page 1: BRAMBLE
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 I’M SENDING a rope down!” Medric said. “There’s nothing to hitch it to here, so don’t pull on it until I’m braced and I give you the word.” “All right,” said Bramble. She was lucky, she supposed, that she had come down into the caves with Medric, an experienced miner, but part of her wished he would let her stay down here at the bottom of this shaft, alone in the middle of a mountain with Acton’s bones, until she too had died and her flesh had sifted into dust. “Ready?” Medric called.

Bramble adjusted the rope under her armpits and clasped her arms around the fragile bundle of Acton’s bones. She pushed down all feeling. She didn’t have time for grief, or love, or anything but revenge. Saker the enchanter was going to come to grief himself, and she would be there to destroy him. For her sister Maryrose. For all the innocents killed by Saker’s ghost army. 

“Ready,” she said. “Now!”

She began to climb, bracing herself against the shaft wall with her feet as Medric hauled from above. The rope cut her, but she was making steady progress when Medric yelled something from above and the world came tumbling down.

Dirt and small rocks hit her face first, blinding her, and then Medric’s heavy body slid down the shaft, slamming them both to the ground, with rubble and pebbles cascading after them, covering the candle stub and plunging them into darkness.

They lay gasping for a long moment before Bramble could move. “Everlasting dark!” Medric swore, his voice shaky. “The edge just gave way.”

 Somehow, it made Bramble grin. Gods and powers, delvers and hunters from the Great Forest, all had conspired to get her here to find these bones, and now a simple accident could undo it all. She rather liked that, liked the feeling of being, for the moment, free from destiny and instruction. No one had foreseen this, as far as she knew. That meant she could react as she liked and do as she pleased in response.

 So she laughed.

“Bramble!” Medric reproved, much as her mother used to.

“Well, it could have been worse,” she said. “You’re not really hurt, are you?”

She sat up and felt both the jacket full of bones and herself for injuries. Scrapes, bruises (gods, lots of bruises!), and a swelling above one ear – although it seemed very large for something that had just happened, so it may have been a legacy from her first fall down the shaft. Medric searched around in the rubble until he found the tinderbox, then fi shed a spare candle out of his belt pouch and lit it. She was lucky that Medric had proved so steadfast. She wouldn’t have blamed him if he had run away when the delvers came and pushed her down this shaft.

“Always carry a few,” he said, although earlier he had intimated that they would run out of light if they didn’t turn back soon. He really didn’t like being underground, Bramble thought, with a fl icker of worry. They weren’t likely to get out of here anytime soon.

“Will your friend go for help?”

“Fursey?” Medric shook his head, sending dust flying out of his hair like gold in the candlelight. “He left after the delvers came. Doesn’t even know we’re down here.” His voice was dark with abandonment; he’d hoped that Fursey would stay with him, Bramble thought.

She ignored his sigh; they didn’t have time to worry about love affairs gone wrong, no matter how strange the beloved or how deep the hurt. “So we’ll have to fi nd another way out.”

“I might be able to climb out,” Medric said doubtfully, but when they examined the shaft they found it was clogged with rubble, and with her saddlebags, which had slid down the shaft with Medric. Bramble dislodged them, sending gravel spinning off, and emptied out everything in them: spare clothes, hairbrush, boot ties, rags, salt were all moved to one bag, leaving the other empty, ready. Almost empty. At the bottom, where she had put it before leaving Gorham’s farm, months ago, was the red scarf she had won when she became the Kill Reborn. It was the only colour in this dark world, and she let it stay where it was, not sure

if she were being sentimental or prudent. It was tangled with the brooch Ash had given her. She had tucked it in there when they left Obsidian Lake.

She left the brooch and scarf and put Acton’s bones in on top of them. The leg bones didn’t fit, and she had to suppress a feeling of panic that she had to leave them behind. She placed them carefully on a low rock, feeling both solemn and silly; they looked ridiculous, like pickings from a giant’s plate, but they were Acton’s, and she couldn’t just throw them away.

Medric tried pulling a few rocks out from the shaft, but more just shifted down into their place. “There’s been a big rockfall,” he said, in a far more confident tone, the voice of the miner. “No getting out that way, not without a gang of men working from above.”

“So,” Bramble said, turning and staring into the dark. “We go exploring.”

They were standing under a low roof in a flat-bottomed area which sloped gently down to their left and rose more steeply to their right, where the roof became too low for them to walk. There was only one way to go.

