"A pack mule," Malentir repeated, hardly bothering to conceal his disbelief. "No doubt."

"Stay here. I'll have a look."

"You trust me at your back? Already? I'm touched."

"I don't trust you as far as I can throw you." She gestured to his slashed ivory-and-black robes and equally striped hair. "But you stand out like a gold crown in a beggar's bowl, and I'd rather not be spotted coming down the slope. Stay here and keep low."

"That must be a fearsome mule," the Thornlord said, but he found a rock to sit on, and he stayed out of her way.

She was glad to leave him behind. The hills were steep and treacherous, and keeping quiet took all her skill. Spell-blasted stones offered scant cover, but at least the smoke's swirl masked her movements. Bitharn moved carefully, testing each step before trusting her weight to it. No matter how cautious she was, loose rocks skittered away underfoot, rattling down the hillside and sometimes letting up plumes of sulfurous steam. The noise made her wince, but there was no sign that it alarmed whoever, or whatever, was approaching from below.

She didn't think it was a pack mule. She didn't think it was Celestians either, but that possibility was harder to dismiss. Her subterfuge wouldn't last more than a day or two before the Blessed's goddess-granted visions revealed the truth of what had happened in the tower. Then the High Solaros would send Sun Knights and dedicants out to recapture the Thorn, and to take her as a traitor for helping him escape. They couldn't have come to Carden Vale so quickly a but they would come, eventually.

Not a pleasant thought. But she had known what would happen before she started, and she'd done it anyway. She hoped they would understand, that they would forgive the necessary evil she'd done a but if they didn't, Bitharn had made her peace with that. Let them call her a traitor if it meant getting Kelland back. Nothing the Celestians did to her could be worse than what he was suffering in Ang'arta.

There would be time to pay that price later. Here and now, her only concern was staying clear of pursuit long enough to trade the Thorn for Kelland's freedom. She'd thought they were too earlya"it was barely past Greenseed, and the full moon was still three weeks awaya"but Malentir had assured her it did not matter. He said the Spider would know he was free, and would come early to claim him. Bitharn could only hope that was true.

The sun was past its peak by the time she reached the end of Devils' Ridge. Green shoots poked through the cracked rocks. Oaks grew ahead, and chestnuts showing their first spring buds. Bitharn breathed a sigh and slipped gratefully into the forest, moving more quickly through familiar terrain.

It wasn't a hunter coming up the hill. It was a boy, barefoot and in a tunic far too thin for the weather. He was fourteen, or a little younger. His left foot was badly twisted, though he stumbled on despite it. The limp made him clumsy; that was why Bitharn had been able to sneak up on him so easily. He made so much noise blundering through the forest that he would never have heard her.

Bitharn was about to call out to the boy, to offer him her cloak or ask what had driven him so urgently into the forest, when he lifted his head toward Devils' Ridge and she caught sight of his face. The call died in her throat.

His face was bloated and pale, underlaid with a violet tinge like an old bruise. Inky spatters stained the corners of his lips and dotted his cheeks in a smiling arc toward his ears. As the boy stood there, chest heaving, Bitharn saw that the purple-black spatters weren't stains. They were sores eaten through the inside of his mouth, as if he had packed his cheeks with lye and waited for it to find its own way out.

She crouched in the brush, too shocked to move, until the boy regained his breath and plunged back into the trees. He went north, heading toward the blasted ridge as swiftly as his bad leg would let him. By the time she thought to follow, there was another crashing in the forest. Someone else was coming.

A sense of wrongness seemed to roll through the air, sharp as the tingling before a storm. Bitharn pressed herself closer to the ground. She didn't know what was coming, but she knew with a sudden, wild desperation that she did not want to be seen. There wasn't any reason for it, and that frightened her almost as much as the terror itself did. She wasn't a child, wasn't given to jumping at imaginary dangers a and yet she was certain, somehow, that what came through the forest was far worse than the boy with the spotted face. Chin in the dirt, Bitharn breathed shallowly through her mouth, praying that whoevera"whatevera"it was would not find her.

The branches parted. Four men came through. They were deeply sunburnt and wore miners' clothes blackened along the seams with greasy coal dust. The incongruity of their clothes and their complexions was hardly the only oddity about them. Their heads had been shaved recently, and their scalps were white through the stubble of returning hair. Blisters dotted each man's head in the same pink constellation, four over four.

