Carin felt the hoofbeats before she heard them—a barely noticeable tremor underfoot, hardly enough to suggest the approach of a rider but enough to stop her mid-stride.

She turned and studied the leafless trees. Nothing moved. No breeze rattled the branches, no acorn fell to earth, no dead limb snapped. Nothing relieved the woodland’s emptiness.

But she was no longer alone under these oaks. A season on her own had taught her what solitude felt like, and it didn’t feel like this.

Every impulse that had brought her to this place screamed at her to get out of sight. Don’t get caught—not now, after all this time and all that way, those long miles that stretched behind. And not here in this high, pathless woodland that had seemed to hold no life.

The papery dry leaves under her boots barely rustled as Carin darted into a thicket. “Unh!” she gasped at the cold and darkness enveloping her. The pale autumn sun didn’t penetrate here. To a passing rider, she would surely be invisible.

She grew still and listened. But the woods stayed silent, with a hush like the calm while the storm-clouds build.

Carin tensed. A shiver ran through her.

There—

She caught them again, tremors in the earth: hoofbeats, now unmistakable. As she hid in the shadows, her breath suspended, she followed their rhythm, the cadence they struck at the threshold of hearing.

Nearer the hoofbeats came—ever nearer and more distinct. They broke to a gallop.

With a sudden sharp burst of noise, a great snapping and splintering of brittle limbs and underbrush, the horse came crashing into the thicket.

“Stop!” Carin shouted. She had no time to run. She couldn’t even straighten from her crouch before she was bowled over onto her back. Instinctively she put up a foot, struggling to boot the animal away. “Get off!” she yelled. “Get off me.” She aimed a kick at the animal’s foreleg but the horse sidestepped and she hit nothing.

A blur dropped from the horse’s back. Steel flashed. And Carin felt the point of a sword touch the hollow of her throat.

“Oh sweet Drrr—” She almost rolled out an oath. But it died on her tongue.

The swordsman was glaring down at her with the angriest, most frightening eyes she had ever glimpsed in a human face. They were as black as volcanic glass, but they burned like fiends’-fire. Their unnatural luster hinted of … insanity? Demonic possession? She couldn’t say what she saw in their depths, but they took her breath away.

The man leaned in slightly. His weapon nicked the skin of her throat.

“No!” Carin yelled. “Don’t.”

He pulled up, just a fraction. His eyes scorched her. And when he spoke, he sounded as furious as he looked.

“Can you show cause why I should not remove your head at once?” he snapped. “The boundaries of my land are clearly marked. Those who would dare to enter here know the offense they commit, and the penalty for it. Do you have a defense to offer? Or shall I execute you now and save you the trouble of arguing your case?”

“Wait! Let me explain!” Carin demanded, blustering a little, attempting a show of outraged innocence. It fizzled. Her voice quivered and muffed the effect.

The swordsman pulled back another fraction—not enough to let her up. But he allowed enough space, between his sword and her skin, that Carin could heave a breath without risking major blood loss.

He gave her a curt nod. “Whatever you have to say,” he growled, “say it quickly.”

Why’d I tell him I’d explain? she thought, aghast at herself. How do I explain what I don’t understand?

“I’m … not from around here,” Carin ventured, feeling her way with him. “I came up from the south—from the plains. And I’m only passing through. I’m not a poacher, I swear.” She wiped her sweating palms on her leggings and tried to sound convincing. “I haven’t even seen a game trail to follow. Not that I would—follow it, I mean. I didn’t come up here to hunt.”

She resisted the impulse to touch the sling that she wore concealed under her grubby shirt. With the weapon, she had killed enough prairie hens and rabbits to stay just shy of starvation. That was down on the plains, though. These high woods harbored no sign of game—no tracks, no droppings, no fresh scratches on a tree trunk.

The swordsman didn’t budge. “Poachers do not concern me,” he snapped. “I accuse you of trespassing. And your presence here, on my land, is all the proof I require. Your guilt is clear.”

He leaned in again, poised to stab the blade through her throat.

“Stop!” Carin shouted. She raised both hands, palms open. “I haven’t done anything. I just climbed up a hill.” Her hands shook uncontrollably, which made her mad. She clenched her fists and demanded: “How was I supposed to know this was private property? There’s no fence on that hillside where the grass ends and these trees start.”

The man’s eyes flickered. The sword in his hand wavered, very slightly, but enough to make Carin press on, talking fast.

