Bera watched with horror as the flames grew, the intense heat searing at his exposed face and hands, forcing him to look away. For an instant his eyes took in the sight of his master, prone against the stone walls, mumbling as incoherently as Jarron had done in his prison.

"Master," he called out, panic rising in his chest. In the face of the heat and fire, he realised they were about to be burned to death and there was nothing he could do. "Master!" Bera entreated once more.

Kanick turned and then slumped down the wall, his eyes glazed over, conversing with what spirit Bera knew not.

The air was becoming difficult to breathe, and the desire to flee away from the flames overwhelmed his thoughts, even if he could only hide under Regius's black and twisted table at the rear of the cave.

Suddenly gripped with the flash of an action to take, to do something, he grabbed the table, ignoring the flakes and detritus that fell from it as splinters of charcoal crumbled under his slippery hands. Ignoring his master, he heaved it over the prone figure and set it down, the surface facing the flames, to form a makeshift shelter.

The momentary coolness, out of the eye of the flames, seemed to calm Kanick and gave Bera some time to think.

"She's here for me," Kanick wept.

Bera looked to his master dumbstruck and felt pity and even disgust. The wood of the table was beginning to smoulder and wouldn't hold the flames for long. He would never have though Kanick to be a coward.

"There's no one here!" He yelled at his master. "But we're going to fucking die!" The words were forced through choked lungs, which sucked in air but with each breath he felt no respite from the tightness in his chest.

Kanick rolled over, away from his apprentice with a moan.

The heat would soon have Bera pounding on the rocky face of the back wall, he thought glumly. Surely, he reflected, the worst thing about being burned to death in a dingy hole was the repressive and relentless heat. He thought, with a grim fatalistic humour it was probably too late to carve a mark of cooling. He had just finished committing one to memory, afterall-

Head pounding Bera scrambled to his knees, thick hands and fingers, feeling as though they were wrapped in wool, scrabbled for the sword at his hip. Was he mad to try? There was nothing else.

Bera took as deep a breath as he dared, as deep a breath as he could, as close to the ground as possible. He cleared the ash away from a dinner-plate sized patch of rock and began carving a rune with his sword; a line here, and a curve there, as deep as possible.

Flames were licking through the table, casting hellish shadows of dancing demons against the walls. There was an unbearable heat at his back so hot that Bera had to tell himself he wasn't actually on fire. He hoped it was true.

A piece of wood from the table, which was eaten away almost clean in half, fell into the sea of flame, whooshing into orange-yellow sparks, forcing Bera to cover his face as he finished the last character.

There was no time to double check the rune, as his vision swam and the pounding deep in his brain dominated all his senses. Nor was there a chance to brace himself for its activation.

There was no space for a final hot, sticky, ineffective breath of air. The rune glowed purple and erupted into sparks. For a horrible moment, Bera thought it would fail, and with it he would too.

Instead, with a muted joy, he felt his limbs leaden and his eye's droop as a tiredness like never before swept over him. His sword fell and clattered to the floor, the sound muted in the thick air, which was now rapidly cooling. Bera suddenly found himself shivering, and he was laying on the ground, Kanick's boot by his head.

Bera could feel his heart throb deep in his chest, an odd out-of-tune sensation, and slowing. He thought lazily back to warm summer evenings playing Chovken, the dust kicked up by the horses feeling peppery in his lungs, and shivered in the intense cold that was biting at his limbs.

He could feel the soft sand beneath him, after falling from his horse, the grains sneaking under his cloak, the safe coolness as he dug his hands beneath its surface. The sun was blazing at his back, but the day was cooling and suddenly he found himself feeling cold, as the laughter of his teammates died away.

"Bera!" They yelled, fear in their voices. I only spilled out, he tried to yell back, but a spasmic shivering stole his words. The world blurred back, his head on a frosty black surface. Black sand?

Then he realised where he was.

The cave had been redecorated and now patches of frost clung like lichen to floor and lower parts of the wall, while cold water from the roof dripped noisily onto the damp floor. The table he had used as a shield had been consumed, save for the barest outline of a frame on the floor. Bera shivered again, and nausea crested suddenly and violently in his throat as he spewed up the contents of his breakfast in rolling, heaving wave.

"Get it all up," a raspy voice said.

"Sayyal?" The voice sounded like the High Mage's but how could he be here?

"I'm afraid not, boy," the accent was lightly accented from the Westerlands. "More's the pity."

"You," Bera moaned as he rolled over, the effort of the movement forcing him to breathe deep. He looked at the soot-lined face of his master, it was the last face he wanted to see.

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"We have to go," Kanick said, his voice quiet, his gaze fixed firmly on the sunlight at the front of the cave. "They-"

"I don't have to go with you anywhere!" Bera shouted, as loud as he could through his raw throat and between coughs. "We could have died!"

Anger flashed across the face of the mage. Bera knew his master tried to project the air of a diplomat, hide his emotions, but Bera could tell the fury in his master's eyes.

"You nearly did," Kanick replied sternly. Bera was going to shoot back, but all that came out was a fit of hacking coughs. "I had to keep that rune active, or you would surely have died from the effort." There were tears in Kanick's eyes, now fixed squarely on him.

Bera felt his own eyes begin to water. This wasn't fair, he had saved them both. All Kanick had done was weep, frightened of a ghost. "But thank you. I am sorry."

Bera looked back to Kanick, confused, sure he was being told off.

"I'm sorry about... what happened," His master repeated. "The fire, I felt... I thought..." He was struggling for words. "There was a voice, after the Scar..." Kanick looked again at the mouth of the cave. "Nonsense, of course, but the flames..." There was a longer pause. "I'm sorry. That was quick thinking on your part, to carve that rune."

