By all rights, it should have been mid-fall, a beautiful time of year for a ride. The Maerchwood should have been ablaze with a thousand hues of flame and gold, and the nearby fields of Maerchlin should have been head-high with ripe wheat and corn. But the ground was sodden and damp with thick, black mud. The fields were strewn with pale, sickly crops ruined by a plague of rot-causing worms. Even the trees had sloughed off their black leaves, standing naked to the skies with soft, rotten bark.

After a long day's ride, they reached the wide fields and scattered farmhouses of Saden. The outpost was in no better shape than Maerchlin, with large pools of black standing water fouling its fields and a stink of rotten grain permeating the air. Eriale wrinkled her nose in disgust. "This is even worse than it was a week ago."

"I wonder if the Shadow Stone's influence is still increasing," Fineghal said. "Its effects may grow even more pronounced with time."

They stopped for the night at Kestrel and Eriale's house in Saden. After a supper of black bread and stew, Aeron and Fineghal stayed up late, talking of Aeron's time in the college and his final days there. Fineghal hoped to find some insight into the nature of the Shadow Stone's power, but they had little success.

The next morning, the three travelers restocked their provisions and resumed their journey. The first time Aeron had made this trip, he'd gone north from Saden to Oslin on the Akanamere, taking passage on a keelboat to Soorenar before switching to a coastal dromond for the last leg of his journey to the great city. This time, Eriale's neighbors warned them against that path. Between Akanax and Soorenar the armies dueled like blind, dumb beasts, lurching from village to village as they grappled for advantage. Few ships on the Akanamere were safe, and Akanax itself was virtually under siege. Aeron and Fineghal agreed that it seemed wiser not to ride into a war if they could avoid it, and set out northeast, following the Adder River and riding across the empty lands of eastern Chessenta.

They managed several days without any serious incidents, setting their course westward along old cattle trails and cart tracks. The lands they rode through had once been heavily populated, with prosperous towns and crowded fields nestling close together in the gentle hills, but in the chaos surrounding the fall of Unther's empire four centuries before, Chessenta's eastern provinces had been ravaged by plague and war. "All this land," murmured Eriale. "It's so desolate, so lonely."

"It will be full of people again someday," Fineghal told her. "In a lifetime or two, folk will come to take up the land that has fallen into disuse. They'll make a good life for themselves, and kings will rise to defend them against those who want to take it from them. It's only a matter of time."

"I hope you're right," Aeron said. "For the past two days, I've been wondering if this is how things will go if we can't undo the Shadow Stone's spell. Each year another house falls empty, another field grows wild, a stone wall falls and is not rebuilt. The circle of light and life around every hearth shrinking closer and closer, until all who are left wait shivering for the darkness to fall. It won't be a quick end, or a noble one."

That night, they came to a small crossroads with a battered old inn sitting beside it. A worn sign creaked from above the door, and warm yellow light seeped out from shuttered windows. Horses stamped and shuffled in the large stable yard beside the building. Aeron was tired and sore from riding, and he did not look forward to another night of camping underneath the cold, clammy mists. He reined in his horse and regarded the innhouse with a thoughtful look.

"Should we stop here for the night?" he asked.

Eriale nodded emphatically. "A warm bed would be worth a handful of gold."

Fineghal hesitated. "I've never been comfortable in such places, but we need the rest, and it would be good to stable the horses someplace warm for a night." He sat up straight in the saddle and muttered a few words in Elvish, drawing his hand over his face. When his hand fell again, Fineghal's elven features were gone, replaced by the careworn, blunt features of a human mercenary nearing his fiftieth year. His elven tunic had become a shirt of sweat-stained ring mail, and he'd even added a slight paunch to disguise his rail-thin build. He turned to Aeron. "You'd be wise to conceal your own features, too," he said. "In my experience, the elves are sometimes not welcome in a house such as this."

Aeron shrugged and worked the same spell. He could not help noticing that he was able to master it with much less effort than it had taken Fineghal; his ability to draw on magic from a source beyond the diminished Weave was a significant advantage as the magic of life and light ebbed away from the world. He settled for masking himself as a plain forester, although his own traveling garb was fairly close to that anyway. "I'm ready," he said. "Let's go in."

They led their mounts into the innyard and stabled the horses themselves, since no servants appeared to help them. After watering the animals and rubbing them down with what little dry straw they could find, they gathered up their saddlebags and headed into the inn's common room, leaving Baillegh outside to watch over their mounts.

It was a dirty room of unfinished wood, rendered almost uninhabitable by a badly made fire that put out more smoke than heat or light. A dozen or so men, farmers and teamsters by the look of them, sat around the room's low tables. In one corner, five mailed swordsmen wearing the insignia of the King of Oslin kept to themselves. Aeron selected an unoccupied table at random and dropped onto one rickety stool, his saddlebags by his knee. He tried to ignore the hard stares the other patrons subjected them to. "Friendly crowd," he muttered to his companions.

"Hard times," said Fineghal. "Strangers always come under suspicion when things aren't right."

They waited a long time before an overworked tavern-maid appeared at their table. She might have been a pretty girl once, but her eyes were dull and glazed and her frame was too lean, as if the life had been wrung out of her drop by drop. "What d'ya care for, gentlemen?" she asked in a mechanical voice.

"Ale," Aeron replied. "The best of what you've got. And we'll need rooms for the night, and feed for our horses."

"That'll be ten gold drakes, in advance," she said.

"Ten drakes!" Eriale recoiled in surprise. "That's a prince's ransom. You must be joking!"

The tired barmaid merely looked at her. "Pay or not, it's your choice. But that's what it will cost you."

"Five drakes should buy us lodging for the week," Fineghal said to the barmaid. "But I've no wish to sleep outside tonight, so I'll give you three now and two tomorrow morning for a place to sleep and a meal."

The woman narrowed her eyes, studying Fineghal for a long moment before agreeing. She turned away to fetch their ale. While she was gone, one of the soldiers rose from his table, sauntered over, and kicked a chair into place beside Eriale. He was a pock-faced man with dense black hair on his arms and a gap-toothed, yellow smile. The soldier offered Eriale a leering wink and said to Fineghal, "I see you're a fellow swordsman. Where're you bound?"

"Mordulkin," Fineghal replied.

"A long way," said the soldier. He leaned back in his chair, folding his hairy arms. "Taking service there?"

Fineghal replied with a shrug. "There's always work to be found in the city."

"Especially with war in the air," the soldier observed. He studied Fineghal, his eyes narrowed. Despite his affable manner, he was not nearly so drunk as he wanted them to think he was. "Who do you intend to sell your sword to?"

"Doesn't matter."

"Stay out of Akanax's service," the soldier said, "unless you want to fight against wizardry." He made a sour face, leaning over to spit on the floor.