Around midday they forded the frigid waters of the Fingerling and they marched along the bank above that cold-strangled river past a heap of black bones and ash where kingsmen had slaughtered and burned a risen settlement years before, the bones strewn along the bank for a thousand yards and the small ribcages and fist sized skulls of children made to die again at the place of their immolation and old shards of broken ceramic and torn canvas fluttering in the wind that scraped the scorched earth. They marched on. A riparian corridor of low brush and pigmy conifers followed the Fingerling down out of the tundratic steppe. To the west stood the jagged slate of the dividing mountains and to the northeast the steaming peaks gleaming white and blue.

Much of the day she walked behind the blue dwarf hoping to hear him stonespeak but she never did. That night she dropped back beside Orc to make camp. They crouched in a land of twisted bristlecones and the dark weighed heavily on their campfire and the wind seethed through the needles and strings of sparks hurtled sideways through the scrub. The weird and her cubs unloaded their oxen and proceeded to tie them off onto the trees. The weird and elder cub tied off two but the third was being held by the younger cub. The ox was branded in arcane figures as if for ritual sacrifice and it snorted and lurched off away from the camp. The cub sat on the ground holding the tieline. He began to drag feet first in the dirt. The weird grabbed the rope and dug in her heels. The elder cub stepped after with his claws on his bony hips. As Mym watched the three of them all clutched to the wandering ox were towed soundlessly from the ring of the firelight and into the roaring wilderness like campinos in the arena of some absurd parochial bullfight.

When the weird’s family returned they were holding onto each other. The weird left her cubs near one of the campfires and she went out again into the wrathful dark alone. Some of the company watched her. Uhquah watched her also. She returned with a pot and a sack of foraged tubers. The tattoos slashing up and down her arms and across her face held a glassy luminescence in the firelight as if they were of liquid tourmaline. At the fire she set down her things.

"Sow," said Uhquah.

The weird looked up. She placed her hand on her chest.

"Aye," said Uhquah.

The weird stood from the fire and walked slowly forward. Everyone's eyes were on her now. Uhquah was smoking a long pipe with a curved stem. He looked up at her.

"You a fortune teller?"

The weird shrugged and she said a syllable of her language.

Uhquah tucked the stem of the pipe between his teeth and pointed at the pot and mimed a reading of leaves with his rough hands. He said something back to her but Mym didn't understand.

"He asks if she can read fates," said Orc. He had come beside her without her noticing.

The weird nodded vigorously and spoke.

"She says yes and asks him to wait a moment."

The weird walked into the dark in the direction of her oxen. When she returned she was smiling fiendishly and holding a flask of some liquor. She motioned Uhquah to the fire where her cubs sat.

"You come here," said the blue dwarf.

She looked at him, her smooth brow furrowed.

The longhorn sat upwind from Uhquah's fire, half naked and half in shadow. He murmured something to the weird. She picked up her pot and tubers and carried them to Uhquah's fire. Her cubs followed her. She knelt before Uhquah and said some things that were lost in the wind. The longhorn rumbled back. She put her pot in the fire and with the flat of a handknife she crushed the root of something against a stone and rubbed it between her palms. She had the flask in her claw and her eyes were rigid in the firelight. Her elder cub took the handknife and approached Uhquah. Uhquah waved him away.

"The humans," he said.

The cub turned. The cavaliers were all of them gathered around six or seven fires. The cub went among them and a woman called Robby rose and came forward.

The cub looked up at her. He held forth the handknife and the woman sawed off a lock of her hair with it. She gave back the blade and the hair. The cub nodded and smiled his chapped lips. He held aloft the handknife and the lock and he carried them back to his mother with such pageantry. She looked at the cavaliers reclining around their fires. They were watching. Robby was smiling as if proud of herself. The weird smelled the hair and then cast it into the pot with a douse of the flask. The pot hissed loudly and steam flashed out of it and parted around her body as the wind swept it away. She looked around again at those attending her, then she peered into the pot.

"Belg dowjana," she called.

Some of the company's orckin nodded to themselves as if they had expected this determination.

Mym looked at Orc.

"Fool to death," he said.

"What's it mean?"

He shrugged. "I've never seen this done."

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Robby called over. "What's a belg dow whatever? What's it mean?"

The cub held up the handknife with his chin solemnly against his chest like a painter contemplating his next stroke.

"What's it mean?" she asked Uhquah.

"It's just a bit o fun Robby. It don't mean much o nothin."

"What's it mean otaur?"

The longhorn smiled. He had been grooming himself with a doll's brush and now he stopped to pull a small creature from its bristles and pitch it into the fire before him. "What's belg dowjana?"

"What's it mean?"

"It's a fate shared by all."

"And what fate's that?"

"Are you given to dancing Robby?"

The woman smiled again as if somewhat relieved. "You mean like a turn and twirl? Sure."

"I think the weird would have you not dance with the risen. Sage advice, wouldn't you agree?"

"That don't seem like any kinda fortune to me."

"Because it ain’t. Uhquah is right. It's just fun. Aren't you having fun?"

Robby frowned at the longhorn, her coiffure now lopsided. The longhorn resumed his brushing. He said, "Bear thy frustration away from me, dear woman. Whither what shall cometh shall be known at the last, as the priests say. To you as to all gathered here."

