She sniffed and looked away.

I tugged the mask from her face. She batted at my hand, but her strength had fled. Without its concealment, she looked Joratese enough: dark brown with an irregular rose splash across her left cheek and forehead. Her hair was straight and black. I guessed her age at twice my own.

But she wasn’t Joratese.

She’d convinced an entire Joratese band to give her their thudajé. Perhaps they hadn’t realized her true ethnicity.

Or perhaps she was just that good at kicking.

“She’s Ninavis,” said the man with the laevos. “We all call her Nina. She worked as a hunter around here before the baron declared this all his forest. His soldiers have moved whole villages out on pain of death. Families who’ve hunted these lands for generations are now poachers.”

“Really, Kalazan?” Ninavis scolded. “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell my name to the baron too!”

“It’s fine to let her know,” Kalazan said. “Don’t you see, Nina? She’s the one we’ve been waiting for.” He turned back to me. “I’m Kalazan. The big man is Dango, and the man with the scarred face is Tanner. That’s Kay Hará and Jem Nakijan, and standing next to them is Vidan and Gan—”

“Gan the Miller’s Daughter,” interrupted the indicated woman. She was young, beautiful, sported a gorgeous laevos, and if she was actually a miller’s daughter, I was the Queen of Old Zaibur. “Kal, Nina’s right. You shouldn’t have said our names.”

“It’s her, Gan.” He became animated, gesturing with his hands. “We’ve eked out a pitiful existence in these woods for months, while the baron and his damn captain burn down village after village looking for their prophesied threat. The demon-claimed child, remember? But what if she is the one they fear? What if it was always Danorak? Nothing in prophecy said it must be someone local.”

I felt a lump form in my stomach, and a blossoming dread stretched over me from head to heel. I closed my hands in fists at my sides rather than succumb to the urge to pick up Kalazan by the neck and shake him by the scruff until answers spilled forth.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “And be clear, for I loathe prophecy.”

But we never finished the conversation.

Arasgon’s senses are better than any human’s. The fireblood screamed out, “Count, we’re not alone!” just as three dozen armed men on horseback wearing Barsine Banner’s gold-and-brown colors rode into the clearing from downwind.

They all had crossbows.

Or more specifically, they all had crossbows pointed at us.