Ivis stood, chest heaving from his frenzied attack on the forest of stakes. He bled from splinters driven into his hands and forearms. This woman should be dead, but she wasn’t. He knew that he could not move her.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he whispered.

‘There is nothing you can do,’ she said. ‘The forest is dying. The world comes to an end. All that you know will break apart. Fragments will spin away. There is no need to weep.’

‘Can you not – can you not stop it?’

‘No. Neither can you. Every world must die. The only question is: will it be you who wields the knife that slays it? I see an iron blade in your hand. I smell the smoke of woodfires upon your clothes. You are of the people of the forge, and you have beaten your world to death. I have no interest in saving you, even if I could.’

Suddenly he wanted to strike her. He wanted her to feel pain – his pain. And all at once he realized, with a shock, that he was not the first one to feel as he did. The anger collapsed inside him. ‘You tell me nothing I do not already know,’ he said, face twisting at the bitterness he heard in his own words.

‘This is my gift,’ she said, and smiled again.

‘And in receiving that gift, all we can do is hurt you.’

‘It is not me whom you hurt, Captain Ivis.’

‘Then you feel no pain?’

‘Only yours.’

He turned away then. A long walk awaited him, back to the keep; a walk from one world to another. It would take the rest of the night. He wanted to believe the best of people, even the Deniers. But what they had done appalled him. He could make no sense of the sorcery they had awakened, or what ghastly rites they had conducted in this secret place. He did not know how they had found her; if they had conjured her up out of the earth, or from the blood of sacrifices.

He reached the edge of the clearing, made his way up the avenue of deformed trees, feeling as if he was being spat out, flung back into a colourless, lifeless world. The forest was suddenly dull around him, and he thought, if he dared halt, if he dared pause and draw a breath, he would hear the trees singing. Singing as they died.

* * *

Malice sat with her sisters in the bolt-hole they had found under the kitchen. Directly overhead was the bakery, and the stone foundation of the huge oven formed the back wall of the tiny room. Where they crouched now, milled flour sifted down from the floorboards each time someone thumped past overhead, and in the low light from the small lantern set on a ledge, it seemed the air was filled with snow.

‘If only she wasn’t a hostage,’ Envy said. ‘I’d cut her face.’