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exhilaration. Rain would hide him; if he rigged the spare sail with a catch
basin, run-off could replen-
ish his cask. Stormy weather might lend him resource to thwart both thirst and
the Thienz.
Yet fortune granted only small favors. The clouds lowered and spilled thick,
misty drizzle, and the wind slacked to the barest hint of breeze. Jaric
hunched over the steering oar.
More wet seemed to trickle down his neck than ran off the spare canvas to fill
his catch basin. By dawn barely enough air moved to fill
Callinde's sails, and beyond ten yards, the waves lay swallowed in drifts of
featureless gray. The possibility that Thienz might lurk unseen at any quarter
of the compass preyed upon
Jaric's thoughts, wore at his spirit until he was angered enough to want to
shout and cry by turns. Instead, he lashed
Callinde on course, fetched out whetstone and rigging knife, and returned to
his post at the helm.
With the oar clamped in one elbow, he resorted to Corley's habit of sharpening
steel to pass the hours.
Day brightened over
Callinde'
s yard. Still the mist did not lift. It mantled waters the gray on gray of
dull metal, and damped the shear of steel across stone as Jaric whetted his
blade. He continued long after the edge was keen, just to keep his fingers
busy; but as the morning progressed, that remedy was not enough.
The fog swirled ghost-shapes around his boat and strung jeweled droplets on
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his lashes. He blinked them away, yet in time this seemed too much effort. His
eyes grew heavy. His hands stopped the motion of whetstone and blade, while
his mind strayed unnoticed across the borders of waking, into dream....
Waves and the dull red of
Callinde
's sails lost color, became the whiteness of snowfall in Seitforest. Jaric
failed to arouse at the transition, wrought as it was by the touch of the
enemy upon his mind. Cold and stillness lulled him. His senses knew nothing
but the slow spin of flakes whispering through bare branches, the soundless
settling of snow into hollows. In time the leaf-patterned forest floor became
featureless as spread linen. Even the creeks froze and drifted over, the
trickle of water over rock silenced until the season's distant changing.
Winter bound the land, and Jaric, into tranced peace. His body assumed the
numbness of extreme cold, and his mind became lost in ice-white landscape.
En-spelled by dreams, he did not feel his fingers loosen, or hear the clatter
as his knife fell to
Callinde's floorboards. Nor did he notice when his arm slipped from the
steering oar.
Callinde lost way, her sails slatting fretfully aloft. Beaded with droplets
from the mist, the compass needle wandered in circles as his boat drifted
rudderless over the waves.
And the dream-cold deepened. Knife-keen, it pierced the very mantle of the
soil and touched the trees to the roots, freezing the dormant life within.
Boughs bent, burdened under cruel shackles of snow. Wood gone brittle with
chill snapped, eerily soundless in the wintry air; frost chewed through the
bark like acid, and ice crystals pried and pressured, and burst the fastness
of stone. Soon the whiteness ruled supreme. Sprawled like a corpse against
Callinde's thwart, Jaric felt no pain. He knew no alarm, no sorrow, no feeling
at all, even as the cold penetrated his body and reached to stop his heart.
Near the end another sound intruded. Faint with distance, and sweetly brittle
in the still air, the chime of goat bells penetrated the Thienz-wrought tomb
of cold. Sluggish with trance, Jaric fumbled after the source.
The white which blanketed his vision thinned slightly, and insubstantial as
ghost-image overtop he saw a hillside patched with wildflowers and heather.
The land was rough, torn in places by weathered spurs of granite. There a
black-haired girl sat amid a milling herd of brown goats. The vision of her
was indistinct, as if viewed through the shallows of a running stream. But her
warning rang clear as the bells through the winter chill which gripped him.
Jaric, the Thienz have set a dream-spell on you! Jaric!'
But the whiteness rendered the words as sound without meaning, a disturbance
that floundered and died into silence. The girl's image dissipated, and the
hillside with its cloak of heather and fern dimmed to wispy shadows. Before
long the void devoured them entirely. Thienz-bound, Jaric drifted reasonless
as a stone.
Yet the presence of the Dreamweaver did not entirely fade. With all her
skills, Taen gathered herself and struck out against the cocoon that demons
had woven around the awareness of Ivainson Jaric. Her urgency pried like a
knife, and this time broke through.
Jaric roused. The workings of his mind and body felt swathed in a tide of
whiteness and he could not orient. Uncertain whether the presence he
remembered was a temptation of demons designed to weaken him, or illusion born
of longing and his own imagination, he murmured Taen's name.
Her answer brought raw-edged fear.
'Jaric, you must break free!'
At last allowed foothold in his conscious mind, she spun dream-sense and
attacked. The demon's prison shivered before the impact of her powers. Taen
struck again, utterly exhausting her strength. Unable to maintain contact, her
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