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the sorcerer, wondering if he could kill Bolverkr with a well-placed arrow. Assuming I had a bow. Or knew how to use it. Taziar had become a mediocre swordsman only because teaching Taz swordplay had seemed so important to his father. Pleased enough to get his tiny son practicing any weapon at all, the elder Medakan had never pressed him to learn to shoot, and the thought of doing so on his own had never occurred to Taziar. Bad enough killing a man who can defend himself. What need do I have to learn longdistance slaughter? Taziar shivered at the thought. Grief-mad after her husband’s hanging, Taziar’s mother had forced her only son to assist in her suicide. The experience had so crippled Taziar’s conscience that he had found himself unable to take a life, even to save his own. Circumstances had forced him to overcome this limitation enough to kill enemies in defense of innocents or friends, but only at times of grave necessity.
    Bolverkr raised his face heavenward. The wind whipped his locks to an ivory tangle. “Who ... am ... I?”
    Each syllable shocked dread through Taziar. There was something eerily inhuman about the call, though the words emerged plainly enough in the language of Cullinsberg’s barony and colored by a clipped Wilsberg accent. The urge to leave as quickly as possible seized Taziar. Studying the ground for glints of magic, he descended with caution, creeping silently back toward the northern forest.
    Bolverkr’s laughter shuddered between the trunks.

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CHAPTER 2
Chaos Dreams
    Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
    —Edgar Allen Poe The Raven
     
    The dream assailed Silme in the deepest part of her sleeping cycle; yet it seemed distant, the trickling backwash of another’s nightmare borne on a thread of shared Chaos. Sated with health and life power, she paced the walled defenses of a fortress. But the life aura she had always known as a friend, an integral part of herself, had became a stranger, an enemy crushing, tearing, and stripping her of identity. A scream cycled through her mind: “Who am I?” No answer came but echoes. Still, the reverberation of her familiar voice soothed, bringing snatches of memory. She knew a humble childhood as the third son of a farmer, the dusty, green perfume of new-mown hay, the milk-breath of spotted cows, and the tickle of piled straw while roughhous-ing in the barn before the cows trooped inside. A brother’s laughter rang in her ears.
    As each remembrance blossomed, Chaos rose to meet it, battering it to pale outline. Anguish hammered Silme, and she twisted in her sleep, unable to comprehend life energy revolting against its master nor why she would fight the chaos denning her own life. Again, the cry cut above the struggle: “Who am I?” New memories whisked by, veiled in white, now of Dragonrank training beneath the original master, Geirmagnus. She remembered, too, a wife named Magan and a fetus destroyed in the Chaos-storm. She felt the cold bite of winds carrying thatch, stone, and corpses, its swish as cruel and mocking as laughter.
    A fetus. Silme anchored her reason on her own growing baby. Always before, she had received only a hint of its presence; its tiny life aura became blended and lost in the vastness of her own chaos. Now, she felt a strong sense of its aliveness within her. It seemed to have tripled in power overnight. Its energy wove intimately into her own: vital, hovering, wailing. Conscious of the changes within her, Silme slid toward waking far enough to realize that the remembrances of farm and storm and training were never her own. Now removed from the struggle between lord and Chaos, she explored both sides with a clarity of thought that could only come with impartiality.
    Still ensconced in sleep, Silme saw only a man battling his own life aura, a war he could never win. Without knowledge of the vision’s source, she somehow