Chapter 1

The candles still burned, Vanyel being far too comfortable – perhaps exhausted was the better word – to do anything about them. Tylendel was asleep beside him, limbs splayed about him and tangled up in a tousled mess of sheets. Vanyel smiled at him and pulled the thicker blanket about him against the chill he felt in the room, huddling under it and shivering inadvertently when his foot touched the warmer skin of his leg. It felt like a damned block of ice. Tylendel shifted and made a noise in his sleep, unconsciously scraping the sheets farther down his body, sweat glistening on his skin in the fitful candlelight. It was odd, the difference in their respective sensitivities to temperature: Tylendel seemed to radiate some inner heat from some unknown sun shining even in the depths of his psyche, whereas Vanyel found himself shivering under the heat of the noonday sun in summer. As if, as opposed to the sun beaming resplendent within Tylendel, Vanyel's body contained a block of ice – ice that crept outward, expanding…

Tylendel shifted again and Vanyel felt the weight of an arm settle on his side. He smiled sleepily to himself. Well, at least his innate cool kept him from sweating, Vanyel mused, muzzily grasping at humour, if he sweated as much as Tylendel on a daily basis, he'd have ruined his brocade vests long ago. Sweat seemed to suit Tylendel, though. Something to do with golden skin… Vanyel felt his eyes close, distantly, the weight of Tylendel's arm an anchor dragging him down into sleep.

The hall was dark, the windows closed against the cool air of the night, and there was a stillness that reverberated off the shadowed walls, one born of shock. There was smoke rising from the darkened candles in their sconces up and down the hall – as if they had all been extinguished, just now, all at the same time. But there were hundreds of them, it was impossible that they could have all been snuffed out at once… A gust of wind – but the windows were all closed…

Vanyel blinked once. Twice. He felt a tingling sensation in his hands, one that he could not name but found distressingly familiar; and the pounding in his head, not a pounding similar to any hangover he had ever experienced – it felt like a part of his brain had declared independence, detached itself from the whole, and had decided to throw a particularly raucous celebration to commemorate the event. Vision blurring once again, Vanyel forced another blink.

Someone shifted in the darkness in front of him. There were people here in the dark, with him, people who had been shocked into silence and stillness. Vanyel squinted: there were faces he recognised. His Aunt Savil was there, with some of the Heralds that came to see her so often; then there was the Queen, Elspeth, looking more shaken than he had ever seen her, flanked by a few other nobles he couldn't quite name but was aware of knowing in some way…The person next Savil shifted again, taking a step towards him this time. He raked his eyes blearily around him, realising belatedly that there must be twenty or so people gathered around him, arranged in a circle that looked as if it had been recently disturbed. As if everyone had taken a few steps back from… from him, standing in the centre.

"Van?" The voice was – Tylendel. Vanyel tried to focus his eyes as he stared in the direction of the voice, but there was something preventing him, something flashing across his vision in spurts of colour and twinges of visible sound. The pressure – the pounding – in his head was growing, his vision seeming to drown in the flashes of colour and sound just as his thoughts drowned in that pain.

"Boy? Can you hear me? What is this, a trance?" There was a hand on him, probably his arm or his shoulder, but Vanyel couldn't quite tell. The voice was no longer Tylendel's – it was now Savil's voice, hoarser than usual, sending a spate of angry purple across his line of vision. But it jerked something in his sputtering mind into place and he knew that there was something he had to tell them, something the Circle needed to hear – and needed to hear now.

"Listen to me." His voice echoed in his own ears, and he felt everything go still and silent in the room – more so, even, than it had been before – and all attention was fixed on him. The voice that issued from his own lips sounded portentous, ominous in a way Vanyel almost found amusing. He sounded like some jester at court, spinning some yarn about heroes of old and the triumph of good over evil, entertaining the children by adopting the booming tones of some crazed mage or other. Vanyel would have laughed, even, if there hadn't been something in his own tone that sobered him. An inflection conveying absolute conviction, denying any comparison with jesters or children's tales – his voice was that of portent and it was genuine. Genuine enough to be frightening. Somehow he knew that it was upon his tone that the attention of the room was hooked. He continued without quite realising it, without quite knowing what he was saying or why he was saying it:

