"If I remain at Trinity, perhaps you and I..." She let the thought hang, her gaze directing Aballister's to the curtain across the small room.
Aballister's dark eyes widened in surprise, and his hand drooped back down by his side. "Continue your search for my s... for Cadderly," Abailister said to her. "Alert me at once if you discover his location. After all, I have ways of striking at the foolish boy before he ever gets near Castle Trinity."
The wizard took his abrupt leave then, seeming flustered, but with an obviously hopeful bounce in his step, and Dorigen turned back to her crystal ball. She didn't immediately return to her scrying, though, but instead considered the action she had just taken to prevent Aballister from sending her away. She held no love for the man anymore, no respect even, though he was certainly among the most powerful wizards she had ever seen. But Dorigen had made a decision - a decision forced by her will to ride this whole adventure out to a safe conclusion. She knew herself well enough to admit that Cadderly had truly unnerved her in the elven wood.
Her thoughts led her to contemplations of Aballister's intentions for his son. The wizard had allies, enchanted monsters kept in private cages in his extradimensional mansion. All that Aballister needed was for Dorigen to point the way.
Dorigen looked down at her still swollen and bruised hands, remembered the disaster in Shilmista, and remembered, too, that Cadderly could have killed her if he had desired.
*****
They set their first camp on a high pass in the Snowflakes, sheltered from, the biting, wintry wind by a small alcove in the rocky mountain wall. With Vander's gigantic bulk standing to further block the gusting breezes (the cold did not seem to bother the firbolg in the least), Ivan and Pikei soon had a fire roaring. Still, the wind inevitably found its way in to the companions, and even the dwarves were soon shivering and rubbing their hands briskly near the flames. Pikel's typical moan of "Oooo," came out more as "0 - o - o - o," as his teeth chattered through the sound.
Cadderly, deep in thought, was oblivious to it all, oblivious even to the fact that his fingers were beginning to take on a delicate biue color. His head down and eyes half-closed, he sat farthest from the flames - except for Vander, who had moved out around the edge of the natural alcove to feel the full force of the refreshing wind against his ruddy cheeks.
"We're needing sleep," Ivan stuttered, aiming his comment at the distracted priest
"0 - o oi," Pikel readily agreed.
"It w - will be hard to sleep with the cold," Danica said rather loudly, practically in Cadderly's ear. The four companions looked incredulously at each other, and then back at Cadderly. Danica shrugged and moved closer to the flames, rubbing her hands all the while, but Ivan, always a bit more blunt in his tactics, took Shayleigh's longbow, reached across the fire with it, and bopped Cadderly several times atop the head.
Cadderly looked up at the dwarf. "What?"
"We was saying that it's a mite chilly for sleeping," Ivan growled at him, his claims accentuated by the puff of frosty breath accompanying each chattered word. Cadderly looked around at his shivering companions, then seemed to realize his own tingling extremities for the first time.
"Deneir will protect us," he assured them, and he let his mind's eye slip back to the pages of the Tome of Universal Harmony, the most holy book of his god. He heard again the flowing, beautiful notes of the endless song, and pulled from them a relatively simple spell, repeating it until its enchantment had touched all of his friends.
"Oo!" Pikel exclaimed, and this time his teeth did not chatter. The cold was gone; there was no better way to explain the sensation that instantly came over each of them at Cadderly's blessed touch.
Took ye long enough," was Ivan's last muttered sentiment before he dropped back against the comfortable (to a dwarf, at least) mountain rock, clasped his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.
The dwarves were snoring in a matter of minutes, and soon after, Shayleigh, her head against arms that grasped her propped longbow, was also resting easily. Cadderly had resumed his previous contemplative posture, and Danica, guessing that something was bothering her love terribly, fought away the temptation of sleep and kept a protective watch over him.
She would have preferred that