"There's nothing to figure out," Fayonne told him. "You don't know that what happened today had anything to do with… with anything else. You're assuming it did, but you don't know."

"Don't I, Mama? It's been following our people around for more than a century. We were fools to believe that it would remain in Lifarsa while we came out here onto the plain."

She started to argue, but thought better of it. The truth was, Mander might well be right. This was precisely the way the Curse of Rheyle worked. They conjured; their spells did most everything she and her people wanted them to do. But at the end they turned out… wrong, somehow. It almost seemed that Qirsar reached down at the last moment and twisted their magic into something dark, something far from what they had intended.

Conjuring had been like this for Fayonne all her life. It had been this way for every man and woman in Lifarsa.

She still remembered watching her father use a simple fire spell to light a cooking fire in their home one stormy night. Most nights they lit their fires without magic, but on this evening they'd started the meal too late. Fayonne didn't remember why. She did recall watching her father as he took every precaution he could think of-moving the wood pile outside; having Fayonne, her older brothers, and younger sister stand outside as well. Families in Lifarsa had burned their homes nearly to the ground with such spells. But he didn't, and for a few sweet moments all of them-her parents, her siblings, and she-thought that for this one night they had escaped the village's unhappy fate. Her mother cooked the meal, and they sat down to eat.

When the fire popped, they thought nothing of it. All fires popped; this one had several times already. But then they smelled the burning cloth and hair, and Traisa began to scream. By the time they put out the flames, she had burns on her back and neck. Fayonne's mother said that they were fortunate Traisa hadn't died, and she made their father promise never to use a fire spell in the house again.

Mander smiled grimly. "You know I'm right, don't you?"

"I'll admit it's possible that the curse had something to do with what happened today." She paused, glancing at the Eandi soldiers again. The nearest of them appeared to be absorbed in their own conversations. "But that's as far as I'll go. We were using ancient, powerful magic. We'd talked of using the blood wolf spell, and a few of us thought we'd figured out how to make it work. But we'd never actually tried it before. Even without the curse we might have had trouble controlling those wolves."

Her son shook his head and laughed bitterly. "Believe what you will, Mama. But we'd best take care with the next set of spells we conjure for the Eandi. Because if we have another day like this one, they're going to start asking questions."

She nearly said the first thing that came to her mind: They already are. Qalsyn's lord heir had already made it clear that he didn't trust them and didn't like relying on their magic. If this occurred to Mander as well, he kept it to himself.

"We should never have left the village," he murmured after a lengthy silence.

They'd had this discussion before, and Fayonne wanted no part of it today.

She didn't want to be out here on the plain any more than he did. Mander knew this, but still he blamed her. And maybe it was her fault. But she still believed that they might find a way to escape the curse, and as eldest it was her responsibility to give the people of Lifarsa an opportunity to live as other Mettai did.

Once, little more than a hundred years ago, their ancestors had been among the most prosperous of Stelpana's Mettai. They lived farther south then, in a village called Rheyle at the southern tip of Bear Lake. They were farmers, cloth weavers, trappers, basketmakers. Merchants-Eandi and Qirsi alike-came from every corner of the Southlands to trade with them.

From what Fayonne's father and grandfather had told her, she knew that other Mettai villages came to resent the people of Rheyle, and perhaps with good reason. It wasn't just that they were so successful, or that they lured peddlers and their gold away from neighboring villages. Rheyle's leaders grew more aggressive as time went on and for a brief time-nearly two years-they engaged in small raids on these other villages. They took fertile farming lands from one, and a bountiful woodland from another. By the end of the second year, the men and women of Rheyle had established four small hamlets as protectorates of the main village. Even Fayonne's grandfather once admitted to her that they were wrong to have done so. He also stated his belief that they would have continued to expand had the other settlements in the Bear Lake region not banded together to stop them.

When Rheyle's soldiers next attempted to take land from Gavdyre, a fishing village on the lake's southeastern shore, warriors from other villages came to Gavdyre's defense. In a bloody skirmish known to the Mettai as the Battle of Seven Villages, the new alliance drove off the men from Rheyle.

Emboldened by their success, they then attacked Rheyle's other protectorates, defeating each of them in turn. When all of the outpost villages had been conquered, they turned their attention to Rheyle itself. They didn't attack this time, but rather used magic fueled by blood taken forcibly from Rheyle prisoners captured in the preceding battles.

They placed a curse-the Curse of Rheyle-on the village's people and their descendants. It laid waste to their once-fertile lands. Suddenly their soil seemed poisoned; crops that had thrived for years before now barely managed to stay alive. Game animals, both large and small, forsook the woodlands surrounding the village. Rheyle's hunters and trappers had to range farther and farther from home in order to find their prey. Much the same thing happened to the lake waters near the village. Schools of fish seemed to vanish overnight.

But the curse did more than that. It touched their magic as well. Spells that Rheyle's people had conjured with ease for centuries abruptly stopped working. Or if they did work, they turned dark, as had this day's conjuring of the blood wolves.

After suffering under the curse for several years, the people of Rheyle finally made a difficult and painful decision. They abandoned their village, moved northward away from their enemies, and established a new settlement on the northwestern shore of Bear Lake, which they called New Rheyle. When they found their new home they thought the lands as rich as any they had ever seen.

Within a year, however, New Rheyle was no better than their blighted first home had been. The curse had followed them. A year later, they fled New Rheyle and built yet another settlement, which they called Dranig, as if by abandoning the name "Rheyle" they might confound the spell and thus escape it.

Three years after that they left Dranig, and settled in what became known as Lifarsa. Lifarsa proved no more immune to the curse than the other settlements had been, but the village's leaders concluded that there was nowhere they could go to escape the magic of their enemies. So they remained in their newest home and did their best to make a life for themselves there, regardless of the curse.

In the hundred years since, none of Lifarsa's eldests had tried to find a new home for their people. Until now.

It wasn't that matters had grown any worse in recent years. But Fayonne could see how the curse wore on her people; she herself knew how great a burden it was. So when Jenoe and his soldiers came to Lifarsa offering them an opportunity to make a new home for themselves far away from the Companion Lakes, she leaped at the chance. How could she not?

Mander was probably right in thinking that the curse would follow them no matter where they went. But what kind of a leader would she have been if she refused even to try?