She raced out the garden gate, along a street to the King’s stables, an enormous building of new wood. She pulled one of the doors open.

A stableboy sleeping in the hay just inside the door shouted in alarm, but Gaborn and Rowan rushed past him, past the long stalls. Here, slung from the ceiling in belly harnesses, were dozens of the King’s Dedicate horses—horses robbed of wit, brawn, stamina, or metabolism so that the King’s own force horses could have greater power. Rowan ran past the long row of stalls, then fled out the back door. Here a stream, the same stream that had flowed through the wizard’s garden, wound through a muddy corral, where the horses stamped and neighed in fear. The stream passed under a great stone wall, the Outer Wall to the city’s defenses.

Gaborn could not climb that wall, some fifty feet in height. Instead, Rowan squirmed under the wall, where the stone had eroded over the ages. The passage was narrow, too narrow to admit a warrior in armor, but the thin girl and Gaborn squeezed through, getting wet in the icy water.

Now the stream tumbled downhill, down a steep green. All around the stream grew tall pussy willows.

Gaborn looked up. An archer on the walls was posted just above them. He looked down, saw them escape, and pointedly looked the other way.

The ground here was kept open near the walls, so that archers could shoot from above. Gaborn could never have sneaked into the castle from here, not unobserved.

The hillside became steep just below the pussy willows, where it led into some deep birch and alder woods that were so dark that Gaborn could hardly see. Yet it was only a small grove, a triangle of trees barely two hundred yards long and a hundred wide.

Through the trees Gaborn spotted the river now, broad and black. He could hear its soft voice burbling.

He halted, grabbed Rowan’s ankle to stop her from crawling farther. On the far side of the river he saw movement: nomen and frowth giants setting camps in the darkness. The nomen were black shadows in the fields of grain, hunched and clawing. Gaborn knew that the nomen, who preferred to leap on their prey from trees in the starlight, would be able to see well in the night, but he did not know how well.

Though the nomen had invaded from the sea a thousand years before, the Runelords had decimated their numbers, had even gone so far as to sail to their own dark lands beyond the Caroll Sea to wipe them out. Long had their war cries been silenced. They had not been fierce warriors, but were cunning fighters in the darkness. The nomen were now little more than legend. Still, rumor said that nomen inhabited the Hest Mountains, beyond Inkarra, and that they sometimes stole children to eat. The Inkarrans seemed never quite able to wipe the last of the creatures from the rain forests. Gaborn didn’t know how much of the tales to believe. Perhaps the nomen could see him even now.