled all over me and looked up at me and Her stomach heaved again, and she quelled the thoughts. "Who was he?" she asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, trying to get her mind on something else. "How did he find out where I was?

And how did he get past the guards?"

"I don't know the answers to your second and third questions," Kero replied, as Elspeth closed her eyes and concentrated on the coolness against her forehead. "But I can tell you the answer to the first. There's a spider-web brand on his palm. He's one of the followers of the Cold God. They hire themselves out as assassins, and they're very expensive because they don't care if they get caught. He was either providing a legacy for a family, or doing penance for some terrible sin. If you hadn't killed him, he'd have killed himself." Kero dropped the cloth and sat back on her heels, and Elspeth opened her eyes and gaped at the older Herald, her nausea forgotten.

"I've never heard of anything like that!" she exclaimed.

Kero nodded. "Not too many people have; the Cold One's advocates come from farther south than anyone I know has been except Geyr. He's the one who told me about them, after the last try at your mother, and told me what to look for. Said that if Ancar really got desperate and knew how to contact them, he might try hiring one of the Cold Blades." She frowned. "I didn't take the threat seriously, and I should have-and believe me, it won't happen again. Frankly, you were lucky-they usually aren't that careless. And there is nothing, nothing, more dangerous than a suicidal fanatic."

"But-how did he get in here, in the gardens?" she asked, bewildered. "How could he? We have guards everywhere!" Kero frowned even harder. "If Geyr's to be believed, by m-m-m-mmagic," she said, forcing the word out around the compulsion that seemed to overtake all Heralds when discussing anything but the mental Gifts and the Truth-Spell. "There're m-mages among the Cold Ones that give them a kind of invisibility. My grandmother could do it-make people think that when they looked at her, they were actually seeing someone they knew and trusted and expected to be there. Works with the mind, like Mindspeech, but it's set up with a spell. Dangerous stuff-and now the guards are going to have to double-check everyone they think they know. There're going to be some unhappy folks, unless I miss my guess... " He either underestimated me, or he was inexperienced, she thought soberly, as Kero left her to talk quietly with some of the Guard who were dealing with the body. And-I don't think we're ever going to find out how Ancar found him because I have the funny feeling that he used magic.

She shivered and stood up, her knees shaking. Her Whites were ruinednot that she'd ever want to wear this set again. Magic again. Whatever had protected Valdemar in the past, it was not proof against Ancar anymore.

Darkwind k'sheyna balanced his bondbird Vree on his shoulder, and peered out across the sea of grass below him with a touch of-regret?

Envy? A little of both, perhaps. From where he stood, the earth dropped in a steep cliff more than a hundred man-lengths to the floor of the Dhorisha Plains-a formidable barrier to those who meant the Shin'a'in and their land any ill. It took knowledge and skill to find the paths down into the Plains, and from there, intruders were visible above the waisthigh grass for furlongs.

His bondbird lifted narrow, pointed wings a little in the warm, grassscented updraft that followed the cliff. "Prey," Vree's thought answered his own, framed in the simple terms of the bondbird's understanding.

Not so much a thought as a flood of images; tree-hares, mice, quail, rabbits, all of them from the viewpoint of the forestgyre as they would appear just before the talons struck.

Prey, indeed. Any would-be hunter attempting to penetrate the Plains without magic aid would find himself quickly turned hunted. The land itself would fight him; he would be visible to even a child, he would never guess the locations of seeps and springs, and without landmarks that he would understand, that intruder would become disoriented in the expanse of grass and gently rolling hills. The guardians of the Plains, and the scouts that patrolled the border, had half their work done for them by the Plains themselves.

Darkwind sighed and turned away, back to his own cool, silent forest.

No such help for him-other than the fact that the eastern edge of k'sheyna territory bordered the Plains. But to the south and west lay forest, league upon league of it, and all of it dangerous.

"Sick," complained Vree. Darkwind agreed with him. Magic contaminated those lands, a place Outlanders called the "Pelagir Hills" with no notion of just how much territory fell under that description. Magic flowed wild and twisted through the earth, a magic that warped and shaped everything that grew there-sometimes for the better, but more often for the worse.

Darkwind took Vree onto his wrist, the finger-long talons biting into the leather of his gauntlet as Vree steadied himself, and launched him into the trees to scout ahead. The forestgyre took to the air gladly; unlike his bondmate, Vree enjoyed the scouting forays. Hunting was no challenge to a bondbird, and there was only so much for Vree to do within the confines of k'sheyna Vale's safe territory. Scouting and guarding were what Vree had been bred for, and he was never happier than when flying ahead of Darkwind on patrol.

Darkwind didn't mind the scouting so much, even if the k'sheyna scouts were spread frighteningly thin-after all, he was a vayshe'druvon.

Guard, scout, protector, he was all of those.

It's the magic, he told himself-not for the first time. If it wasn't for the magic-Every time he encountered some threat to k'sheyna that used magic or was born of it, and had to find some way other than magic to counter that threat, it scorched him to the soul. And worse was his father's attitude when he returned-scorn for the mage who would abandon his power, and a stubborn refusal to understand why Darkwind had done so ...If I could go back in time and kill those fools that set this loose in the world, I would do so, and murder them all with my bare hands, he thought savagely. His anger at those long-dead ancestors remained, as he chose a tree to climb, looking for one he had not used before.

A massive goldenoak was his choice this time; he slipped hand-spikes out of his belt without conscious thought, and pulled the fingerless, backless leather gloves on over his palms. The tiny spikes set into the leather wouldn't penetrate the bark of the tree enough to leave places for fungus or insects to lodge, but it would give him a little more traction on the trunk. As would the shakras-hide soles of his thin leather boots.

In moments he was up in the branches. The game-trail along the edge of the territory lay below him. When two-legged intruders penetrated k'sheyna, most of the time they sought trails like this one.

When scouts patrolled, it was often up here, where the trails could be seen, but where the scouts themselves were invisible.