Life did more than flicker. It burned with fire. He knew it to be a fire for the simple reason that eventually it burned itself out. It ate up all the fuel it possessed, and dimmed and waned, and then was gone.

But were life and soul one and the same? Why the division at all?

Anyone could draw circles in the dust, but in the greater scheme of things, it made for a pathetic moat.

His Houseblades had pushed away their weariness and were attending to their mounts. Saddles were pulled off, brushes drawn. Hands stroked down the length of muscles, felt along tendons and brushed bones under stretched hide. The animals stood motionless: Ivis never knew if they but tolerated the attention, or were comforted by it. He’d seen mischief in animals, but none of them could smile. And always, their eyes were but wells of mystery.

Corporal Yalad moved up alongside him. ‘Sir, they wheeled with precision, didn’t they? Never seen anything so perfect.’

Ivis grunted. ‘You want compliments, corporal? Maybe even a kiss? Go find that maid you keep rocking up the wall back of the stables. I’m the wrong man to make you feel good, and if I wanted a conversation I’d find someone with more than half a brain.’

Yalad backed a step. ‘Apologies, sir.’

The captain knew that his foul mood was the subject of plenty of barracks talk. If no one knew the cause of it, all the better as far as Ivis was concerned. It just made them work harder trying to please him, or at least avoid a dressing down. If they knew, they’d think him mad.

There was something in the air, in this summer heat, that felt … wrong. As if malice had a smell, a stink, and even the hot winds blew through it and left it untouched, and the sun could not beat it down and all the ripening crops could not burn it away.

Days like this were making his skin crawl. He’d seen lone riders skirting the estate grounds, cutting fast and hard across Dracons land. He’d caught the faint smell of bad smoke, the kind of smoke that came from burnt clothes, burnt possessions, burnt hair and flesh – but never enough to be entirely certain, to even so much as sense a direction or possible source.

He had taken to watching sunsets, wandering out into the trees or drifting along the forest’s edge, and in the failing of light he found moments of frightening stillness, as if even in a held breath some breath was lost, the faintest exhalation, smelling of something wrong.

If all life possessed a soul, then perhaps it too was a burning fire, and just as life burned out when it had used itself up, so too did a soul. But maybe it took longer to wink out. Maybe it took for ever. But just as life could sicken, so too could a soul – sometimes one could tell, if there were eyes to look into, if there was an easy focus to that wrongness. When he walked through the dusk, along the forest’s dark line, he thought he could feel the land’s soul – a soul made up of countless smaller souls – and what he felt was something sickening.