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from dragon kills. Encer could see that but he couldn’t imagine how they came to be before him. Some brave hunter must have gathered the skins of dragon kills. Encer only wondered what price the individual had paid when the dragons had acquired the furs.
    Shuddering Encer dropped the skin and tucked Inadar warmly back under it. A look at Mytera showed Encer that she was busy altering her son’s clothing to fit Inadar. She acknowledged him and returned to her work without another word. He gave the sleeping infant one last look before leaving.
    Encer had no way of knowing for sure what the circumstances of the child’s arrival were but he was sure that the dragons were involved and couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the villager’s lives depended on the child’s wellbeing. The five dragons in the sky, the claw prints in the hard packed earth around the child to the skins the child was wrapped in. He had little doubt that the dragons were involved somehow. But how and why? Encer had a feeling that he was going to be getting little sleep tonight as the questions persecuted him.
     
     

 
    Chapter Four
     
    The gentle sound of the creek and Urake sleeping slowing convinced Skeln that what he had experienced was a dream. The thing he couldn’t shake was how real the dream had felt. The shoulder that had been pierced by the crossbow bolt ached at the memory. It didn’t have that vaguely unreal quality that accompany most dreams. This one was different.
    Finding himself unable to sleep Skeln rolled out of bed and dressed himself. The sky had begun to hint of a sunrise in the near future. Still the dream lingered in Skeln’s mind. He was oddly unnerved as if expecting the chainmail clad men to leap out at any moment from hiding. Any attempts to reassure himself that the men in chainmail didn’t exist only left him with a sense of foreboding. The sunrise had begun creeping up the valley floor when Skeln decided that he needed fresh air to clear his head. Grabbing the blanket from his bed he wrapped it around himself and began climbing the hill behind the house. After a while he turned at a right angle and began traversing the hillside. In this manner he avoided the village.
    From his vantage he was able to see the waking village below. The valley widened out and flattened allowing for fields to be planted west of the village. The Redzyn and the Rothac manors could be seen presiding over their lands. These two families held the vast majority of the land around the village. They had held the land for as long as anyone could remember. The rumor was that both houses were heirless and that the lands would go to the crown on their deaths. The King seemed to hold most of the land in the Braebach these days. For the people that lived and worked the land it didn’t matter much who held the land. Some preferred it one way or the other. It really depended on what land master was sent by the king to oversee the working of the land.
    The neighboring village was held by a rather lazy man who didn’t much care for the day to day dealings. As long as the fields were planted, tended and harvested in that order he could have cared less. Not every holding was so fortunate. A traveling merchant had carried a tale of caution about a village where the land master routinely raided any passing caravans. He nearly starved the surfs that lived on his lands by taxing them to within a copper of starvation.
    Typically Redzyn and Rothac families had upheld a longstanding tradition of ill will towards each other. A generation had passed since their houses had engaged in open warfare. As recent as a couple decades ago it was not uncommon for the youth in each house to engage in brisk fistfights. The families had decided that it was time to bury the hatchet after most of their men had been called to the wars never to return. The banquet that was held ten years ago had ended tragically with most of the participants having been poisoned. Only the