Caewen was a small child, no more than five years. Her heart was beating with fear–almost fluttering, mothlike. Her father was calling to her. The wicked man from the hilltop was walking down his path, coming to the village. Was he was looking for fresh servants, or on some other errand? She darted away, and she ran. Swift as shadow she was within the family house, then down the trapdoor. Deep in the lightless root cellar, she cowered, clutching her straw-and-rag doll, biting her lip, doing her best not to cry.
-oOo-
Rank upon rank of knights, their armour grey as the sheen on icy rocks, their horses uncanny, blue-eyed, high-stepping. They poured in a line between two massive gates that had been carved into the form of dragons. Behind the riders lumbered a single file of huge and bestial things, hairy, but walking upright like men. Though the knights were silent, the shaggy monsters sang. Their voices rumbled in strange songs of the wilds and winds of the icy north.
-oOo-
A woman’s skull speaking, the dead tongue complaining about having been called back from sleep in the night-soaked earth.
-oOo-
A dead girl on a rock, her blood tracing patterns in the stone that had been carved there so long ago. In the shape of a dragonet. In the shape of a goddess of rainbow colours.
-oOo-
Caewen and Dapplegrim singing together as they wandered along a southward road, trees blowing the cool winds, carefree on the road. How long ago was that? Just a few days. It seemed so much longer.
-oOo-
A skinny pale-faced youth, not quiet yet a man. He was dressed in fine furs that had the effect of emphasising his scrawny musculature, and he wore on his head a plain circlet for a crown. In the darkness, he was staring at a piece of something: was it bone, or a piece of horn? There were letters carved on its surface, but he seemed to be just as unable to read them as Caewen was. He turned the thing over in frustration, looking hard at it but finding no answers.
-oOo-
A fog full of ice crystals, sparkling like diamond dust: spread through the tents of the moot, and the moot silent, empty. At heart of the fog there is a shape, a thing that looks like a man that is not a man. He is here. He has come.
-oOo-
Fafmuir pacing back and forth in his tent. Muttering to himself. Muttering about all that he has seen. He is here. He is here. No, no. He has come.
-oOo-
A shadow slipping through caverns and glittering caves, all lit with the many thousand reflections of flowstone and crystals. This whisperous shape sneaks into a vast chamber that is filled with the glow of old, red heathen gold. A single piece is snatched up from the piles and vanishes within folds of a secret cloak.
-oOo-
She is meeting Dapplegrim for the first time. Her own fear of the talking, fang-toothed, skull-faced horse seems so comical to her now. She wants to reach out to herself, give herself a hug, and say to her, hush, it will be alright. He will be a friend.
-oOo-
An eye as large as a bull’s whole head, full of the spinning depthless colours of emerald, garnet and malachite, tumbling, tumbling colours. The great black pupil seeks this way and that. It knows. It knows. It knows. A thing has been stolen. A small thing, but stolen! How! Where is it? He cannot find it anywhere? He cannot smell it, or feel its soft and lovely call to him. The rage he feels is so deep. So much more primeval than any anger of any person. It is as if a mountain furies. It is as if a storm is roused to anger. It is as if the rocks of the earth are enraged.
-oOo-
The moot. They brought it to the moot, and now… and now…
-oOo-
Spinning and falling, down and down, and Caewen opens her eyes. She was surprised to find tears, stinging and hot, burning her eyelids. A faint taste of the salt touched her lips. Through a wet, hazy vision, she turned to look at Dapplegrim, blinking rapidly. “It isn’t the Winter King who plans to destroy the moot. It is Fafmuir who wants it. I know what he is planning too. I saw it. I know what he saw. I know his plans.” After a hard, long draw of breath she managed to say, “Dapple?”
“Yes?”
“I think his plan… I think… it might actually work.”