The Silvermoon Academy

   Five bells after midnight, and the winter streets were still dark and empty. A few coloured lights glowed through residential windows, vestiges of the Winter's Veil celebrations that had just passed. In an hour or two the city would come to life again, but now the chill morning belonged only to the bakers, night soil men, guards and drunks - and the solitary figure slipping through the streets.
   Drynna Shieldsong walked briskly, her soft woolen trousers and shirt too thin for the bite of the morning. She would be grateful when she had worked up a sweat on her usual morning run outside the city walls, but as she strode through the streets goosepimples rose on her arms and her breath steamed in the air. The sooner she was out of the city the better, and she ducked down the network of shortcuts known as Murder Row without a second thought. Though unarmed and off-duty, she was still a guard and soldier, and one confident in her abilities.
   Skipping lightly around a pile of refuse spilling from an abandoned hessian sack and over a puddle of unidentifiable liquid, she noted that even the working girls and boys had found the morning too brisk for their liking, and had retreated back to their cathouses. She barely spared a glance at the dim, recessed doorways lining the street. The homeless were all too common in the city now, but most of them found more palatable places to bed down in winter than a filthy street frequented by whores, drunks and cutthroats.
   Her ears twitched as she approached the back entrance to the Silvermoon Inn. Evidently the honeywagon hadn't come this way in some time; the stench here was overwhelming and her nose wrinkled in disgust. That wasn't what had caught her attention, however. She stood still for a moment, her head tilted as she listened.
   There it was again. A low moan, half-choked, and a hoarse murmur of words. Drynna's eyes scanned the ill-lit street, and it was lucky chance that a sliver of metal caught the low light in a doorway opposite. The moan sounded again, weaker, and it was instinct - not thought - that drove the unarmed woman across the street, a wordless shout echoing through the alley. What she had taken to be a pile of rags or sacks in a dark doorway were two silhouettes, one laying huddled on the ground, the other hunched over the supine figure.
   She grabbed at the bent figure's ragged sleeve, pulling on its arm, and drew in a sharp breath as it looked at up at her her. Its blue eyes glowed dimly, but the malformed, hollow-cheeked face was twisted into a hateful grimace. She paused for a moment, shocked, but it was long enough for the figure to shove her away and for the elven woman's heels to slip on the icy ground. Drynna hit the side of the doorway hard, her hip and head cracking against the cold stone. Dazed, she caught only a glimpse of the figure as it hurried away, elven ears laid back and the gleam of metal on a blade before the winter darkness swallowed it up.
   Shaking her head to clear her vision, she glanced back down to the second figure, and bit back a gasp of surprise. A familiar sight on the various expeditions that she had accompanied, Solneryl Tel'es lay in a crumpled heap in the doorway, his face pale and his breathing shallow.
   A thin rime on the unconscious elf's face and frost slowly melting on the dark doorstep were all that remained of his attacker.