Tucked against Vai, I listened to him think by listening to the way he breathed steadily, sucked in a breath as a thought struck him, then slowed again as his mind waded through the possibilities. The river flowed with a soothing voice that pulled me into its drowning waters. Held in his arms and with Bee’s back pressed against mine and Rory’s soft snuffling just beyond her, I did not fear. My mother’s hand and my father’s voice had guided me home. I slept.

I woke alone in the frosty chill. A pallor of gray brushed the edges of the night, promising dawn to come. Wisp-lights trailed along the far bank.

Vai knelt beside me, a gloved hand shaking my shoulder. “Catherine, wake up.”

“I’m awake. What are those lights?”

“Troops searching the shore. We’ve got to get back out on the water.”

The Rhenus River flowed north before its final curving southwest plunge toward the vast marshy delta we in Adurnam called the Sieve, which poured through a hundred channels into the Atlantic Ocean. On this stretch of the river the current was steady but not treacherous. Vai gave us each turns at the oars. The banks were overgrown with bushes and woodland. All morning we saw no villages or fields, and only once a rider on horseback.

Just past midday and by now exceedingly thirsty and hungry, we spotted a village on the western bank marked by the round houses typical of northwestern Celts. It appeared to be a peaceful place, folk about the spring business of sharpening plowshares and milking ewes. We pulled into a backwater and tied up.

The village was larger than it seemed from the river, with a pair of temples and a blacksmith’s forge at the intersection of two cart tracks. The crossroads was marked by a stone carved with the image of a seated man with antlers on his head, who held a snake in one hand and an armband in the other. Called Carnonos in my mother’s village, he had other names elsewhere and was often called a god, but I knew the figure was a depiction of the Master of the Wild Hunt, who in the old tales guided the souls of the dead across the veil that separates this world from the spirit world. My father had recorded one such tale in a journal: Everyone knew the worst thing in the world was to walk abroad after sunset on Hallows’ Night, when the souls of those doomed to die in the coming year would be gathered in for the harvest.