El runs into the kitchen, which is filled with dead things that don’t interest the Spore. She stuffs all the food she can easily gather into two sacks, grabs a knife, a pot, two leather flasks and, best of all, a tinder box and a small glass jar filled with precious salt. Then, she runs out, ignoring the garbled, shrieking noises of dying people, ignoring the hysterical screaming of the scullery girl, who has reached the safety of the pool but without the cook, who by now is a shambling monstrosity of howling pain as her body transforms itself into something huge and terrifying.

El turns her back on it all. She runs, just as the outlaw said.

The grandfather yew lies at the back edge of the clearing. Yew trees are considered a holy sign of the honored ancestors. Their wood is said to fend off Spore. Ao is pressed up against the massive trunk, standing on a big branch that’s grown out along the top of a half-buried stone wall. She’s staring, hand over her mouth.

“Can you hear it?” she moans. “It’s speaking to me.”

El swings a sack into her sister’s grasp. “Don’t listen to it. Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“They’ll think we are dead.”

“But where can we go?”

“Anywhere.” She pats the sealed pot, which is attached to a cord now slung around her neck. “We’ve got a weapon.”

Imagine two girls running through the forest and then, after El judges it is safe, cutting back to the lane. They make good time and, even when the sun sets, El keeps them moving. There’s a gibbous moon with enough light to guide their feet on the road. Night is dangerous because you can’t see the pale glimmer of Spore before it overtakes you, but El has better instincts than most. She trusts the night, so long as it keeps speaking to her. The night birds call. The air smells only of late summer, cut straw, and a distant thunderstorm. No rose oil.

Very late that night, they reach the holy road.

A fortlet stands up on the road, constructed so as to use the road’s elevation to oversee the countryside and to block traffic. That’s how the masters stop people from using the road without permission. Forts, gates, and executions. A small village huddles to the south of the lane, protected by a yew hedge and a ditch filled with muddy water. Everyone is asleep there, although a sentry light burns where guards watch the road day and night.