“They arrest people who’ve got”—she lowered her voice to a stage whisper—“dhak.” The word, with its connotations of filth, infestation, and immorality, was inappropriate in polite conversation. If Gyre’s mother had heard Maya saying it, she’d have gotten a smack on the ear. “Maybe Billem Crump’s got ghoul dhak in his shed and the centarch is going to drag him away!”

Gyre watched the dust cloud with something less than his sister’s wide-eyed wonder. He still didn’t believe it was a centarch, and if it was, he wasn’t sure how to feel about having one of the Order’s champions on their farm. He’d caught on to the hard expression his father and the other farmers wore when the subject came up. Everyone knew the Order kept the people safe from plaguespawn. But …

Nothing else, just the significant “but.” And Gyre knew, as Maya did not, what was in the locked shed off the south field. Last summer, when a plague of weevils had threatened their potatoes, Gyre’s father had taken him out there by night. They’d both equipped themselves with a double handful of bright green seeds, like hard young peas, from a half-full sack, and spent the evening planting them between the rows of potato plants. By the next afternoon, the field was full of dead weevils. Gyre had swept them up and buried them in the compost pile, proud and guilty with the shared secret.

Was that dhak? Gyre suspected it had been. Dhak was anything from the Elder times, before the war that had destroyed both ghouls and Chosen, unless the Order had approved it as safe, sanctioned arcana. But his father had assured him it was fine and that every farmer in the valley had something like it laid away. A centarch wouldn’t come after him, just for that. Would they?

“We should get back to the house,” he told Maya. Or, he discovered, he told the empty space where Maya had been, since his sister had already jumped down from the fence, wriggled out of his grip, and set off up the path as fast as her short legs would carry her.

Gyre looked at the dust cloud. It was rounding the point of the hill now, going past the turn for the Crump farm and definitely heading their way. He wanted to run after Maya, but there were the vulpi to think of—well behaved or not, he couldn’t just leave them on their own. So he spent a few frantic minutes rounding the animals up, ignoring their affronted blats and whistles at being turned out of the pasture early. Only once they were safely back in their pen, jostling for position at the water trough, did he hurry toward the house.