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"You ht"

"Alone?" Souda asked, alarmed

"Alone is best," Dokyi said "Souda, I am the First Dedicate of the Earth teht and the dark are my elements I will be fine" He stood and went to Rosethorn "Do not wait for then you as you travel, and the es to you, hter" He kissed Rosethorn on the forehead and looked at Briar "If all things go well, soon ill ain"

As he walked froeneral followed to ask their own questions The an a scold that blistered Briar’s ears

FORT SAMBACHU

SNOW SERPENT PASS

Briar rose at dawn the next day after a night filled with foul dreams of Rosethorn and Evvy in the hands of io back to sleep and risk irl’s pero uphill, but the sight of the Sun Queen’s threeover him made him feel uncomfortably fenced in Instead he rode down, past the tent village where most of the ar, and out onto the grasses and brush of the Gnaht in the sky was pearly and seemed to come from everywhere in the east It would be a while before the sun crested the tophts of the hills and mountains there

His horse startled a pair of pheasants, who drove horse and rider away frosters Snow finches, wagtails, and larks also gave their opinions of the rider and his horse as their day was interrupted Briar wasn’t sure, but those opinions sounded like bird insults He scanned the sky for the fales, but there were none in sight

"Too cold," he told the ’s going on They’ll get plenty of food at those places, enough for every carrion bird in Gyongxe" Norone without for the first eleven years of his life, but it was hard to wish a buzzard well at a battlefield

Once he could no longer see the village on the eastern hills or the fort on the southern ones, Briar dis the mare’s reins trail The horse, a sturdy aniraze Briar walked on until he heard only the wind in the grass and the insults of the saLho and the Drier of hts and around the capital, Garenerals could put their catapults to good use First they would have to fight the e Sharlog around the eastern passes No one wanted the ia

Briar would have preferred to fight in the canyons, where he could have put trees to work, but the plain hat he would have, first when he rode ith Parahan and Souda and later when they rode to Garers into the dirt of the Gnaht his intrusion, just as it fought the death of the winter freeze

"I’m a friend," he told it "I just want to ic over the bed of plants There were patches of bare earth here and there, but he could feel the plant roots running under them, nourished by the trickle of rasses treravely "You’re very strong Those lowland grasses would never stand a chance against you"

The grasses were scornful of fat, water-soaked plants beyond the mountains Only here, next to the sky, could they reach for the infinite

Briar shook his head and looked around A line of boulders stood close by There were iht colors and outlined in white: a od, a snake twined about itself toa beast whose antlers were tipped with stars, a spider that wore a crown It wasn’t the first tis on rocks Then, as now, he wondered ent to such trouble, and why The Snow Serpent Pass was bare of theht of it, the Ice Lion Pass, which they had taken on the way to Dohan, had also been bare of the paintings It was as if the artists had not wanted to share the his head at the idea, possibly a leftover of his nightrass closed over the space it hadthe dirt in his pal on these plains, he needed to understand his battlefield He spent his ride back to Fort Saers, and dusting it onto his cheeks Finally he rinsed it off in the little river that ran past the caa and what grew there, if not the stones and their paintings

This dirt was very young and energetic, thrust up by the sas themselves That sarew in it,it ht ask of it