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lovers for only a week or so, rather than years. Dritt and Lang had become obsessive about caring for their horses, and the otherwise fearless Lang had been looking over his shoulder a great deal. Even Sunspark, in its horse-shape, had been cribbing quietly at an elm tree, leaving small scorched places bitten out of the bark.
    Segnbora laughed at herself then, a mere breath of merriment. And look at me. All the time I’ve spent on the trail, a hunted woman—and look what kind of watch I’m keeping. My back turned to open country, where Goddess knows what could be coming up from behind—and me sitting here staring at this silly hill as if it’s going to jump out of the water and come after me! Yet that silent, remote benevolence kept watching her, kept waiting.
    In the distance a clear melodious sound, like the night finding its voice, rose up—joined a moment later in the long note by another voice wavering downward a third, and yet another, higher by a fourth. The unsettling harmony sent a delighted shiver down her spine. The wolves were on post as their rearguard, singing to while away the watch.
    The Goddess’s dogs, Segnbora thought. It was the old affectionate name for them, the votaries who sang to Her mirror, the Moon, through all its phases, silent only when She was dark and dangerous. Where the Moon tonight? Segnbora wondered, glancing upward. It hadn’t yet risen. But she was distracted, as always, with the sight of the first few stars pointing through the twilight, and the memory they always recalled.
    How old was I? Segnbora wondered, though wondering was vain. Very small, she’d been—small enough to still be wearing a shift instead of a kilt, but large enough to push open the front door of the old house at Asfahaeg and escape at bedtime. She’d gone out into the dark, unsure just what she was looking for—then had glanced up and found something, a marvel. Not just sunset, or dusk, or dark, but a sky burning with lights, every one solitary and glorious; and she knew, small as she was, that somehow or other she and those lights were intimately connected.
    Now Segnbora knew them as stars, knew their names, knew about the Dragons who had come from among them, and about the Goddess Who had made them. But the wonder had never left her: that desire to get closer to those lights that called her—and, eventually, closer to the One Who had made the stars. When the Rodmistresses tested her at the age of three and found the Fire, she’d been overjoyed. Everybody knew that when you had the Flame, you got to talk to Her more often than most.
    But years of study had failed her. School after school had been unable to provide her with a focus strong enough to channel the huge outflow of her Power—and so there had been no breakthrough, and no truedreams in which the Goddess walked. After much bitter time Segnbora had admitted the truth to herself, that she was never going to focus. She might as well give up sorcery and lore and Flame and all the other timewasting for something useful, as her father had always said.
    And, having given up, so it was that she’d met the Goddess at last. She was good enough with Charriselm to go looking for a job as a guard. She found one, in a little Steldene town called Madeil—and found Freelorn in the mucky alley behind the tavern there. Later, fleeing from an old keep in which the aroused Steldenes had besieged them, the group had come across a little fieldstone inn on the border between Steldin and the Waste. It had seemed strange at the time that there should have been an inn out there at the very edge of human habitation, but the innkeeper had put them all at ease. Finding that they were short of money, she offered to share herself with one of Freelorn’s people to settle the scot. A common enough arrangement, and Segnbora had won the draw for the privilege.
    It had been a sweet evening. The innkeeper had been fair, but there was more to her beauty than that. A long while