They were still talking amiably two hours later when a hot sirocco buffeted them from the south.
“By the Almighty Scribe,” the three Haveners had said, and Bere had blurted on epithet native to her shire, the four of them exchanging worried glances amidst their looks southward.
Deciding to camp there, pending further developments or additional augurs of depredation, Ari and the other three had settled in.
And in the morning had awakened to a blackened sky to the south. Its direction slightly west of due south, the cloud—if a single cloud it were—was ominous, and as she studied it, Ari felt a foreboding, as though impending doom were about to descend upon the four corners like some orthopteran pestilence.
The cloud might actually be that orthopteran pestilence, she had thought wryly at
