whelve (v.) to bury something deep, to hide.

When Ina woke, it was to the day rising, slowly, somewhere beyond the trees. The night had cracked open to let daylight ooze through, and the sunrise was the colour of bad blood, leaking slowly between the trees to stain the forest floor with long lashes of stolen gold and growing pools of ash black, like wounded heavens. It was so beautiful, and so eerie; it reminded Ina of nothing less than the strange, enormous deer that they had seen yesterday.

Yesterday...

"You didn't wake me up." She sounded accusing. She was accusing. They wouldn't last out here for long if he insisted on being stupidly self-sacrificing. Was this some bizarre attempt to ape Pekka – to do as he would have done? Ghjuvan had clearly had the same instinct; Ina wondered what Pekka would have thought of that. Would he have been gratified that someone was taking up his responsibilities, looking after those who couldn't look after themselves? Or would he have been quietly disapproving? Ina could remember him saying as much about Zoran, once: Czarnecki wasn't chosen for the Programme to just play therapist.

Bit rich, coming from you. She had looked up at him with a fond smile. They had been sitting on the sidelines of the sparring field, watching Zoran fail utterly to dismantle Kinga's defences as the smaller Warrior spun a spear in her hand and handily blocked his every strike. She made it look easy; she had looked bored; and for a moment, Ina had envied her. There were so many forms of strength, but to possess one that was so visible – that was, surely, some form of relief. Kinga never seemed to doubt her position in the world; she took up space defiantly.

He has skills more suited to serving the cause. Pekka had paused. There had hung between them a silent sentence further; he did not say it, and he did not need to. She knew him better than that.

She had known him better than that.

"You needed the sleep," Zoran replied, turning a page; the thread which bound them moved slowly with his movement, the same pale silver now stained with a hint of orange as though the sunlight had stained it too. He was reading Matthias' notes again; she knew better than to ask if he had found anything worthwhile embedded somewhere, deep within the ink. The Hierophant's Curse drove its holder inevitably, irrevocably, insane; she supposed it was some small wonder he had even been able to type, at the end. And yet, she thought, in the sparse few glimpse of Kloet that they had been accorded at initiation – he had seemed lucid, lucid and focused, but not at all the wilder boy that the other Warriors had once spoke of with a fondness. She almost wanted to ask Zoran about it, whether his predecessor had seemed sane during his initiation, but she knew better than to do so. Initiation was a sacred, and private, ritual. Inanna Nirari was not a superstitious sort, but when one was dealing with curses… she thought the term taboo had a little more meaning in times such as these. For the same reason, she wondered if she should have read the notes at all. They were intended for the Hierophant, and the Hierophant alone – weren't they? "I didn't mind."

"You'll be seeing black dogs if you're not careful."

She meant to keep her accusing tone, but it came out as fond; she wasn't entirely sure why. She had, for once, not woken screaming. When was the last time that had happened? Was it just her exhaustion that had drawn her down and pinned her to nightmares, silently? Or had it been something within her, her Curse, forcibly holding her to her sleep? For she had still had nightmares; she always did. She just had not screamed.

She had dreamed of Pekka. Could that ever count as a nightmare?

"I almost wouldn't mind." He had a point; this silence was overwhelming. There was only the soft noise of her friend turning another page. His eyes darted quickly; she could not read his expression and that, more than anything else, worried her. Zoran was so typically an open book for her, if for no one else. This inscrutability was so unnerving...

"Anything useful?" She indicated the bundle of notes, and watched his expression darken almost instantaneously. Ah. She drew herself up onto her knees and ran a hand through her hair – tangled into soil-stained knots, surprising nobody – and smoothed down her clothes. They were going to invade Illéa like this? They looked like teenagers who had got lost in the woods – they were.

"Well," he said, and she almost smiled. He always started his sentences like that when he was hedging – usually because he didn't want to be wrong. It was the same way he spoke when he was about to propose a strange strategy in class, or when he was sure his suggestion would be shouted down instantly by Myghal or Uriasz. It was the sound of Zoran knowing, on some level, that he was correct, and almost being afraid to acknowledge as much. "I'm not sure."

That did surprise her; she hadn't been expecting to hear anything so half-optimistic. She blinked, and glanced at him; she said nothing, hoping he would elaborate on his own, and then, when he failed to do so, she said, "not sure if there is anything, or not sure if it's useful?"

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other." He shook his head; over the past two nights, his hair had totally lost any semblance of the neatness into which he had forcibly arranged it before inspection. It fell in his eyes now; Ina almost reached to push it back, like she might have done for another candidate ordinarily, but something – the memory of Pekka, perhaps – checked her before she could make the mistake of doing so. No, she thought; just as she had been unable to take his hand yesterday, she could not touch him today. She couldn't say why; she could not name that shapeless sorrow hanging over her. What was she afraid of? "It's probably nothing."

