She thought about the ghost in the woods, the shadowy form with the inner-burning light, and she decided that it wasn’t her imagination or a hallucination. It was something else entirely. It was Sider reaching out to her, keeping her safe, even after death. She didn’t know if she believed such a thing was possible, but that was what she felt.

She trekked out of the forested valley floor and began to climb toward the scattering of homes on the upper slopes. Although Sider’s home was abandoned, another farmer had taken over management of his parents’ fields and farmed them as part of his own. Sider had never said anything to the man and his wife about wanting compensation, but had simply let it go. The farmer and his wife already lived nearby when Sider departed with the former bearer of the black staff. After his parents died, the house was left vacant—already beginning to fall into ruin. Sider had never returned, so far as anyone knew. But that was like him, she thought. He had never come back to anything. The past was never his concern.

But on this occasion, it would be hers.

If she could be safe anywhere, it would be here.

Still keeping a sharp eye out for the demon, still afraid it might find her, she worked her way steadily upslope to the beginnings of Sider’s old homestead and from there around the early plantings in the fields to where the remains of his house stood abandoned. She approached cautiously, aware that she was unarmed and woefully deficient in fighting skills. But the building was dark and silent and, in the end, empty. Mice and rats and a few nesting birds had made a home within, but nothing more dangerous was in evidence.

She stepped inside through the open doorway, the door itself long since gone, and stood looking into the darkness as her eyes adjusted. She listened to the sounds of wings beating and paws scurrying, and then she moved through the tiny living area, past the little kitchen space, and into the room at the back of the house that had been Sider’s.

Once within that room, she stopped again. Moonlight flooded through the open window, illuminating a bed, a chest at its foot, and a small table and chair. There was nothing else, and what remained was splintered and broken and empty of anything useful. Bones from another life, the skeleton of better times—it made her cry all over again.

But then she wiped the tears away, took a deep breath, and moved to one corner. The boards that hid the concealing compartment Sider had built with his own hands were still in place. She found the cleverly designed fingerholds, released the small wooden slide latches, and lifted the boards away.