She wanted to turn back, to flee to the border and the embrace of kin. So why was she seized with a desire to slip inside the silent fortress? Was it curiosity, or simple defiance? Proof to herself that the Dark hadn’t turned her into a fearful, timid creature as it had the folk of Kreska? Or perhaps she hoped for a sight so horrific that it would grant licence to turn back, to endure Sera’s certain chastisement?

So it was that without really knowing why, Melanna descended the root-woven hillside and ghosted across Cragwatch’s dry moat. There was no cover to be had in the ditch, but she kept low and moved at a bandy-legged run, all the while expecting to hear challenge from the wall, or else the heart-stopping thump of a bolt in her belly.

Neither came.

She scrambled up the sheer bank to where the weathered stone bridge met archway. Silver arrowhead bobbing before her like a hallow-wisp, she approached the iron-braced timbers of the gate. They sat ajar.

The stench hit Melanna as she passed inside. Soft and sweet; rotting meat leavened by dawnblossom. Kin to the bonfires on Kreska’s walls, and yet different. Sour where the other was smoky. The stink of death left unburied.

Cragwatch’s courtyard lay thick with corpses; scores, even hundreds. They lay in groups, beneath stones smeared with blood and half-sunk in filthy puddles. Most wore the king’s blue of the Tressian army – the rest a hodgepodge of garb drawn from all walks of life. The latter struck Melanna as almost peaceful in repose. Not so the former, who had the look of men and women set upon by rabid wolves. It wasn’t war as Melanna knew it, but desperation. The stones practically shrieked with terror.

And the citizenry . . . Torn fingernails and blood crusted about their lips. Their wrists shackled. And their eyes . . . glittering black, with spidery vein-work running across flesh like cracks across parched land. And the wagons standing empty. A prison convoy? Southwealders bound for servitude in the north until . . . Until what? How could folk furious enough to contest steel with bare hands seem so serene in death?

They couldn’t. Not unless the will driving them was not their own.

Sera was wrong. The dream had not been a dream.

The boggy field sucked at Viktor’s heels, clinging to his boots with the determination of a street-keelie to a nobleman’s stolen purse.

Viktor pressed on, head bowed into the wind, hewing as south-westerly a course as the muddy fields allowed. If anything, his mood was blacker than his immediate surroundings. They, at least, had the lantern to lend contrast. He’d done this. He’d loosed the Dark in a moment of pride and fury. The land he’d sought to save from the arrogance of his countrymen was now humbled by his own.

He had to do better. He would do better.