“Just as well it’s heading the right way,” Bramble said. “Everything gets turned around underground,” Medric said warningly. “Don’t depend on your sense of direction down here.”

“But –” Bramble always knew where she was, and that sense seemed to be working fi ne. She pointed down the slope and slightly to the right. “The mine entrance is that way.”

Medric looked sceptical. “No choice either way,” he said. “We follow the river bed.”

“What?”

“This would have been a river course, one time,” he explained as he led the way down, candle held high. “That’s why the walls are so smooth.”

Bramble hitched Acton’s bones over her shoulder more comfortably, and reached out to touch the wall with the other hand. It was smoother than she’d expected. “So if we follow it down, we find water?” she suggested.

“If we’re lucky. If it doesn’t narrow too much, or if there’s been no

rockfalls, or if the land hasn’t shifted since the river fl owed — which it probably has, which is why the course is dry now.” He turned to look seriously at her, his hazel eyes refl ecting the spark of candlelight. “We’ll be lucky if we get out alive.”

Bramble smiled. At least this was real ó not god-given dreams or time shifting beneath her feet. And it distracted her from thoughts of Acton, which she wasn’t ready to face. She thumped Medric on the shoulder and saw him wince as she hit a bruise. “I’m hard to kill,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They went carefully but as fast as they dared, not knowing how long they’d be down here. The candles wouldn’t last forever. They followed the old river, ignoring narrower side passages, even though some of them sloped upwards, because in the larger course there was a faint stream of air across their faces

“Follow the air,” Medric said, as though it was the one rule of life, Bramble thought, and maybe it was, in a mine.

Medric settled down into a plodding careful state. He looked at the fl oor, mostly, leaving it to Bramble to look ahead. She realised that this shutting off was how he had managed to survive the long years of mining.

The old river bed was leading them gradually astray, further down, further north. Bramble reckoned they had passed the mine entrance some time back, and they were now much deeper than when they had started, but she was encouraged by the fresh air which still blew gently in their faces. It had to come from somewhere.

They reached a section where the passage closed in, so they had to crouch, and then slither along. Medric started breathing more heavily. He was a big man, and it was a tight fit.

“I’ll go up ahead,” Bramble said, “and see if it widens out.”

He nodded thankfully and backed out to where he could sit up, his hands shaking. Bramble left the candle with him and went backwards on her stomach, feeling with her toes. The passage narrowed until she could only just move, and she felt a sudden spurt of panic. The walls seemed to press down upon her, the dark she had found soothing only a few minutes before was now full of death, the earth itself a grave where she would be pinned, helpless, forever . . .

She set the fear aside, but it gave her more sympathy for Medric. If he felt like this all the time, he was being heroic just for not screaming. With an effort of will, she kept moving.

As if to reward her, the toe of her boot, sliding carefully backwards, fell into empty air. A ledge, dropping off. How far down? She bent her leg up and found that at the edge her toe couldn’t reach the upper wall. The passage widened just before the drop — perhaps enough to let her sit up and turn around. She snaked sideways so that she wouldn’t be hanging half-off and half-on the ledge and edged carefully down.

She could feel the air moving more freely around her head and shoulders as she came closer to the drop, and cautiously sat up, bumping her head just a little. She could sit crouched over easily enough, and she could sense a huge empty space in front of her, full of sound . . . whispering, plinking, rushing . . .

“It opens up,” she called back to Medric, “but come carefully — there’s a drop on the other side.” She sat and listened hard as her voice echoed out and round. Other noises, too. Water and air, air and water . . .

Medric came face first, pushing the candle in front of him. That’s not going to do much good in a place this size, Bramble thought, but she took it from him and raised it high as he shuffl ed closer and sat up, more hunched than she but a safer distance from the drop.

The tiny light from the candle was caught, reflected, from a million places, a million drops of water. They were at the top of what must have once been a short waterfall, at the edge of a cavern so large that every sound they made was taken and echoed and echoed again.

There was just enough light to see boulders and arches of rock, icicles and ant hills of rock reaching down and up from ceiling and floor, joining in places into pillars. The cave — the cavern — stretched up in places so high that no light reached. It seemed to reach up into the dark of the night sky, so Bramble felt surprised not to see any stars.

“There are no wonders like the wonders of the dark,” Medric said quietly. Bramble suspected that was something Fursey had once said to him, but whoever said it was right. The echoes of Medric’s voice climbed and soared and fl ew back to them in high cascades of sound.

