In his case, she shoved the flat of her dagger against his hand, sharing the warmth, and when the hand and arm relaxed, guided it down to his sword—which was also, as she had hoped, radiating warmth.

Good against evil . . . it might not be a lot of help, but it’s something, and I’ll gladly take the gift.

Now she moved past Stev to poor Korlak, fearing the Mage had passed out cold. But she found him still alert; rigid, but listening to his crow, who was muttering into his ear. She grabbed his hand and pressed it to the hand holding her dagger, and she heard him let out a faint sigh that was half sob as he too felt some of the fear ebbing away.

The time they spent besieged by terror were the longest candlemarks in her entire life. It wasn’t just that those howls invoked fear. It was what was under the fear.

You are alone. You will always be alone. You will die alone and no one will care.

You are nothing, and no one. Insignificant. You matter less than a grain of sand.

And everyone knows this. When they think of you at all, which is almost never, they laugh at you and your pretensions.

The world would be a better place with you gone from it.

Die. Give up. Now.

She got the sense that even if someone escaped the terror and the claws of those beasts, this relentless message would burn itself into their souls and send them into a despair from which the only escape would be death.

Korlak squeezed the hand holding the dagger, and she reached out and caught Stev’s free hand in hers, and she hoped he stretched out his to Jicks. Because that, and not the warmth and magic of the daggers, was what drove that message out of her heart and showed it to be a base lie. Here they were, a human bulwark against despair. They mattered to each other.

Then, all at once, the howls stopped. So did the terror. And after an interminable silence, a lone, brave bird began to sing.

Exhausted, Abi let go of Stev’s hand, and Korlak’s, and she put her head down on her arms and, somehow, slept.

She woke instantly when Jicks moved, raised her head, and saw that the first fingers of dawn had broken over the hills. Jicks was getting stiffly to her feet, dagger still held loosely in her hand as if she did not dare let go of it. Abi got slowly to her knees; Stev and Korlak were doing the same. She peered in the direction that Jicks was staring. The wagon still seemed to be there, though whether or not it had been ransacked was impossible to say from this distance.

“Are they scrying us?” Jicks asked quietly, never taking her eyes off the wagon as her hinny lurched to her feet.