“Nay! Nay! Call them off! I beg you! Anything! Anything!”

Alain pushed through the brush to find Sorrow standing on top of a man. His right wrist bled where Rage had bitten him. A bow carved of oak lay on the ground atop a fallen arrow. The man writhed, moaning and whimpering, as Sorrow nosed his throat.

A ragged wool tunic covered his torso. It had been patched with the overlarge stitches that betray an inexperienced hand. His hands were red from cold. He was also barefoot; his feet were chapped, heavily and recently callused, and the big toe of his right foot was swollen, cracked, and oozing pus and blood.

Alain picked up the arrow and broke it over his knee, then unstrung the bow and tied it onto his pack.

“Mercy! Mercy! It was my sin! I am the guilty one!”

“Sorrow! Sit!”

Sorrow sat on the man’s left arm, pinning him, and panted, drooling a little, as Alain stepped forward to look the man in the face.

“I know you. You’re called Heric. You were a man-at-arms in Lavas Holding seven or eight years back.”

The pungent smell of urine flooded as the man wet himself.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I pray you, forgive me!”

“For trying to kill me just now?”

Heric kept babbling. “It was my sin! Mine!”

Although it made his head ache a little, Alain remembered. “You were the one who put me in the cage.”

“Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!”

“What of the reward you received for bringing me in to Geoffrey? Surely he gave you something? How after all that do you come to be hiding in the woods wearing such rags?”

“Don’t let them chop off my hand! I didn’t steal anything!”

“Only my freedom!”

Heric screamed and jerked his leg, but Rage was only licking at the swollen toe. “I had to! You were an outlaw! You were a thief, the worst of all! You took what wasn’t yours to have. So they all said!”

“Roll over onto your stomach.”

“The beast’ll bite me!” But he did so, easing his arm out from under Sorrow as the hound looked up at Alain for direction.

Heric had been a big man once, but hunger had worn him down. He hadn’t a belt for the tunic, and a crude cord woven out of reeds tied back his unruly hair. This man had betrayed him. But Alain could find no indignation on his own behalf for this pathetic creature who had no shoes, no gloves, and only two arrows, one now broken, with which to kill himself some supper. He hadn’t even a knife.

“Why are you here at Ravnholt Manor?”

“Heard deer and rats seen roundabout,” Heric replied, head twisted to one side so he could speak without choking on dirt. “I’m hungry.”

“Do you know what happened to those four women?”

“No.”

“Ah.” Centuries ago, as humankind measured time, Alain had been bitten by a blind snake hiding in the lair of a phoenix. The effects of that venom still coursed through his blood, and where the poison burned, he burned with outrage. “You’re lying, Heric. I pray you, do not lie. God know the truth. How can you hide from Them?”