“Hope, I don’t know, I’ve told you. It’s like . . . have you ever tried to explain a dream? A really strange dream, one that makes perfect sense to you when you’re in it but once it’s over and you’re awake you can’t put it into words, can’t make sense of it, even to yourself?”

Hope stared at him, nodding.

“That’s what I hear. Stuff I can’t explain. But I don’t even understand it when I’m hearing it.”

“What you’re hearing,” Hope said, “is an ages-old language. Few alive now have spoken it, or if they have, then only to themselves. It’s the language of the land, Rafe. It’s the language of magic.”

“But what does that mean?” She had told him that several times now, old languages and words no longer spoken. But it made no sense. It did nothing to distract his mind from his parents’ deaths, nor explain them. He needed sleep.

Hope sighed, looked down at her hands. They twisted around each other as if trying to wring something out. She was a whore, she had told him. Those hands had done a lot.

“I’m older than I look, Rafe,” she said. “I’m a witch. I have ways and means to keep myself young.” She waved around at her room, adorned as it was with plants and roots and dead things hanging from the walls, shelves lined with old books, opaque containers scattered across every available surface, their contents hidden away. “And all my life I’ve been waiting for you.

“You must know of the magic, the old ways Noreela used to live before the Cataclysmic War? Better times. The world was at peace with itself, and as we took from nature, so it gave. All that was stolen away by the bastard Mages because of their greed and avarice, their pride in thinking they could usurp nature and make the world their own. And now, because of them, there’s no peace in the world, and the more we take the more the land dies.”

“My parents always told me there was more myth than truth in those stories.”

“Lots of myth, to be sure!” Hope agreed, laughing with little humor. “But lots of truth as well. Stories that big have plenty of both. You’ve not traveled the land, you’ve not seen how much it’s changing.”

“You’ve been waiting for me?” Rafe asked, his voice weak and vulnerable.