His efforts were fruitless. Each memory he called up was quickly obliterated by the one of perpetual ice clinging to a six-towered castle. And for an instant, he glimpsed a pale-faced figure flicker past the frost-glazed pane of a window.

Now Magiere stood by the fallen tree, dressed in breeches and hauberk, with her black hair unbound and her falchion on her hip. The Chein'as's long dagger was tucked slantwise into the back of her thick belt. Her dark eyes shone in the morning light with a hard intensity.

Sister of the dead… my child… lead on!

Chap recoiled at those words rising from Magiere's memories, back-stepping once as he pulled from her mind.

That voice hissing in the darkness of her thoughts… like something on the edge of his own memories that he could not place. He shivered, and when he looked up, Magiere was watching him.

Chap's earthly instincts screamed that they should turn back. And in that faltering instant, he considered committing a sin. He remembered a law of the Fay:

Whatever they might do otherwise, no one of them would ever enslave the will of any being.

In part, this was why he had chosen to be "born" rather than invade the spirit of one already living. But if he wished, he could take Magiere, possess her even for a moment, and turn her from this journey. In his time with her and Leesil, he had come to respect their need for free will. So how could he take that from her now?

For that matter… why did he think of enslavement as the first "sin" of the Fay?

And how did these sudden fragments of his memories-and the voice of Magiere's dreams-connect to this artifact she sought?

More missing pieces that his kin had torn from him at his "birth."

Magiere reached down to stroke his head.

"When we get there, I'll know what to do," she whispered.

The others were packed up and ready to leave. Leesil stood with Sgaile, and Wynn walked with Osha, chatting away in Elvish, forgetting to enforce his practice of Belaskian.

Chap turned his eyes up to the west, and the high wall of the Blade Range, seemingly distant beyond the forested foothills. He traced the jagged silhouette far southward to where the range broke against the even higher snow-capped mountains.

"We'll travel the coast as long as possible," she said. "I'll know when we need to turn inland."

Leesil took her hand.

As the others headed down the open beach, Chap remained a little longer. He had forsaken everything to protect his charges from death and from their fates. But a chill ran beneath his thick coat, as if the worst was yet to come, and he dropped his head, feeling helpless.

He tried to focus on Wynn's light chatter to Osha about screeching seabirds wheeling high above the shore. And he loped after them across the gravelly beach.

Chane was still young in his undead existence and, at times, felt he knew too little of his new nature.

Almost a full moon had passed, and now he and Welstiel climbed into the high, snow-choked Pock Peaks south of the Blade Range. He gave little thought to the temperature dropping lower each night, as he never truly felt the cold.

As dawn approached, his fingers would not close.

Chane stared at his hands, paler than ever before.

"Welstiel?" he rasped.

Jakeb whimpered and began biting at his fingers.

Chane tried to fold his fingers against his thigh. His legs had stiffened and barely moved.

Welstiel cursed under his breath and dropped heavily to his knees, digging furiously in the snow with stiffened fingers.

"Set up shelter, quickly," he ordered, but his words were half-mumbled.

"What is happening to us?" Chane demanded.

Sabel and Sethe wrestled with the tent's cold-stiffened canvas as Welstiel uncovered a flat rock beneath the snow. He fumbled with his pack, but his hands were too stiff to open it. In the end, he simply bit through the flap's tie and dug clumsily inside before drawing out what he sought. The steel hoop with dark etchings was hooked over his wrist, and he dropped it in the hollow.

At the clang of steel upon stone, Chane remembered the hoop's scent and taste of char. He no longer felt his legs, but he kept silent, waiting to see what Welstiel would do.

Humming softly, Welstiel swept stiff fingers around the steel hoop, and its hair-thin lines and symbols began to change. Red sparks appeared, quickly spread, and those dark etchings brightened until all the hoop's markings were as fiery as a smith's forge. Heat began to emanate from the steel.

"Thaw your hands," Welstiel ordered, "but keep them still until they loosen… or you could lose a finger. We do not have enough stored life to repair severed digits."

Chane dropped hard to his knees, relieved he could bend at all, and glared at Welstiel.

"Why did you not warn me!" he hissed.

"I thought if we kept moving," Welstiel began, "we would not succumb to-"

"Answer me!" Chane spit back.

"We have bodies, dead or not," Welstiel returned in a low voice, "susceptible to freezing… but unlike the living, we do not succumb to pain… so we had no warning."

More secrets of Chane's new existence-fire and beheading were not the only things for a Noble Dead to fear. And again, he'd narrowly escaped a harsh lesson before Welstiel finally revealed the truth in little pieces.

"Put out your hands!" Chane whispered at the ferals.

He held his own above the arcane source of heat. Monks scrambled in around him to do likewise. Within moments, Chane's fingers began to flex, though his legs and arms were still stiff.

They raised the tent over the snow hollow and the glowing hoop, and then huddled together once more around the source of warmth. Welstiel shed his gloves, warming his fingers more directly, and Chane noticed his ring of nothing was now on his left hand. Perhaps the change meant nothing, and he never asked. He would not get an answer anyhow, and he passed the crawling time in seething over Welstiel's continued secrecy.

The only thing keeping him steady as he felt the sun rise outside the tent was the knowledge that Wynn had survived the shipwreck.

During one predawn pause in the foothills of the Broken Range, Welstiel had slipped down to the shore to check Magiere's trail. Chane could stand it no longer. He had followed at a distance, watching from hiding.

Welstiel had crouched low just beyond the reach of the noisy surf surging up the beach, and then he went a little farther, turning toward the tree line. He stopped to study the ground there. When he finally turned away, he headed back toward camp at a slow and steady pace. Whatever Welstiel sought, he looked no further.

Chane knew what Welstiel had found.

Magiere had finally turned into the foothills, headed for the mountains.

The moment Welstiel was out of sight, Chane had rushed south through the trees rather than heading for the beach. He came upon a stream weaving down the rocky slope. At a lip of sod overhanging the trickling water, he found three distinct footprints among others in the mucky earth. Small and narrow, they could only be Wynn's.

As Chane hunched in the tent over the glowing steel hoop, he clung to that memory. He tried to shut out the presence of Welstiel and the ferals as he curled up on the ground. Soon dormancy took him, and he sank in the brief respite of dreamless nothingness for the day.

More nights passed.

Welstiel led them on, always following after Magiere. Each night, the temperature dropped lower as they climbed higher. Chane learned to keep moving.

As long as he did so, his body resisted freezing. Friction was also useful, for though his dead flesh generated no heat, rubbing his joints harshly and often kept them limber. He taught the ferals to do the same.