“Wonders . . .” the echoes said, and, “Dark . . .”

The echoes were surrounded and supported by another sound.

Everywhere, from the icicles of rock and from points on the cavern’s roof, the tiny drops of water fell, onto rock or into shallow pools. Each small plop or splat was magnified and transmuted into a thin, ceaseless, mourning cry. The rocks were weeping, and this was the sound of their tears.

The falling water caught the candlelight and sent sparks of it back to them, so that they were caught in a small pool of dazzle, of rainbow glimpses and fleeting lines of light.

“You know where we are, don’t you?” Medric said. “These are the Weeping Caverns. The home of Lady Death herself. We’ll never get out.”

page 7: ASH
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LIKE HARP music, the sound of the river rippled far below them. It sounded calm, now. Soothing, as though it had never leapt high, never threatened. The old man smiled, his long white hair casting a shining circle around his head in the firelight. Ash was aware of the other men, his father included, standing in the shadows of the cave, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at them. Desperately, he stared into the old man’s intense blue eyes.

“She calls you,” the man said. “She calls your name. Close your eyes. Listen.”

Bewildered, hoping that he was not beyond acceptance, that the human face which had refl ected back at him from the pool did not mean that he was worthless, Ash closed his eyes. He had so hoped to fi nd his true shape when he climbed down to meet the River. Every other Traveller man did so, after all. Why should he be different? Did he have no true shape? No animal spirit deep in his soul which the River could call out? What did that make him?

Ash shuddered with a combination of grief and horror at the thought and felt the old man pat his back in comfort.

“Listen,” he said gently. “She will speak to you.”

The river was growing louder. Ash concentrated. He had heard the River speak only minutes ago, when he stood in her waters and asked permission to drink. She had laughed, and granted it. Now there were no words, only sounds, like music, like the music he carried in his head, day after day.

The music built in his mind, speaking of emotion deeper than thought, deeper than words, stronger than time. Love was only a small part of it, on the edges. Desire ran through it, but was not the centre. He strained, listening harder, and felt it slip away.

“Be still,” the old man said.

The hand on Ash’s back was warm and reassuring. He let out a long breath, forcing his muscles to loosen, and found the centre of the music, the rhythm that controlled everything. Welcome, it said. Belong.

He began to cry. He had yearned towards homecoming when he lived with Doronit, hoping past sense that she could give it to him. He had seen belonging like this and envied it, watching Mabry and Elva hold their baby, his namesake. He had dreamt of returning to the Road with his parents as a stonecaster, earning a place with them as he had not been able to do as a musician. Each dream had withered, sending him back to the Road, and fi nally pushing him here. Perhaps he had been Travelling towards the River all his life.

Yes, said the music. All your life.

Ash raised his face to the old man, who was smiling.

“She has been waiting for you for a long, long time, child,” he said, as he had said once before. “And so have I.”

Ash found his voice with difficulty. “Who are you?” he whispered. “I am the Prowman.”

It was a term Ash knew from old river songs — the Prowman stood at the front of the boat and signalled to the steersman which direction to take, to avoid the rapids and treacherous currents. He found the name reassuring.

Ash’s father, Rowan, came forward hesitantly. His head was a badger’s; each of the men there wore his true nature in the form of an animal, revealed to them through the power of the River. The sweat on his naked skin refl ected the torchlight in slabs of gold and red.

Rowan put a hand gently on Ash’s shoulder. The dark badger eyes searched his. And then Rowan let Ash go, turned to the other men and lifted his arms high in a gesture of victory. He howled triumph and the other men joined in, dancing and shouting, the animal screams and yowls echoing off the cave walls until Ash was nearly deafened. It was a terrible sound: harsh, cacophonous, wonderful. It lifted him up into a kind of exaltation. He still didn’t understand what had happened, or why he had not been given his true shape like the other men; but he did understand that they accepted him, honoured him, just as he was. The moment was over too soon. Rowan and the other men ran off into the darkness which led to another cave. Some of them carried torches, the fl ames and smoke fl ickering behind them as they ran. They left one torch behind, stuck in a crevice in the rock wall. The dark closed in around, making the cave seem even bigger, the echoes sharper. Ash was aware of his wet feet and calves, suddenly cold where the River had splashed him as he climbed.

The Prowman walked behind one of the boulders near the passage and came back with a blanket and pack. He threw the blanket to Ash, who hesitated. All the other men were naked, except for the Prowman, who wore leggings and a tunic.

