Lewen rose from his crouch and even the mighty irk favoured his thighs. “A long day and a long night,” he said. “I smelt the taint of Orley and his kind by Liliwithen. They are ahead of us. Two days to the fortress for them; three for us.”

Aneas looked into the silent woods. “I am tired already,” he admitted.

Lewen nodded. “And I.”

Aneas trudged back to the beach, where all of them were getting their packs on their backs, and the Galles were looking warily at the trees.

“Seventy leagues,” he said. “We will go as quickly as we can, by paths that are mostly safe. But we must be aware that we might have to fight at any time.”

Gas-a-ho waved a pipe. “I will know if Orley is even close. Our . . . host . . . gave me a sign.”

Aneas wished the news cheered him, but he felt more fatigue than anything; the pursuit, the hunt, held no joy for him.

He looked around him, and mostly what he saw was how many of his people weren’t there anymore, their places filled by strangers.

He took a deep breath, and tried to make himself focus on the scent of the trees and the taste of the sun.

“We will alternate running and walking,” he said. “Twenty leagues is a long day. Twenty-five is even longer. Come!”

He sounded his horn, and all the rangers who had horns raised them and made a deep music, and then they were trotting through the trees.

The Cohocton—Ash

Ash passed south like a murder of crows writ large, and animals quailed beneath his wings.

From his vast altitude, he could see the earth almost as far as the great river in the west. His army moved along the valley of the Cohocton, a column of darkness like the march of an army of ants seen from the top of a house, and the three mounds in the west that still spat ash and molten rock were filling the sky in a way that boded freezing winters and enormous hardship, an unexpected and delightful consequence of his meteors.

But in the aethereal, his race’s oldest foe was stirring, and more than stirring. It was becoming. Ash knew the signs, having in some ways deliberately weakened the old workings that kept the Odine trapped in the gate.

But it is too early, and too strong. I need it docile.

Ash gathered power as he flew, and he left lines of dead and desiccated trees in his wake. He had discovered—or rediscovered—that the black was almost always the easiest power to seize.

He raised his various protections and descended . . .

The first bolt raised against him was almost his undoing.