Winter.

Unrelenting, filled with the malice of iron and ice, it came to the land, devouring the green, cracking trees and rock as it went, a nameless God of cold death. Who would dare to name the God, who would dare to acknowledge him as he waged war upon the warmth of Sun?

They called him therefore, merely Winter, and hoped he would spare them from his icy embrace.

That word had always spread a chill throughout men's hearts, as they steeled themselves for months of cold, tightened their belts, and prepared for the Season of Wolves. They looked to their mage for the herbs they needed to cure pestilences born of damp and ice, for the charms that could steer a wolf-pack away from their sheep pens, and for the amulets that persuaded the rats to look elsewhere for grain and salted meat. Just what the mage got from all this, nobody ever wondered, or cared. Certainly he himself did not seem to care that they had nothing he could possibly want, these simple folk who had little to think about but food and shelter and surviving the bitter snows that came from the mountains. He ghosted across the land with his pack full of herbs and medicines, and he never stayed long in any one place. The country folk said he lived in a tower carved from blue rock, surrounded by ice, and not even the wolves dared disturb him in his home. No-one had ever been there. He would have welcomed visitors, but there was no-one desperate enough for his company to make that journey, and so he would leave his tower, trudge across the barren steppe, and peddle herbs and amulets for a night by a warm fire, and hot food in his belly. It hadn't always been that way. One day, they would bar their doors against him and call him nything, and his bitterness would destroy all they knew, until their land turned to nothing but ice and rock.

The mage, as everyone knew, was the land. It molded itself to him, until he became part of it. This mage was tall, with hair the colour of sunlit snow, and eyes the colour of cold iron with the glint of a bright winter sun in them. He could feel the rock deep down beneath his feet, he could dowse for water and well-springs, call up new Spring shoots and send the trees to rest in Autumn. He could raise his arms and bring in the winds, and he drew ice to him with reverence and joy. He stood straight and proud, yet serenity lived in his smile and his touch was warmth and comfort.

His folk loved him, and the wolves respected him.

When the mage went away, the land fell silent. There was nothing to mark his leaving, not even the prints of his boots in the snow.

Across a lonely waste of ice, he trudged, his head down and his mind closed to the bone-cracking cold. He'd angered the gods, so he did not pray to them. He walked South, for there was nothing North, nothing but the Northers, and them, he did not want to meet. Beyond their land lay a dark sea, and only his books told him what was beyond that, for there was no-one alive now who'd made that journey.

He'd burned his books.

And he went South because his blood cried for fire. He left behind him a terrible legacy, something that should never have walked the earth, but by his will of arrogance and ignorance, it did. He sent it North, to the dark island, in the hope that the fog and the ice would kill it, and it would never find him.

'A few months' supply is all I can give you. The things I need are scarce and rare now. My dear, this can't go on. I don't know how much longer I will be able to help you.'

He took the vial from her, turned it round and round in fingers cramped and crooked with blisters. The bottle was smooth and cold, straight from the North; he craved the chill. 'Thank you,' was all he said.

His visitor sighed, rolling diamond-black eyes whose beauty still had the power to melt his heart. 'Tell me you'll take better care of yourself.'

'I...' he stopped. How to tell her the only way to throw off this malady was to go home, and that he could never do? He'd told her before. She refused to believe him.

She touched his cheek with one finger. 'I am a believer in one truth, and that is that time heals all,' she said. 'You've been gone from Vertland more than two hundred years. Whatever you think you did to deserve this self-imposed exile is surely forgotten by the folk of the North?'

'I haven't forgotten.' He tucked the bottle into a pocket hidden in the folds of his cloak. Though the heat of Cartha reached even this far North, where the forests of the lazy jungle South met his borders, the nights were always several degrees below freezing. 'And as long as I live, I will remember.'

'Then you'll die here.'

'I know. I came to die here, or have you missed the point entirely? I'm just sorry it's taking so long.'

Her breath misted the night as she leaned in to kiss him softly on the cheek. Time was, he remembered, when that kiss would have touched his lips, and he'd have returned it ten-fold, with a passion he could hardly remember feeling, now.

