Timegods' World by L.E. Modesitt Jr. Page A

the wind so it would not swing inside and hit the wall, I stepped into the night—or the predawn darkness.
    Overhead, I could see some stars between the swirls of fast-moving clouds. The wind was light and skitterish, with gusts of warm air, then
cooler air. From what I could see in the dim light, most of my tracks had been covered by snow and wind.
    Since there wasn’t much I could do about hiding my tracks, I walked to the far end of the wall, where the double stone steps came down to the lawn. The higher ones were clear of snow. Glancing up at the windows and seeing no light, I walked up two steps in the snow, and then turned and retraced my path to the lower door. From there I walked backwards along the wall until I neared the point where the other set of steps went up toward the courtyard and the kitchen. They were clear in the center, and my prints did not show.
    The courtyard was dusted with snow, but only in the west corner had it drifted more than a finger deep. By scuffing my boots side to side, I obscured my prints enough that they did not look recent, and with the hint of warmth in the wind, after sunrise they might not be visible at all.
    Like our drive, the Davniadses’ was raised a handspan or so above the lawn, and the center part had been windswept. I checked the house, but there were no lights. Going down the drive was a risk, but Jerz Davniads wasn’t the sort to chase me without considering the consequences—assuming he saw me at all. And taking the drive left fewer tracks.
    It might be days before snow left parts of the woods path. Besides, anyone could be coming or going down the drive. Only Sammis Olon would be using the woodlands path.
    At the curve in the drive, just before it entered the woods on its slope down to the road, I looked back at the house. In a way, I had hoped to see a single candle, or something. But the windowpanes were dark, and the hot-cold wind whistled across my cloak. I watched for another moment, then waved to Allyson, or no one, and began the hike downhill.

XII
    “THE WITCHES OF Eastron? What a strange conceit, coming as it did from the only non-monarchial culture in Queryan history. Yet the thread of the so-called ‘witches’ appears in folklore, literature, and even in diaries for a period of close to a millennium.
    “The references span four phases of government, including the Fylarian Fragmentation, and demonstrate remarkable consistency …
    “ … women (or men) who did not age, who were seen in places too far apart for them to have travelled the distance, who displayed remarkable
skill and dexterity, who avoided war and violence, even for the best causes …
    “None of the attributes of the so-called ‘witches’, except for the rapid travel, and that could have been mere coincidence, are that remarkable, especially given the extraordinary hatred that devolved, either in Eastron or Westron, upon those accused of being witches. Yet even into modern times, the witchcraft charge has been used …
    “All in all, the remarkableness of the conceit has been its continuation, given the mildness of the evils attributed to such witches—they lived a long life, possibly an endless one, and they could travel far distances in the blink of an eye. Yet such charges destroyed whole families in the early days of Eastron and even into the founding of the Westron Chartered Monarchy …”
     
    Archival Text Fragment
Temporal Guard Archives
Quest, Query
1200 N.G.E

XIII
    I KEPT TO the side of the Davniadses’ drive, and to the edge of the road after that. There was nowhere else to go—not by the road.
    Father said that there had been talk of extending the road until it reached the Wayland Highway on the other side of the hills, but the Engineers had never started the work. My choices were clear—blunder through the still snowy hills or risk the road in the darkness before dawn, accompanied by wind and chill, before the marines started their usual canvass of the area and all