"Trust not the hawk, nor the eagle, no matter how loftily they perch and peck at your door. The crow, bowing and scraping at your doorstep and cheating and stealing once your back is turned, is the truest servant you will find once the coming dark falls. Not because the crow feels loyalty, nor any real obligation though he take your offered charity without qualm, but because the crow's plumage is black. The crow will fly through the dark without soliciting a glimmer of suspicion and serve those who offer him most; the hawk and the eagle will fall, shot out of the night sky, their nobility as useless as their fealty when their life is extinguished. Trust not the crow with your heart and soul, but trust him with your throne and safety. He is the warrior who may guide us through to victory, but victory is not in his interests. Trust the crow in the pitch of night; beware the crow in the dawning of the day." Vanyel felt his dry throat close after the final words, his body seeming to know better than his conscious mind what was needful at this gathering of gatherings. He could hear an audible gasp from somewhere in the room, but it was too far away to affect him.

He was lost under a tsunami of colours and rushing sounds and flickering sensations. His mind – or some other force – swept conscious thought aside as the room was lost to him, feeling only the tile under his cheek and hearing only the clatter of feet hastening towards him before he was gone.

Swirling all about him, in some nebulous plane of possibility, were paths. Streams and fords and rivers and channels flowed all around him in perpetual motion and perpetual uncertainty; some were overlapping, some criss-crossed each other, others were juxtaposed and perpendicular, and still others ran parallel each other with a thrumming energy linking them. Vanyel felt himself caught up in the storm of motion and change, unable to find himself in the tumult, unable to keep himself from being tossed about and battered by the forces that reigned in this terrible place. He was thrust into the channels by whatever forces carried him, first into one then into another, following them in the courses and seeing to their cores. Watching it all go up in flames…

That was when he understood. He understood the words that he had spoken, why he had though them so important; he understood this place and its endless mutation; he understood it all because –

"Van?"

Vanyel started from his sleep, ripped from his dream with as much force as he had felt in that realm of channels, and paths, and movement. He searched the room quickly, recognising nothing for a moment, his chest heaving and his skin brittle with cold. A hand set on his shoulder caused him to flinch, turning in the direction of the attack with as much alertness as he could muster. He met only Tylendel's wide eyes.

"Hey, Van, calm down! You were having a dream, though I don't imagine it was a terribly good one. Just," Tylendel shifted closer and slipped his arms under the blanket Vanyel trembled under, "breathe for a minute."

Vanyel felt Tylendel's heat, burning all the hotter for his concern, and allowed himself to relax. All was well, it was merely a dream. Merely a dream – or so he wished to tell himself as Tylendel held him and the cold and the trembling abated. But the voice he had used to address the Circle still rang in his ears, the primal vibration of that realm of channels was encased in his bones. Sure, it was a dream… It was a dream like the ice dream – not really a dream at all.

"Are you okay?" The question was whispered into his hair, the concern still there but rendered fuzzy and soft around the edges by the sleep that had crept back into Tylendel's voice. A hand reached up to stroke his hair and Vanyel realised that he had yet to stop trembling. He was suddenly embarrassed – it was foolish to keep Tylendel from his rest like this, terrified out of his wits by a… 'dream'. He was acting like a child.

"I'm fine. Go back to sleep." Vanyel let the protests die on their own as Tylendel lay back and was soon fast asleep. He curled up next to Tylendel's sleeping form, trying to drink in as much of his heat as he could – his skin still felt as hard and cold and fragile as ice.

He tried to close his eyes and tried to find sleep again, knowing that, by the time-honoured adage his mother had recited constantly, that one could not experience two night terrors in one night. Unless there were special circumstances. And Vanyel knew that whatever that had been, it had not been a dream. His eyes opened slowly, fixed on the ceiling – dark now, as the candle had evidently guttered while he had been asleep – and they did not close again.

It wasn't a dream. And, as Vanyel continued to shake, pressed up against Tylendel as he slept beside him, he wasn't quite sure it really terrified him.