“Lady Linsha!” Her name rang down the canyon and echoed off the high rock walls.

Linsha looked up from the stone and the sword in her lap, cocked her head for a moment, and went hack to work. The Scorpion Wadi was a deep, curving canyon with a complicated maze of caves, tunnels, washed-out gullies, and eroded stone walls. Voices carried in odd ways through the Wadi, so it was often difficult to tell where the caller was located.

Not that Linsha bothered to find out. She had finally managed to steal another few minutes away from the crowded, noisy camp, and she was in no mood to help someone find her and ruin a rare moment of sulking.

“Lady Linsha!”

She continued to ignore the call while she ran the honing stone along the edge of the sword blade. Her name bounced off the rock walls and went unheeded.

“It might be important, you know,” a raspy voice said from the shaded ledge of a nearby outcropping.

“They’ll find me,” Linsha replied in a tone as hard and uninterested as the whetstone in her hand. She flipped the weapon over and began to sharpen the opposite edge.

“It sounds like young Leonidas,” prompted the voice.

Linsha’s clear green eyes narrowed and her lips tightened to a thin line. Couldn’t she enjoy a bad mood alone for just a little while?

“All right, all right,” she grumbled. “Go get him.”

An owl, brown and creamy in color, hopped off the ledge and glided silently out of the side gully and into the main canyon.

Linsha paid scant attention. The whetstone in her hand continued its raspy journey along the length of the sword blade. From guard to tip. Again and again. Slow. Steady. With even pressure and fierce concentration. The stone evened out the inevitable nicks and honed its edge to a killing line.

If only, Linsha thought wearily, there was a whetstone somewhere to take the nicks and bluntness off her soul. She felt as battered and worn as the sword in her calloused hands, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it in this place.

Hooves thudded in the canyon close by then clattered into the dry gully where she had chosen to retreat. She didn’t bother to look up. Varia had been right. The one who called her name was the centaur, Leonidas. She could recognize those hoofbeats anywhere. Feeling perverse, she ignored the new arrival and bent over her sword.

“Lady,” a male voice said, then she heard an audible intake of breath.

Leonidas may have been a gangly buckskin stallion barely out of colthood, but he had been a friend to Linsha through the long, bloody summer, and he had learned early to recognize many of her moods, including her occasional bouts of temper. Although she normally kept them in check, once in a while something would slip loose and she would erupt like Mount Thunder-horn. Since Crucible left two days ago, even the lowliest camp potscrubber stayed out of her way.

“Before you throw that sword at me, I have a message. Lanther sent me to tell you we have captured a prisoner who has news of the eggs.”

Something twisted in the pit of Linsha’s stomach. Her hand fell still.

The eggs. In the name of Kiri-Jolith, why had Iyesta left those eggs in her care? They had been the bane of her summer. The great brass dragonlord had meant well, Linsha supposed, when she’d made a human promise to look after the clutch of brass dragon eggs that she’d left to incubate in the hot sands in a labyrinth under the city. Linsha assumed at the time that vow was simply a gesture of respect. None of them, including the sleeping mother dragon, had ever suspected Iyesta would be dead only a few days later. Then the mother brass was murdered, the eggs disappeared, and the promise made by a Rose Knight of Solamnia became a matter of honor.

Linsha suspected the Tarmaks had the eggs, for reasons known only to them, and she had tried everything she could think of to learn their whereabouts, only to be thwarted at every step. As far as she knew, the eggs had vanished. But what if they hadn’t? What if the Tarmaks had hidden them somewhere and someone else knew about it? It was a chance she could not ignore.

“Lady, did you hear me?”

The sudden, insistent voice jolted Linsha’s attention back to her surroundings. She hadn’t realized she was staring blankly at the ground. For an answer, she slid the sword into its battered scabbard and rose to her feet.

“I heard you.” She sighed and raised her arm, wrist straight out, in an invitation. There was a flutter of wings and the owl, Varia, came to land on her forearm. Sidestepping delicately, the bird made her way up to Linsha’s shoulder and settled comfortably close to the woman’s head of auburn curls.

Linsha turned her face to let the owl’s soft feathers brush her skin. The scent of owl, mingled with cedar, desert wind, and dust filled her nostrils. A bit of down tickled her nose, causing her to sneeze a gust of air that fluffed out the owl’s feathers across her chest.

Varia gave a throaty chuckle. She was a rare bird-one of a kind as far as Linsha knew-who had appeared in the forested mountains outside Sanction and adopted Linsha as her own. They had been inseparable for years and were very familiar with each other’s personalities.

“Are you through sulking?” Varia asked.

Linsha smiled. “Not yet, but I’ll work on it.”

She could never remain sullen for long. It was too much work. Her temperament was naturally optimistic. Like her parents and her grandparents, she was a fighter who sought to find the positive in any situation-even one as dire as the circumstances she found herself in now. As long as there was a scrap of hope, the Majeres managed to find it.

Her bad mood ebbed a little, and instead of nurturing it as she had since Crucible left, she let it go. She really needed about two months of sleep, steady meals, and easy duty to feel normal again, but she could at least do herself a favor and let her better nature take over.

She saw Leonidas watching her dubiously, like a man watches a cobra from a distance, and she offered him a faint smile as an apology. “Thank you for bringing Lanther’s message. Where are they?”

The young centaur swished his black tail and stamped a hind foot as if to say, “about time!” What he said aloud was, “They’re on the way to the Post.”

She looked at him closely and saw for the first time the dark patches of sweat on his sandy-colored hide and the dust on his legs. He had traveled hard and fast to reach her.

Without wasting more time, they hurried down the trail through the Wadi, wending a way between high stone walls tinted with late afternoon shadow. Smoke and smells from the cooking fires wafted down the canyon on a capricious wind. Voices bounced off the rock walls. A mile from Linsha’s chosen retreat they came to the edges of the camp that had sprung up in the canyon that summer after the death of Iyesta and the fall of the Missing City to the Tarmaks.

In the open plains that surrounded the port city, the Wadi was the only defensible position large enough to provide sanctuary for more than a few people, and in desperation, they had come in the hundreds. Someone had made a complete head-count shortly after the fall of the city and numbered 892 men, women, children, centaurs, elves, kender, and miscellaneous sorts living in the canyon. That number had changed often as more refugees and escaped slaves arrived, as a few displaced families left to seek shelter on the Plains of Dust with relatives and clans, and as people succumbed to wounds, disease, and conflict. It was a population mostly of fighting men and centaurs made up of remnants of the dragonlord’s once-proud militia, the City Watch, the Legion of Steel, and a few tenacious survivors of the Knights of Solamnia. No one knew exactly how many people remained in the Wadi, and most people were too tired to care.