“Do not mistake my kindness for weakness,” he said.

Her defiance beneath his shadow burned like a hot coal under his hand. It would be so easy to smother it, to snuff out the last vestige of the woman. Viktor wasn’t certain what that would leave behind. Something biddable, certainly, but he sensed a precipice, and an abyss beneath. That one, simple step would be a step too far.

What good of reunification with Calenne if he’d made himself the monster she’d once feared? He stooped and raised Apara from the mud.

She shied away. “So who have you brought me here to kill? I assume that’s what you want.”

Viktor unhooked the lantern from his belt and coaxed it to life. Light rippled across the flooded courtyard, picking out the farmhouse’s hunched eaves.

“Where have you brought me?”

“Where you wanted,” said Apara.

“I wanted to be brought to Branghall.”

“It doesn’t work like that. The mists run where the mists run. Eskavord should be a few miles south-east. Whichever way that is. We weren’t in the mists that long. It should be dusk.”

“It is dusk. The Dark has smothered the sky.”

“What are you talking about?”

He crossed to the nearest window. The drapes hung open behind the leaded frame. Three bodies lay slumped across the table. A father and two children. Their eyes gazed emptily across half-eaten meals. No blood. No sign of struggle. A peaceful tableau, but for the flies swarming like fractured shadows beyond the glass.

And everywhere the echo of magic. A familiar magic, like to Viktor’s own shadow, but deeper . . . so much deeper. He’d touched it before. At Davenwood. In that one, desperate moment when all had seemed lost, and anger had slipped the shackles of reason.

“Malatriant is making Eskavord her stronghold,” he said. “Those she can’t control, she kills.”

“Malatriant? You’ve been too long in the mists. It’s scattered your wits.”

“No. If anything, I’m seeing clearer than ever.”

Apara joined him at the window. Her face twisted in revulsion. “Poison. Blue spittle’s a giveaway. Moonglove, most likely.”

“And the fourth plate. Untouched. The mother’s. Malatriant whispered in her ear and she poisoned her family, never knowing why.”

“No. You’re mistaken. There are a dozen reasons she might have done such a thing.”

He lowered the lantern, glad to let the scene sink into gloom. “You shouldn’t judge all mothers by the standards of your own.”

Apara answered his bleak humour with a bitter look. “Nothing could make me do that to my own kin.”

He snorted. “I could. I did. Malatriant once bent whole nations to her will. This . . . This is nothing.”

Apara glanced about. “Do you suppose she’s still here?”

“I doubt it. I understand she keeps her thralls close. They have Branghall besieged.”

“Sounds like you need an army.”