Abi’s blood froze in her veins, and she was so terrified she couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. Belle went into a paroxysm of shivering but didn’t attempt to move.

The howl was joined by a second, a deeper note, and the night air, no longer peaceful, filled with such horrible cries that Abi clapped her hands over her ears trying to shut them out, in vain. She literally could not move once she’d covered her ears, and she didn’t want to look, and yet her eyes were pulled to that black patch where the wagon stood.

She only caught a vague glimpse of something, something moving too quickly for anything but a sense that there was something there, around the wagon.

If the trip across the gorse to the forest had seemed to take all night, waiting in the trees seemed to take forever. The tiny bit of Abi that was still able to think was certain that if the screaming and howling went on for a single moment more, she’d go mad with fear.

And yet it did, and she didn’t.

This was terror that turned her insides to water, that almost stopped her breath, and yet inexplicably allowed her to take shallow gasps that didn’t seem nearly enough. Now she thoroughly understood what poor Korlak must have endured, and she could not possibly have felt more sympathetic toward him.

That was when she felt warmth penetrating her tunic and breeches at each hip.

Somehow, fighting the terror that assured her that if she moved at all, she’d be spotted and torn to small bits, she brought her right hand down to that patch of warmth. Her hand closed around the hilt of one of the two daggers that the Mage-smith had given her.

And the second her hand touched it, the fear ebbed.

It didn’t vanish, but it no longer left her paralyzed and unable to think. She pulled the dagger from its sheath—and, gods be thanked, it did not glow, since that would be a dead giveaway to anyone watching where they were—and pressed it to her chest. The warmth spread from the dagger into her frozen body, and with every passing moment, she was able to think more clearly.

Moving as slowly and imperceptibly as her father had taught her, she clasped the dagger against her with her left hand and edged over to Jicks.

Jicks was rigid to the touch; all her experience had not saved her from that same paralysis of fear. Abi unsheathed her left-hand dagger, felt for Jicks’s hand, and pressed the unsheathed dagger into it.

Almost instantly, she felt Jicks relax. Several long moments later, as the howls and screams continued to fill the valley, Jicks patted her shoulder, and she edged over to Stev.