Clariel cried out as pain shot through her hands, a bitter ache that ran through the bones of her wrist and up her arms and ended explosively in the middle of her forehead with a sharp agony right under the Charter mark on her forehead.

‘Embrace the Charter,’ said Kargrin. ‘It will make it easier. You touched the creature, and some of its taint is on you, resisting the healing marks.’

Clariel gave the slightest nod, because it hurt to move her head too much. She tried to visualise one of the common marks, to use it to find the Charter, but she just couldn’t make it appear in her mind. She needed to sketch the mnemonic used to remember the mark, but Kargrin held her hands, and it was … all … too … difficult …

‘Is she badly wounded?’ asked Roban, who was himself holding his broken right arm, his face pale from hurt.

‘Not physically,’ said Kargrin. There was sweat on his brow as he forced the final mark of the healing spell into the unconscious Clariel’s left hand. It had taken all his skill and power to set the spell in both hands, and neither had worked as completely as they usually did. She still had partly healed cuts across her palms and the lower joints of her fingers, which would need to be bandaged to complete their healing at a natural rate. ‘But she held the creature for some minutes, protected by her blood and her berserk fury. I suspect in anyone else their flesh would have boiled away.’

‘She’s a brave lass,’ said Roban. ‘I hope Kilp and that viper son of his don’t get their hands on her.’

‘Indeed,’ said Kargrin. ‘Her great desire is to leave the city and go back to the Great Forest and I am thinking that is a very good idea, and soon. We need to keep her away from the creature, in any case.’

‘Will it return here?’ asked Roban, looking over the Islet, his good left hand on the hilt of his sword.

Kargrin shook his head.

‘I don’t think so. It has been greatly weakened by the spear, and the spells it laid on the people and place here are broken now. I think it will go into the city … or try to … which means there is still a chance that we’ll get it today … I was so close to the binding! Another few seconds … We have to hope that –’

‘No point moaning over might-have-beens,’ interrupted Gullaine, leaping nimbly up the step. She had a crossbow over her shoulder, a very sandy crossbow that she had just picked out of one of the channels. ‘I lost the creature near the causeway, deep in stone.’

‘But you got the assassin?’ asked Kargrin. ‘Who was it?’