“I swear I wouldn’t be here if I’d seen anything that said ‘Keep out.’ But the way I came, there’s nothing. Maybe the sign’s down. Or,” she hazarded a guess, “somebody stole it.” She gulped a breath and added, “Let me up and I’ll leave—right now. Just let me go and I’ll clear out of here.”

The swordsman was staring intently at her. Is he a bit thrown by my accent? Carin wondered. People often are.

She tried to look the man in the eye. But she caught a gleam so strange, like a flame deep in the darkness of his eyes, that she recoiled. Carin found herself studying his throat instead, where a burnished badge fastened his cloak of black wool. One half of the badge was a crescent moon worked in silver. The horns of the crescent locked around the red-enameled, golden-rayed sun on the design’s other half.

“Cock and bull,” the swordsman snapped, whipping Carin’s gaze back to his. He gave her a look that, like a cautery knife, burned as it cut. She flinched, but she didn’t cry out—

—Not until he flicked the point of his sword up to her eyes. The blade was so close, she couldn’t focus on it. She couldn’t see much of anything, nor hear much over the pounding of her heart in her ears. But still she caught every word the man said next.

“I had planned to show mercy and kill you quickly,” he growled. “But you deserve a slow and painful death for your poor attempts at lying. It is not possible for any mortal to ‘steal’ the warnings that protect these woods from interlopers. Nor is it conceivable that any living thing could fail to notice those warnings. Your own words condemn you.”

“I can prove it!” Carin yelled. By now she was breathing so hard and so fast, she could barely talk. “I’ll take you—show you. There’s nothing. You’ll see.”

The blade was too close. She couldn’t look. Her eyelids clenched shut in a spasm of terror. Her body went rigid and her senses threatened to desert. For a moment, there was nothing: no brambly undergrowth pricking her skin. No spicy scent from the autumn woods’ decay. No sound of her own ragged breathing.

Something prodded her leg. Carin screamed—a cry like a cornered animal’s. Her eyes flew open, and she was back in the moment.

“Get up,” the swordsman barked. Again he jabbed her calf with the toe of his boot. “Walk. Take me to the boundary. I wish to see this impossible thing. If you have the proof, show it to me.”

The instant the man stepped away from her, Carin was on her feet. But her legs didn’t hold her up. She stumbled and fell to one knee and had to scuttle aside as the man’s horse loomed over her again. The animal was a tall, charcoal-gray hunter. It didn’t snort fire from its nostrils, but its rider was surely possessed of the devil.

“Walk,” he repeated. His eyes glittered hotly. “Show me where you entered this land.”

Carin pried herself up, pushed the tangles of dirty hair off her face, and pointed unsteadily. “The hill’s this way,” she said in a strangled tone. “It’s about an hour by foot … my lord.” Carin added the honorific as the man’s natural due. She had no experience with the nobility of this region, but the title seemed to fit him. His good horse and riding gear, and his highlander sword, showed him to be wealthy if not highborn. And he was clearly accustomed to being obeyed.

She faced back the way she’d come and swung into the ground-eating stride that had already consumed many miles that day. Carin watched for the broken twigs and crushed leaves and boot prints in patches of bare dirt that confirmed she was retracing her steps.

In no time, her feet began to feel heavy. And the farther she backtracked, the heavier they got.

This is all wrong, warned a feeling deep inside.

This forced march was taking her in the wrong direction. To reverse course now was not an option, not with every instinct—every compulsion—pushing her northward. If this woodland wasn’t her ultimate destination, it had to be close. Up in this highland of oaks, here in the hard-won north, she might find the place where she belonged.

But not if she kept retreating like this.

Carin fingered the sling that hung around her neck, hidden and waiting. Palm the weapon, fit it with a pebble, whirl, knock the swordsman unconscious with a single precise throw: could she?

It’d be a risk. If her first shot missed, the man following her would be alerted to his danger. Then he would ride her down and either trample her or take her head off.

She threw a glance over her shoulder. The swordsman was not staring a hole in her back. Something else held his attention, at the eastern edge of the clearing they had just entered.

Carin followed the rider’s gaze and saw movement—a flickering in the branches, not the sun but something equally bright, sparking through the bare-limbed trees. It kept pace with her like a shadow made of light.

She watched the light and not her feet, until her left boot slipped sideways and sent her leg out from under her. “Mother of—!” Carin bit off the oath as she pitched forward and her right knee came down on a spur of stone that was as sharp as a knife.

It happened too fast to hurt at first. But, oh! the blood—lots of it, streaming from a gouge that crosscut her knee.

