At home he'd liked snow, liked to run in it. The hive mind showed the forefathers running on it, on broad skis split from birch and strapped to their feet, with furs laced on for traction. Their ancient homeland had been rich in snow, and the forefathers had run on skis to herd reindeer.

He himself had never had time to learn the skill. Few did. The lands they'd migrated to seldom had prolonged snow cover except in the higher mountains. In winter it rained a lot and snowed only occasionally.

Here in Vismearc he'd slighted running, as he had in Bavaria. He'd been too busy. Even on the march he'd slighted it, slowed by the pace of his human infantry. Then, after establishing their forward line on the Deep River, they'd begun setting up their winter base at the west side of the Merrawin Valley. And he'd begun running an hour each evening.

That had been late Ten-Month, barely a week past. Even allowing for the cold autumn, there should nave been time to build hutments for the troops before weather like this. As it was, most of the huts consisted only of survey stakes set by the engineers. Stakes now buried. The huts completed were for voitar and the higher ranking humans. Even most of them were without real roofs-log walls with a tarpaulin over a roof frame, their doors and windows mere holes in the walls, with curtains, blankets actually, that one could hook shut, more or less.

A truly wretched base camp! His father would not approve.

As it was, his father didn't know, for the hive mind had proven to have distance limits. Well before his army reached Vismearc, the rest of the species had faded out of touch. The historical hive mind it carried, but as for current events-they knew only those of the army's own seventeen hundred voitar.

They'd adjusted to the sense of disconnection, but it could still be disconcerting on occasion.

His run hadn't taken him through the hutment area and the vast bedraggled tent camp. That would simply have aggravated him. Instead he'd run in the quiet forest, on a narrow woods road, then followed his tracks back. Already they were little more than a shallow groove in the snow. Now he could make out his quarters ahead-a forester's cabin at the forest's edge, simple but comfortable. The ylvin torch had missed it.

He'd already decided to move his headquarters to a large manorial farmhouse he'd been told of. Not only the house, but the barns and other outbuildings had all escaped burning. It was much nearer the Deep River, where the 1st and 4th Divisions were on line. And where winter quarters were no more ready than they were in the Merrawin Valley base camp.

Major General Hohs Gruismak stood in the vacant doorway of his cabin, watching it snow. He'd never seen so much fall so early, or so fast.

Gruismak was not a commander. He was a human, General Orovisz's hithik aide, and his job was dealing with "administrative" problems. Mostly problems that could have been avoided if he'd been allowed advance input.

Troop morale had been low since Prince Chithqosz's army had been brought north. Their stories of the small-folk-of their ferocity and devilish ingenuity-had spread like a grassfire through the rest of the army. Stories enriched by the notion that dwarven sorcerers had called down the storm and the flood.

And now this damned snowstorm. The men had been busy much of the day trying to prevent the wet snow from collapsing their tents.

The army, he told himself, should never have left the Merrawin River, only twenty-five miles east. True the locals had torched the towns and villages, but many walls remained, needing mainly roofs and doors. And to the north, patrols had found pine woods. Thus it hadn't been necessary to move west to the edge of forest. Poles for roofs, and logs for hutments, could have been floated down the Merrawin. While here the forest was mostly of hardwoods, harder to cut, heavier to haul and raise, and requiring far more time-consuming dressing with axes to fit together halfway decently. Nor were hithik soldiers skilled at such work.

But none of that meant anything to Orovisz or the crown prince. They didn't have to solve problems. They just created them, and ordered others to solve them.

He turned to his orderly. "Corporal," he said, "make damn sure your men don't let the tarp come down on us. Otherwise the provost will have a busy day tomorrow with his strap."

"Yessir, General, sir!"

Gruismak walked to his bedroll near the fireplace. The chimney wasn't drawing properly, and the hut was smoky. He sat on his pallet to pull off his boots. Not even a damned stool to sit on, he thought. He wished devoutly he'd never heard of Vismearc.

At about midnight the snow had ended. The sky had cleared and the temperature plummeted. Now the newly risen sun glistened off miles and miles of white. Men moved like lines of ants to the firewood piles, or huddled around the thousands of warming fires whose smoke settled and spread among the tents. It was cold enough, the moisture from their breath formed frost on their collars.

Then officers appeared, human and voitik. Sergeants shouted orders. Reluctantly, heavily, the soldiers left their fires, or dropped the wood they carried, and formed ranks. Within minutes they were trudging through the knee-deep snow to their work details. The smarter of them saw the value of it. They needed to get their huts built, so they'd have effective shelter before winter arrived.

Before winter arrived!

The great raven soared high above the Pomatik River, more than a hundred miles south of the invader's base camp. It was the twelfth of Eleven-Month. The past few days had been bitter cold, and he'd spent the night in the dense crown of a hemlock, sheltering from radiative heat loss. Now, circling in the hazy morning sunlight, he could see a broad ice shelf along each shore of the river, formed since the day before. Between the shelves, the channel was filled with ice that had broken away in the current. Unless it warmed considerably during the day, the bird knew, the river would probably freeze over by nightfall. If not, another such night would do it.

It was something to call to Old One's attention.

32 On the Move

Winter had come with a vengeance to the country north of Duinarog, around the southern end of that great sweetwater lake called the Middle Sea. Cyncaidh's cohort had reached Southport on four three-masted schooners, two days after the season's first big snowstorm. There the snow had come on a cold wind, and drifting had been severe.

Two days later, Gavriel's war minister, Lord Gaerimor, had arrived in a sleigh, a large cutter drawn by two strong horses. With him he brought five east ylvin refugees to serve the cohort as guides. A great raven had arrived on its own, to be Cyncaidh's communicator. The drifts had delayed arrival of their supplies three days longer, and a bureaucratic foul-up delayed arrival of their horses from the military remount reservation longer still. Meanwhile there was no additional snow, and temperatures much colder than seasonable gripped the land.

On the day after the cohort's arrival, Varia had arrived in a light cutter pulled by a single horse. Through the several days till the cohort was ready to ride east, she stayed with Cyncaidh in the Southport Inn. Both of them recognized the extreme dangers in his mission, and on their last night, their lovemaking had been exceptionally passionate.

Afterward Varia had laid awake thinking. If Raien was killed, what would she feel? What would she do? They'd been together for nearly two decades, two good decades. She would miss him in her bed, miss him around the house, and across the table from her at meals. Miss him in her life.