Lamps spring alight in the fortlet. Voices startle awake in the village. Dogs start barking. It’s too late to circle around the village and head north. So, El turns south. She and Ao run alongside the embankment as she scans the area for a place to hide. This close to the road, the land is striped with grain fields, which are divided by blackthorn hedgerows and rows of hazelnut and walnut trees. The dogs will sniff them out in a heartbeat.

“A little farther,” she says as they run. “Then we can cut east and circle around.”

But they’ve never turned south at the fortlet. The lady’s court never goes that way. It turns out they are much closer to the White Sea than El realized. The last field is bordered by a hedge of yew, beyond which lies graveled ground and a second yew hedge grown as a protective wall. Beyond the second hedge, there’s only burned ground and a jumble of stones, the discarded bones of a long-abandoned village. A white-needle pine grows in the middle of the village clearing, the white-haired god’s sign that Spore has killed in this place. Beyond that lies a long stony slope and then—visible at night with the same pallor as a ghost—the shore of the White Sea.

The troop roars, thundering up behind them, howling in glee.

Ao gasps, “Give me the knife. I’ll kill myself.”

This is the moment when El becomes a murderer.

“Keep running. I’ll be right behind you,” she says.

She stops and she turns, yanking the cord holding the sealed jar over her neck. She waits one breath, two, three, five. When the front ranks are a stone’s toss from her, too close to easily shift direction, she flings the jar hard at the ground and stomps on it for good measure.

It cracks.

She sprints after Ao, toward the shore of the White Sea.

The screaming begins.

Spore moves fast when it senses a rush of vibrant animal life. A horse has bolted in a complete panic and, rider clinging to its back, plunges straight toward the White Sea. The soldier sees his doom coming. He tries to throw himself off the horse, but his boot gets stuck in the stirrup and so he is dragged, bumping and twisting, into the mist. How quickly it happens.

The horse rears up as its head stretches and tears apart, sprouting two heads, then four. The soldier shrieks, high and higher still, until the register of his voice turns into a whistle. He is elongating, as if the Pall is trying to turn him into a giant worm, body collapsing into segments, then dissolving, as if eaten through by a cloud of invisible locusts.

“El!” Ao’s voice is frantic.