HOPE WALKED CLOSE to Rafe’s horse. Her place was beside him, and she would not leave. She had been the first to find him, see his potential, sense the burgeoning power within, and now she thought of herself as his guardian. He had grown, even in the few days since she had found him curled up in a doorway in Pavisse, but the need to protect him remained. And she intended to be alongside him until the end, whatever the end might bring.

She felt proud of herself and her lineage. For generations her family had been witches, and now here she was, trudging through this filthy night with the source of new magic on a horse beside her. He looked asleep, but Hope guessed he was merely composing his thoughts, staring at his hands where they held his horse’s reins, looking inward not outward. Trying to see and understand the strange new landscapes within.

What she would give to be in there with him. What she would do to have just one single look.

She glanced back at the fledge miner and the comatose woman. He was steering the horse, glancing back constantly to make sure she had not slipped sideways in the saddle. It was one of the horses Hope had traded for at the farm, and even in the cool wet night it foamed at the mouth, snorted, straggled behind. It would be dead soon. Perhaps the girl would too.

Hope could find no trust in her heart for someone she did not know. It came from a lifetime of witchcraft. There were those who still feared a witch, but there were many more who knew for sure that she was a sham. Witches of old practiced magic, curving it to their whims and letting it re-form again, molding it like so much clay. Since the Cataclysmic War, a witch was merely a shadow of her ancestors, a pretender, wallowing in past glories or hiding beneath the veneer of legend. To some, frightening in her very madness. To others, pitiful. Hope was a witch and a whore combined, with double the reason to be hated.

Hope had always been a woman on her own—ironic that she had shared her bed with so many men—and now more than ever she felt withdrawn and introverted, longing to hide from the strangers she had been thrown in with. She had never met a fledge miner topside who could be trusted. They always ended up craving their fresh drug, swindling and lying and cheating in the vain hope that they could procure some more without returning underground. They knew so little of the lands they sought to live in, their knowledge confined instead to the caves, the darkness that hid millennia of memories. This knowledge combined with their own peculiar myths—born of the constant darkness, the tremendous pressure of the world surrounding them—to make them unreliable at best, and willfully devious at worst.