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dark, lean form slunk through the snowdrifts not far away, and Gunnar tied the still-nervous horses more tightly than usual, so they couldn’t run from the wolf. He stripped off his clothes, and as he stowed them away for the day, a snowflake hit his cheek, conjuring a memory of Lady Eleanor’s sweet kiss.
    In the next instant, a gust of wind scoured it away and set his shoulder and hands afire anew with a blast of stinging ice crystals, and all he could do was stand there naked, freezing, until the pain of transformation overwhelmed the pain of his burns and beat him to the ground.
     
    THE WATERS WERE stirring again—most strange when the whole of England was frozen.
    Cwen stood in the doorway of her woodland cottage, staring out at a gray winter dawn so cold that the fog of her breath turned to ice and settled to the ground like snow. It had taken all her craft to call down such cold, and she savored every drift and shattered branch, knowing that the misery of it pursued the beast-warriors into their very lairs. Even if they’d found shelter amongst men, at this instant before sunrise, as at every dawn and dusk, they lay freezing and naked in the snow. Surely by now they must be begging for the death they could never have.
    And yet so much was amiss.
    Cwen turned back to the loom that sat in the corner and the nine colors of thread—one for each of the seven remaining men plus black spun from her own hair and a reddish brown dyed with her own blood—that hung upon it in tatters. When she had retired last night, the cloth had been all but done, a year’s worth of labor woven into the interlocking figures and finely wrought chains. The elaborate spell had been a makeshift, meant to freshen the now ancient curse and hold the beast-warriors more securely while she searched for a way to recover the fullness of her powers.
    But mice had come in the night as she’d dreamed, gnawing at both warp and weft like mad things, undoing it all. She’d not heard a sound, nor apparently had the magpie, her companion, who sat on his perch less than a yard away. Yet the magic so carefully woven with each pass of the shuttle was unbound, and the little beastlings, three of them, lay at the foot of the loom, struck dead by the very magic they had shredded.
    It was a message, clearly, a warning from the Old Ones that yet another fragment of the old spell was on the verge of unraveling. And though disappointment and anger twisted inside her at the idea of it, she felt no surprise. She’d sensed it for years, a vague uneasiness as unseeable as the currents of air beneath the magpie’s wings.
    But this. This was clear.
    It was time to act, to once again deal with the Northmen and their efforts to escape her vengeance. But how? She dropped to her knees before the loom and raised her hands in supplication to the gods, opening herself to their wisdom and aid.
    Their answer came later that day when she had burned the ruined spell-cloth and purified herself in its smoke. As she trudged to the great oak that overshadowed her cottage and prepared to spread the remains of her magic-making on the snow beneath it, the wind lifted the ashes from the copper basin she held and swirled them high into the air, up through the tree’s bare branches to where the magpie watched. Startled, the bird shrieked loudly and darted off, heading due west like a black and white arrow from blind Hodor’s bow, the trail of ash swirling along behind in his wake.
    Cwen smiled, then bowed low toward the tree. “I understand and obey, my lord.”
    She called the bird back to her with a sharp whistle and went inside, and the next morning she set about dispelling the fearsome cold and clearing the roads so that she could go find whatever awaited her in the west country.

CHAPTER 2

    One month later
     
    “AH, IT IS good to see you at your sewing again, Lady Eleanor. It tells me you are truly well.”
    “Your Grace.” Eleanor started to lay aside her sewing to rise and