“Am I . . . allowed?”

The old man shrugged, the beads at the end of his long braids clicking softly. “Animals go naked,” he said. “We are not animals.”

“What are we?”

The Prowman gestured to the fl oor and they sat, cross-legged, Ash pulling the blanket around himself. The pack held food: cooked chicken, bread, apples, dried pear. Ash fell on it thankfully. He hadn’t eaten in three days.

“Slowly,” the Prowman said. “Or you’ll just throw it all up again.” It was good advice, but it was hard to follow. Ash forced himself to start with the bread and chewed it thoroughly instead of wolfi ng it down. “What are we . . . Well, that’s a little hard to say,” the Prowman said, smiling. “We are . . . Hers. I can tell you some things about yourself, although I do not know you. You are a musician.”

Ash shook his head vigorously, glad his mouth was full of bread so he didn’t have to say the disappointing words out loud.

“No?” The Prowman paused, surprised. “You don’t make up music?”

Ash stilled, his hand over the chicken. Did he make up music? The moment seemed to stretch for hours.

“In my head,” he said fi nally. “Only in my head.” “Ah, well, that’s where all music starts.”

“But I can’t sing!” Ash said. “Or play anything.”

“The River doesn’t care about that. She wants what’s inside you, not what you do outside.”

“What? What’s inside me?”

“The thing that makes the music, that thinks the music. The centre of you. It’s why She chose me, why She chose you.”

“Chose us to do what?”

For the first time, the Prowman seemed unsure. “Different things. Be Her voice, for one. Be Her eyes in the world, Her . . . life, Her . . .”

“Her lover, you said,” Ash prompted. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, except intensely curious.

“Mmm . . . you’ll find out about that in time, although it won’t be what you expect.”

“Nothing ever is!” Ash exclaimed, tired of being told only part of things, tired of always being at the beginning of understanding. Enough of this mysticism. He had a job to do. “I need to learn the secret songs.”

The Prowman shook his head, and Ash jumped to his feet, infuriated. “Don’t tell me there’s another shagging test!”

“No, no, don’t worry,” the Prowman said, laughing sympathetically. “You don’t need to learn the songs because when you need them, She will give them to you. How do you think the men learnt them in the first place? She gave them to me, and I gave them to the men. She will be your teacher, lad, when the time comes.”

But Ash had a better idea.

“You can sing them!” It was a relief, to hand over the responsibility to someone he was sure could fulfil it. But the Prowman put up a hand in refusal.

“No. This is your job. Your time to be active in the world. I have had my time, and it was more than enough.” There was a note of sorrow, of loss, of relinquishment, in his voice. “So there is nothing to keep you here,” the Prowman went on. “Go where you need to go, and She will be there waiting for you.”

“Sanctuary,” Ash said without thinking. “I have to go to Sanctuary.”

The Prowman’s face became shadowed; tears stood in his eyes. With their bright blue clouded, he looked very old, the torchlight showing hundreds of wrinkles, his hands browned with age spots, his hair snow white.

“Sanctuary,” he whispered. “That is a name I have not heard in a very long time.” He looked up, tears disappearing. “Why do you go to Sanctuary?”

Ash hesitated, overwhelmed by how much he had to explain.

“To raise the ghost of Acton,” he said simply. “So that Acton can lay this army of ghosts to rest.”

The Prowman went very still.

“Acton,” he said. “She did not tell me that. I wonder why.” He sat for a long moment and then stood up, as supple as a young boy. “If you go to raise Acton’s ghost, lad, I think you will need me with you.”

Relief washed over Ash. “You’ll come with us?” “I will take you the River’s way.”

page 12: LEOF
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AT NOON the enchanter had sent the wind wraiths away and the ghosts moved off to the south, and Leof, Alston, Hodge and Horst followed them on Thegan’s orders. The other troops had returned with Thegan to Sendat after the ghosts had routed them at Bonhill, but there was just a chance that a small group of horsemen could pick off the enchanter from a distance.

“Take any chance you have,” Thegan had said. “At any cost.” Leof nodded. “The other reports say that the ghosts faded at sunset or sunrise,” he reminded Thegan. “We might get our chance then.” Thegan clapped him on the shoulder in a parody of his usual comradeship. It was a show for the men watching, and Leof was glad that Thegan could still make a show. He had never seen his lord angry like this, not even when Bramble had defi ed him and escaped.

