Penthos’s strictures meant that Enth could not harm her. She could only hope that he could also not assist the ground in harming her, by the simple expedient of letting go. I would, the thought came to her with unwelcome clarity, about halfway up. If I was trapped and forced into service, I’d take any chance to turn on my captors. But perhaps Enth lacked the imagination for that, or perhaps Penthos had wrought better than she feared; either way she reached the top of the wall without incident, and the descent down the other side was quicker.

Because the good people of Armesion were all tucked up by nightfall, there was little nocturnal traffic on the roads leading from it. She located the north road readily enough and, with her hood up, and with Enth’s purloined robe, the two of them could just about pass for a brace of pilgrims heading home so long as nobody examined them too closely. All it would have taken was one overvigilant knight of the church or suspicious priest—or even a well-meaning vigilante with a magic lodestone like Lothern—and they would have been lost. Enth must practically reek of the Dark, after all: a real and actual monster of evil, within spitting distance of the Heart of the Light.

And yet, for that very reason, nobody noticed. Had they been trying to sneak about near the borders, or in the disputed lands where they had found Enth, then any traveler might have had cause to fall back on trinkets and divination to check up on his companions of the road. People assumed, this close to Armesion, that those they met were not owned heart and soul by the Dark.

When the man in the tavern had mentioned a wood, somehow she had expected something like Enth’s home, dark and close-grown and haunted. Instead it was just a forest, thinned by the axe but still expansive. If the road through it was not favored by pilgrims, then that was presumably because it was a rutted track, and winding, and there were better, straighter paths for most to take.

So Cyrene set off into the trees, wondering fitfully what had happened to the others, Enth trailing unwillingly in her wake.

“So, perhaps you should explain what happened next?” Artaves was a man who had been a strong warrior in his youth, but had gone somewhat to fat since becoming the Lord Commander of the Order of the Sacred and Vigilant Shield, also known as the Armesion city watch.