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Storm Silverhand crossed a glade like a slow and patient shadow, making as little noise as possible. She’d meant to be there much earlier, but the need for stealth and leaving no clear trail conquered all else. She’d draped the wizard’s cloak over her distinctive hair to make herself a cowled, anonymous figure.

Twice she’d sunk to her fingertips to crouch in motionless silence as foresters with ready bows came stalking through the trees, following the trapline trails aseeking dinner. Their bows were more to keep off bears and worse than to bring down game, but it seemed there was always one who’d loose a shaft first and worry about what it had hit later.

It had been years since Storm had been the Bard of Shadowdale in anything more than legend; she farmed her land and mothered Harpers under her roof no more. The folk of the dale would think her a ghost or a shapeshifter or perhaps an accursed reminder of the Spellplague—and try to put an arrow through her or set their dogs on her, as likely as not.

And it had been years since such violence would have been a passing annoyance to her and no more. Increasingly she was more forlorn grim wisdom than mighty power. Alone, most of the time, too, though that bothered her less and less.

From the glade, it was a short way up through close-standing trunks and rising rocks to where a shoulder of rock reared out of the trees, moss-girt and dark with seeping moisture. Cracks and crevices aplenty gaped in its flank, some impressively large. Two were big enough to be termed “caves” to a passing man’s eye.

One, she knew, was a niche that went in no deeper than the length of a short man lying down. The other was her destination.

Or would be, after she’d turned at the last tree to look back and bide silent, listening long enough to make sure no one was following her.

Storm held still as gentle breezes stirred leaves above and around, until the birds started to call and flit about unconcernedly again, and she decided no one was on her trail. Whereupon she set the cloak down on the toes of her nondescript old boots, shrugged off her robe, undid the jerkin beneath it and doffed it, wrapped the cloak around herself, donned her clothing again over it—and strode straight to that deeper cavemouth.

Where she stopped, put her left foot carefully on a little ledge about shin-high up one side of the jagged opening, and kicked off, to leap forward into the darkness, taking care not to put her other foot down anywhere on the rocks by the lip.

As a result, the spring-spear mechanism remained still as she ducked past it, rather than slamming its long metal boar spear right through her body.

Several human skulls—that she’d helped gather, a lifetime ago—adorned the narrow and uneven floor of the natural cleft she was suddenly standing in, that ran deeper into the solid rock. Mere warnings.

She strode past them and into the real guardian of the cave, hoping its magics hadn’t decayed enough to kill her.

Harper mages had woven it long before, Elminster among them; a magical field to keep intruders out of this waystop hidehold in the forest. The Blue Fire had turned the ward into a roiling chaos that made living bodies shudder and terrified most who felt its touch, but the menaces it offered were meant to scare, not slay. If, that is, they still worked as intended and hadn’t become something worse.

First came the blistering heat that robbed her of breath and drenched her in sweat in two steps. Storm closed her eyes to keep her eyeballs from cooking, gasped for air through clenched teeth, and forced her way on.

On, as the inferno grew and all her garments hissed, the moisture baked and blasted out of them, into—in midstride—icy cold, a chill that froze the sweat on her skin and plunged her into helpless shivering. A cold that seared nostrils and lungs, stabbing at her like countless spikes—Storm had nearly died, too many years earlier, on hundreds of sharp-pointed metal needles, and