BARBARA HAMBLY
Icefalcon’s Quest
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Copyright © 1998 by Barbara Hambly
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006483038
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007469208 Version: 2016-12-22
For Neil Gaiman
Contents
Had the Icefalcon still been living among the Talking Stars People, the penalty for not recognizing the old man he encountered in the clearing by the four elm trees would have been the removal of his eyes, tongue, liver, heart, and brain, in that order. His head would have been cut off, and, the Talking Stars People being a thrifty folk, his hair taken for bowstrings, his skin for ritual leather, and his bones for tools and arrowheads. If it was a bad winter, they would have eaten his flesh, too, so it was just as well that his misdeed occurred in the middle of spring.
The Icefalcon considered all this logical and justified: the laws of his ancestors were not the reason that he no longer lived among the Talking Stars People.
All the horror that followed could have been avoided had he minded his own business, as was his wont. Sometimes he felt that he had spent entirely too much time living among civilized people.
It had been a bad year for bandits. The summer following the Summerless Year had seen more than the usual bloody strife in the rotting kingdoms that once made up the empire of the Alketch in the South, and bands of paid-off warriors, both black and white, drifted north to prey on the small communities along the Great Brown River. It was said they had penetrated far to the east, into the Felwoods, though few came so far north as the Vale of Renweth. Now it was spring again. When a woman’s screams and a man’s thin cries for help sliced the cold, sharp air of the Vale, the Icefalcon guessed immediately what was going on.
In