“What about the mud-men? Won’t they jump us again?” asked Fawn fearfully as they came out on the path overlooking the dead ravine.

“No. It’s all over for them when their malice dies. They go back to their animal minds—trapped in those made-up human bodies. They usually panic and run. They don’t do too well, after. We kill them for mercy when we can. Otherwise, they die on their own pretty quick. Horrible, really.”

“Oh.”

“The men whose minds the malice has seized, its fog lifts from them, too. They revert.”

“A malice enslaves men, too?”

“When its powers grow more advanced. I think this one might have, for all it was still in its first molt.”

“And they’ll…be freed? Wherever they may be?”

“Sometimes freed. Sometimes go mad. Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what they’ve been doing betimes. They remember, d’you see.”

Fawn wasn’t entirely sure she did. Or wished to.

The air was warm, but the sun was setting through bare branches, as though winter had become untimely mixed with summer. “This day has been ten years long,” Dag sighed. “Got to get me off this bad ground. My horse is too far away to summon. Think we’ll take those.” He pointed to two horses tied to trees near the creek and led her down the zigzag path toward them. “I don’t see any gear. Can you ride bareback?”

“Usually, but right now I feel pretty sick,” Fawn admitted. She was still shaking, and she felt cold and clammy. Her breath drew in as another violent cramp passed through her. That is not good. That is something very wrong. She had thought herself fresh out of fear, a year’s supply used up, but now she was not so sure.

“Huh. Think you’d be all right if I held you in front of me?”

The unpleasant memory of her ride with the bandit this morning—had it only been this morning? Dag was right, this day was a decade—flashed through her mind. Don’t be stupid. Dag is different. Dag, on the whole, was different from any other person she’d ever met in her life. She gulped. “Yeah. I…yeah, probably.”

They arrived at the horses, Fawn stumbling a little. Dag ran his hand over them, humming to himself in a tuneless way, and turned one loose after first filching its rope, shooing it off. It trotted away as if glad to be gone. The other was a neat bay mare with black socks and a white star; he fastened the rope to her halter to make reins and led her to a fallen log. He kept trying to use his left limb to assist, wincing, then remembering, which, among all Fawn’s other hurts, made her heart ache strangely.

“Can you get yourself up, or do you need a boost?”

Fawn stood whitely. “Dag?” she said in a small, scared voice.