'Time is death, and it is also healing,' she whispered. 'Soon one will be, Serthesen. I wish it were the other. Go home.'

'I can't.' He turned from her, to face the star-lit night above him, and snapped his fingers. To draw out the farewell, as they did every other time, would prolong her pain, and he had nothing with which to take it away. So he left her there, and hoped she would not stay for his return, because he didn't intend to.

The lands to the South were strange to a man from the cold steppe of the North, and though this one had called these lands home for longer than he cared to remember, they never lost that strangeness. He was always a traveller, though he returned to the same place each night. He was always a stranger, though he spoke to the same people each day, drank with them, ate with them, exchanged stories with them. He did not have friends. He never allowed anyone close enough to call them that, but he didn't notice the lack. Self-contained and naturally quiet, there were those who said he was haughty, and others who said, with malicious smiles, that he was merely dull.

He was neither. Now, as he picked his way carefully among the stones of the forest path, the shadows seemed to seek him out, wrap him and cloak him in a caressing layer of protection, but it was the tiny ball of light he held in his hand that marked him as a mage. He made for the inn that stood on the edge of the trees, brambled round and dilapidated, but warm inside, and welcoming. Two moments ago he'd landed in a crumple of bruised limbs, sucking in his breath to stifle the scream of pain that threatened to rend the silence of the wood. Fifty miles, as the crow flies. He could travel that far in a mere heartbeat, but it cost him dear. But the inn had two things he wanted: fiery, pain-numbing drink, and gossip. Two things Cartha did not have, and this was the nearest town.

He pushed the door open, flooding the road with golden light, crossed to the bar, and elbowed himself a place. Several faces familiar to him greeted him with cordial smiles, and their owners squeezed up along the bench near the fire and made room for him. The fire warmed him to the point of discomfort, but the night was cold and though he loved the windy darkness, to stand in it would only have prompted some funny looks and awkward questions. Are you alright? Aren't you cold? Come in by the fire! You'll catch your death.

'Damn cold night, Soufien,' the landlord said by way of greeting. He laughed, a warm, jovial sound. 'Aren't they all, though? You look peaky. A two-shot of whisky?'

'Make it three,' the mage said with a wince as someone next to him squeezed in a little too tight on the bench and bruised his wrist. 'Ice too, if you have it.'

He took the drink and downed half with a grateful gulp. It shot to the back of his throat and burned with a fire that for once, he loved. The ice slid down after it and he leaned his head wearily back against the high hard back of the bench. No-one said much to him, they never did, continuing their conversations that occasionally included him, for his wisdom and far-sightedness. He made no effort to join the talk, preferring to listen. He learned much that way, and gave little away.

The less they knew about him the better, and so they called him Soufien Nath to his face, and the wraith behind his back, thinking he didn't know that. He did not give them another name by which to call him, though he had one. He rose again, having emptied his first glass, and ordered another.

The landlord bit the coin Soufien handed over, grunted in approval, and dropped it into the metal strong-box under the counter. 'You're drinking me dry,' he grumbled without rancour. 'Do you know how hard it is to get this stuff? I've a shipment on order but when it'll arrive God only knows - another ship went down off the Port of Lisse last week! It's these infernal summer winds. I wonder at anyone putting to sea in this weather.'

'There are those who can handle their rigs better than that,' said Soufien with a brief smile. 'The Fäärslaans, for one. Iskallan coasters for another. In fact, all Northers can sail any storm. Perhaps your luck will turn.' He didn't think so, however. The winds could last for months, with no letting up until well into Autumn. The land always coped, always rode the storms. He looked around him. The inn's low ceilings rang with loud chatter, laughter, and jokes, packed to the brim with men who'd finished their working day and now wanted nothing better than to drink away the sweat and grime. This was a day before a holiday, and so they'd started as they meant to go on through the next three days. Only he didn't drain his glass the moment it was refilled, but sat quiet and unassuming on a bench with three others, listening to the talk around him.