Now the four warlord’s men followed as the ghost army, frustrated by the solid doors and shuttered windows of Bonhill, headed out into the countryside, looking for easier prey. Horst strung his bow, the short bow he kept for using on horseback.

“My lord,” he said to Leof, indicating the enchanter and the bow. During the battle, the wind wraiths had plucked their arrows out of the air and they had lost their best chance to take the enchanter. If the wraiths stayed away now, Leof knew they might have a chance. “Yes,” he replied. “Anytime you get a clear shot, take him.”

But as they rode, slowly, always at a distance, they could see that the wraiths were hovering far overhead. The enchanter probably couldn’t see them, but they were ready to protect him.

Leof turned to Alston. “If we can charge them suddenly, Horst might get a shot away. He only needs one.”

He expected Horst to preen at the praise, but the man just nodded. Something was worrying Horst, more than the ghosts. He had arrived back from the Last Domain only just in time to come south with Thegan, but without Sully, who had been killed in an ambush in the Golden Valley. Another problem for Thegan to deal with, but not one Leof could think about now.

Perhaps Horst was missing his friend. He kept glancing at the sky and wiping his hands on his breeches. Well, wind wraiths were enough to make anyone nervous. Gods knew they made Leof jittery enough.

“Do you know this country, Alston?” Leof asked. He knew it well himself, from riding chases all over it.

Alston nodded. “Aye, my lord, a little.”

“The road goes between a small hill and a stream, up ahead, about a mile away. Once they pass the hill, we can come after them fast and catch them up on the other side. If we come in fast enough, the wind wraiths may be taken by surprise. It might give us a chance.”

Nodding, Alston considered it.

“We should close up the gap, maybe,” he ventured, and Leof agreed.

“But slowly, and gently. Don’t alarm the wraiths.”

Hodge and Horst both shivered at the thought, then exchanged embarrassed glances. Horst set his face in a scowl, as though preparing himself for the worst.

They urged the horses to a faster walk and gradually, as the ghosts and the enchanter strode on, unheeding, they closed the gap little by little. The wraiths seemed unaware of them, but Leof didn’t hold out much hope. As soon as they moved in, the wraiths would swoop to protect the enchanter. He wondered if he should give Horst his own horse Arrow to ride ó she was by far the fastest, and would get him closest to the ghosts. But she wasn’t used to her rider shooting as he rode, and Horst’s bay was. He would just have to take care not to get in Horst’s line of fire.

Ahead, the last of the ghosts disappeared as the road bent behind the hill. “Draw weapons. Horst, ready bow. Now!” Leof ordered.

They spurred their horses, Arrow getting away fi rst, but the others catching up fast as Leof held her back a little. Horst took the lead, arrow nocked and bow held down, reins between his teeth. His horse knew what was expected of her, and she gave it: a steady pace, like a regular drum beat, so that Horst could loose the arrow at precisely the right moment in her gait.

As they rounded the hill, Horst was just in the lead.

“Spread out!” Leof commanded, and he and Alston took point either side of Horst while Hodge brought up the rear, his own bow out and ready.

The ghosts turned at the sound of their hoof beats, but they were too far from the horsemen to interfere. Horst was almost within bow shot. The enchanter turned.

“Wait, wait, not too soon,” Leof called.

Horst took aim and the enchanter put up a futile hand to ward him away. As the arrow left the bow the ghosts moved in front of the enchanter, but too late.

Then, in the split second before the arrow reached him, the wraiths dived between, snatching the arrow from the air, screaming. They turned towards Horst, claws out, teeth bared, and lunged.

“Fire again!” Leof commanded, but Horst screamed, too, and turned the terrifi ed horse, kicking her away. The other horses were also panicking, and the ghosts had closed in around the enchanter. They had lost their chance. Bitterness in his mouth, Leof shouted, “Back! Back!” and they turned their horses and took off after Horst, who was well down the road, his bay galloping faster than ever before.

The wraiths nipped and scratched at them as they went, scoring the horses’ rumps and scratching long furrows in their scalps. It was terrifying. The wraiths’ shrieking seemed to sap all the strength from Leof’s muscles, but he was bolstered by fury, and he rounded on them and shouted, “We are in settled lands and there has been no betrayal. Begone!”