She hunched over the wound, her masses of unkempt hair tumbling around her face, strands of it trailing in the gore. Blindly Carin fumbled in her belt-pouch for something to stanch the bleeding. Her fingers met only flint and steel for fire-making, pebbles for arming her sling, and a length of twine that was useful for everything from tying back her shaggy auburn mane to rigging a brush shelter.

Abruptly a hand grasped the shank of her leg, and another shoved at her shoulder. “Straighten up,” her captor snarled.

Carin threw back her head and flung the hair out of her eyes. “You!” she gasped. “But—” She hadn’t heard the swordsman’s approaching footsteps—a seeming impossibility through the crunchy carpet of autumn leaves. Yet here the man was, crouched beside her and brandishing a dagger. Carin’s hand flew to shield her throat, but it was her knee he put the blade to.

Stay away from me! she wanted to shout at him. She couldn’t get the words out—not in a way that made sense. As sometimes happened when she came unglued, Carin lapsed into a language of her own. The sounds that passed her lips weren’t gibberish, but no one ever understood a word she said when she got like this. Carin yelled at the man, in her own private language, and tried to wrench free of his grasp.

“Stop your noise,” he barked. He held her leg tighter and waved his dagger in her face. “If you can’t be quiet, I’ll cut out your tongue.”

“Unhh—” Her words choked in her throat. She pulled back and let him cut away the blood-soaked fabric of her legging. Rapidly now, the pain welled up with the blood.

Don’t faint, she told herself.

Carin gritted her teeth, and trembled only too visibly, but she didn’t faint. She didn’t take her eyes off the man’s hands. A nobleman he might be, but his hands knew work. They were muscular and lean. The fingers were long, almost elegant, and bore the scars of labor old and new. The blunt nails were well cared-for but stained at their edges. And from his left hand, he was missing his little finger.

When the swordsman had sliced away enough of Carin’s legging to lay the wound bare, he reached inside his coat and drew out a pair of small leather packets. One held a bronze-colored powder; the other, a matching amount of a green dust.

“Hold the knee still,” he ordered as he dosed the wound with the bronze stuff. “This will burn.”

Burn, however, was not the word to describe it. A glowing coal dropped into the cut would not have blazed hotter. Tears streamed down Carin’s face but she kept still and made no sound, even as she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood.

He glanced at her face as he set aside the bronze powder and picked up the green.

Sweet mercy, what next? Her fingers dug into the cold ground under her.

But when the man sprinkled the green dust into the wound, the fire in Carin’s flesh died. Her knee went numb. The gash, though alarmingly deep, no longer bled or throbbed. Carin freed her lip and tasted the blood she’d bit from it.

The man resealed the colored powders and slipped both packets back inside the black leather coat that he wore under his cloak. From another pocket, he produced a square of linen and bandaged her knee.

He stood then and walked to his horse, but he did not immediately mount. “Get on your feet,” he snapped.

He’s demented. Carin eyed him, more than a little confused. He’s insane. One minute, he was threatening to kill her. The next, he was doctoring her hurts. And now his anger seemed rekindled.

She pushed up from the rocks and teetered, the toe of her right boot barely touching the ground. The sun hung low in the west. She had to hurry or night would be on them before she could lead this strange man to the edge of the trees and prove her case.

Get on with it, Carin ordered herself. She put one foot ahead of the other and tried to ignore her injury. But she could barely hobble. The numbing effect of the swordsman’s medicinal powders wore off fast. With each step, she stifled a groan. She didn’t get far before the pain shooting through her knee forced her to brace against a tree and give her sound leg her weight.

“If you continue to try my patience,” the swordsman growled, “you will discover how limited it is. Move!”

Carin glared at him. “I can’t walk,” she snapped in a tone that was as sharp as his. “If you want me to show you that hill I climbed, you’ll have to let me ride.”

The man scowled. He muttered an oath—something about “guts and gall.” But after a moment in which he seemed to weigh his options, he led his horse up beside her.

“Mount,” he ordered brusquely. “I am determined to see this place along my borders that you claim is unmarked. Even a blind man must heed those warnings and turn aside. Though you are a clumsy creature, you’re not blind. I will have you show me what you claim not to have seen.”

I didn’t see it because it’s not there, you lunatic, Carin thought. But she said nothing more, only stretched for the pommel and pulled herself up. She barely managed to get her throbbing right leg over the horse’s rump. And she hadn’t quite straightened before the man swung up behind her. He pressed her forward on the flat huntsman’s saddle and gathered the reins in both of his hands.

“Oh—!” She flinched, swallowing another oath, finding herself trapped between his arms. Only the damned should be this close to a devil who had the fires of the abyss in his eyes.