The rumours were rife again, and though he had heard it all before, he nonetheless thought it prudent this time to offer his own opinions lest they think he was a part of the conspiracy. They knew him well enough in these parts, though his home was three days' ride away. They knew him as well as anybody did...which is to say, not well. He was nondescript in appearance, and though many might have passed him by and thought nothing of him, there was no hiding what he was. His coat, long and dusty, might once have been brown, might once have been grey. Red dust clung to the hem, mildew stained the cuffs. A long tear down the back had been neatly stitched, but there was no mistaking a sword slash. Had it been a strike aimed at him? They'd never know, because they'd never ask. They knew him for a mage, their mage, and they knew a certain pride because of that. Mages chose their stomping-grounds carefully, and if a neighbourhood or town had one, then it considered itself fortunate. Plague and pestilence did not walk where a mage had set his feet. Even this mage.

'Mistwort?' he said, staring thoughtfully into his glass. 'Are you certain that is the plant this...somebody, whoever it is, is looking for?'

'S'what I heard. Can't say I ever heard of it,' said the landlord, busy wiping glasses with a damp linen towel. Soufien chewed his lip, thinking hard.

'Mistwort? 'S'known as redruthen in our parts! Northers! What do they know?' The garrulous old man in the seat next to him hawked, threatened to spit, and hastily swallowed it again as he caught the landlord's furious eye. Soufien took a long draught of whisky, thinned with lemon-water and salt. Sour, like fiery seawater, the way he liked it.

'Pah. Like as not they'll still come looking here, and you know what happened last time anyone dared hunt for mistwort.' The old man's companion, as old and gnarled as he, chuckled nastily. '1231 it were, in the middle of bloody winter an' all. King Athal gave 'em a bloody good hiding! And served 'em right.'

Soufien nodded agreement, and silently cursed the ancient, long-dead King Athal to the nearest hell. He remembered well those times; he'd been one of the plant's hunters.

'Mistwort's a strange name for a plant that's red as blood,' he put in, his mouth quirking at the corners in amusement. He felt none. Far from it being the Northers they spoke of who lacked knowledge, it was these backwards Southern country folk, as rooted in their ways as any North-eastern sea-mage, who were ignorant. Was that his own fault? Should he have taught them more? Should he have revealed more of who he was?

From the corner came the lively, jaunty notes of a song, the player plucking the strings with an energy he wished he could feel. The music sidled under his skin, slithered craftily into his bones, and made him rebuke it; he had no inclination to give in to light-hearted pleasures. He could not dance, could not risk his feet crushed under another's, or a too-forceful stamp of the foot.

'A strange name indeed, sorceror.' His companion nodded sagely, inspecting the contents of his thick, rough-blown glass with a critical eye. 'Aye, well, my friend, mayhap the mist in the North's red as blood!'

'Then they have never seen blood. I have seen too much of it.' He drained his own glass. He felt suddenly disinclined to join in their ignorance. The rumours, this time, were more than that, he knew. Someone was looking, they said, though they didn't know who. The plant was rare enough, but he knew where it could be found. And he knew what it was used for. 'I have to go, gentlemen,' he announced as he rose. No-one answered him. The musician in the corner was well underway with her song, and her audience was picking up the chorus with gusto. There was a part of him that still remembered how it felt to dance, but he never gave that part credence anymore.

He let the door slam behind him as he left, and turned his collar up against the bitter red winds that blew up from the South.

He knew the plant by yet another name. Magebane. Who was it who was looking? He looked to the sky, in the vain hope the answer would reveal itself there, but there was nothing but pale blue shot with rays of pale gold as the sun rose. Whoever it was, they must not find it – he had to see to that at all costs. The damage that could be wrought with it was too great to risk even a single petal. Under his skin, his bones tingled, like glass tapped with a silver cane. He felt the shadow pass over his grave, and felt the exhilaration that could only mean one thing: that whoever wanted the plant was himself a mage.

He knew of only two, besides himself, who knew enough to use magebane, and only one who would want to.

You would raise your ugly head again and find me, I knew you would!

After all these years, he was still hated. He wished he could understand.

The mage stamped his foot, howled in pain, and left the country village in a whirlwind of red dust.