They were the words his father had taught him, to banish wind wraiths. The words had worked for a long, long time, part of the compact between the spirits and humans, which had been established so long ago that its beginning had passed out of memory. The spirits — water, wind, fire, forest, earth — were free to hunt in wilderness but forbidden to attack humans in settled lands. Unless a human betrayed one of their own to the wraiths, as humans sometimes did. But that did no harm to the compact itself. Without the compact, the wraiths could feast on body and soul right across the Domains, with nothing to stop them. They were even harder to fight than ghosts. Without the compact every stream would be full of water sprites, every wind a carrier of death, every step into a wood a step into peril . . .

Leof wasn’t sure the compact still held, and the thought that it might have broken irrevocably was frightening. But the wraiths hovered behind him and screamed disappointment, their claws dripping blood. Arrow would not be held. She pulled her head around and made off after the other horses, the herd instinct taking over.

Leof let them run half a mile or so before he called them in. The horses’ sides were lathered and their eyes still showed too much white. He had to let them rest and drink before following the enchanter again. For all the good that would do, he thought.

The stream was close to the road here, and Hodge walked the horses for a few minutes to cool them down, then watered them. He was shaking, still.

“Horst,” Leof said. “Come.”

He took Horst aside. The man wouldn’t look him in the eyes. Like Hodge, he was still shaking, but Leof suspected it was with shame as much as with the aftermath of fear.

“You did not follow my order, Horst.” Leof kept his voice deliberately calm.

“I’m sorry, my lord! Please — please don’t tell my lord Thegan.” Leof considered that. Could he blame this man for panicking in the face of those deadly claws and teeth? A human enemy was one thing, but a foe who could eat your soul was something very different. Thegan, on the other hand, would blame him and punish him. And Horst was Thegan’s man. He worshipped his lord. A hard word from Thegan was enough to cause anguish ó real punishment, real shame, would be unbearable.

They needed every archer they could get, if they were to have any chance at this enchanter. There would be opportunities in the next battle. Horst was the best they had.

“There will be another time,” Leof said slowly, “when we may confront the enchanter again, with his wraiths, and only an archer can save us.”

“It won’t happen again, my lord. I swear it. I swear it.”

There was something else here, something Horst wasn’t saying, something that accounted for the panic. Leof took a guess. “You’ve met wind wraiths before.”

Horst looked astounded “Aye, my lord,” he mumbled. “They almost killed me.”

“And now you have faced them again. Tell me honestly, Horst, if I needed you to face them one more time, could you?”

Horst stared at the ground for a long moment, then looked up and deliberately met Leof’s eyes, as a common soldier rarely did to an officer. “I could,” he said firmly.

“Then I think Lord Thegan may not need to know any more than that the wind wraiths stopped our attack.”

Horst’s face was flooded with relief. “Thank you, my lord.” “Don’t let us down, Horst.”

“I’d die first,” Horst promised.

Leof slapped him on the shoulder. “I’d prefer you didn’t. We have need of you.”

They remounted and took the road again, watching with beating hearts for the fi rst sign of wind wraiths in the sky above them. Where there were wind wraiths, they would find the enchanter.

The horses were rested and their wounds staunched, but they didn’t like being asked to go back down the road towards the spot where they had been so terrified. Hodge’s black gelding dug in his hooves and refused to move.

“We might do better on foot,” Leof said. “The horses won’t face the wraiths without bolting.”

Hodge cleared his throat the way sergeants do when offi cers are about to make a big mistake.

“Well, sergeant?” Leof asked.

“Without the horses, we’d’ve been dead back there. Sir.” Hodge said it simply, and he was right, of course.

“Very well, then. Our aim is to keep them in sight until sunset, when the enchanter will be without his army, at least, and we may have a chance to waylay him without the wraiths seeing us.”

They nodded together, Alston, Hodge and Horst. Good men. Experi-enced, level headed. Leof wondered if they would all make it back home, but shoved the thought away, down where it belonged, in the well of shadows that every soldier avoided thinking about.

“We’ll go across country, then,” Leof said. “Skirt the hill and fi nd him on the other side.”

The black gelding — Canker, a bad name for a horse, Leof thought ó was happy enough to take to the fi elds and the other horses followed Arrow eagerly.

By mid-afternoon they had traced a big circle around the hill and made their way back to the road. But there was no sign of the enchanter.

“A hand canter until we have them in sight,” Leof ordered. “Horst, you lead. Keep an eye out for signs they’ve left the road.”

