Roots flex and trip our feet, and the loose white soil drags our steps like a mire. The gaps in the trees and branches stare at us. Shallow pools of fog dot the ground, now mist floats down from the boughs. Almost immediately it is so thick we can barely see ten feet ahead, sluicing over us in a wet wind like snow flurries, dense in my lungs like water. No one wants to go on, but Makemin seems to draw us forward like an ox dragging many leads.

“Stop!” Silichieh cries, his voice nearly stifled. “We’re crossing our own tracks here! We’ve gone in a circle!”

Now Makemin stops, and we all look at the ground, see footsteps ahead of us and doubled up behind us.

“Those are blackbird tracks,” someone says.

I can’t see Makemin clearly in the fog, but he has turned toward us again; his face sweeps to one side and then the other.

“How many of us?” his words are like trumpet notes, puncturing the air.

Count and count again—one less, one less ... the last of the Yeseg officers.

*

The charm is dragging me to one side. They are following me with their eyes, a dangerous, heavy, slow anger. If I tell them it would have been worse on the road, they won’t believe me.

“There’s a hill there,” I say, pointing. “Let me go up and have a look over this fog.”

A muffled word I take for approval comes forward, and I go cautiously away, catch sight at once of a dark, irregular slope through the trees. They let me go alone.

The fog thins, as though it shrouded only us, and, stepping from the trees to the hillside I come back out into the white daylight of the sunless sky. Being alone doesn’t frighten me; I believe the charm would warn me if there were any danger. I climb the hill covered with black flakes of stone, more like a great heap of rocks than a hill. From the top I see trees all around, and a fog bank smeared over the trees to my right.

There’s the road, slicing toward the cemetery not two miles away—remote, dreamlike. There is something across the road near the forward edge of the fogbank, but I can’t see what it is. There is no blockage on the road past that point.

I kneel down to consult the charm. It points to the path, then swings back toward me again, not quite pointing toward me, again and again. I’m putting the charm away when I feel something move over me and it’s ripped from my grasp. Jil Punkinflake has it—the charm—in his fist; a look of demonic joy mutilates his face, and he laughs at me.

“This is how you knew!”

He brandishes it as I get to my feet.

“I knew you were lying!”

My mouth goes dry, his is gasping.

“What do you know now?!” he cries, and flings the charm down, shattering it against the stones.