The men carried picks and shovels slung across their backs. Each wore a long bone knife, too, strapped bare bladed at his hip. The knives were smeared with something dark. Not blood; it was the wrong color for that, and too grainy. She was too far to be sure, but it looked like the blades had been rolled in tarry sand.

The sense of wrongness did not come from them. It came from the fifth man, the one who ran at their head, the one who wore a collar hooked into his neck by steel rings punched through scar tissue. His eyes were gone. Welts of slick pink flesh filled the sockets.

As the men came to the trampled brush where the boy had paused, the eyeless one raised his head and snaked his tongue into the air. That tongue was impossibly long, impossibly wide; laid against Bitharn's forearm, it would have stretched past her fingertips. Five holes, like the finger holes of a flute, ran along its length. The lowest was big enough for a hen's egg to slip through, the last one was small as a fingertip, and all of them whistled softly as the eyeless man licked the wind.

His head turned blindly to follow whatever his tongue felt. Bitharn shivered as the eyeless man's gaze passed over her, his tongue darting quick stabs in the air. He took a step toward her and her fingers closed around the hilt of a knife, even though she knew her accuracy would be hopeless if she threw while lying on her belly in the dirt.

The eyeless man took another step, swaying from side to side. Muttering, the man holding his leash jerked him back. "Ank'raah. Blackfire, not blood. Find the boy."

"What's the problem?" asked another miner.

"He smells blood." The one with the leash spat. "Deer, maybe. Or a rabbit. He hasn't eaten in so long, he might even be lighting on sparrows. Not our boy, though." He flicked the leash. "Ank'raah. Find the boy."

The eyeless one whined, but he curled his tongue back into his mouth and sent it undulating out again, glistening with black-flecked saliva. This time he turned north, along the path that the broken-footed boy had taken, and plunged ahead as far as the leash would let him. The other men followed. In a few moments they were out of sight.

Bitharn pushed herself up and brushed the wood loam from her clothes, swallowing to get rid of the cottony taste of fear. She wasn't sure what she'd seen, but she remembered the terror on the boy's face and knew she couldn't leave him to face them alone.

The miners had no slings or bows. If she kept her distance, she'd be safe enough. In the forest, with the advantage of surprise, she could kill five mena"six, if she was wrong about the boya"before they closed on her. She had no illusions about how many things might go wrong, but the odds favored her.

If they were men. If he was a boy.

Kelland would have been able to tell her. He would have known who those people were, and what they wanted, and what the right thing to do would be. With him beside her, she wouldn't have been nearly as afraid.

But he was in the dungeons of Ang'arta, being tormented by the Thorns, and her meeting with the Spider was his only hope of freedom. The thought brought a familiar wave of despair and a swift stab of anger. How could he abandon her to carry such a weight of choice and consequence by herself?

It wasn't a choice. Duty trapped him as surely as it did her. She couldn't leave that crippled boy to his fate.

She checked her knives and her bowstring, then stalked after the hunters.

They never heard her coming. The men shoved carelessly through the brush, drowning out any sound Bitharn might have made. The eyeless one canted his head in her direction, curling his tongue out again, but the man holding his leash forced him onward with a curse. She circled around them, hurrying to reach the boy before they did.

She found him slumped against a log, sobbing for breath. His bad leg was stretched out to the side. A huge purple canker swallowed his foot and crept halfway to his knee. She'd never seen its like on a human limb; it looked like an eruption on a birch trunk, all twisted bark and gnarled wood. Not flesh.

That sense of wrongness came from him, too, foul as the stench off a tannery a but Bitharn had to help him. Had to try. She stepped out of the trees. "What's happened to you?"

The boy looked toward her. Bitharn recoiled. The spots on his cheek had widened and deepened. Now they were black fissures in his face, their insides glistening wet and gritty. The skin between them had wrinkled and bunched, as if his face were a mask about to slide off. Only his eyes were human, and they were filled with fear.

"Are you real?" he whispered. His drooping lips distorted the words so that she could barely understand.

"I am."

"Please." Tears trickled down the wrinkles of his ruined face. "Please a if you are real, help me."

"How?" She wasn't Blessed; she couldn't heal him. She wasn't sure Kelland could have. The boy's affliction was obviously unnatural, and there were limits when magic ran against magic. What those were, and where they lay, Bitharn wasn't certain, but she knew there was nothing she could do to cure him.