"If you think it's something," she said softly, "I believe you."

He moved closer to her, to show her what he had been reading; in this strange gold-red light, Matthias' typing seemed all the blacker upon the half-yellow page. Those pencil marks were still there, long and meandering across the page, wavering lines that were only mostly straight. "These numbers..." He gestured to them; she looked. Strings of digits stretched across the page, not appearing to align to any pattern or order: 12471912516198711189321...

She shook her head gently. "Co-ordinates?"

"That was my first thought," he said, "but if they are, then it isn't anything to do with Illéa, it can't be…."

"A code, then?" He allowed her to take, gently, the page; it was cool to the touch, strangely so, despite the mild warmth of the air around them. "Alphanumeric? No..." No, she thought ruefully, only a simple glance at the page would tell her that trying to apply a simple cypher would just churn back a string of letters, like those on previous pages: dgibbhgafibcbg, maybe, or dgivhgjfiw. Maybe a less simple cypher, then, but how could they hope to crack that with so little to go on? "Do you think he's laughing at us right now? Matthias, I mean."

"You think he'd find this funny?"

"Isn't it?" Ina shook her head. "He literally left us the future… and we can't read it. We're lost in a forest, and we have all the answers in our hands, and we can't read them."

Zoran's voice was so soft, and it cracked as he spoke. "He left us ravings, Ina. He lost his mind. Maybe he left us what he remembered of the past." He reached past her arm, carefully avoiding brushing against her, and gently tapped one of the words which crawled along the bottom of the margins: konradkonradkonrad. He had written Pekka's name, Ina remembered; they said when a Hierophant went beyond recovery, they lost all sense of what was, what had been and what was yet to be.

"Maybe," Ina said, very softly. She could not shake the unerring feeling that Zoran had been right the first time: that there was something here. But maybe that was wishful thinking; maybe that was merely their mutual yearning for something to be certain; maybe they just wanted to be concretely, physically, useful. Ina thought again of those long evenings, watching Pekka and Kinga and Khalore and thinking, oh, is that what a Warrior is?

Pekka had never failed to take her seriously, but she had always detected, faintly, that he did not agree with her. That was fine; they had always disagreed on plenty. But on those dark evenings, when he would accompany her to the sparring fields after dinner and help her with her combat drills, carefully adjusting her limbs to strengthen her stance, covering her hands with his to show her how she needed to move – she remembered him saying, you're Ina. You've succeeded here because you're Ina.

And she had not been able to say anything but Ina has debts to pay.

He had known. He had understood.

The next page, which she looked at now, was geometrically arranged – three imperfect circles nestled within one another, looking like they had been drawn freehand and in a hurry. A string of words beneath: kelchtiamatnavtxorigjollganzir. More nonsense, Ina thought, consonants piled upon consonants. Still, those pencil drawn lines carved through the face of the page; Ina held it up to the light, squinting at it carefully, and froze.

"Zor."

He glanced up, and saw the expression on her face. Instantly, his focus sharpened. "Yeah?"

"Please," Ina said softly, "tell me I'm not going crazy."

He extended a hand for the page; she shook her head gently. "Look at it like I am," she said. "Look at it from here." There was a slight shake in her voice – fear? No, she said, or, well, maybe… a kind of fear. The fear that she was getting their hopes up for naught. The fear that she was wrong or, worse, that she was imagining things. The fear that Matthias Kloet really had been mad, and they were all about to follow him into that madness, headfirst.

Sometimes, one or two Warriors survived the initiation of their predecessors. Often it was the Hierophant, who, deprived of any gift of prophecy, was confined to an asylum for the rest of their brutally short life. Ina thought again of how Avrova and Matthias had seemed to die of nothing, and of how Jaga would have lived, inhuman and inhumane, for many years if Kinga had not drawn a blade against her sister. Was that really a better fate than succumbing to your curse? Living in madness... She watched Zoran carefully incline his head to mimic the same angle from which Ina was looking. She could tell when he had seen it; he froze, much as she had.

She barely breathed. "Right?"

Holding the note up to the light like this, the sunlight streamed almost unhindered through the page, turning the paper translucent. Those barely-there pencil-drawn lines barely retained their shape at all, paling in the warmth of daylight and yet – they could tell, even with the faintest trace remaining, that these marks aligned perfectly with the silhouette of the trees before them. Trunk-to-line, they were looking at a perfect, albeit rough, sketch of Ina's view of the forest. Holding it like this, the pencilled lines included every tree in front of her, just the line of them, following them up and out of the margins of the page.

Ina's first thought was oh, thank god, there is something. There is something. This, then, was hope.

