“The dam?” Adare said, shaking her head. “Why would they be working on the dam?”

“No idea,” Lehav replied grimly. “And I don’t like not having an idea.” He turned back to the scouts. “You swept the forest? It’s dense on either side of the road. . . .”

The scout nodded wearily. “Went up on the east, came back on the west. Nothing. No ambush, no snipers. Nothing but hemlock and deer shit. Up near the village we got close enough to listen to a couple men chopping wood at the edge of camp. They know we’re coming, know we’re close, but they think we’re coming to help them.”

Lehav frowned. “Maybe we are.”

It was late afternoon when they finally broke from the damp shadows of the pines into ruddy sunlight. For the first time in days, Adare could see more than a few dozen paces, although the world was so bright that for a moment she wasn’t sure just what she was looking at. She blinked, shaded her eyes with her hand. They’d reached a lake, she realized, a wide lake stretching north so far she couldn’t see the opposite shore. Sun shimmered like golden coins on the surface.

“Scar Lake,” Nira said, “and Aats-Kyl.”

A good-sized town of log homes with roofs of turf and shingle had forced back the forest at the south end of the lake. A tall palisade of rough logs ringed the town, wooden towers at the corners. Outside the wall, a rugged patchwork of fields held back the forest, wet ground drained by a ragged network of ditches. Even at a distance, Adare could smell the wood-smoke rising from the stone chimneys, could hear the farmers urging their horses and oxen over the broken ground. Farmers around Annur had begun plowing weeks earlier, but here, with the cold wind scudding down over the Romsdals, planting seemed to come late.

“Well,” Adare said, considering the town, “no one’s tried to kill us yet.”

“Give it time,” Lehav replied.

“Where does the road go from here?”

“It doesn’t,” Fulton said grimly. As the day wore on, he had guided his horse closer and closer to her, checked his broadblade more and more often. Now, he kicked the creature forward a few paces, putting himself between her and the settlement below.

“What’s past here?” she asked.

“Forest tracks and logging camps. Trees.”

And the Urghul, Adare thought, trying to come to grips with the nature of the threat all over again. She’d left Olon expecting to battle il Tornja in the streets of Annur and instead she found herself in a forest on the very edge of the empire preparing to hold off an Urghul attack. Not for the first time she prayed that she was making the right decision, that she wasn’t committing some idiotic mistake that would doom them all.