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"There h theas they can"

"Then all is lost"

"Don’t despair That does half your ene fro the heavy clasp with his sii He held out the ring to Altran "I know Partnerships cannot be inherited, but whatever dwarves and interests in the Company Djer possessed are now in your hands"

"They were considerable Doesn’t seem it matters now"

AuRon put the d in Djer’s tobacco pouch and tucked it into his ear "I must hurry on my way Don’t let your felloarves scatter You have friends yet, east with the Dairuss, south with the elves scattered in the forests, and west in Hypat"

"What about north? That is where the true danger rests"

"Leave that to me"

AuRon backed away from the wounded dwarves and saw that the attendants were fashioning litters to carry thes He would co place

"Altran, one rave unavenged"

Chapter 22

The old ered over showed the Isle of Ice to be not one isle, but reat tree that had thrown off hundreds of saplings, the island was surrounded by s est isle in the best of weather When the winds of the equinoxes blew, atteuarded the isle, but conspired to hide it, as well The currents of the inland oceanwar direction at the archipelago to run down the barbarian coast toward Hypat As the air passed over the cooler waters, , and atop that, a cloud belt It was this last that AuRon tiredly cursed as he drifted in the sky

The Bowing Dragon stood higher in the sky than he had ever seen, and were it not for him and the polar star, AuRon would have despaired But the science of Hypat had mapped the stars as well as the coast, and their positions told hiht latitudes to find the isle

He needed rest He had been flying for three days, fighting a cold north wind Autumn, the most dilatory of the seasons, was already on her way in the north of the Inland Ocean

A faint light flashed in the clouds far ahead, like reddish lightning, only the light grew and faded in the time it took for AuRon to inhale and exhale, rather than in the eyeblink of a storue and drifted He counted twenty breaths, and it happened again, and he angled hiht When it happened a third ti an echo of itself on his sensitive eyes in the same place it had flashed before, he kneas not a weather pheno at a fixed point below