The roadway shifted beneath Viktor’s feet. Faces leered out of dancing vapour, only to dissipate as stumbling steps drew him on. Cobbles gave way to stark black soil and desiccated vines. Buildings crumbled to ruin as he drew near, stones cracked to rubble and woven through with the pale fronds and withered leaves. And always that piercing cackle of birds, and the thrum of beating wings.

The passage of the mists, though terrifying, might have been bearable but for his shadow, which reeled drunkenly about his soul. Even when the road ran clear through the green-white skeins, Viktor was beset with such nausea that it was all he could manage not to lurch headlong into the shifting tides of spectres long dead.

Viktor clung to the memory of Calenne. As within the provosts’ cells, she offered anchorage where mortal senses offered none. At times, Viktor thought he saw her beside him, her being as pallid as all else in that accursed realm – her face pleading as she reached for him with insubstantial fingers. But only a fool trusted to his senses in the Raven’s kingdom.

At last, he could bear it no more. Legs buckled, and then gave. Viktor fell to his knees beside a shallow pond of water that was not water. A face pale as parchment gazed back from the reflection. His face, or a bleak approximation thereof, with hollow cheeks and cruel demeanour. More like his dead father than himself.

A hand closed around Viktor’s collar. His bellowed challenge died beneath a smother of bird-voices. Dredging up his last strength, Viktor thrust a hand into the mist and pivoted about cold stone.

The weight on his collar vanished. Off-balance, Viktor sprawled into mud. Darkness rushed in. Not of sleep, but something deeper and more pervasive. But even that vile, discomfiting sensation was as the sweetest wine after the numbing mists.

Mud oozing between his fingers, Viktor rose on unsteady legs. Already the mist-wreathed portal was fading into the brick of the farmhouse wall. Apara stood beside it, shoulders propped against a crumbling buttress, the white streak in her hair vivid in the oppressive dark. Her expression fell a hair short of sullen superiority.

“Why?” Viktor wiped a clump of mud from his chin. “You could have abandoned me. You’d have been free.”

“And if you’d found your own way out? Would you have forgiven that betrayal?”

Viktor spat the last of the sourness from his mouth and nodded. “You may yet live to pay your debts.”

Her lips tightened. “And when does that happen?”

“When I consider them settled.”

Apara pushed away from the wall. Sullenness gave way to worry. “If the Parliament of Crows learns I’ve taken an outsider into Otherworld, I’ll not live to eat another meal, let alone pay my way clear of you. Perhaps I should have left you there.”

Viktor hauled hard on her hidden tether. She fell to her knees, hands splayed for support.