Stephen folded his arms across his chest.
“A faneway has to be walked in sequence, and the whole faneway has to be awake, so to speak, for its power to flow properly. That’s why something strange happened when I set foot on one, probably because I already have a connection to the sedoi.”
“And so?” Leshya asked.
“Well, if I understand this invocation, the last sedos in the faneway is Khrwbh Khrwkh,” Stephen explained. “We don’t know where that is, obviously, but according to this verse, the first one is the Spectral Eye . . .”
“You know where that is?” Aspar asked.
“In a minute,” Stephen said absently. “I’m still thinking this through.”
“No, please, take your time,” Aspar muttered.
“The second one, ‘Mother Devouring’—that’s the fane I went in, I’m certain of it. The first one Leshya led us to. That’s one of the titles of Marhirehben.”
“Aspar, back when you were tracking the greffyn, after you sent me off to d’Ef, you said you found a sacrifice at a sedos. Where was that, exactly?”
“About five leagues east of here, on Taff Creek.”
“Taff,” Stephen considered. Then he reached into his saddle, back where his maps were rolled up. He selected the one he wanted, then sat down cross-legged and rolled it out on the ground.
“What map is that?” Leshya asked, peering down at it.
“Stephen is in the habit of carrying maps a thousand years out of date,” Aspar said.
“Yes,” Stephen said, “but it may have finally done some good. This is a copy of a map made during the time of the Hegemony. The place-names have been altered to make sense to the Vitellian ear and to be written in the old scrift. Where would the Taff be, Aspar?”
The holter bent over and studied the yellowed paper. “The forest is different,” he said. “There’s more of it. But the rivers are near the same.” He thrust his finger at a small, squiggling line. “Thereabout,” he said.
“See the name of the creek?” Stephen asked.
“Tavata,” Winna read.
Stephen nodded. “It’s a corruption of Alotersian tadvat, I’ll wager—which means ‘specter.’”
“That’s it, then,” Leshya said.
Aspar made a skeptical noise.
Stephen moved his finger over a bit. “So the one on the Taff is the first. The one I stepped into is the second, and about here. That last one was about here.” He placed his finger on curved lines indicating hills. One, oddly, had a dead tree sketched on its summit.
“Does that mean anything to you, Aspar? Do you know anything about that place?”
Aspar frowned. “It used to be where the old people made sacrifice to Grim. They hung ‘em on that Naubagm tree.”
“Haergrim the Raver?”
Aspar nodded slowly, his face troubled.
“I’ve never heard of Pel,” Stephen allowed, “but the fact that both he and Haergrim are connected to rage is interesting, isn’t it?”
“I follow you now,” Leshya said. “So far, the monks have been moving east, and we’ve seen the first three of them. So where is the fourth?”
“Huskwood. In Vadhüan, Vhydhrabh.” He moved his finger east, until it came to rest on the d’Ef River. There was a town labeled Vitraf.
“Whitraff!” Winna exploded. “It’s a village! It’s still there!”
“Or so we hope,” Stephen said grimly.
“Yah,” Aspar said. “We’d best go see. And let me know when our prisoner wakes. He might be convinced to tell us more about this.”
But when they checked him, the monk was dead.
They gave the monk a holter’s funeral—which amounted to nothing more than laying him supine with his hands folded on his chest—and set off across the Brog-y-Stradh uplands. The forest often dissolved into heathered meadows and lush, ferny cloonys. Even with winter set to pounce, in these parts, the King’s Forest seemed to teem with life.
Stephen could tell that Aspar and Leshya saw things he didn’t. They rode at the front like dour siblings, guiding Ehawk’s mount. Winna had ridden with them for a time, but now she dropped back. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I feel fine,” Stephen said. But it wasn’t completely true—there was something nagging at him. He couldn’t tell her, though, that when he had awakened on the mound and grabbed Ehawk’s bow, he’d very nearly put an arrow into her instead of the monk.
Those first few heartbeats, he had felt a hatred that he couldn’t have imagined before, and could not now truly recall. Not for Winna specifically, but for everything living. It had faded so suddenly that he almost doubted he’d truly felt it.
He’d remembered dreams of some sort on first waking, as well, but those were gone, too, leaving only a vague, unclean feeling. “What about you?” he asked. “I’ve never seen you so subdued.”
She grimaced slightly. “It’s a lot to take in,” she said. “I’m a hostler’s daughter, remember? A few months ago my greatest worry was that Banf Thelason might get drunk and start a fight or Enry Flory might try and run off without paying for his ale. Even when I was with Aspar when he was tracking the greffyn, it was pretty simple. Now I don’t know who we’re supposed to be fighting. The Briar King? The praifec? Villagers gone mad? Who does that leave out? And what good am I?”
“Don’t talk like that,” Stephen said.
“Why not? It’s what Aspar has been saying all along. I’ve denied it, come up with excuses, but down in the marrow, I know he’s right. I can’t fight or track, I don’t know much of anything, and every time there’s a brawl, I have to be protected.”
“Not like Leshya, eh?” Stephen said.
Her eyes widened. “Don’t be cruel,” she whispered.
“But it’s what you’re thinking,” he said, surprised to hear such bold words coming from his mouth. “She’s beautiful, and more his age. She’s Sefry and he was raised that way, she can track like a wolf and fight like a panther, and she seems to know more about this whole business than the rest of us put together. Why wouldn’t he want her instead of you?”
“I—” She choked off. “Why are you talking this way?”
“Well, for one thing, I know how it feels to think you’re useless,” he said. “And no one can make you feel as perfectly useless as Aspar. It’s not something he does on purpose—it’s just that he’s so good at what he does. He says he doesn’t need anything or anyone, and sometimes you actually believe him.”
“You, useless?” she said. “You’ve saint-given talents. You’ve knowledge of the small and the large and everything between, and without you we wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do.”
“I wasn’t saint-blessed when Aspar met me,” he pointed out, remembering vividly the holter’s undisguised contempt, “and Aspar certainly thought I was dead weight. By the time we parted, I thought he was right. But I was mistaken. So are you, and you know it.”
“I don’t—”
“Why did you follow Aspar, Winna? Why did you leave Colbaely and your father and everything you knew to chase after a holter?”
She bent her mouth to one side, a habit he found winsome. “Well, I never maunted to actually leave Colbaely,” she said, “not for this long. I thought Asp was in danger and went to warn him, and then I reckoned I’d go back home.”
“But you didn’t. Why?”
“Because I’m in love with him,” she said.
That pricked a peculiar feeling in Stephen, but he pressed on through it. “Still, you must have been in love with him for a while,” Stephen said. “It didn’t happen that fast, did it?”
“I’ve loved him since I was a little girl.” She sighed.
“So why, suddenly, did you do something about it?”
“I didn’t intend to,” she said. “It’s just—I found him all laid out on the ground. I thought he was dead, and I thought he would never know.”
“Why did you imagine he would care?”