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the body. The lantern at her feet cast a golden swath on the dead face. The icy wind gusted inside the lantern with a whoosh that sent flickering shadows trembling in the shed. The amber light seemed almost as uncertain as the shadows themselves, like colored darkness.
    Elaine huddled inside her hooded cloak. There had been much yelling about her braving the cold so soon after nearly dying, butin the end, they had listened to Gersalius. He said she would be fine. It was magic, and on that, like it or not, Gersalius was the expert.
    The wizard moved up beside them, kneeling by the body. His thick cloak spread like a dark pool on the hard ground. One pale hand appeared from his cloak to trace the man’s cold face. His fingers were very long and graceful: musician’s hands, poet’s hands. They traced the bones of the cheek, the chin, the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the fleshy lips. Without looking up, he said, “What do you see, Elaine?”
    “I see a dead man,” she said.
    “Look with more than your eyes.”
    Elaine shivered, drawing her cloak tighter. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    He looked up. His eyes were thrown into shadow, like blind holes. His face was strange, somber, no longer friendly or even approachable. Kneeling there in the fire-kissed dark, fingers touching the corpse’s up-turned face, he was suddenly a sorcerer, with all that one word implied.
    “Come, Elaine, we have had this discussion before. You are a budding wizard, a witch, if you prefer. Tell me what you see.”
    His voice filled the shed, beating against the darkness. It was not a shout, and yet it was, as if his voice shouted on other ears besides her normal ones.
    “We haven’t got all night, wizard,” Tereza said. She stamped her feet against the cold. “Question her later, in the warmth.”
    Gersalius did not even look at her; his black-hole eyes never wavered from Elaine’s face. “She must learn.”
    “I asked if you could discover why the great tree had come to life. You asked to see the corpse. I brought you. Now you go allmysterious on me. Why is it that wizards can never do anything like normal people?”
    He turned to her at last, a slow move of his head. As his eyes moved out of shadow, they gleamed with a greenish light, the color of nothing in the shed.
    His eyes weren’t really glowing, were they? Elaine did not want to know if they were.
    “You wanted me to discover something about the spell that killed this man. I am trying to do just that,” the mage explained patiently.
    “I asked you about the spell that animated the tree. We know what killed the man,” insisted Tereza.
    “Do you? Do you really?”
    “The tree tore him in half, old man.”
    “That is how he died, yes, but not what killed him.”
    “It is too cold for riddles.”
    “And too cold for interruptions, gypsy.”
    Elaine’s eyes flicked to Tereza. No one used that tone with her, not and lived a long and happy life.
    Tereza drew a long breath that steamed in the air. Her eyes looked away from the kneeling wizard. “You are right. My apologies.”
    Elaine couldn’t have been more astonished if Tereza had sprouted a second head. The woman never apologized, not for anything.
    “Is that a spell?” She blurted it out before she had time to think. If it were a spell, saying so was not a good idea. Or perhaps it was. Gersalius shouldn’t be bewitching them with his eyes. Surely Jonathan would disapprove of that.
    Tereza smiled. “It is not a spell. The mage is trying to teach yousorcery, and I am questioning his methods. If I were teaching you swordplay, I would not want to be second-guessed.” She made a small bowing motion with her arms. “Pray, continue, wizard. I will merely stand here freezing while you play schoolmarm.”
    “Graciousness becomes you, Mistress Ambrose.” His voice held a familiar lilt of humor. It was the voice that had been so comforting in the kitchen. Then he turned back to her, and as his eyes crossed into