But it was hard. They’d lost half a company when the mists rolled in. Fifty souls from the garrison dragged into the mists. Those who’d survived until dawn had done so in the circle of blessed light cast by a proctor’s sun-stave.

The last embers hissed out. The horses whinnied, as unsettled as their masters.

Rosa pressed back-to-back with Kasamor. “We should have spent the night in Callastair.”

“I’m sorry I ever argued.”

Straining her ears, she caught a new sound beyond the rustle of leaves. A chatter of scratching, croaking cries. And beneath it, a wild fluttering thrum. Bird voices and wingbeats. She raised her sword.

“What in Queen’s Ashes . . . ?”

The crow-flock hit the dell in a storm front of wings and croaking voices. Rosa yelped as talons tore deep furrows in her leathers and ripped at her face and hair. Kasamor bellowed in pain.

One arm raised to shield her eyes, Rosa struck at the swirling crows. Bodies burst into darkness, the lurid green of their eyes fading into the eddying mist. Breathing came hard, each lungful sucked down through smothered lips. The air stank of things long dead.

The storm abated. The crow-things sucked away like water circling a drain and coalesced into a hooded figure. He stood on the dell’s edge, garbed wholly in black and with nothing but a thin beard showing out of shadow.

Breathing hard, Rosa shared a glance with Kasamor. His blond hair was flecked with blood. Small rents on his sleeves and chest gleamed wetly. Flashes of hot, wet pain told Rosa she looked little better. But Kasamor’s face possessed something hers lacked: a flicker of horrified recognition.

“Your life is over, Kasamor Kiradin.” The hooded man’s sonorous voice rolled across the dell. “Send your companion away, and make your peace with this world.”

Kasamor’s face fell. “Rosa, you need to go.”

“Go?” She kept one eye on the hooded man, who for his part seemed content to wait out his ultimatum. “What is this?”

His face creased. “He’s a kernclaw. He serves the Crowmarket. Leave me. I won’t drag you into the mists with me.”

Rosa stared at the kernclaw, and told herself that she trembled at the cold, not fear. But it was one thing to face Hadari spears, and another to stand defenceless before a witch. And the look in Kasamor’s eye made it worse. She’d not seen it at Hosgard, nor at Yarismark, when the wind shook to Hadari war-horns and arrows had fallen like rain. No, Rosa had seen that bleakness only once. In the alley behind the Silverway, in the heartbeat before Viktor’s arrival interrupted the duel.

Kasamor expected to die.

She reached beneath her tunic and squeezed her sun-pendant tight. The wolves had known what was coming, hadn’t they? She might have noticed had she not been lost in foolish, unrequited imaginings.