Of the cavaliers arranged about their fires some seemed to hold a new regard for the longhorn's words and others looked at the woman. She returned to sit by her fire and the cub again walked from pit to pit with the handknife in his claw as if it would find its fated mark.

"Kos, kos," he whispered.

None offered themselves. The cub next came before the longhorn who now worked his brush through his mane. He raised the brush and pointed.

"Yon mason," he said.

"Kos?"

"Bherdeh."

"Bherdeh," repeated the cub. He turned about until he saw the one identified. He stepped over the outlying legs and feet of the cavaliers until he stood before Mym. He crouched with the blade outheld swaying in a hidden rhythm like a trout languid in a current. His claw was gnarled and misshapen as if in this manner it had been often clubbed and broken, or perhaps malformed in some way by the repeated idolatorious oblation. He said some things to her.

"He requires your hair," said Orc.

She looked at the cub and she looked at her companion. "How much?"

Orc upheld a pinky. "About that."

The cub nodded. "Heyu, heyu."

She took the knife and made the cut and turned them back.

The cub hurried the cut to the weird and she cast it into the pot and the great whoosh of it and the boiled vapor. "Ketwor steyh," she called out.

The cub's eyes met Mym's. The fire uplit his face and his eyes seemed aflame in the voids made by their shadowed sockets like two offering candles flickering in their niches. The weird twisted around to see from whom the sacrifice had come. She smiled and nodded.

Mym saw the longhorn was laughing. She looked at Orc and at Uhquah and at the company of humans. None of them were laughing. The orckin looked at her plainly and without any expressions whatsoever.

"Well?" she said.

"Four of stones," whispered Orc.

"What's that one mean?" called Robby.

The longhorn nodded his great head at Mym. "You'll have to ask the wedwarf."

Robby and some of the others turned to her. The lancing fires sawed up sideways the night between them. Uhquah watched her also. She saw Orc make the slightest shake of his head and it was a warning she didn’t require.

"Must be the number of turds in me shits," she said.

Some of the cavaliers laughed. The cub was back among the company smiling as if he had understood and shared in their mirth. He began to move through the orckin who seemed at once reverent and disdainful of him. At last he came back before the longhorn. The longhorn pointed his brush at Uhquah. "Old blood and guts there," he said. “Hafudah bherdeh.”

The cub turned his head to the blue dwarf and back to the longhorn. He made a sign as if in doubt or hesitancy.

“Hafudah bherdeh,” snarled the longhorn.

The cub backed away and sought out Uhquah where he sat alone at his fire. He knelt and offered up the handknife. Whatever he said was lost in the wind. Uhquah regarded the cub with a hint of amusement, his eyes squinting against the blow. He took the knife and sliced a single black whisker from his enormous beard. The cub took it between his finger and thumb and went back to his mother and passed it to her. Perhaps she touched it, perhaps not. Steam surged forth and whipped away. The cub's head snapped after the cloud. The weird's face downturned to the pot bottom. She began to gibber but Mym didn't understand.

Uhquah rose from his fire. "Shut up," he said.

"Krsos," she said. "Krsos keklos."

Mym looked at Orc. "What is it?"

"A chariot."

The weird continued, her voice rising. "Krsos keklos hepi. Werskrsos hepi. Gherskrsos. Spenhkeklos."

Uhquah had come to the weird's fire and shoved the cub aside. The cavaliers looked at their fires as if they hadn't heard, for the words held no meaning. The orckin exchanged intense glances.

The weird never ceased her divinings. "Gherskrsos lewnokts."

Uhquah had unstopped his canteen and now dumped its contents into the pot and the steam off of it billowed into the weird's face. She reeled and cried out and flung her arm across her scalded eyes. The cubs both ran to her and Uhquah kicked over the pot with his heavy boot. The elder cub howled and stood from his mother with the handknife gripped fast in his claw.

Uhquah drew his carbine. "By the stones I said shut her up."

The weird cried out as she writhed in the dirt. "Gherskrsos lewnokts plhnos skelhs!"

The longhorn like an elemental of soot stepped through the fire and the flames lashed up to the height of his waist and delivered him to where Uhquah now shouldered his weapon. He wrapped his arms around the blue dwarf who was redfaced in and by the firelight. The cubs half carried their weeping and wailing mother away into the dark. Someone scattered their fire to death.

Mym turned to Orc. He said, "A deadcart, lost in the dark, filled with bones."

"I think I know what that means," she said.

The game curtailed the company now bedded down and their fires burned low yet whispered in the blow as if the spirits of the timber they burned yet communed and conspired. From her bed Mym watched the flames peel off of the top of their fuel and tumble downwind as if sucked away by the void of the night, the absence of being and of meaning, and she listened to the stones that ringed them. Although they did not understand her they told her of the curse of that place and of a doom that was neither by will nor by fortune but was instead manifested by a third mover that was not the prime mover. They whispered these rumors and to their terrors did she fall asleep.

The company went on in the light of the dawn before the sun had risen. The windstorm had blown past and the prophecies of the night were now away in the past as all fulfilling prophecies must be. The weird with her skin blistered about her eyes padded barefooted up to where Uhquah rode on his mule and fell in beside him while her cubs wrangled their oxen. As Mym watched the column stretch out she felt Orc step up beside her and they went that day side by side without a word until they reached the ruin of Lorderic.

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> +1 [Stonespeaking]: What sort o terrors can scare up the hardy stones? (4/10)