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"You would risk your precious daughter so near to lile’s expression as he leaned forward to stir the fire with a stick? Sparks drifted lazily up into the night, flicking out abruptly where they brushed against the stone

"I can’t trust you, it’s true This uarded by a creature that never sleeps, and ill soon knohat manner of threat you pose And it seeht you had snuck into hter to kill her, had that been your intent A knife in the dark offers a quick death Yet she lives, despite my carelessness"

Was that a tear on Wolfhere’s cheek? Hard to tell, and the heat of the fire wicked away all lanced at Heribert, who only shrugged to show that, in this case, he had no advice to offer "Travel with me and my company of thistles, Wolfhere What better option do you have? You don’t trust Anne King Henry has pronounced you under ban At least I can protect you froly "It isn’t the king’s wrath I fear," he said, but he raised no further objection

VII

A DEATH SENTENCE

1

STRONGHAND had seen in his dreams that it was the habit of humankind to ratification They let fermented drink addle their minds They ate too much Often they became noisy, contentious, and undisciplined, and they spent their resources extravagantly and as though their cup of plenty ran bottorown into the habit of celebration after each victory They ht command their warriors to parade treasure before theed between slaves and beasts By such means, and in the company of their rivals, they boasted of their power

He had no need of such displays The ships of his dead rivals lay beached on his shores and noelled the numbers of his fleet Weapons he hoarded in plenty, and the ironsed at his order The chieftains of twenty tribes had come to Rikin Fjord at his command to lay their staffs of authority at his feet They had accepted hi equals, as the huned over those who called thehand, by the right of naiven by the OldMother of his tribe He was, after all, the first chieftain to unite all the tribes of the RockChildren under one hand

But he felt no thrill of triumph, no ecstasy of power He had no wish to celebrate He nursed in his heart and mind only the chill knife of ambition and the cold emptiness that marked the absence of the one whom he had known as a brother in his heart: Alain, son of Henri, now vanished utterly froer drea source of bitterness and sorrow

But dreams were not all of his life He did not need his dreah his desires with all due calculation Not even the loss of his heart would divert him from his purpose After all, ambition and will serve best the one who is heartless

Froathered before hi land that descended toward the strand that e Twenty-two staffs lay at his feet, and the chieftains who had surrendered their staffs to his authority stood at a respectful distance The warriors of Rikin tribe stood behind the with those warriors who had sailed to Rikin with their war leaders Beached on the strand and anchored farther up and down the fjord lay at least eighty ships, each one e assembly represented only a portion of the army he could call on now

They were many, and more waited in the fjords that were horeater nuued together

That hat Bloodheart and the old chieftains had always failed to understand The huht be weaker in body, but they had the ith of nu down from the fjall, where the WiseMothers conferred in the silence that is the privilege of stone Behind, the SwiftDaughters shifted restlessly They did not have the patience of their randmothers Not for them the slow measure of eternity Like their brothers and cousins, they would tread the Earth for nounder the press of time