The horse leaped.

She shrieked as she lurched sideways, grasping the post to stop from falling as the mare beat with heavy wing-strokes into the sky. Then she started laughing with relief and nerves as they rose higher, and the men came into view. One loosed a single arrow, which fell harmlessly back to earth, although she wished it might loop back and stick him in the chest.

The mare’s flight seemed snail-like compared with the effortless sail of her eagle. It passed through the edges of several promising thermals, but unlike an eagle, it did not catch them and rise. It flew no faster than a horse could gallop, its thin legs imitating the gait as if it were running along an invisible road. Slow, slow, slow. Below, the company continued its dogged pursuit, scrambling up the trail.

“We’re in for it now,” she said to the horse, who flicked an ear. “Cursed if I don’t think they’re out looking for me in particular, although why I should think so, I don’t know. I must have escaped that woodsmen’s camp after all. Maybe these are friends of theirs, or the very men from that camp in pursuit of me. Lord Radas might have put them on my trail. But the one man said Walshow. That town lies beyond High Haldia, up in Heaven’s Ridge. That’s well to the north of the Liya Pass and far away from Iliyat.”

Above the trees, where they flew, she had a better grasp of the land around her. She knew she was no longer on the Liya Pass, and nowhere near the vale of Iliyat, where Lord Radas ruled. And she certainly wasn’t anywhere near Copper Hall. She had seen country like this during the year she had flown her apprentice’s circuit as a newly trained reeve: in the high mountain escarpments of Heaven’s Ridge. Steep ridges and peaks dominated the northern and northwestern horizons, a wall to separate the Hundred from the dangerous lands beyond. She and the mare flew above the foothills, a wilderness known to reeves as a haunt of bandits and other folk tossed out of their home for criminal behavior; it was also the remote nesting territories where eagles mated and raised their young out of sight of human eyes.

How had she gotten here, hundreds of mey away from the place she had died?

If she had died. Yet she could not shake that horrible dream of walking to Copper Hall. It had seemed so real. Yet if she had died and become a ghost, why did she get cold? Why did her hands and feet get scratched? How could these men see her? That twenty gods-touched men would have flocked together in the barren backcountry defied belief, because the temples prized any man or woman gifted with the spirit sight, even the ones who were cracked in the head like the old man Mokass. It was almost as if she had been a ghost then, and no longer was. How could that happen?