It was evening. The light slanted across the forest, turning it golden, except for a thin broken band where the big river ran. She looked at how far she’d travelled, and it seemed both a long way and not enough at the same time. If she could cover it, so could the wolfman. The notch between the two peaks they’d been heading for was obscured by the angle she was seeing it from, but as she turned, she saw more mountains beyond, blue with distance, rising like a line of filed teeth.

The forest was thinning in the direction she was going. The land rose and fell, and there were large patches where there were no trees at all. Neither was there anything else that she could see. A village might not be visible, but a town might, and a city certainly would. There wasn’t a single building in sight, nor a spire of smoke to indicate a fire.

Empty. The world was empty but for her.

She knew that wasn’t true. There were other people, and if there were those who would trick her, trap her, and – then what? What would they do to her once they’d caught her? She’d heard things, wild, wicked things, of women and men treated as slaves and subjected not just to endless hours of work, but every other kind of degradation too. If that could happen in London, where help was often no more than a shout away, it could happen here, where a girl could scream her lungs to bloody ruin and no one would either care or hear.

If there were those sorts of people, there had to be some of the other kind, the ones that would take her in, feed her, teach her, help her rescue Dalip, Stanislav, Mama and the others. Why? Because there did. It was a law of the universe, wasn’t it? For every gold-plated bastard, there was going to be an angel. She just had to find them in this green wasteland.

Where should she start looking? She shaded her eyes against the brightness of the sky, and studied the view in front of her, carefully this time.

Assuming she didn’t want to throw herself at the geomancer, she didn’t want to go near the closest mountains. There was nothing at the coast for her. The hill country, then, where houses might hide in the folds of the ground, where they’d only light fires at night and put them out by morning, like those people who kept their curtains closed and their door unanswered against the debt collectors and the police.

Perhaps the hill country was just that: a different country. It didn’t look it, but there weren’t lines on the ground like there were lines on the map.

She felt hopeful, like she’d discovered something for herself that was useful.

Then the wolf began to call.