He didn't want a cure. "A knife. An arrow. You have a bow. Give me mercy. Please. They will come for me. I was a thief a but take pity on me, please. I stole only because I needed it. Needed its taste. Have mercy."

"No," Bitharn whispered, horrified. She couldn't heal him, but someone else could. There might be a Blessed in Carden Vale or another town along the river. Malentir might help. The Thorns could heala"differently, drawing on darker powers, but their skill was well known. Some said they were the best healers in Ithelas. They had to be to keep the victims of their interrogations alive, and Malentir was powerful among them. Perhaps he could turn cankers back into flesh. "I'll find a healer."

"Please." He tried to stand and failed, dragged down by his cankered leg. "They will come."

"I'll defend you."

"You can't. You cannot save me from my sins. I wanteda"I wanted the fire under the mountain. Unworthy. I touched it. I dared, I devoured a and I burned. The penance is mine, the price a but will you forgive me? Please? Oh, Bright Lady, forgive me. Forgive me. I wanted." He spoke to the air, sobbing, and did not look at her again.

The miners were coming. Bitharn heard them kicking leaves and breaking branches. Cursing herself for a fool and a coward, she pulled back into the bushes to hide.

She watched, though. She could not help but watch.

They fell on him, swiftly and savagely. There were no cheers, no cries. The lead miner tied the harnessed one to a tree, like a dog, and all of them went at the boy with their black-bladed knives. They cut the canker from his leg and crammed its dripping pieces into their mouths while he watched glassy eyed. They wrenched the bones from his body and made them into tools. With swift, crude cuts, they made picks and handles from the long bones of arm and leg, shovels and scrapers from the wide bones of hip and shoulder. Their other tools were bone as well. Bitharn hadn't noticed, dirty as they were.

It wasn't torture, and it wasn't butchery. Both those words captured part of it, but what she saw was wilder, more savage, than that. Bitharn felt as if she were watching an old rite, something from the ancient days when the White Seas clans drank the blood of their enemies and left their living bodies staked hand and foot to the ice for their gods.

The boy never lifted a hand to defend himself, and the miners never said a word. The only sound was the scuffing of their boots, the wet noise of knives tearing through flesh, and the whistles of the harnessed man straining toward the slaughter, his tongue sieving blood spray from the air. Very soon the boy was dead, although the cutting went on for some time after that.

Bitharn waited until they were done. Then she turned away and was quietly sick in the woods.

Darkness fell before she reached the rock on Devils' Ridge where she had left Malentir. By night, the blasted ridge was like a glimpse into Narsenghal, where the ghosts of the sinful dead were condemned to wander. The crevices between the stones were chasms of depthless black, the stones themselves a mosaic of broken silver. Moonlight glowed within the smoke, turning the rising wisps into coils of drifting light and covering the slopes in a pearly, dreamlike haze.

To her surprise, the Thornlord was waiting when she returned. Bitharn had half-expected him to leave, although she wasn't sure why. He could go whenever he wanted; she had no more control over him than if he'd been a lion on a leash of string.

Garbed in slashes of silver and shadow, Malentir seemed as alien as his surroundings. A sparrow perched on his shoulder. Its chest feathers were dark with blood. It cocked its head at Bitharn, and in its beady black eyes was a gleam of pallid light. Not moonlight. Magic.

"You were gone for some time," he said, while the bird stared at her with dead eyes. "Was the mule so hard to subdue?"

"It wasn't a mule."

"Oh?"

"It was a boy. Something that used to be a boy, at least." Bitharn told him what she had seen. She spared no details. There was nothing about it she needed to hide, and she suspected he had witnessed the whole grim hunt through the bird's eyes anyway. The Thorns used dead things as spies, and if he was showing his so openly, he meant for her to know it.

Recounting the boy's death made her feel sick all over again. Bitharn scrubbed a sleeve across her mouth when she was done. "Could you have saved him?"

Malentir shook his head. "I wouldn't have tried. Another power had already claimed that one's soul, and that would have made it a dangerous. For a second deity to prevail over that claim would have required someone very strong and very skilled. My mistress might have done it. Not I. Not for some useless villager."

She quelled her irritation. "Then you know what afflicted him."

"No. I have a guess."

"What's the guess?"