Ina's second thought was this is my view. It was not an angle Zoran would have naturally encountered, and it was not an angle visible from the places he had chosen to sit; it was too low, too close to her body, held higher than Zoran's natural reading position. He preferred to read with a book on his lap, after all. Zoran, alone, would never have spotted this; it was something, if not for Ina's eyes, then for Ina's discovery. That idea warmed her – not her heart, but her veins, something like gratitude spreading slowly through her chest. Oh, she thought, so I'm being useful. Oh, Pekka would be proud.

"What do you reckon it means?" She kept her voice hushed; this felt like too momentous of a moment to break the utter silence of the forest. Was this something? Was this anything?

"I'm not sure," Zoran said. He didn't need to say that; Ina could read it in the lines of his body. It wasn't that he wasn't sure about what she was saying; he wasn't sure whether he should let himself believe it. He gently took the page from her, and tilted in his hand, and said, softly, "there's about a dozen of these in the whole bundle."

Ina said, "a path?"

"How," Zoran said softly, "could we ever hope to follow it? Look..." He moved his hand, very slightly. All of the alignments slid away; they were, once again, just mindless trails of pencil across paper. "We'd have to look at the right time, with the right angle..."

"He was the Hierophant," Ina said, rather helplessly. "Maybe he just knew."

"Maybe," Zoran replied, rather dubiously. "Maybe. But I guess this means… he knew we'd be here."

He had. And that meant, for a brief second, the weight on Ina's chest seemed to abate. It did not lift - her heart was too heavy for that - but it eased, very briefly, as she thought of the others - Ilja, Azula, Ghjuvan, Mielikki, Khalore... For one reason or another, Matthias had seen Zoran and Ina here, and now. They hadn't gone so astray. They were where they were meant to be.

And then, a cruel realisation dawning, Ina said, very softly, "do you think he saw us here for good reasons?"

After all, they hadn't seen a druj yet.

Zoran stared down at the page in his hand, and did not answer.

Ina wasn't sure she wanted him to.

They had passed a brief clearing, where the sky was visible; they had been in the forest for little more than a day, and yet the sight of the sky had brought Azula to a stop. She had, for a single moment, stared up at the great blue; it was the colour of cornflowers. Some of it, towards the east, was patched over with daffodil yellow and dahlia pink. For a moment, the fog seemed to have receded; a single pale cloud scuttled along the edge of the sky. How strange, Azula thought, how strong – that there could be such gloom and chaos and pain here, while above there was only sweet blue gentleness.

It did not last. It could not last. Ignoring the pain in her leg, she had put her head down and continued on. Mielikki, tracing behind her, seemed happy to follow. East, Azula thought, it was yellow in the east, and so they continued to march in the direction of the sun. They had to go eastwards, she knew that much, and if they continued eastwards then they might even run into one another. Really, how much land could these forests actually cover? Over the past two days, they must have ventured thirty five miles or more… surely, she thought, surely they were coming close to the sky again.

Surely, somewhere, there would be something other than trees and druj.

They had walked through the night, not daring to stop; they had lost their bags, and Azula had not dared to risk fire here in the shadows of the forest. Were druj afraid of fire, or would it only draw them closer? Did it matter? The forest itself was out to get them. She thought of the vines, clutching at her as though alive, and withheld a shudder; she understood now why they called this a cursed island. Everything was out to kill you – yes, that was an understatement. Glimpsing the sky had been paltry relief; another relief had been the realisation they were walking, vaguely, in the right direction. At the very least, they seemed to have been walking north-east for the most part; that was close enough to right that Azula wasn't going to quibble.

They would come to the others eventually, surely? This forest wasn't so large – they had run in the same direction – they knew where they wanted to be. East, she thought, they needed to go east. Would Hyacinth remember as much, if she was still alive, if she had found her way out of the water? Azula didn't dare get her hopes up; she didn't dare wish. This forest had that effect on you – she had never felt so tiny. The sky was far away, but these trees…. she imagined, very briefly, that they had pierced the stars themselves.

How tiny they were, in the greater scopes of things. Was this what it was to be caught in the scope of war? Azula had always hoped it would never come. Had the past Warriors felt so? She thought again of the phantom with the bloody mouth. Had Céluiz ever felt so small, facing down the rest of the world without even his abilities to protect him? She wished she could lean on his strength now, but it was utterly absent; she was, as ever, alone in her own head. That should have been a comfort, and yet… and yet.

She glanced at Mielikki. There was a stripe of black on Mielikki's hand, scored there as though by cinders; she was rubbing at it absently with her thumb as she walked. At least they were not alone in real life, Azula thought – if she had been left utterly alone in the woods, she wasn't sure how she would have coped. Well, she thought wryly, remembering how tightly the vines had constricted upon her bones, maybe she wouldn't have. Maybe she would have just sunk into the ground, then and there, just as the last Star had. Maybe, like Alajos, there would have only been a little Azula-shaped patch of flowers left behind to show that she had ever existed. That was peaceful, she thought, wasn't it? It was pretty. The kind of death other Warriors dreamed of.

