Through Barl’s fading incants he can feel Dorana’s writhing, rotting anguish. The unbalanced magics lash like a wounded snowcat’s tail. But he can use them. They feed him. They make him stronger with every slow breath. In binding him, Barl has freed him. In being bound, he’s found himself.

My love, without meaning to you have done me a favour.

But that does not mean she is forgiven. Oh, no.

Nursing his strength, coddling his fury, Morgan pursues his escape.

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-five

Brimful of foreboding, unable to sleep, Jervale left his wife snoring and slipped outside their crumbling mud brick cottage to wait for dawn. Lur’s night sky was cruelly clear, not even a hint of cloud… and no moisture in the air, either. Underfoot, the dead grass made a helpless, crackling sound. Three years, was it, since the last spit of rain had fallen on the cottage’s roof? No. Longer than that. Closer to four, by now. Must be. He’d given up properly counting. Too sad a pastime, that was. Not that he had any right to complain. Other hamlets had been rainless almost twice as long. In these dry, dispirited days his wet childhood felt like a dream.

As he pottered down the starlit cart track to his favourite rock by the good-as-dead creeklet, passing his neighbours’ unlit mud-brick dwellings, he caught the low, fretful wail of Tam and Rinna’s new baby. Poor little mite. It’d be dead soon. He’d seen it. But he’d not told Tam and Rinna, for what was the point? Knowing wouldn’t save their baby. There was no medicine could save a sickly life born too soon. Besides, like most folk, Tam and Rinna wanted to live in hope.

Grunting only a little bit, surefooted in the near dark, he climbed the weathered lump of sandstone that was the best fishing vantage point above the creeklet. Used to be, anyway, back when there was water. And fish. Twice a man’s height, in daylight it let him see all the way down to the creeklet’s lazy bend on the hamlet’s western edge. Looking t’other way, with eyes shaded he’d see east to the cliff above Fogget’s ravine.

Settling his bony arse onto the rock, he shivered. The cliff. Eleven days since Ma Gammil had pitched herself off it, to smash herself to pieces at the bottom. Why hadn’t he seen that coming? He’d have stopped her jumping, if he had.

But no. Aside from a quick glimpse of that poor little baby, all he’d seen for weeks now was the starved, terror-pinched faces of the strangers with pale yellow hair, who climbed over the mountains dragging death behind them. The strangers he’d dreamed as a small boy, who he’d not dreamed again ’til three round moons ago.