A scream arced from the forest cover.

“The hells!” Bai drew her sword.

“Shit!” Eridit fumbled the mount as two men sprinted out of the woods, packs flapping on their backs. If they had held swords or spears, they had lost them.

A pale-haired, demon-eyed ghost rode out of the forest, with a light burning in her left hand and a mirror held in her left. Mist coiled around her, only it was not mist. It was a cloak that concealed her legs and, in its winding, blended into the furled wings of the mare she rode. One of the men looked back over his shoulder at the demon.

The mirror, catching light, flashed. The man collapsed to the ground.

The other stumbled gibbering to the ground and raised hands in supplication, but when the mirror flashed again, he slumped forward, then toppled sideways.

Bai sheathed her sword and yanked a strung bow from her quiver, fitting an arrow as the ghost rode forward. The hawk banner huddled around Shai, fixed in the silence they’d learned to keep. Other children, farther away, cried out and ran, some toward the byre where Yudit had gone, but others back to Shai.

All the tales said that demons were beautiful, that they aroused men and women to lust; this one was no different.

She pulled up her mount and faced him.

“You’re a demon,” he said, his voice strong enough that it surprised him to hear it issue so forcefully from his mouth. He wasn’t accustomed to speaking up. “You’ve taken on the appearance of someone who is dead.”

“I am a demon,” she agreed, in the smoky voice he’d dreamt of so many nights, wishing to hear her speak even though in all the time she had served the Mei clan she had seemed mute. Meeting his gaze, her brow furrowed. “Yet your heart is veiled to my sight.”

She looked at the others. Eridit choked down a cry; the children wept; Bai doubled over, a hand clapped to her heart, bow and arrow falling out of her hand to the ground to leave her helpless. The ghost looked back at him, the only one who could meet that cold blue demon gaze. Yet what is a demon, after all, but your fears and hopes stalking you?

“Those who hurt others must be punished,” she said.

Vali clung to him, and Eska and Dena had thrown their arms around his body. Gently, he pushed them behind him. “Maybe I harmed you once, but these others did not. Spare them, I beg you.”

A ghost retains emotion, but demons have been bled dry. Her round, pale face did not alter expression as she raised the mirror.

And lowered it.

“You act as I did once. What does that make you?” She shook her pale head, as at an unanswerable question, then rode off across fields green with untended weeds. The horse unfurled its wings and leaped, rising above the treetops. All stared as the demon and her horse vanished from sight.