Her gray attackers still smothered her, but now they were looking at him with suspicious eyes. They did not seem perturbed by what had happened—indeed, none of them seemed to be looking at their dead, petrified companions—but the threat had bled from them. One stood on Lulah's chest, stepped off and loped back between and into the trees. Soon, the others followed.

Lulah remained motionless on the ground. Ramus wanted to go to her, but then his legs began to shake, and he went down to his knees.

All instinct, the Widow said in his memory, and he relished his vision of her. He closed his eyes, and drove away all the sour memories the gray people had dredged up. He answered her, and it felt good to have his own voice back.

“Much for you to see here, Widow. Plenty for you to know. You'd be proud of me.”

“Ramus,” Lulah whispered, and she was looking at him in fear. “You have the power of the gods.”

Ramus shook his head, unable to meet her eyes. “Maybe just one of them.”

LULAH STUMBLED AROUND the dead people, staring down as if they would move again at any moment.

“I spoke without thinking,” he said. He frowned, not understanding. The Widow's words of advice echoed in his mind, but she was not really here, did not really know what he had.

Lulah kicked at a stone man's leg and it came off, thumping to the ground. She looked at the broken part, running her fingers across the insides and rubbing dust between fingertips. She avoided catching Ramus's eye. She had yet to thank him, and he felt a brief rush of annoyance, but smiled at such foolish petulance.

“They were preying on bad memories,” Ramus said. “Sucking them out of us.”

“Not me,” she said.

Her denial surprised Ramus. “You were screaming.”

Lulah rubbed her chest and neck. “They were hurting me.” She looked away again, retrieving and sheathing her dropped sword.

I heard you, he thought. I know what you were going through, because I went through it myself. But if Lulah wanted her distance and privacy, so be it.

For the rest of that day, as they left the great forest behind and set out across the strange landscape of water and standing stones, Lulah said little. And Ramus wondered what dark deeds were swilling in her mind, trying to lose themselves in the past once again.

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

TWELVE DAYS AFTER they had entered the forest, it ended by the side of a lake, and beyond the lake, Nomi saw a plain of standing stones. When they skirted the lake and realized how huge the stones were—the largest were ten times the height of a person—they paused for a while to admire them, and Nomi wondered how they had ever been placed. Nobody suggested that they might be natural.

They saw no sign of Ramus or Lulah.