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carnage ensued over what seemed like hours. When it was over, he had joined those giving aid to the bloody victims lying in the pink snow, and witnessed many long agonies that ended in shuddering death. From that moment on Velt had prayed for a quick end when the time came.
    It appeared that time was upon him. He gritted his teeth as the horses' hooves spattered him with gravel. He waited for them to stop, but the soldiers rode on as if oblivious to him.
    Finally, as the thunderous noise began to dim, Velt grew brave and opened one eye a crack.
    The cohort was almost out of sight, but he could see that the horses were gray mountain horses, rather than the standard bays and chestnuts most often seen in this part of the lowlands, or the roans preferred by the Lirin to the west. Freezing as his body was, Velt's heart was suddenly colder. The last time he had seen such horses they were under the soldiers of Sorbold who were assaulting the winter carnival. The extremities of his body were going
    numb, and Velt's mind was following. As the fog closed in, he looked up at the wagon looming above him. Could 've at least taken the apples, he thought before the darkness took him. They'll be withered and frozen by the time anyone finds them. As will I.
5
    Haguefort, Navarne
    Gwydion Navarne was pacing the thick carpet outside the Great Hall, awaiting his turn to be called into the room. That this was his first council since becoming fully invested as duke on his seventeenth birthday a few months before weighed heavily on his mind as he strode up and down upon the heavy fibers woven into a tapestry that told the history of his family. With each step he unconsciously traced the lineage of the tuatha Navarne, from its Cymrian progenitor, a First-Generationer named Hague who had been Lord Gwylliam the Visionary's best friend, to the ascendancy of his own late father. Stephen Navarne, who in his youth had been the best friend of Ashe, the current Lord Cymrian, Gwydion's own namesake, godfather, and guardian. The rich colors of the plaite threads—forest-green and crimson, deep blue, royal purrple and gold—told a melancholy story that was fitting in its mood. Over and over as he walked in circles he silently repeated what he had seen in the harbors and outposts of Sorbold, the great nation of threatening mountains and windswept deserts to the south of Roland, struggling to keep the facts and figures straight in his mind.
    Seventy-five three-masted cutters, he thought to himself running down his list again in anticipation of the discussion that would sooner or later come about. Sixty three-masted schooners, at least four score heavy barges, all in the south-western port of Ghant, all in the course of one day's time. All carrying slaves, thousands of them, perhaps the contents of ten or more entire villages, probably bound for the salt mines of Nicosi or the sweltering ironworks of Keltar. Gwydion had been unable to fully quell the racing of his heart since the moment he had witnessed the unloading of the human cargo a few weeks before. Compassion and outrage at the sight had quickly been joined by fear; a little sleepy harbor town teeming with soldiers and longshoremen, mountain guards and human chattel, had been enough to convince his companion that the war for which Sorbold was preparing would be greater in scope than anything the Known World had ever seen. Given that his companion at that moment had been Anborn ap Gwylliam, the Lord Marshal of the first Cymrian empire and perhaps the greatest military mind that had ever existed on the Middle Continent, Gwydion had been quickly and nau-seatingly convinced, especially since Anborn had engineered the previous war to be described as such. The heavy carpet beneath his feet bulged up into a ridge from where he had unconsciously worn a groove. Gwydion smoothed it down with his feet, pushing the bump to the edges, arriving at the fringe at the same moment that the doors to the Great Hall banged