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“Here he comes!”

“Idiot!”

Creslin concentrates upon melding wind and water and the chill of a thunderstorm, trying to replicate the conditions he had created outside Perndor, although his sword finds its way to his hand as he bears down upon the White guards.

The blinding chill of a wall of ice-bolts lashes the three front riders, and his sword finds no resistance.

Essttt. . .

Fires flare around Creslin as he drives toward the fourth rider, but the winds carry him through the flames. His blade strikes once, and again.

“No . . . demon . . .”

Another flare of white sheets around him, around the shield of the winds he has woven, even while his sword sweeps under the fifth guard’s arm and strikes.

“Uggmm . . .”

And the winds whip toward the White Wizard, where winds, fires, and cold iron meet. The iron triumphs.

Creslin reins up just in time to see the last guard spur his horse back toward Fairhaven . . . and to lean over himself.

“Uuugghhh . . .” His guts turn themselves inside out.

Wheee . . . eeee . . . The chestnut skitters, but Creslin ignores the mount as the tears stream from his eyes and he continues to puke from the saddle. Hammers pound through his skull, and he ignores the six bodies on the ground, three of them shrouded in slowly melting ice and three of them bearing dull red incisions. Overhead, the dark clouds mount.

Finally he straightens and turns the chestnut toward the pass from which the Certan cavalry is emerging. He still shivers by the time he nears the bouldered hillock where the mercenaries and Megaera wait.

Megaera glares at him. She is pale, he notes absently, and a few dunnish streaks dot the forelegs of the gray she rides.

“Sorry. I didn’t expect that,” he says.

Megaera makes no answer.

“Ser?” asks the head Spidlarian.

“You don’t have to worry about the wizard. Or his troops.”

The Spidlarian blanches.

The mounted troop, under the red-and-green banner of Certis, has reached the base of the hill on which the six wait.

“I think we need a storm,” Creslin observes.

“You’ll destroy the weather for months!” Megaera protests.

“Fine. Do you want to die right here? I can’t take on twenty armed men.”

“I count fifty.”

“Shit . . .” murmurs the youngest mercenary under his breath.

“No battles,” reminds the Spidlarian senior, his voice a shade more tense than before.

“Shut up.” Creslin checks his blade to see if he has cleaned it before sheathing it. He does not remember doing so, but the steel is cold and blue and clean. He replaces the blade even as his eyes, and the feelings behind them, seek the winds again, although winds of a different pattern of twisted air and moisture than those before.

A trumpet echoes in the mid-morning air, rings in Creslin’s ears, and vibrates copper-silver above the road less than a kay downhill, just before the squad leading the Certan horsemen.

Creslin swallows and grabs for the winds.

Whhssttt . . . weeehhsss . . .

His tunic threatens to tear away from his body.

“. . . shit . . . shit!”

Creslin wonders if all mercenaries have such limited vocabularies as he wrestles with his soul and the lashes of the sky. Thick gray and swirling white clouds begin to build around them, and around the horsemen.

“. . . wizardry . . .”

“. . . didn’t say an air wizard . . .”

Creslin touches Megaera’s arm before their vision becomes nearly useless. “Rope. Twine.”

“Hold hands, reins, something—”

“No! I can’t!”

Creslin jerks back as one of the Spidlarians screams, claws at the cottony fog and spurs his mount toward the south, back toward the Vergren road.

Megaera reaches out, touches the wrist of the lead mercenary, tugs at his sleeve, and draws him and his mount closer. The other two mercenaries shiver in their saddles but follow Creslin, the redhead, and their leader.

“There’s one! They’re headed back!” a Certan horseman shouts.

The sound of hooves echo through the cottony fog.

“Watch it! Might be a trap!” another warns.

“. . . damned wizards!”

Creslin leads the way downhill and to the north, farther away