Her gaze held a whisper of the wild fury of lofty winds where an eru might climb, when she is free to fly as she wishes. I could not see her third eye, but I knew it was there. “Perhaps I am not the only one who is chained. Chains reach deep and rise high, little cat. They may be anchored in the depths of the Great Smoke, or pull against us from the heights of the tallest peak. Do not mistake the servant for the master.”

I thought of the courts atop the ziggurat feeding on the blood my sire brought them. Picking up a stone, I tossed it into the water. “I have been thinking about chains.”

“Cat! Over here!” Rory knelt at the wall of a byre. “It’s all dried now, but Vai pissed here.”

I saw nothing except scuffed ground and what looked like half-formed letters scraped into the dirt and then obscured by footprints. “You can distinguish different people’s urine?”

“Can’t you? I shall never understand you Deadlands people. How do you distinguish who has been poking around where if you can’t smell?”

“There’s a thought I am grateful had never occurred to me before now.”

A scrap of leather cord had been half shoved into a hole scraped under the byre’s wall. I got hold of it and fished out the empty ring of an ice lens. The sight so congealed my legs that I sat down with a thump.

Rory pried my hand open to see what I was clutching. “He left this here on purpose, so we would know he is with Drake.”

All along the road to Arras and then on to Audui, every isolated staging post had been burned. Worst, at one hostel the corpse of a magister had been stuffed headfirst down a well. When we pulled him out by the rope tied around his feet, the seeping blisters over every bit of his reddened skin told the story of how he had died.

“Over here.” Rory beckoned from beyond the hostel’s vegetable garden to an old and falling-down outhouse. He indicated a row of three stones and a pearl jacket button.

The mansa came up behind us. “Four stones for Four Moons House. The estate of Four Moons House lies on the Cantiacorum Pike. If they stay on this road, they will pass it. If Andevai attempts an escape there, he can hope for assistance.”

“I don’t think Vai will risk drawing Drake’s anger down on the House, or on his village. And I’m certain he won’t abandon the other mages.” But I rubbed the dirt off the button and tucked it into my bodice.