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things trapped in spirit-glass arrowheads. But much more powerful, because the shamans and witches could not control her, and even the most powerful spirit-glass arrows simply enraged her, instead of ensuring her final end.
    The usefulness—or not—of spirit-glass arrows against her had been tested several times, to the archers’ cost. There were many among the clans who hated the Witch, and had lost children as offerings. Now the survivors had even more reasons to hate her, but were powerless to do anything about it.
    There had been a brief hope that on becoming a bodiless spirit, the Witch With No Face wouldn’t need any more offerings, and would even let the current crop walk out of their solitary dwellings and return to their tribes. But this was not to be. Word had come that they must all be killed, their bodies burned on pyres, stacked high with fuel and kept extra hot.
    For some reason, the Witch either feared the offerings, or perhaps wanted them killed to remove a reminder of the bodies shecould no longer inhabit, the physical life she could no longer have.
    All through the north, the offerings had been slain, and urns containing their ashes dispatched as evidence that the order of the Witch With No Face had been carried out.
    Except in one place. The people of the Athask, the red-stitched goatskin-clad people of the mountains, had sent an urn containing human ashes, sure enough, but they were not those of their offering.
    They did this because another witch had told them so. A witch who had died some nine years before and had stayed properly and sensibly dead. This witch had told the elders what was to come, Seeing it in the frozen waterfall that hung jewel-like in the winter, above the summer camp, the highest point in the mountains where the clans regularly pitched their tents.
    Ferin had only vague memories of the Cave Witch, as her people came to call the visitor, but she recalled a woman with blue eyes and skin a different shade of brown than the mountain-folk, her hair the color of dry grass. Ferin had been told how the witch had appeared one summer, taking up residence in a cave off the mountain trail between the winter and summer camps. She had slain five of the clan-folk soon after her arrival, including a lesser shaman. They had tried to kill her and take the rich and strange things she had brought with her, along with the two mules that had carried her goods. Mules were rare beasts on the mountain, and tasted even better than horse.
    But the Cave Witch had killed her attackers with unusual magic. Old Kingdom magic, from the far south across the great river. Recognizing her power, the elders treated with the foreign sorceress. Normally they would have also sent word to the Witch With No Face, but this was one of the first things the Cave Witch told them not to do, as it would bring them ill luck. As she also correctly told them about an imminent raid from the Ranash people—the Moon Horse clan—who lived in the highest part of the steppe, close to the mountains, they listened to her. When she told them otheruseful glimpses of what was to come over the years, they continued to listen.
    In the months before she died of the wasting sickness, the Cave Witch told them of her most important vision. She foresaw that the Witch With No Face would be killed but not killed, and would no longer need her offerings of young women. Instead, she would require something more, something that would end in the complete ruin of the clan, the death of the Athask people.
    The blue-eyed woman told them the only way to stop this from happening was to send a messenger to her own people, and it was then she told the elders about the tribe of seers who lived around and under and beside a glacier in the Old Kingdom.
    People she called the Clayr.
    She’d written a message to be sent to them, in particular for her own daughter. She’d repeated that, over and over. Saying her daughter’s name as if it