"No concern of yours." Some of her frustration must have showed, for the Thornlord made a small, placating gesture. "Not yet. Not until I speak with my mistress, and know what my orders are and what I am permitted to say. It may be that I will tell you then a but not before."

"Such loyalty."

Malentir gave her a mocking smile, but it did not touch his eyes. "Of course. No disloyalty survives the Tower of Thorns. Our mistress reads our hearts and minds; those who do not love her never leave."

That sounded like a nightmare. "How many fail?"

He shrugged, looking away. "It is easy to love her, if she chooses you." The bird on his shoulder fluttered its wings and flew off. "Do you intend to spend the night on these rocks? I had hoped for a more comfortable camp. Or at least a less sulfurous one."

"Fine." Bitharn led him down the smoky slope, picking her way as carefully as she had the first time. There was little need for quieta"she was quite sure that the Thornlord's bird had been sent ahead as a scout, and would warn him if anyone lurked nearbya"but the rocks were twice as treacherous by moonlight as they had been by day.

It was near midnight when they came to the forest. Bitharn's eyes blurred with weariness and she stumbled with every step. She hadn't pushed herself so hard since she'd ridden for help after Kelland's capture. Her back ached, her feet were stone bruised, and her hands felt like useless blocks of ice. Making a camp was beyond her, and Malentir was hopeless at woodscraft, so Bitharn wrapped a thick wool blanket around her body and buried herself in a drift of dry leaves.

Despite her exhaustion she lay awake for a while, thinking about the boy, and when she finally fell asleep she thought of him again. In her dream he had Kelland's face, and the hunter with the holes in his tongue had an eye that shone blue and bright as a winter star. She watched, helpless, as the miners sank their knives into the crippled knight. Smoke and light poured out of his wounds instead of blood. The smoke tangled around the light in dense black ropes, trying to strangle it, and the more they cut him, the darker it grew. Kelland screamed and she screamed with him, despairing. Then the knives were suddenly in her flesh, too, stabbing and tearing.

It hurt. It hurt so badly, sharper than dream pain should.

Bitharn woke with a gasp. The dead sparrow was perched on her shoulder. It tilted its head to one side and then the other, regarding her with empty eyes, and hopped to a branch nearby. The blood on its chest had dried to a prickly-feathered streak, but there was fresh wetness on its beak. She could feel the sting of little stabs along her neck and shoulder. Groggily, she understood.

"I was shouting," she mumbled. "Too much noise. Sorry. I'll be careful."

The bird made no answer. She sank into sleep again, strangely comforted by its dead gaze. This time there were no nightmares.

In the morning the leaves piled atop her blanket crackled with transparent frost. The sky was gray and cloudy, echoing Bitharn's mood. She longed for a cup of hot tea to banish the chill. A bowl of steaming porridge and a fire would have made it a not pleasant, but bearable. She'd had many such mornings on the road with Kelland, and had loved every one.

There'd be no fire today. They were too close to Carden Vale, and she didn't want to risk anyone finding the Thornlord. The miners still troubled her. Whoever they were, they couldn't have come from far away; they'd carried no food or traveling gear. Most likely they were from Carden Vale. If that was so, then the town held monsters. She didn't know what to make of that possibility, and Malentir offered no help.

Breakfast was a handful of cold biscuit and dried fruit washed down with water that tasted of the leather skin it had been carried in. Once they had eaten, Bitharn resumed their descent, ignoring the protests of her aching muscles. She'd been riding for too long; she had forgotten what it was to walk.

A fine rain was falling by midmorning. The drizzle washed the color from the world, surrounding them in a velvety gray gloom. Bitharn lost all sense of time in the blurred forest. She was startled when the sky began to darken, and more so when the trees thinned ahead. Past them, she could look down on Carden Vale.

It was a small town that had once been a great one. The ruins of its grandeur were still imposing. Smooth stone wharves reached out toward the river, delicate as a lady's fingers, though now they grasped a fistful of mud. A high wall curved around the south end of the valley, shielding the town from invaders. Black spears, tiny as flyspecks from this distance, marched along its parapet.

To the east and west, the Irontooth Mountains stood guard over Carden Vale. A long road crawled from the town to the ruins of Duradh Mal. The road was cracked and broken, shattered like the fortress it served, but the scar it made on the mountainside remained. Dusk hid Duradh Mal from view, but Bitharn fancied she could feel its presence, malignant behind its veil of shadow.

