What an odd request, but she felt that same strange flicker of recognition; and she agreed, without knowing why. “Yes.”

“Quickly, Katsa.”

In an instant they turned and ran, and when she heard voices she clapped her hands to her ears. But she could still hear words barked here and there, and what she heard confused her. And then Po’s voice, yelling at her to keep running; yelling at her, she thought vaguely, to drown out the other voices. She half heard a muffled clatter of hooves growing behind them. The clatter turned into a thunder. And then she saw the arrows striking the trees around them.

The arrows made her angry. We could kill these men, all of them, she thought to Po. We should fight. But he kept yelling at her to run, and his hand tightened on her shoulder and pushed her forward, and she had that sense again that all was not right, that none of this was normal, and that in this madness, she should trust Po.

They raced around trees and clambered up slopes, rushing in whatever direction Po chose. The arrows dropped off as they moved deeper into the forest, for the woods slowed the horses and confused the men. Still they kept running. They came to a part of the forest so thickly wooded that the snow had caught in the branches of the trees and never reached the ground. Our footprints, Katsa thought. He’s taken us here so they can’t trace our footprints. She clung to that thought, because it was the only piece of this senselessness she understood.

Finally, Po pulled her hands from her ears. They ran more, until they came to a great, wide tree with brown needles, the ground littered with dead branches that had fallen from its trunk. “There’s a hollow place, up high,” Po said. “There’s an opening in the trunk. Can you climb it? If I go first, can you follow?”

“Of course. Here,” she said, making a cup with her hands. He put one foot into her palms and jumped, and she lifted him up as high as she could into the tree. She made handholds and footholds of the rough places in the trunk and hustled up after him. “Avoid that branch,” he called down to her. “And this one: A breeze would knock it down.” She used the limbs he used; he climbed and she followed. He disappeared, and a moment later his arms reached out of a great hole above her. He pulled her inside the tree, into the hollowed-out space he’d sensed from the ground. They sat in the dark, breathing heavily, their legs entwined in their tree cave.

“We’ll be safe here, for now,” Po said. “As long as they don’t come after us with dogs.”

But why were they hiding? Now that they sat still, the strangeness of all that had happened began to pierce Katsa’s mind, like the arrows the horsemen had shot at their backs. Why were they hiding, why weren’t they fighting? Why were they afraid? That woman had been afraid, too. That woman who looked like a Lienid. Ashen. The wife of Leck was a Lienid, and her name was Ashen—and yes, that made sense, because that grief-stricken man had called her his wife. That man with the eyepatch and the bow in his hands was Leck.