'Tas's pipe, Tanis! We must be near the shelter!'
Tas's pipe! But that poor, crippled little instrument, the 'dreaded pipe' Flint called it, had never given Tas music this sweet. And yet, what other could it be? Tanis climbed wearily to his feet and helped Sturm to rise.
'We'll follow it,' he said. 'No, leave your pack. If the shelter is that close, I can come back for the wood. And I've still got mine.' Home, the music sang,
come home…
Snow ghosts! The spirits of the storm-killed. Or so they would have been called in the faraway mountains of his homeland. Flint watched the eerie blue race of breaking clouds across the white mantle of the snow. He shivered, more from the memory of an old legend than from the cold. Behind him Tas's pipe faltered, then fell silent.
In an odd little exodus, as soon as the snow had stopped falling, moments after the wind finally died, Tas's strangely assorted menagerie of storm refugees had filed past him into the night. Still, even after the last creature had left, Tas had continued to play, hoping that Tanis and Sturm would hear the pipe's music, feel the call of its magic.
Magic! Flint thought now. The word felt bitter and hard in his mind. He told himself that he never had believed. Some wild coincidence, some quirk had led the animals to the shelter. It hadn't been, after all, any of the pipe's doing. Though he could still feel, in memory, the frightened race of the rabbit's heart against his palms, and later the confiding warmth of it where it lay against his foot. Nonsense! The poor little beast was too exhausted and frozen to care where it finally collapsed. He refused to remember the deer and the goat, the mice or the owl. He sighed and kicked at the blackened embers of the fire. We can go out and look now, he thought. He would not allow himself to think further. He did not want to consider what they must find.
'They're home.' Tas's voice was oddly hollow.
Flint turned slowly, the skin on the back of his neck prickling. 'What did you say?'
The kender's face was white, etched with weariness. But his eyes were bright with some pleasure or satisfaction that Flint did not understand. 'They're home, Flint. They're back.' He put his pipe aside. Wobbling to his feet, he went to stand beside the dwarf. He was tired, but it was the best tired he'd ever felt.
Flint peered out into the night. Two shadows intersected those pouring across the gleaming snow. They were darker and more solid than that weird blue flow. Snow ghosts?
Shivering, the old dwarf squinted harder. Not yet! he thought triumphantly. Not yet, they're not! But one of them was staggering, leaning on the other.
Flint grasped Tas's shoulders and hurried him back inside the shelter. 'Stay here, Tas. STAY HERE. They're back!'
Tas smiled and nodded. 'Of course they're back. I told you they were. They heard the pipe, they felt the magic — Flint! Where are you going?'
Yawning mightily, forgetting Flint's warning to stay inside the shelter, Tas retrieved his pipe and jogged out into the snow.
As he had for the past two mornings, Tanis leaned against the door jamb, smiling at the winter sun as though hailing a well-met friend. Beside him Sturm gingerly lifted his pack.
'You're certain you are well enough to travel?'
The youth nodded once. 'Yes.' He was pale yet, but the dressing covering his wound had come away clean with its last two changings.
'You did well, Sturm.'
Sturm's solemn eyes lighted, then darkened. 'No. I almost cost you your life, Tanis. I couldn't go on, and you stayed.'
'I did. It was my choice. And,' he said quickly, forestalling further protest, 'it was a choice, at the time, of freezing with you or a few yards farther on. Where you did well was in another place altogether.'
'I don't understand.'
'You are a good companion, lad, and one I would not hesitate to travel with again.'
Plainly Sturm still did not understand. But he took the compliment with a notable absence of youthful awkwardness.
In the silence fallen between them Tanis heard the beginnings of an argument between Tas and Flint that had become all too familiar these last two days.
'There was no mountain goat,' Flint growled.
But Tas was insistent. 'Yes, there WAS. And not only that, there was a deer — '
'There was no deer.'
Grinning, Tanis went to join them.
'Flint, there WAS! You saw them. And the field mice, and the owl. And what about the rabbit, Flint? It slept against your foot all the time.'
This time Flint made no firm denial. 'Kender stories,' he snorted. He glanced sidelong at Tanis and veered sharply away from the subject of magic pipes. 'Are you certain Sturm is ready to travel?'
'So he says, and I think he is.'
'I'd like to check that bandage once more.'
Tas watched him leave, then reached over to finger a broken pack strap that had been giving the old dwarf trouble. 'Look, Tanis.'
'Frayed, but it should hold with repair.'
'No. Look. It's not frayed. The goat chewed it.'
'Yes, well…' Tanis smiled and quietly relieved Tas of Flint's small whittling knife. 'Fell out of the pack, did it?'
Tas's eyes widened innocently. 'Oh! I guess it did. Good thing I found it. Flint wouldn't have been happy to leave it behind. But what about the pack strap?'
'It looks frayed to me.' He patted Tas's shoulder. 'Come on, now. It's time to go.'
'I don't know why no one believes me, Tanis.'
Tanis wished then, for the sake of the wistful hope in the kender's voice, that he could believe in the magic pipe. But it sounded too much like all of Tas's fantastic stories. Some, doubtless, were true. But Tan-is had never been able to separate those from the soaring flights of imagination that Tas passed off as adventures.
'You know,' he said kindly, 'enchanted or not, your piping saved our lives. If we hadn't heard it, Sturm and I would have died out there.'
'I'm glad it did, Tanis, I really am. But, still, I wish someone would believe I found the magic. I don't know why Flint won't. He saw the deer and the goat and the mice and the owl. And the rabbit was sleeping against his foot.'
That rabbit, Tanis realized then, was not among the things that Flint denied. In matters of magic, that might be, where Flint was concerned, considered avowal.
When he looked up again Tas had gone. Rising to join the others, he caught sight of something small and abandoned on the floor. 'Tas, you forgot your pipe.' He picked it up and then saw words carved into the wood that he had not seen before.
Find the music, find the magic.
'Did you carve this?'
Tas did not turn. 'Yes,' he said, reluctantly. 'I have to leave it.'
'But, Tas, why?'
Tas squared his shoulders as though firming some resolve. But still he did not turn. 'Because the shepherd said that it could only be used once. That's why I can't get the pipe to play that song again — or any song. I've used the magic.' He took a deep breath and went on. 'And he said that once I found the magic I had to pass the pipe on.' He paused and then he did turn, a scamp's humor in his long brown eyes. 'It's going to be a long winter. I'm going to leave it here for someone else to find.'
Suddenly, as sharply as though he was yet there, the half-elf saw himself crouched in the snow, too aching and exhausted to move. He felt again the bitter whip of the wind, the life-draining cold. He heard, very faintly, the coaxing tune that had called him back from freezing. Maybe, he thought, seeing the earnest belief in the kender's