"I wasn't really thinking," Bera's voice remained high and rasping. "I just thought-"

"It was better than waiting to die?"

"That I was really too warm," Bera finished with a rasping laugh.

"Well done," The master replied, smiling back. He glanced at the cave's mouth again. "We really must go, whoever set that spell might be back to check that we're dead."

The light and peace of the day was undisturbed as Kanick emerged from the darkness of the burned and frozen cave, though shame and anger lurked in the murky corners of his mind, untouched by the idle song of the birds and pleasant warmth carried by the breeze. Those feelings were settled there, along with demons of fire and the thousands of screaming souls incinerated in the scar.

He could keep them there, until the time came.

Looking down along the path, he had more immediate concerns. The horses, staked to the ledge, were gone and in their place was a splatter of blood across the stone, already gelatinous and drying but glittering weakly in the light overhead.

"Is that blood?" Bera huffed, staggering down the steep, uneven path.

"Not enough for a horse, I assume whoever attacked us got more than they bargained for." Kanick wrinkled his nose as he spotted a finger and a chunk of flesh from a hand, some meters away from the main splatter.

A trail of it led away down the path, and Kanick leaned over to see their horses wrecked upon the bottom of the cliffs, crashed together with their limbs tangled. Someone had managed to spook them, but not before surrendering a chunk of themselves.

Bera came over to look and sucked in air when he saw the horses.

"The blood is a trail, see?" Kanick pointed out. "It could be we might find our attacker, weak and wounded."

"We're weak and wounded," Bera pointed out.

"We can't stay here," Kanick reassured him. "No doubt our attacker or attackers fled fearing the attention of the fire, but if there was just one we might be able to capture him."

With that, Kanick began to carefully descend the path, following the occasional splatters of blood, that had dropped from their attacker.

They saw no bodies strewn on the cliff, nor any on the path on their way down. When they finally arrived at the bottom, not far from the horses, broken at the muddy base, the trail ran cold.

"There's nothing here," Bera mumbled, breathless.

Kanick looked around in vain. Apart from a few specks on the cobbled stones of the road, the apprentice was right. Fruitlessly Kanick looked in the grass and bushes that lined the verge of the road, but he knew the figure of a man would be obvious in the relatively sparse foliage.

"What will we do now?" Bera asked.

Kanick's features creased into a pale frown. He knew what they had to do, but after the effort of keeping Bera's spell going, and their climb from the cliffs, he felt a deep almost painful fatigue as he contemplated their next step. He could only guess how his apprentice would feel.

The walk was miserable, even without their thick robes as the sun pulsed angrily at their backs, burning into their skin. Kanick's mouth grew dry and his thoughts disordered as they shuffled in downtrodden silence back along the road. Only the fear of their attackers kept them moving at all.

They arrived, in the dying light of the evening, at the thicket of buildings that made up the logging camp they had passed that morning. They were bowed, sweating, bloodied and blackened by soot. Bera, underneath the veneer of grime, looked pale and shaken and Kanick worried that without help the apprentice could go no further.

With dismay Kanick saw that the main sawmill, a long building with a stone base supporting a wooden frame where the main saw sat, was dark and empty. They rounded a corner and almost walked into a line of horsemen.

Kanick recoiled quickly, fumbling for his sword. Bera stood, dead eyed and staring straight ahead.

"Woah, calm down," Kanick recognised the voice as the Governor's.

It took Kanick a moment to take in the scene. Four union cavalrymen sat atop their horses in a line, with the governor making a fifth, his fine dark blue doublet in stark contrast with the mail and steel of his companions. A sixth man, potbellied and ginger stood nervously by the horses.

"Governor deLan," Kanick started with relief. "What are you doing here?"

"The foreman here," he nodded to the standing man, "witnessed a group of armed figures ride hard through the camp. He was concerned and sent a runner to inform me. Knowing your mission, I was concerned myself." The governor looked past Kanick to Bera who was being violently sick against the walls of the sawmill. "What's wrong with your boy?"

"We encountered those riders, I fear," Kanick replied and explained the whole situation to deLan, who listened calmly. "I must go and see the Magister at once," he finished. "I fear the Sons of the Prince are more active here than he realises."

"Then we will take you back to Woodbend. I would like to know more about the nature of this spell you have discovered, but it can wait."

Kanick and Bera, with much help, shared a mount each with two of deLan's soldiers. They circled round and began to ride hard, back towards the city. Before long Kanick saw the keep of the city beginning to rise up over the trees, the lights from the city twinkling in the distance, and the square tower of the Enclave poking out behind it.

They rode straight through the city, ignoring the central street up the castle and went directly through the Eastern Gate. Bera was barely holding on to his rider when they pulled up at the gate. Kanick dismounted, sliding past his rider, deLan following.

A battlemage peeked out above the gate and yelled a challenge.

"I am Master Kanick, here with Governor deLan to see the Magister. We have urgent news!" Kanick yelled up and the Battlemage slipped back out of view. While they waited for the gates to open, Kanick turned to deLan. "Can you have Bera taken back to our rooms in the Black Crown? The day has been taxing, but upon him especially."

deLan gave the order, and the cavalryman carrying the sleeping apprentice wheeled around and began to ride back towards the city.

They waited and waited as Kanick grew more tired, pacing in front of the sturdy wooden gate, kicking loose stones across the road.

"Maybe he's not in," deLan remarked.

Kanick's answer was interrupted by a loud bang and a long creak as the gates to the Enclave finally opened.