grunt. Then they were all flat upon the earth, deep in the grasses,
breathing heavily in the sudden stillness.
A Darter’
The name scraped like rough bark on bare skin as she
screamed it in her mind. She remembered how close one had
come to killing her on the way in. Garth’s arm loosened about
her waist, and she signed quickly to him as the hard, bearded
face pushed up next to her own.
Ahead, she heard her grandmother sob.
Frantic now, forgetting everything else, she scrambled for-
ward through the tall grass, the others crawling hurriedly after
her. She passed Gavilan, who was still trying to figure out what
was going on, and caught up with Triss as the Captain of the
Home Guard reached the queen.
Ellenroh was half lying, half bent over the Owl, cradling
him in the crook of one arm as she wiped his sweating face.
The Owl’s scarecrow frame looked as if all the sticks had been
removed and nothing remained but the clothing that draped
them. His eyes were open and staring, and his mouth worked
desperately to swallow.
Dozens of the Darter’s poisonous needles stood out from his
body. He had taken the full brunt of the plant’s attack.
“Aurin,” the queen whispered, and his eyes swung urgently
to find her. “It’s all right. We’re all here.”
Her own eyes lifted to meet Wren’s, and they stared at each
other in helpless disbelief.
“Owl.” Wren spoke softly, her hand reaching out to touch
his face.
Aurin Striate’s breath quickened sharply. “I can’t . . . feel a
thing,” he gasped.
Then his breathing stopped altogether, and he was dead.
WREN DIDN’T SLEEP at all that night. She wasn’t sure any of
them did, but she kept apart from the others so she had no real
way of knowing. She sat alone with Faun curled in her lap at
the base of a shaggy cedar, its trunk overgrown with moss and
vines, and stared out into the swamp. They were less than a
hundred yards from where the attack had occurred, huddled
down against the vog and the night, encircled by the sounds of
things they could not see, too devastated by what had happened
to worry about going farther until morning.
She kept seeing the Owl’s face as he lay dying.
It was just a fluke, she knew, just bad luck. It was nothing
they could have foreseen and there was nothing they could have
done to prevent it. She had come across only one other Darter
until now, one other on the whole of Morrowindl she had trav-
eled through. What were the chances that she should find an-
other here? What were the odds that of all of them it should
end up striking down Aurin Striate?
The improbability of it haunted her.
Would things have turned out differently if Stresa had been
there watching out for them?
There was no solid ground in which to bury the Owl, noth-
ing but marshland where the beasts that lived in Eden’s Murk
would dig him up for food, so they found a patch of quicksand
and sank him to where he could never be touched.
They ate dinner then, what they could manage to eat, talk-
ing quietly about nothing, not even able to contemplate yet
what losing the Owl meant. They ate, drank more than a little
ale, and dispersed into the dark. The Elven Hunters set a watch,
Triss until midnight, Dal until dawn, and the silence settled
down.
Just a fluke, she repeated dismally.
She had so many fond memories of the Owl, even though
she had known him only a short time, and she clung to them as
a shield against her grief. The Owl had been kind to her. He
had been honest, too-as honest as he could be without betray-
ing the queen’s trust. What he could share of himself, he did.
He had told her that very morning that he had been able to
survive outside of Arborlon’s walls all these years because he
had accepted the inevitability of his death and by doing so had
made himself strong against his fear of it. It was a necessary way