The man who called himself Amaury the Harper knew that only madmen or desperate ones risked traveling the Hellers near winter.  Even in the foothills bordering Serrais, the gales could blow a man off the mountains into chasms, far below.  Amaury feared he might have been mad once, seasons ago; now he was only desperate.  He spurred his chervine, and the tired beast stumbled, fell, and began to plunge about.

Amaury rolled free.  "Zandru's hells," he swore. "This finishes me."  He knelt to recover his gear, then dispatched the chervine with the knife that was his only blade.  Though three packs of bandits followed him, he couldn't abandon the beast, which had served him to the limits of its strength, to death of hunger, pain, and cold.

Then the bandits struck.  He'd been tailing one group all day and had suspected that they had known it since their last halt.  Some of them must have doubled back.  One moment Amaury was crouched over the dying chervine; the next, a blow thrust him sprawling in the snow, and someone's hands grappled for his throat.

Years of practice let him counter that grip, brought him to one knee, his hand flashing down automatically for the sword he no longer wore, then for his knife, for any weapon at all.  But a savage kick sent it spinning out of his hand; another caught him in the ribs, throwing him onto his face in the trampled, blood-reddened snow.

"Amrek!  Kill a harper, and you die howling!" he heard one bandit warn his attacker.

Would he owe his life to a superstition?  He hoped so.

"This is the spy who tailed us from Carthon!  Are you saying I've got to let him live?"  His attacker paused while Amaury felt himself go hot with fear and scalding shame.  Coward!  I thought you wanted to die.  After Marelie Hastur had died at Arilinn, Amaury had broken his sword, had left Aries; to wander, abandoning hearth and lord-right to sing love songs and laments until one night, pacing sleepless outside a serai in Carthon (his food, pallet, and harsh wine paid for by enthusiastic listeners), he'd heard a whisper, pressed closer, been discovered, and forced to flee until he could hide out.  Bandits were riding toward Serrais.

For the first time since Marelie Hastur's death, Amaury woke concerned with something besides his own heartbreak.  Serrais was where he'd been fostered; south of it, near Temora, was his own estate, a small holding in Domain Elhalyn which he suddenly remembered he loved.

Amaury lay in the snow, waiting for the Drytowner's blow and thought of his home, burning, his people dying.  Once again he couldn't save what he most loved.

"Quiet, you!"  The man standing over him kicked him again, lower than before.  If he'd groaned before, this time he retched with pain.  The irony of it made him almost as sick as the kick to his groin: to think he'd die failing to Save the home he'd abandoned... just when he'd learned to care for it!

"He's swordless, Amrek.  What kihar do you get from butchering a swordless man?  Plus the curse.  Knock him out and let the storms take him, and the harper's curse too.  Get his pack."

Something thudded down beside Amaury's head in the snow.  "Your harp, harper," Amrek growled in a Drytown dialect so thick that he could barely make out the words.  "Sing to the gods that Alar's wolves, not I, killed you."

"Are you coming with us?  Or are you an ombredin to take your pleasure with him there in the snow?" the leader shouted.

"Ombredin, am I," Anger roughened the man's voice still further.  Pain exploded in a storm of lights - like the fire in a starstone, a backflow...  NO! - at the base of Amaury's skull.  In the fires burned a face, beautiful, beloved, but burning, being consumed... and he was burning too....