“What are your people armed with?” Rynyrth asked. “The latest from my brother Morlock says that distance weapons are best against these beasts.”

Thea displayed her spear. Aloê shamefacedly presented the knife she had scavenged from the burned-out Raenli homestead, and a club that had, until recently, been a tree branch.

Rynyrth examined them gravely. “I know you are dangerous with any weapons,” she said. “But my weidhkyrren bring songbows with gravebolts, enough to arm most of you.”

Aloê dropped her club and sheathed her knife with great relief, accepting the new weapons offered by the dwarves. Thea was more reluctant: she was used to her spear, which was strong enough for stabbing but balanced for throwing. But there was no denying the greater force of the songbow, so she slung her spear over her shoulder for emergencies and adapted to the needs of the moment.

The gravebolts were much like ordinary arrows, but the shaft of each one contained an impulse well.

“The gore,” Rynyrth explained to Thea, tapping the pointed arrowhead, “bears a talic oculus. See that silver ring around the point? You take the bow; you aim the bolt at what you would strike. If the target has a talic presence, the arrow will perceive it. The pattern in the arrowhead freezes at the moment of release from the bow. The bolt will travel straight from the release to the target. Don’t count on a rise and fall, as you would with a normal arrow.”

Rynyrth drew a gravebolt from her own quiver. She showed a mark on the shaft to the Guardians: it looked a bit like a pine tree with the branches missing on one side. “Note the rune. Your gravebolts will fly at the note of your songbow, no other.” She spun the arrow a few times to fill its impulse well and then fitted the bolt to her bow. She took aim at a nearby tree; she released the arrow and the bow sang it on its way. It struck the tree with splintering force and the tree shed a year’s worth of new needles. Rynyrth retrieved the gravebolt and showed it to Thea and Aloê: it was undamaged. She replaced it in her quiver.

Thea was impressed. “What is its range?” she asked.

“It will vary from weidhkyrr to weidhkyrr. We find a gravebolt usually travels three or four times as far as an ordinary bowshot.”

“And it always hits its target.”

“There is no always. The target must have a talic imprint, and that imprint must be more or less stable. But usually a shot means a strike.”

“It’s not very sporting.”

Rynyrth’s dark eyes crossed with amusement. “Listen, Rokhlan, I don’t know how it is with you. We do not shoot for sport. For sport we sing and dance; we climb trees; we juggle; we do many things. When we shoot, we kill.”

Aloê almost spoke to interrupt the tension she saw developing between the two females, but Thea laughed and put her hand on Rynyrth’s shoulder and the moment passed. Thea was much like one of the Weidhkyrren, Aloê reflected. She never fought without purpose, and then she fought without quarter.

From that moment their dual leadership became a triad. In principle, Guardians could not command the Guarded, and in addition Rynyrth was a sensible female who had seen combat before, albeit not since the Year of Fire when dragons invaded the Northhold.

They paused for part of that day so that the Guardians could acquaint themselves with their new weapons and so that the two groups could acquaint themselves with each other. Rynyrth had news, too, that the senior Guardians needed to discuss. Lernaion and Earno, their resplendent white cloaks somewhat the worse for travel, joined the informal council but listened more than they spoke. There was an art to being a summoner; Noreê called it “leading without command.” Aloê didn’t fully understand it, but she was glad that the males didn’t try to steal the thread of conversation.

Rynyrth used the butt of her songbow to sketch out a rough map of the gravehills on a patch of soft ground. “Eldest Vetr is sending his bowmen—” She used the Wardic word with a wry inflection “—here, in the northwest. The Gray Folk, all but the children and their caregivers, hold the hills in the south.”

“Where is everyone else?” asked dry, dark-skinned Lernaion. “We found their town empty.”

“They are under Thrymhaiam, enjoying the courtesy of their ruthen kin, the Seven Clans.” Again, Rynyrth smiled as she spoke: there was some tension there, Aloê knew, between the dwarves and the mandrakes. Or was it between the male and female dwarves?

“Word from your fellow vocates, Naevros, and my harven-kin Morlock is that they will rally the Silent Folk beyond Kirach Starn and attack from the west. They say they will drive the Khnauronts before them.”

“Bold words,” observed Thea dryly.

“Maybe. That harven-kin of mine is reckless enough to earn a hero’s grave.” She drummed her fingers thrice on the wood of her songbow. “Not in this war, we hope, Oldfather Tyr.”

Aloê did not disagree with any of this, but there were more urgent matters to discuss. “Then we stand in the east and await the retreat of the Khnauronts?”

“You stab at the matter’s heart,” Rynyrth said agreeably.

“Then I recommend we take up station on and around the Hill of Storms,” Aloê said. “It is the tallest of the gravehills—best for watching, best for defense, and it commands the passes to the south, if the Khnauronts try to flee that way.”

“You speak my thought, harven.”

“Agreed,” said Thea.

The summoners said nothing, but turned away to call their junior Guardians back to the march. The red-cloaked vocates among them had as much right as anyone else to participate in the decision just made, but none of them seemed to have been interested. Aloê was often struck at how often the independence of the vocates was merely theoretical. As soon as most Guardians got the right to stand among the Graith at Station and wear the red cloaks of vocates, they sought out one of the summoners to follow, as if they were still thains. It was odd to her . . . but in this case it made for a quicker result.

They pressed their march and halted at last in twilight on the dark shoulders of the Hill of Storms, or Tunglskin, as the dwarves called it. Thains, vocates, and weidhkyrren sat side by side, drank water or bitter ale from bottles, and munched cold provisions. There was not much talk.

Aloê, Thea, Rynyrth, and the summoners stood atop the hill, in front of the Broken Altar. Once the first and greatest of the Corain had been imprisoned here, but he had been slain at last and in truth during the Year of Fire by a bewildered young man whom Aloê had later married. She took some comfort from that thought but didn’t speak of it. She spent part of the time going through her quiver and making sure the gravebolts all bore the same mark as her songbow: a tangle of curves with a sharp protrusion or two—something like a rose. There was little chance her harven-kin would have made a mistake and included the wrong gravebolt in her quiver . . . but it is the kind of life-losing chance that sometimes happens in combat. Anyway, there was little else to do.

As night arose, the three moons opened their eyes: Horseman glowering and red in the west, Chariot perhaps halfway up the vault of the sky, with Trumpeter rising, searingly bright in the west.

“Khai, gradara,” whispered Rynyrth to the rising moon.

As if in response, the banefires were kindled on the gravehills—but not on all of them. There was a cloud of darkness in the heart of the burning blue graves.

“Rokhlan Earno,” Rynyrth said, “why do they kill the dead Corain? We know it is so because the Guardians said it in their message, and because we in Over Thrymhaiam watched the banefires go out, one by one. But we don’t understand. Why kill the dead?”

“Dead is a relative term,” Lernaion began, but Earno, talking over him, said, “Incidental, I think. The banefires are tal-sinks—they are meant to drain away the tal of the dead Corain. Unfortunately, they learned to master them and use them to drink the tal of living beings nearby. It is the tal implicit in the banefire web that the Khnauronts crave. We think they live on tal as much or more than they live on flesh.”