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to go find her.
    And then Dayna had come rushing out of the hold, having already detected the raw magic, and having brought Iri, a more advanced wizard, from her sudden faint to whisper nothing more than dead . So with Iri's wails building inside the small, two-story hold and no one currently more in charge of this small, two-story log facility than Dayna, she'd put her cold hand on the palomino's bridle to stop Trent from mounting up, and told him to wait for her. And for Katrie, one of Sherra's strongarms who'd worked with Dayna in the past and who'd come with her to this experimental little wizard's hold.
    Katrie, tall, strong, hardened Katrie, now came out of the snow-covered bushes wiping her mouth; she pulled the bota from her gear and rinsed her mouth, spitting. "Sorry," she said, swiping fingers through her short pale blonde hair; there was hardly enough of it to be in disarray, but it looked as ruffled as Dayna had ever seen it.
    "No problem," Dayna told her tightly. "I only wish I'd done the same." Instead, all the horror sat in her stomach like a cold poisoned rock. She shivered, drawing her fur-lined hat down over her ears.
    Of the wizards who'd come here, there was very little sign. The area sat quiescent, an unnatural mix of colors, heaving ground, and distorted trees. Maybe an acre of it, with a central blot of bright red that had once probably been a bird.
    A grasping hand jutted from one of the trunks, dripping skin. A scrap of someone's perfectly preserved scarf rippled in the frigid breeze, pinned by metallic leaves. Dayna thought she saw someone's bottom protruding from the ground, but couldn't tell without a closer look . . . and wasn't about to take it.
    Trent turned a circle, the fidgety palomino's reins in his hand as he searched the woods, putting his hands around his mouth to bellow, "Sher-ra!"
    Katrie and Dayna exchanged a dark glance; Katrie shook her head. She rewrapped her scarf around her ears, a combination headband and neck scarf, and shook her head again.
    "It doesn't matter," Dayna said, as Trent moved off the trail to repeat the call in a different direction. "Let him look. Just don't let him get too close to . . . that ."
    "No," Katrie said, direct and immutable disobedience; she had no intention of going to Trent. "I'm staying here, with you."
    Dayna looked at her in surprise, and abruptly understood. With the others dead, she'd suddenly become more valuable to Camolen. She was the only one with a working understanding of raw magic, which somehow played a role in the tragedy before her. She was one of a very few taken for schooling within a wizard's hold, even though the circumstances were so mitigating as to make her actual aptitude meaningless—as an offworlder with a feel for forbidden raw magic, where else would she have been placed but under expert supervision? But because of that supervision, she'd learned in leaps and bounds.
    Because of her experience with conventional magic used at the highest levels and because she was gifted with an innate talent that had thrived under expert tutelage, Katrie in her stubborn loyalty had the right of it.
    Dayna was of value. If not among the vocationally oriented wizards who made up the Secondary Council and kept Camolen running, she was among the few remaining wizards with the skill and mindset to find out what happened .
    And to keep it from happening again.
    If they could.
    But for all her experience—unwanted, unasked for experience—Dayna had never taken action alone.
    Even assigned to the changespell team last summer, she'd been nothing more than a cog in someone else's wheel. No, when she got outrageous, when she made terrifying make-a-difference decisions, she'd always had her friends there as a catalyst.
    So when she got back to Second Siccawei, she sent a message out to Carey, Jess and Jaime . . . and she even wished for Mark.
    We need to talk , she said, hoping that between them, they could make some sense of this tragedy, untangle