As they rode south at a canter, the swordsman sought no guidance from his captive. Carin would not have been able to direct him even if he had asked. From horseback in the darkening woods, she could see no traces of her previous passage. But the man seemed sure of the way, as if he knew right where she had set foot on his property.

So why make me show him the spot? If he knew the place, then he must know it was wide-open to any traveler.

Covering the remaining distance far more quickly than Carin could have walked it, the man reined up. He had indeed brought them to the slope where these wooded highlands met the grasslands below. Though the day was far gone, enough light remained to pick out a distinctively scarred tree on the hilltop. Carin recognized it. The white mark on its trunk looked like a dolphin. When she had passed by here earlier, she’d particularly noticed the dolphin because it looked so out of place, suspended between the golden plains and the leafless oaks.

She started to point out the tree, to tell her captor that this was the precise spot. But the man behind her spoke first.

“Show me!” he demanded, so forcefully that his hot breath ruffled the hair on the back of her head. He pointed down the slope. “If you value your life, show me the break you claim to have discovered along my well-protected borders.”

What does this madman want from me? Carin half twisted around to vent her frustration on him, but stopped when she thought how close that would bring her face to his. She jerked her head down instead, and brought up her arm. With a sweeping motion, she indicated all of the landscape that lay before and below them.

“What are you talking about?” she exclaimed. “What are you looking at? You can see for yourself that there’s no wall, or fence, or signpost.” Carin pointed out a glade down on the hillside. “The lower you go, the fewer the trees. That’s all I see.” She shook her head. “Sir, I don’t think much of your ‘well-protected border.’ If you want to keep people out of these woods, you need more than a few scarred oaks and an imaginary fence.”

“By the blood of Abraxas!” the man swore in her ear. “You’re a brassy chit.”

Carin swallowed hard and waited for him to hit her. Whenever her old master, the wheelwright of a small southern town, had barked at her like that, he’d always finished by clouting her.

But the swordsman didn’t hit her. He only urged his horse forward, muttering something so far under his breath that Carin didn’t catch it.

The horse took two steps, then stopped of its own accord. It snorted nervously and pawed the ground, clearly unwilling to descend the slope.

Its master did not force it. The man dismounted and ordered Carin down.

She dragged her stiffening knee over the horse’s back, slid past the stirrup iron, and managed to land with all of her weight on her good leg. As Carin wobbled on one foot, the swordsman caught and steadied her.

“Show me,” he ordered again, his voice tight. With the hand that had helped her off the horse, he gave her a push—not enough to unbalance her, but enough to make his meaning clear. He wanted her to go down the hill, back toward the plains below.

Do what he wants. Get out of here. Find another way north.

Carin half hopped and half limped down the slope. Pain lanced through her knee. She had to stop, far above the foot of the hill, and brace against an oak. She closed her eyes and tried to master the pain through willpower alone. She did not succeed.

But in her stillness, Carin again became aware of the silence that pervaded the woodland—a silence in which not so much as a whir of wings nor the distant call of a bird could be detected. The profound hush that had made these woods seem peaceful and promising, when she’d first entered them, now impressed Carin as sinister. No tomb for the dead was more oppressive than this place.

Go, whispered her fear. Get off this hillside.

Carin took a step. “Aaahh!” she cried as the pain buckled her leg under her. She collapsed into a pile of leaves.

Sweet mercy, her knee hurt. The tears came again, wetting her face. She ducked her head to hide them, but an avalanche of profanities made her look sharply uphill.

The swordsman was striding down toward her, swearing with his every step, shattering the stillness. Though the oaths he spoke were unfamiliar to her, she could recognize the inflections of violent cursing when she heard them.

The man stopped swearing just before he reached Carin. He crouched on the slope so that his eyes were only a little above hers. He stared at her, hard.

Don’t scream. Carin beat back a deep need to do so as she endured the searing intensity of his gaze.

Her breath came in short bursts. She grabbed one and panted out, “Got to stop … knee’s gone … won’t take my weight.” She squeezed it tightly. The pressure helped the agony and helped to steady her. As her breathing eased, Carin demanded more coherently: “Leave me here. I’ll sleep under a tree. Tomorrow, I’ll head down.” She pointed to the flats below them. Pain sharpened her voice as she added, “You won’t see me again. I promise.”

The man didn’t answer her. If he altered his expression at all, it was only to deepen his scowl. The sun had set on the hill, but in any light her captor’s eyes would be easy to see. They remained fixed on her. He studied Carin as if he doubted what he saw. His face didn’t give much away, but she detected a veiled astonishment.