It was a strange journey. The sun was shining brightly, the breeze was warm, Leof could hear thrushes in the hedgerows and grasshoppers shrilling. A beautiful day, and a lovely ride. But behind them lay death and before them terror. It was as though they rode in a bubble of safety that might be popped at any moment. He shook his head to clear it. It had been a long night and longer morning, and he was much too tired. He should eat something, although he felt at the moment as though he’d never again be hungry. He dug some dried grapes out of his belt pouch and chewed on them stolidly, the sweetness making him thirsty, so he drank. The others were doing the same, he noted, except Horst, who had no attention to spare from the dust of the road.

They should have caught up with the enchanter quickly enough, despite their long detour, but the road stretched on and they came eventually to the next village, Feathers Dale, which lay so quiet and orderly under the sun that Leof knew immediately that the ghosts had not come this far.

“We’ve missed them,” he said, turning Arrow. She moved reluctantly, smelling water and stables and hay in the town somewhere. “Come on, lass,” he encouraged her, and they went back again to investigate more thoroughly.

It turned out the ghosts had left the road just after the hill where they had tried to ambush the enchanter. They’d wasted more than an hour and a half. Hodge swore, and Leof felt like joining him. “Let’s go,” he said instead, taking Arrow through a gate into a field. The ghosts had left the gate open, and he made sure Alston closed it again behind them. For some reason, that carelessness with the gate made him angry, angrier even than during the battle.

He was suddenly sure that this enchanter had never worked with his hands, never sweated in a field to get the hay in as he had, next to his father and brothers and all the inhabitants of their town, as just about every person in a warlord’s domain had at one time or another. Bringing in the hay, harvesting the grain or the grapes or the fruit or the beans, these were a part of life, one of the patterns of life which brought people together in comradeship and common purpose.

Up until this moment, he had feared the enchanter’s scheme, but he had not thought about the man himself. Now he was filled with hatred. Contempt. This man was a destroyer of lives and he deserved to be destroyed in return.

The trail was clear enough, and they followed as fast as the horses could bear. Arrow was tiring badly, after her great run from Carlion the day before, and the others, not as fit as she, were in much the same case. The wounds the wraiths had made weren’t deep but the horses had bled enough to weaken them.

The country here was a series of dales and small hills, fields separated by coppices of beech and birch and ash, the trees for spears and chairs and trugs and charcoal. Settled country, with farms regularly spaced. Peaceful.

Cantering down a gentle hill towards a farmhouse, they heard screams. Dying screams, familiar to them all from many battles. They urged the horses forward, Leof feeling sick, because what could they do to protect these people? Nothing. Nothing except try to get them inside and barricaded.

“Hunda!” they heard someone scream. “Run!”

A young man came skittering out of the farmyard, a ghost close behind, two wind wraiths sailed down from the heights and swept across his path. Perhaps it was fear that made him stop in his tracks and watch them as they sailed up again into the sky and disappeared, but it gave the ghost behind him time to catch up and bring down his scythe. The youth fell, fair hair darkening with blood.

“There they are!” Alston shouted.

The ghosts were outside a barn, arguing with the enchanter, it seemed. There were three bodies already on the ground, but no wind wraiths, thank the gods. The ghosts looked up as the horsemen approached, and the leader, the short one with beaded hair, hefted Leof’s own sword and grinned at them. But the enchanter pulled him away, speaking urgently, and the ghosts, reluctantly, followed him out of the farmyard, running.

“See to the wounded,” Leof told Hodge, and he kicked Arrow forward to her best pace. He rode into the pack of ghosts, Arrow following her battle training, kicking out behind her to stop pursuers, allowing Leof precious seconds to swoop on the enchanter and drag him across the saddlebow.

He almost made it. Would have made it, despite the ghosts. But the wraiths descended from where they had been perched, unseen, on the far side of the barn roof, and fl apped and clawed and spat and dragged the enchanter back into the air with them. He looked almost despairing as he vanished into the sky.

Leof pulled Arrow away as the ghost leader aimed a huge blow at her neck. He blocked it with his borrowed sword and slashed down at the man’s head. The blow cut right through his neck. The head didn’t fall, as a living man’s would have, but he reeled and swayed and gave Leof enough time to back Arrow and turn her.

The other wraiths, he realised, were attacking his men. “Back!” Leof shouted. “He’s gone. Get back!”

Then the ghosts had run after their enchanter and the wraiths flew away, and they were left, the four of them, looking at the bodies, the youth, an older woman and two young girls barely out of childhood, whose blood gleamed darkly in the sun.