I step softly up to the Predicate. His trembling hands are still out in the air before him, and his cats are laboriously backing up and lurching forward again, trying to angle the cart toward the stream. I suppose they are thirsty.

Slowly I lift my hand. His long hair hangs in a braid to the small of his back, flanked on either side by long unbraided locks swept from above his ears. I pinch a bit of the left lock away and double it in my fist. I put Thrushchurl’s scalpel through the loop and, in one motion, sever it. I pocket the hair and slip back to the rocks, from there up the defile toward the low rise.

His toothless mouth gurgles and clicks—he has turned and seen me—he leaps up onto the stones with an acrobat’s speed. Now the cold fear has me and I straighten up and sprint, picking my steps, up the stones moving in a straight line and looking for a place to hide—I am already within its confines when I realize I’ve found the rock pile Thrushchurl meant. While the old man is still out of sight, I dart in among the big stones and conceal myself there.

The ammonia smell, and then that clicking gurgle in the mouth. A dark shape flashes by the gap in the stones before me. He’s missed me, and is searching. Then, near me, another thing moves—dry steps on the stones. I can hardly stifle a shout when something hairy bounds past me in the dark. Silence. Slowly I lift my head.

Now I can see out among the rocks. In the open space, the old man stands motionless, staring. Opposite him, a huge black hare sits, returning his gaze from eyes that are just two starlike glints in liquid black. This hare is strange—its face doesn’t twitch. It stares at the old man, who begins to back away, hands held out in front of him. He turns and moves off over the stones, picking up his robe, looking back again and again with sweeps of his white locks.

I don’t like that hare either, and I climb out of my hiding place. The moon makes a faint radiant patch on the fog, and I follow it back to the path.

*

The hairs have turned brittle and hard as glass in my pocket. I instruct White Dead Nettle to boil a pint of the cleanest water available in a clean pot, and wait for a bit to boil away before I throw in the lock. The steam turns bitter at once, with a musty, vervain smell of dank stockings.

“Give me my dose now. Pepedora must know it works.”

“I put myself at great risk to get it.”

“Don’t worry. Pepedora will keep his word.”

“How do I know his charm will work?”