Torcaill looked doubtful, at best.

“You’re sure?” Orisian asked quietly. It was too late to refuse this woman’s guidance now, after they had come so far.

“She’s that way,” Eshenna insisted dully.

So they drove into the wild wood. Branches scratched at their faces, fallen timber blocked their way. Tangled, leafless bushes caught in their stirrups and snagged their horses’ tails. Birds scattered from their path, chattering alarm calls into the stillness of the forest. Their pace slowed, even as the oppressive sense of fear and foreboding grew.

They found another trail, and followed it. It was wide enough for two or three to ride abreast, but no more. They ate in the saddle, passing biscuits and waterskins from one to another. It left Orisian still hungry. His eyelids grew heavy as the day turned past its midpoint. His thoughts wandered, shapeless.

He recognised the sudden sound as soon as he heard it, but could not name it: that snapping, hissing flutter like a score of breaths abruptly expelled. He turned in time to see a flock of arrows darting out from the forest along the track. They rattled in on the column of men and horses. Someone cried out. A horse reared. He looked for their attackers, but there was nothing save the dark thicket of tree trunks. And now another scattered flight of arrows flashing through the crowd of his men. One rider slumped out of his saddle.

“Go!” Torcaill was shouting close by. “Ride on, ride on!”

Orisian’s horse sprang into a gallop. He was not certain whether he had kicked it into motion or whether it was just carried along by the sudden rush of all the other riders. They surged down the track. Orisian felt and heard an arrow smacking into the shield slung across his back. The horse ahead of him veered to one side, stumbling and faltering on suddenly flimsy legs. Orisian glimpsed the fletching of an arrow protruding from its neck. Thundering on by, he turned his head to see the animal crashing through a bush and falling, spilling its rider. He lost sight of both the man and his mount.

The forest seemed to press ever more closely along the path. Orisian expected the lithe figures of Kyrinin to emerge at any moment. The horses stretched their legs, though, and hammered on and on, until the forest thinned a little and the trail opened out.

Rothe reined in his mount next to Orisian and reached across to pull at the arrow embedded in his shield. Yvane, clinging to the burly warrior like a limpet, looked queasy.

“Are you wounded?” Rothe demanded. “Were you hit?”

Orisian shook his head. “You?”

“No.” Rothe grunted as he finally freed the arrow. He snapped its shaft and threw the two pieces to the ground.

Orisian looked around for Torcaill. It was hard to tell, amidst the throng of riders milling about, how many might have fallen. He glimpsed the young man at the rear of the company, sword in hand, expression grim and angry.

“Torcaill,” Orisian shouted. “Are they coming after us?”

“I can’t tell. We should put more ground between us and them, anyway.”

Orisian hauled his horse’s head around. The animal resisted, almost as if it too dreaded what lay behind them, and he had to dig his heels into its flanks to move it. He worked his way to Torcaill’s side. The two of them stared back down the path. It looked like any other woodland trail: a muddy stretch of wiry grass, bare overhanging branches and twigs bobbing in the faintest of breezes. There was no sign of life.

“How many men did we lose?” Orisian asked.

“I’m not sure. Two, I think. We’ve others injured, though, and some of the horses. Still, we were lucky.”

“They’re only playing with us,” rumbled Rothe, coming up behind them. “Chipping away. Come, Orisian. You shouldn’t linger in the open like this. There must be bodies between you and any arrow’s flight.”

“He’s right, sire,” Torcaill said, sheathing his sword. “You should stay in the midst of us. We won’t see them coming next time, either, unless we’re luckier than we’ve any right to expect.”

Orisian allowed himself to be shepherded into the centre of the column, like some prized lamb kept in the heart of the herd.

“We could use your Fox friends now,” Torcaill muttered as they moved on down the trail. “Will we be seeing them again, do you think?”

“Yes,” said Orisian tightly. “Yes. We’ll see them again.”

Kanin oc Horin-Gyre had discovered depths of exhaustion such as he had never before imagined. He bore half a dozen small wounds – cuts and many-hued bruises – but it was lack of sleep that had sapped his strength, and the emptiness that came in the aftermath of battle. He was limping heavily: he had torn, or strained, something in his knee during the battle, leaping from the back of his dying horse. It hardly hurt, but the joint was enfeebled.

His Shield followed behind him through the streets of Glasbridge. Igris still carried, like a fool, the stick that he had tried to persuade Kanin to lean upon. A Thane, the victor in savage battle, should not be seen humbled by such a minor injury. The streets were soft with slush and treacherous underfoot, but Kanin would rather fall than hobble along like an old man.

After the battles he had won at Grive and Anduran, he had felt a dazed exultation, a lifting up of his heart and a sublime affirmation of the rightness of his deeds. No such exalted feelings attended upon the brutal victory won in the snowstorm on the road to Kolglas. The struggle had been unlike anything Kanin had previously experienced: desperate, seemingly never-ending. Wreathed by snow and cloud, there had been no time, no location to the slaughter. It had simply existed, a world unto itself, and all purpose had been lost save the imperative to slay one man, and then the next, and the next.

Driven back from the earthen wall that the Inkallim had raised across the road, almost overrun by the hordes of the Haig Bloods, he and his dwindling and scattering companies had fallen back towards Glasbridge, turning again and again to face another charge, to die. Eventually, lost, adrift in the blizzard, they had turned for the last time and stood in the calf-deep snow to await fate’s resolution. And there had been enough blood shed there to leave them wading in it. Kanin had known he was going to die then, and had felt no great sorrow at the thought. But he had not died, and the enemy had instead faltered and then fled. The battle was won, by the snowstorm and by the army Fiallic the Inkallim and Temegrin the Eagle had brought down upon the flank and the rear of their enemy.

There had been ravens of the Battle Inkall fighting and dying at Kanin’s side all through the long day, with Shraeve at the forefront; there had been scores of commonfolk from the north, come across the Vale of Stones to stand with Horin-Gyre. All these had been there in the fields of snow, but not Wain. His sister had insisted on remaining in Glasbridge with the vile halfbreed who, impossibly, she had brought back with her from Anduran.

Wain was, in manner and character, unrecognisable. Kanin’s heart ached to think of it. Her face and voice were as they had always been, but what lay behind them had changed. Since her return, she spoke only of things that Kanin did not wish to understand: Aeglyss, the Kall, storms, all-consuming fires and terrible, wondrous fates. Half of what she said was incoherent, little better than the ravings of some mind-addled crone; all of it was spoken with a strange intensity.

As far as he could tell, nothing Kanin said reached her any more. She would not be parted from Aeglyss; she would not participate in any calm, reasoned conversation that Kanin attempted. That part of her that had always burned fiercely, with faith and hard certainty, now seemed to have overwhelmed all her sense, all her restraint. The sister Kanin loved, and respected above all others, had been taken away from him by these strange changes. And he was all but certain, in his deepest instincts, that Aeglyss was in some way responsible.