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a dead giveaway! But I swallowed, feeling my first stomach lurch and my gizzard quake as I heard the air hiss with that unmistakable stropping sound. First, I saw the spikes of stiff feathers like daggers rising from a hagsfiend’s spine and then a very long tail. Can it really be Penryck? It was. The air stirred about me as he flew by so close I could have reached out and touched him. So close that I saw the little half-hagsswirling in the currents of his tail feathers. These minute parasitic demon creatures are much smaller and not as strong as hagsfiends, but it is as if all evil has been concentrated in them, distilled to the highest potency. Their beaks are said to drip a kind of poison that hagsfiends themselves are immune to. It is a poison that kills the mites that live in hagsfiends’ feathers. The half-hags feed on these mites and are therefore dependent on the hagsfiends for their sustenance. I had pressed my feathers as close to my body as possible and drawn myself up tall, spottilating so as to turn my plummage inside out. In my stillness, my slenderness, and my near whiteness, I was, for all intents and purposes, an icicle—one of many. It seemed to take Penryck forever to fly by. I saw more of his feathers close up than I cared to and more of the half-hag demons. Thankfully, they did not see me. The half-hags have woeful eyesight. Some say it is because they are part bat.
    It should be noted here that the plumage of a hagsfiend and a half-hag is as different from that of any true owl as a snakeskin is different from a bear’s hide. Hagsfiends’ feathers are a deep glistening black, but instead of plummels, those fine fringe feathers that help owls fly so silently, the leading edges of their flight feathers are very long and shaggy and trail through the air, disturbing currents andmaking a hissing sound. And then, of course, there is the awful stench. There is nothing subtle about a hagsfiend and in many ways this is good. One knows when they are coming. But there are other characteristics of these birds that are truly terrifying. Perhaps they do not need to be subtle. Their beaks are as sharp as any ice blade. Their talons are like ice needles. Indeed, all the weapons we have learned to make from the strong ice—ice needles, ice swords, ice splinters, spiked fizgigs—were invented to combat the deadly sharpness of hagsfiends’ beaks and talons.
    Penryck finally did pass by, and it was then safe for me to go into the small fracture in the ice cliffs. I threaded my way through the twisting passages. There was a full moon and, as the storm clouds scudded across the sky, an occasional shaft of moonlight fell through the issen clarren, or clear ice, illuminating the interior of this strange, tangled web of ice and frost. There was nothing more beautiful than the Ice Palace in falling shafts of moonlight. Every ice crystal, every flake of snow radiated intricate faceted designs that sparkled fiercely. It was as if the stars had fallen from the sky and hung suspended within these cliffs.
    Deep in a maze of ice tunnels and channels I came upon her. There she sat, the widow queen, trembling onthe nest of her egg. Her breast was nearly bare from the feathers she had plucked to weave into the packed snow from which she had fashioned her schneddenfyrr, that special kind of nest that we birds of the near-treeless north build for our eggs. These nests are surprisingly snug and warm, and Siv herself was not shivering from cold but from fear. I could see the grief deep in her amber eyes. The stranger at the grog tree had told me about that last battle in which H’rath had been cut down. The queen had witnessed it from an ice notch in the Hrath’ghar palace and had seen the king, her mate, fall in flight, his blood splattering the glacier below. The stranger had said that if she had been in flight instead of sitting on her egg, she would have gone yeep. “As it was, she could hardly move, sir. It seemed as if her