“How have you come through the barrier?” the swordsman asked, finally breaking his silence. “Tell me: do you perceive nothing here? Feel nothing? See nothing that alarms you?”

“The only alarming thing I’ve seen all day is you—sir.” The tacked-on courtesy sounded like she was mocking him: unwise, under the circumstances. But her misery was loosening Carin’s tongue. “You want to know what I’m feeling?” she snapped. “My knee’s killing me. I’m dead tired from walking a thousand miles, and I’m hungry.” Ravenous, in fact. She’d long since walked off her last meal of rabbit and redberries. “I’m cold, too,” she added as she shivered so violently that the leaves under her rustled audibly in the stillness.

The man shook his head. “None of that matters. Tell me: what is here?” He pointed to the ground under her. “What do you sense in this place?”

“Sense?” Carin paused to consider her answer, for she’d gradually become aware that she did in fact perceive something—a kind of tingly energy, diffuse and thready, all around her. “It’s hard to describe.” She looked around, as another shiver traveled over her. “But it feels a little like the air does when a storm is building. You know, when it’s thundering and lightning but the air is so dry it crackles, and the rocks are throwing off sparks the way a wool blanket does on a winter night.”

She refocused on him. Though the man’s expression was unrevealing, his eyes narrowed—not enough to hide the glint in them. Carin shuddered, wishing for a good wool blanket to cover her threadbare clothes.

“That feeling in the air is easy to miss,” she added, dropping her gaze to avoid his. “It’s weak. I never noticed it when I came this way the first time. I barely feel it now that I’m sitting here freezing to death. When I passed through before—this afternoon, when I climbed up and went on in to where you found me—I didn’t sense it at all.”

A thought came to her then. Incredulous, Carin snapped her head up and demanded: “Is this little tingly feeling supposed to be guarding your borders? That’s ridiculous! You claim your lands are protected, but there’s nothing on this hillside that would stop a butterfly.”

In response, Carin’s captor raised his right hand and made a motion with his thumb and fingers, as if flicking away an insect.

Then the man rose to his feet. He loomed over her.

“Come away from there,” he growled. With his three-fingered left hand he grasped Carin’s arm and drew her up. His right fist drove at her face. The blow landed.

Or did it? Carin’s head snapped back from the force of it, and yet the fist had failed to connect. Half an instant before striking her, the man’s fingers straightened and arrowed at her eyes. They seemed to go right through her as a cold white flash engulfed her and nearly popped her head off.

She knew every agony, every torment that human flesh could endure. For a moment, Carin hurt as she had never hurt before.

Then all things subsided. Pain, hunger, and weariness slid away, leaving only a vague, lingering bewilderment. She wasn’t entirely gone to insensibility. The white flash had banished vision, but she caught a breath of night-crisp air that carried the scent of the woods.

And gradually, an awareness of movement asserted itself: she or something touching her was in motion. The action had a rhythmic quality, soothing as a baby’s rocker. Carin retained enough mindfulness to know she was back on the horse, swaying with the animal’s steps. She could almost hear the plop and crunch of hooves on earth and fallen leaves.

Soon these impressions faded, all becoming white and smooth and peaceful. The whiteness filled and took her. And the two voices that came to her then, as if from a great distance, had no power to revive Carin. The words of the two seeped through her brain, like snowflakes melting, leaving no residue—


“The girl makes a pretty picture, mage, resting in your arms.”

“Faugh! A drowned cat would look better … and smell better.”

“She is another, you know.”

“Another what, pray tell?”

“Another like me.”

“How so?”

“Unbound by the laws of your world, mage, or by your spells. She is from elsewhere.”

“A fanciful notion, sprite, hardly to be credited. She is a serving-maid, more like, running from her master and ill prepared to fend off starvation in the winter that comes.”

“How then do you explain her utter disregard for your imprecations?”

“Not so. She sensed the magic. She succumbed at the last.”

“Scarcely! And by slow measures, only after swimming in your spells for long enough to drive the sanity from any of your countrymen. You know I speak the truth. Take care how you deny it. I was there. I saw.”

“Be off with you, woodsprite. I find your chatter tedious. Though I may be powerless to banish you from this land, I won’t abide your insolence. Begone, and do not let me see you again.”

“As you wish, magician. I’ll leave you to ride home through the dreariest patch of woods that ever grew. But mark my words: you shall find that this traveler who’s asleep in your arms belongs here no more than I do.”