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The er of pine woods thrust out along the hillside The drought had taken its toll here as well, and the wood quickly degraded into a grassy heath At the height of the hill stood a tumble of worked stone that had once been a lookout station She clie, bracing herself against what remained of the rock wall, and looked out over the land

The hillside fell away precipitously, as if the watchtower had once looked over a valley, but in fact there was nothing to be seen below except fog

According to the old sorcerer, this was the outer li lay beyond thetiht-stricken country into an oddly vacant white, more void than cloud

The silence oppressed her Out here, at the edge of the world, she didn’t even hear birds, nothing except a solitary cricket It was as if the land were slowly e away into the void Like her own heart

Setting quiver and sword aside, she settled down cross-legged She clapped once, a sound to split away the ordinary world froht her With patterns he had shown her, she stilled her hts, she could listen into the heart of the world: the purl of air at her neck, the slow shifting of stone, the distant babble of water, and beneath all those, the nascent stirring, like a flower about to bloom, of vast power held in check by its own peculiar architecture

"Humankind was crippled by their hands," the old sorcerer had said "They came to believe that the forces of the world could only succumb to manipulation But the universe exists at a level invisible to our eyes and untouchable by our hands, but comprehensible by our ic, which seeks neither to harm nor to control but only to preserve and transform"

In every object, all the pure elements mix in various proportions If she could cal, draw her concentration to such a narrow point that it blossomed into an infinite vista, then she could illuminate the heart of any object and draw out froht be of use to her in her spells

In this way, the dais had called fire even froic known to the Aoi

But she had a long way to go to h levels of awareness and clapped her hands four tiht her squarely back to the ordinary world One of her feet had fallen asleep She scratched the back of her neck, tickled by a withered leaf, and blinked aher quiver over her shoulder, she cla those that rattled or shifted under her probing foot

In the shade at the base of the tower, she drank sparingly and finally allowed herself to eat: some desiccated berries, a coarse flat bread ary, withered carob pods she gathered every day, and today’s delicacy, a paste of fish-meal and crushed parsnip flavored with onion and pulped juniper berries There was so so desperate about each meal here that she had quickly learned that the old sorcerer would neither watch her eat nor let her watch hiers, she turned to her coil of rope Twisting fiber into rope was the most tedious of the tasks the old sorcerer had set her but one he insisted she th of rope She ainst an outstretched arh

Tying one end around her waist, she cinched it tight and, with her weapons slung about her, walked to the edge of the fog She tied the other end of the rope to the trunk of a pine tree, tugging to test the knot, before she swept her gaze along the hillside Nothing stirred A bug crawled through the dry grass at her feet, startling because it was the only sign ofof trees in a delicate wind

She walked cautiously into the fog In five steps she was blind She could not even see where the rope left the fog She could not see her hands held out in front of her face, although blue flashed froiven to her by Alain which, he had promised her, would protect her froe of an abyss? A barricade? A dead land drowned in cloying mist?

In another five steps, she walked out onto a ridgeline At her back drifted the wall of fog Right in front of her grew a dense tangle of thorny shrubs As she jerked sideways to avoid the hand brushed a thorn A line of red welled up on her skin She stuck the scrape to her mouth and sucked A serpent hissed at her from the shelter of the thornbush and she sidled away slowly as superstitious dread clutched at her heart