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lie.”
    “And the heart?”
    “The heart must continue,” Nyss intoned the ritual words, almost as a sigh. “But it would be best if questions and eyes were directed … away from the heart.”
    The figure remained silent. “Is there other word?”
    Nyss shook her head. “No, and we should’ve heard from Those Outside by now.”
    “There’s been time,” the figure acknowledged.
    Nyss nodded solemnly. “There should have at least beenmessages, and none have come, either from the hold itself or those sent onward.”
    “Which would imply a … failure.”
    Another nod. “The question, then, is whose?”
    The figure sighed in turn and took another sip. “The
question
, Nyss, is who, at this moment, commands the gem?”



CHAPTER I:

E MERGING
(W ESTERN E RON : NEAR W OODSTOCK S TATION –D EEP W INTER : D AY XXXV– MORNING )

    D awn had turned the snow pink. As pink as the tongue of the raccoon that licked rime from its fur, where flakes had sifted into its tree-trunk den during the daylong blizzard. It yawned sleepily, yet something suggested that the air had shifted toward warmth and light, if only briefly, and that this was a good time for foraging. Heaving its compact body out of the rough bark shell, it dropped into snow already frozen hard in only half a night.
    A step. Another. A pause.
    Something else was awake out here. Something that took no care for the noise it made. Something big, by the sound of it, and coming from that snowbank at the foot of the slope, the one with the peculiarly steep pitch and the overhang that made a cave beneath. The one from which …
smoke
was issuing. The raccoon danced back, alarmed. A shift of wind brought that stench more strongly, and with it came others: burned fish and something worse.
    The noises increased: scrabblings, the rasp of tearing wood, and angry, guttural cries. A vertical line appeared in the cave’s back wall. A hand thrust through, then an arm, as a much larger beast struggled through that slit. It was covered with fur in no pattern that made sense, and had a pale, thin, and very flat face, with big eyes and too little nose to matter.
    It stank, too. Of sweat and dirt and death.
    The raccoon returned to its den. This was no time for hunting.
    Eddyn thought briefly of barring the door behind him and abandoning Rrath in the boathouse where the two of them had sheltered since that blizzard had come ripping out of the east two twilights ago, piling snow atop snow, up past the windows to the eaves—which was what happened when one built in hollows. Fortunately, the structure was sound, and the snow itself provided insulation, which was also fortunate, because there was little left to burn beyond the boats drawn up outside, and Eddyn didn’t want to touch them.
    Leaving Rrath, however …
    That
was a hard call. Companionship could mean survival when one was outdoors in Deep Winter. On the other hand, he wouldn’t
be
here if not for the Priest. Too, Rrath’s motives and actions were ambiguous at best, and while his fondness for Eddyn was real—and his hatred of Avall—he’d also shown no compunction about betraying Eddyn to the ghost priests, and drugging him to achieve that goal. In short, he was either very naive or very complex, but easy to underestimate regardless—which made him dangerous.
    But Eddyn was stronger. And now that he controlled Rrath’s cache of sedatives, he had that advantage as well. A day’s worth of arguing coupled with a fair dose of intimidation as recently as breakfast had made that amply clear.
    He hoped.
    In any event, Rrath seemed cowed right now, judging from the way he was lurking back there in the gloom beside the single unburned table. “Is it… safe?” the Priest called tentatively.
    Eddyn slogged farther onto the porch. The snow only reached to mid-calf. “You tell me; you’re the weather-witch.”
    Rrath joined him. “I have to be outside to do that,” he murmured. His breath ghosted into the air as he