She was a gibbering wreck for more than half an hour. While she told Dueril her story, Caden improvised shelter from the earth beneath the snow. Salvar didn't have as much magic to work with as Raiaera, and the mountains were especially difficult since this was land that had risen in spite of everything trying to keep iflat, but Caden made do. Three slabs, crushing together until they formed something kin to a teepee, and then Caden raised it up on thick pillars of rock until he was barely eyelevel with the small crawlhole in and out. More geomancy and he put a narrow ladder in and out, and then dragged his wand across the underside in the shape of runes. Warmth.

If he hadn't been so brutalized the week before, he probably would have stopped to make such a shelter for himself.

He helped the woman up the ladder, even though she looked almost as terrified of him as she had been of the story she told. Dueril promised to come back later, and she watched them go without a word. There wasn't any hope in her eyes. She was practically a dead woman walking, and her story lodged in Caden's mind the rest of the way to Borse-Aryakham.

"They came in the night," the woman told them. Dueril had identified her as Lasya, a miner's wife. "They waited until the mining shift was changing and then they came and there was nothing we could do to stop them. We tried. We tried we tried we tried but there was nothing any of us could do! They killed anyone who fought back. The miners tried to outnumber them and it didn't do any good at all! Just three of them and the village was almost brought to its knees in minutes! And then the leader came...

"He took our dead, Dwight. He took my husband and raised him from a corpse! But it wasn't him anymore. His eyes were so empty, so lifeless. But he moved. He moved and he moved and he kept telling stories and he took a knife to our boy. He took a knife to me too. And when he was done he sang a song and nailed his own brother to a wall, right at the elbows. Oh Saint...

"When they'd proven that we couldn't do anything to stop them, they gathered us all in one of the barns and started letting children out. Saint, I could hear my boy screaming for hours...and then they sent him and some others out into the cold to find a...to find..." She had looked at Caden then, and he understood why she was afraid of him. "To find a Wizard...

"After the first few, they started letting the mothers go. They stripped us, to make us go faster. Keep us from going too far if we found our babies. Keep us coming back to see what they'd do to our husbands. Mothers only; any mere 'maiden' was just chained up around the neck by their leader and...

"I had a daughter too, Dwight.

"She's not even fourteen years old."