She looked down at Pick. “Now what?”

He gestured to her right without speaking.

She turned and found herself staring right at the tatterdemalion. She had seen only a handful in her life, and then just for a few seconds each time, but she knew this one for what it was right away. It stood less than a dozen yards away, slight and ephemeral in the pale autumn light. Diaphanous clothing and silky hair trailed from its body and limbs in wispy strands, as if on the verge of being carried off by the wind. The tatterdemalion’s features were childlike and haunted. This one was a girl. Her eyes were depthless in dark-ringed sockets and her rosebud mouth pinched against her sunken face. Her skin was the color and texture of parchment. She might have been a runaway who had not eaten in days and was still terrified of what she had left behind. She had that look. But tatterdemalions were nothing of the sort. They weren’t really children at all, let alone runaways. They weren’t even human.

“Are you Nest Freemark?” this one asked in her soft, lilting childlike voice.

“I am,” Nest answered, risking a quick glance down at Pick. The sylvan was mired in the deepest frown she had ever seen on him and was hunched forward on her shoulder in a combative stance. She had a sudden, inescapable premonition he was trying to protect her.

“My name is Ariel,” said the tatterdemalion. “I have a message for you from the Lady.”

Nest’s throat went dry. She knew who the Lady was. The Lady was the Voice of the Word.

“I have been sent to tell you of John Ross,” Ariel said.

Of course. John Ross. She had thought of him earlier that morning for the first time in weeks. She pictured him anew, enigmatic and resourceful, a mix of light and dark, gone from Hopewell five years earlier in the wake of her father’s destruction, gone out of her life. Maybe she had inadvertently wished him back into it. Maybe that was why the mention of him seemed somehow inevitable.

“John Ross,” she repeated, as if the words would make of his memory something more substantial.

Ariel stood motionless in a mix of shadow and sunlight, as if pinned like a butterfly to a board. When she spoke, her voice was reed-thin and faintly musical, filled with the sound of the wind rising off trees heavy with new leaves.

“He has fallen from grace,” she said to Nest Freemark, and the dark eyes bore into her. “Listen, and I will tell you what has become of him.”

Chapter 4

As with almost everything since John Ross had become a Knight of the Word, his disintegration began with a dream.

His dreams were always of the future, a future grim and horrific, one where the balance of magic had shifted so dramatically that civilization was on the verge of extinction. The Void had gained ascendancy over the Word, good had lost the eternal struggle against evil, and humanity had become a pathetic shadow of the brilliant ideal it had once approached. Men were reduced to hunters and hunted, the former led by demons and driven by feeders, the latter banded together in fortress cities and scattered outposts in a landscape fallen into ruin and neglect. Once-men and their prey, they were born of the same flesh, but changed by the separate and divisive moral codes they had embraced and by the indelible patterns of their lives. It had taken more than a decade, but in the end governments had toppled, nations had collapsed, armies had broken into pieces, and peoples worldwide had reverted to a savagery that had not been in evidence since well before the birth of Christ.