North of Carden Vale there were no defenses save a mossy palisade and an earthen wall so eroded that Bitharn could barely tell it was there. More of the palisade's wooden stakes were missing than whole. An unpaved cart road ran through the widest gap, reaching to where the mountains closed in at the valley's end. Miners' picks left pockmarks in those mountains' faces, dimly visible through the misty rain.

Within those walls, the town was a tiny, shrunken thing. Half its houses had been scavenged for stone. Perhaps two hundred stood intact, and of those, many stood on streets that the wilderness had begun to reclaim. Some of the roads were more green than gray. Saplings stretched out of empty windows, while brown threads of winter-bare ivy reached in.

"Where are we to meet her?" Malentir asked.

"By the paupers' pyre, below the dule tree, at midnight." She pointed to it outside the northern palisade: a sprawling chestnut with pale rings on its limbs where they'd been chafed by hangmen's ropes. Next to it was a wide, shallow pit stained with the ash of countless pyres. The dule tree was not far from the town's walls, but it was far enough to lie well outside their torches' reach after nightfall. "The Spider has a taste for theatrics."

"She does. But it is a sensible choice. The dule tree is easy for a stranger to find, and these mountain villagers take their hauntings seriously. Anyone who braves the dark to see us will likely take us for ghosts and flee back to their beds a if there is anyone still abroad here."

There was an odd hint of foreboding in Malentir's last words, Bitharn thought, but she doubted he'd elaborate if she asked, so she merely nodded. Common superstition held that rapists and murderers, denied absolution at death and so forever barred from the Bright Lady's paradise, haunted the sites of their executions. Their souls were condemned to Narsenghal, but on full-moon nights, the stories said, the veil between worlds thinned, and some of them slipped back to lure the living into taking their places in hell.

It was only a story, but she had little doubt that any villager unlucky enough to stumble upon the dule tree on this full-moon night would soon be meeting his gods one way or another. She hoped the people of Carden Vale were uncommonly superstitious. It might be all that kept them safe tonight.

Bitharn pulled back into the forest's cover, waiting for night to fall. As the gray sky darkened to inky blue, anxiety crept over her. What if she'd gambled everything on a lie? What if the Thorns had killed Kelland, and meant to fulfill their bargain with a corpse or a mind-blasted shell of a man? It would satisfy the letter of their promise to return him "unhurt," but only because he'd be unable to feel anything ever again.

Old doubts, all of them, but they seemed new again as she sat shivering in the rain. Bitharn closed her eyes and tried to pray, but the words felt empty. She'd done all she could. Her prayers would be answered, or not, in hours. Repeating the words wouldn't change anything.

She opened her eyes and stared at the sky. The rain had stopped, but clouds blotted out the moon and stars. It was impossible to tell the hour.

Beside her, Malentir stirred. "She is here."

"How do you know?"

"I can feel her. We all can." There was a note of diffidence in his voice, strange in a man so arrogant. "It is a part of how she does what she does. We who share her gifts can a sense the strength of her blessing from afar."

Bitharn wasn't sure she understood that, but she didn't care. She wanted this over. "Best not keep her waiting."

"Yes." The Thornlord stood. He was a shadow of warmth in the night, more felt than seen. "If I do not have the opportunity to tell you later a thank you. For what you did in freeing me from the tower. I know you did not act for my sake, but I am not a unmindful of what it cost you, and not ungrateful. Whatever happens at the dule tree."

"Do you expect it to be such a disaster?" Bitharn tried to keep her tone light, and failed miserably.

"I expect nothing where my mistress is concerned." He touched the back of her hand. His fingertips were fever hot. Then he began walking down to Carden Vale, and Bitharn had no choice but to follow.

The darkness did not seem to trouble Malentir, but Bitharn tripped over unseen stones and tree roots all the way down. The more she hurried, the more she stumbled. The descent took so long she began to worry that the Spider would think she'd broken her word and leave without waiting for them to arrive. The new worry tangled up with the old ones, and by the time they reached the bottom she was shaking with fear.

Malentir caught her wrist. His touch had grown even hotter; it felt like he was burning. "Do not be afraid. She has not deceived you."

"How do you know?" she asked. He let go of her wrist, and did not answer.