Chapter 29: What Comes South

The raven arrived at the fourth hour past midnight.

Pia found it when she came in to light the morning fire, which was early even for her, because the cold had been wrong for three days — not the ordinary cold of a settlement short on timber but something with an edge to it, a mineral quality, the kind that came from a direction rather than from the sky. She stood in the doorway for a moment looking at it, the small grey bird hunched on the perch with its cylinder still sealed, and then she went to wake Aldric without stopping to light anything.

He was already sitting up when she knocked.