were too weak, and his left arm barely worked in the best of circumstances.
Nothing came to him, not so much as a twitch or a creak, though he could smell something burning—a cook fire, perhaps. With a hint of meat being charred.
The wagon was absolutely still. So, it seemed, were the lands of Dyn Cobb outside the wagon, though he couldn’t yet lift his head high enough to see over the sideboards. He must have taken another fit, where he thrashed and twitched and lost his place in the world. Sometimes the spells lasted for minutes. Sometimes hours or days—with more days coming back to himself while sipping Snakekiller’s bitter brew of milk thistle, skullcap, and valerian.
A quick glance at the sky told Nic it was early morning, and his last remembering was of sitting beside the fire for a dinner of rabbit stew and dried leeks.
A night, then. Maybe longer. He clenched his teeth against the knowledge that he was a burden, slowing the progress of his traveling party to little more than a turtle’s crawl. Without him, Snakekiller, Hasty, and Hasty’s good-humored apprentice, Terrick, would have long been back about their lives at Triune. No endless winter in a strange village. No begging and bartering for supplies to get them home.
Once more in Dyn Cobb, farther west than Nic thought he had ever been, fall was moving back toward winter. Since they had left the shelter of their first winter home, they had barely managed to skirt seven different bloody skirmishes between the Cobb Dynast Guard and the combined armies of Dyn Altar and Dyn Brailing. From what Nic understood, the lesser dynasts to the west were massing an ever-greater force on the southern reaches of Dyn Mab, but still raiding across Cobb borders for supplies and conscriptions. So far, Cobb was holding its own and maintaining its neutrality, but Nic had enough education and sense to know that sooner or later, Lord Cobb would have to declare on one side of the war or the other.
And when he did, Lord Ross and Lady Vagrat might follow his lead.
If that happened, the conflict would be decided swiftly enough, in favor of whatever cause the greater dynasts chose to support.
Nic wasn’t sure what he hoped in that respect. He had no use for the likes of Lord Brailing or the bellicose Lord Altar—but if the men could defeat his mother, stop her from attacking Dyn Ross, bring an end to her madness, perhaps that would be best for Eyrie.
The stillness around Nic began to bother him once more.
He finally managed to pull himself up using the nearest sideboard—and grunted in surprise when he saw no oxen tethered to the wagon. Fly-covered mounds in the nearby grass caught his attention, and he realized with a sick certainty that those were the missing beasts.
The oxen were dead.
And —no, no, no!
Nearby, the mules lay dead as well!
Nic couldn’t see well enough at this distance to be sure, but one of the mules seemed to have a shaft protruding from its ribs.
A battle arrow? A hunter’s mistake?
But all of the beasts?
Where is Snakekiller?
The thought shot through his mind as forcefully as another deadly arrow. There was nothing but endless stretches of grass on three sides of the wagon, and the dead animals. Nic’s neck ached as he turned his head. A small clump of trees stood ahead of the wagons, a quarter-league or more away. A thick plume of gray smoke floated like a shroud above the leaves.
Nic realized he hadn’t been smelling a cook fire.
More likely, it was a funeral pyre.
Or many pyres.
His heart began a frantic pounding as he struggled to use his good arm to lever himself out of the wagon.
“Snakekiller!”
His voice sounded like a whisper in the vast space, and his teeth began to chatter. His fingers and toes felt so cold he might be part-dead himself.
Where is Hasty? Why can’t I hear Terrick laughing or swearing or singing?
Nic rolled himself over the side of the wagon, fell like a rock wrapped in gray cloth, and struck the ground with a jaw-snapping thud. Pain fractured his body, his awareness, and Nic feared he would sink in to another round of fits and die where he lay, in the cool grass beside the wagon’s wheel, on some deserted field of Dyn Cobb. He held out his arms and tried to grip the wheel’s spokes to hold himself still, to stave off the shaking of the fits—as if that would do