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around, we’ll hear about them.”
    But she didn’t appear to be listening to him. Instead, when she’d scrambled to Skew’s back she said, “You don’t have to worry. I won’t tell anyone.”
    â€œTell what?” he asked, leading the way back to the trail they’d followed the night before.
    â€œThat someone in your family, however far back, laid with a Traveler. Only someone of Traveler blood could be a Bard,” she said. “There are no solsenti Bards.”
    He was beginning to resent the way she said solsenti; whatever the true meaning of the word, he was willing to bet it was also a deadly insult.
    â€œI won’t tell anyone else,” she said. “Being Traveler is no healthy thing.”
    She glanced up at the mountains that towered above the narrow trail and shivered.
    Â 
    There were not as many thieves in that part of the Empire as there were in the lands to the east where war had driven men off their lands. But Conex the Tinker, who found the dead body beside the trail, was not so honest as all that. He took everything he could find of value: two good boots, a bow, a scorched sword with scraps of flesh still clinging to it (he almost left that but greed outweighed squeamishness in the end), a belt, and a silver ring with a bit of onyx stone set in it.
    Two weeks after his unexpected good fortune a stranger met up with him on the road, as sometimes happens when two men have the same destination in mind. They spent most of the day exchanging news and ate together that night. The next morning the stranger, a silver ring safely in his belt pouch, rode off alone.
    Conex would never more go a-tinkering.

C HAPTER 2
    â€œYou see those two mountains over there?” Tier gestured with his chin toward two rocky peaks that seemed to lean away from each other.
    Seraph nodded. After several days’ travel she knew Tier well enough to expect the start of another story, and she wasn’t wrong.
    Tier was a good traveling companion, she thought as she listened to his story with half an ear. He was better than her brother Ushireh had been. He was generally cheerful and did more than his fair share of the camp work. He didn’t expect her to say much, which was just as well, for Seraph didn’t have much to say—and she enjoyed his stories.
    She knew that she should be planning what to do when they reached Tier’s village. If she could find another clan, they’d take her in just for being Traveler, but being Raven would make her valuable to them.
    If Ushireh had been less proud they would have joined another clan when their own clan died. But Ushireh had no Order to lend him rank; he would have gone from clan chief’s son to being no one of importance. Having more than her share of pride, Seraph had understood his dilemma. She’d agreed that they would go on and see what the road brought them.
    Only see what the road brought, Ushireh .
    There was no reason now not to find another clan. No reason to continue on with this solsenti Bard to his solsenti village. There would be no welcome for her in such a place. From what Tier said, it lay very near Shadow’s Fall. There would be no clans anywhere near it.
    But instead of telling him that she would be on her way, she continued to ride on his odd-colored gelding while Tier walked beside her and amused them both with a wondrous array of stories that touched on everything except his home, stories that distracted her from the shivery pain of Ushireh’s death that she’d buried in the same tightly locked place she kept the deaths of the rest of her family.
    Arrogance and control were necessary to those who bore the Raven Order. Manipulation of the raw forces of magic was dangerous, and the slightest bit of self-doubt or passion could let it slip out of control. She’d never had trouble with arrogance, but she’d had a terrible time learning emotional control. Eventually she had