There was no escaping this creature, yet she must find a way. She tightened her resolve and pressed on, sliding ghostlike through the trees, stepping carefully, silently. Leave no trace of your passing. Leave no footprint or sign. Stay focused on what is needed. Do not let yourself be swayed by his words. They are only words, and they cannot hurt you.

Yet they did. They cut like knives.

She was deep in the woods now, so far in that she could only barely find her way from one sliver of moonlight to the next, everything gone stifling and dark, layered with shadows. She was infused with a sense of need for haste that she knew she must resist. One step at a time, she told herself. The demon had gone silent, but she knew it was back there, following doggedly, determined to catch her and put an end to her.

If she was lucky. Much worse, if she was not.

Then a shadow crossed her path just ahead, a glimmer of something unlike real shadows, something not wholly dark but lit from within. She gasped in spite of herself and almost gave way to the fear pressing down on her. But then the shadow disappeared, and she turned away from it.

She blinked uncertainly. She must have imagined it. It wasn’t there now, had barely been there before. Yet something about it—something in the way it moved—was familiar.

“Aislinne?”

The demon again, but farther off now, its voice more distant.

She moved ahead carefully, waiting for something more. Abruptly, the shadow was there in front of her again, a faint glimmer, a forest wraith come out of nowhere to intercept her. She veered away once more, hurrying just a little faster now to get clear of it. It was there before her only an instant and then gone. Just as before, it seemed no more than a vision her imagination had conjured.

But this time she had the odd impression that it mimicked something of Sider Ament.

On she went, working her way through a tangle of trunks and grasses, ruts and gnarled roots, the shadow appearing and fading again at regular intervals, each time causing her to veer in a new direction, each time reminding her in faint ways of Sider.

She only heard the demon once more. It called her name from what seemed like a great distance, and then she didn’t hear it again.

It was nearing dawn when she found her way clear of the forest and started upcountry toward Sider’s old home. The night air was cold on her skin; she wore only the clothes she’d had on while imprisoned, not having had time to find anything more, and she shivered in the predawn chill. But she kept moving to keep warm, to reach her destination, and after a time she didn’t notice the cold so much.