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By Root 868 0

had happened someplace else, some other country. Bastun's escorts to the lands beyond Rashemen were as full of rumors about him as if he'd become a myth, one of Rashemen's great beasts of legend. Absently, he traced the dark mask that covered his face, so similar to Thaena's and yet garnering a pale reflection of the respect an ethran was afforded. From forehead to jawline it covered his features, carved of a light but durable wood and inlaid with silver whorls and tiny designs resembling thorny vines. It marked him as a vremyonni, the title of all male wizards who chose to remain in Rashemen.

Enchantments in the mask enhanced his hearing, enough that he could detect the faintest intake of breath or the quietest whisper among the warriors. He observed them intently, for when he'd been younger he desired to become one of them. Tales abounded of the berserkers' strength and ferocity. The wychlaren, too, were venerated in songs and epic poems, their magic forging the realm of Rashemen from the ashes of an ancient war. In all of the vaunted tales and stories, the vremyonni were a footnote-a wise sage here, a forged blade there, and rarely a name to remember or speak of. There would be no tale of Bastun to tell around a campfire on a cold night.

Children had no need to hear stories of treason or murderers.

Leaning forward, Bastun regarded the staff across his lap, feeling the old wood and leather wrappings on its grip. Though spells and incantations had no true master, no real signatures, being forces of the Weave bound only by the will of the caster, Bastun swore he could sense the presence of his teacher in the grain and the knots.

A few of the warriors noticed the movement and tensed, their breathing interrupted. Bastun paused, smirking beneath his mask as they calmed and settled back into their seats along the rail. He did not care about the rumors they spread or what they believed, but if he could not gain their respect he would accept their fears and assumptions. Staring at the staff, feeling the old wood in his hands, the magic it held tingled beneath his fingertips.

Light thumps against the hull of the ship signaled another series of ice sheets slightly thicker and more tightly packed than the others. Thaena stood from her seat in the stern and looked out across the surface of the lake.

"All is well, helmsman?" she mumured.

"Yes, ethran," the man answered. "The ice will slow us some, but little else."

Bastun could hear the nervousness in Thaena's voice and see the determined focus in her eyes. It was unusual for an ethran to be put in charge of a fang, even on such a mission as this, but Thaena had always been ambitious. Even as a child, sitting around the bonfires for the Firedawn Cycle, she had sworn that one day she too would be a hathran. Though the othlors, the oldest and wisest of the wychlaren, truly ruled Rashemen, the hathrans were the face of that rule and the ethrans their dutiful students.

He could almost remember the face behind the mask, despite the years that separated the adults they had become from the children they once were.

While studying the ethran, Bastun noticed the warrior beside Thaena looking at him-Duras. Tall and lean, Duras had also been there in that village just south of the Ashenwood in the heart of Rashemen. He and Bastun had sworn that they would join the Ice Wolf Lodge together, blood brothers to defend their homeland and make great legends of their lives. Duras nodded and looked away, appearing uncomfortable. Bastun turned as well, peering over the rail toward the western shore, still not visible beyond the veil of mist and clouds that gathered there.

The wind strengthened and the sails strained as they rocked the felucca through waves that had grown choppy and splashed higher along the front of the hull. Bastun leaned back into the curving hollow behind the bow and pulled his cloak tighter, cradling his staff against his chest. Near the head of the staff, a curving section covered in runes and tipped with a sphere of heavy steel, Bastun traced the dark line of a scar in