Azula had not dreamed of death since she was a child.

Mielikki's voice, soft behind her, broke her from her reverie. "I'm hungry."

So was Azula, but she did not admit this. She just said, "all of our food was in our bags. If we want to eat, we need to..."

"I have berries."

Azula shook her head. "They're probably poisonous," she began, and then glanced back to see that there were already pale blue stains marking Mielikki's fingers and lips. Well, that was… typical, actually, that was fairly typical of Mielikki Zorrico. She was still standing, at the very least; Azula wasn't sure how she would cope if she was expected to carry her fellow Warrior. Was this why Commandant had always insisted on such heavy weights during their morning death marches? Azula had never thought she would be grateful for them, but here she was, wishing she had carried something a little heavier again. How much did Mielikki weigh, anyway? She sighed. "How do they taste?"

Mielikki looked thoughtful. "Sweet," she said, finally, and extending a hand towards Azula. They superficially resembled blueberries, she thought, though they were oblong and slightly larger. "They're fine. Better to risk it than to starve."

Azula shook her head. "I can last a little longer, I think." Her leg was dragging a little, and her stomach was threatening to bore a hole through her torso, but...

"But you'll slow us down."

Azula bristled at that; she thought Mielikki had been expecting as much, from the guileless way the Death of Kur was looking at her now. "I won't. I promise."

Mielikki looked clearly doubtful, but only shrugged. "I'll keep them for you," she said, and Azula just smiled in response. She didn't want to be waspish – they were friends, as well as comrades – but the weight of the past few days was heavy upon her. She was hungry, and she was tired, and she was scared. They had lost all of the others – they had been hunted by druj – they were still in the woods.

She thought a little waspishness was the smallest sin she could commit right now.

Watching Mielikki now, she had the most eerie sensation that there was something missing. Nothing tenable, nothing physical, nothing perceived by the eye – it was not as simple as that. It was like she was looking at an unfinished puzzle, like her friend was a jigsaw with a single piece missing. She wasn't sure what that piece was, only that she was abruptly possessed by the idea that she, Azula, held it. She held some extra piece, something Mielikki was missing, and she could reach out, easy as that, and just…

She shook her head. Hunger, she thought. She felt slightly dizzy. Maybe, she thought ruefully, she should have taken those berries. She was loath to show weakness, but was it really weakness to just look after yourself? What would Pekka say? She didn't need to wonder; she remembered. He had fixed her with those blue eyes and said we don't need to earn our lunches, Zula. No matter what Sauer says.

She knew that. Intellectually, she knew that. And yet, when she thought of eating, the image of that phantom with his mouth full of blood flitted into her mind again. She wasn't sure why she was thinking of Céluiz now, but she seemed to be capable of thinking little else. Had he been able to speak? How had he communicated with the other Warriors – sign language? Or had he been committed to some kind of silent existence, watching, observing, without ever being able to warn his friends or call his loved ones by name?

They kept moving. In the trees, she was aware, as she was always aware, of the things moving through the shadows. Nearest to them, something that vaguely resembled a skull-faced ape hung from a branch, very high in the trees; it had long, muscular brown-furred arms twice as long as its torso, and its red eyes followed them closely as they moved. But it seemed to make no motion towards the two girls as they crossed another clearing and set to an uphill portion of the woods, the ground sloping upwards so steeply that Azula found herself clawing her way up on hands-and-knees. After the panic of the day before, Azula found that strange, though she was unwilling to say so for fear that she would jinx the rest of their journey. Why did the druj hang back now?

Maybe they had seen what Mielikki had done to their brethren. Maybe they shrank back now out of fear. Maybe they could sense the curses lying heavily on the Warriors. Azula could hope, right?

She could always dream.

It was her turn to shrink back, when Mielikki offered her a hand; it was nothing personal, just the memory of the plants dying back under the other Warrior's withering touch, and Mielikki did not seem to take it as anything but. She just nodded and then, pausing, glanced at the berries in her other hand. They had curdled into tiny black raisins; she casually flung them into the undergrowth, and flashed Azula a smile. "We might need to pick more, then."

"Yeah," Azula said with a smile. Behind her friend, she could see that the druj had begun to move, slowly, through the trees - sometimes disappearing into the outgrowth only to reappear, higher, closer. It was gaining ground on them, in both senses, and she didn't trust them to be fast enough to flee. Her smile faded slowly. "We might."

"I think," Khalore said, as she took her friend's hand, "she has been possessed by the spirit of Nerezza."

Ghjuvan said, "god help us if that's true."

Kinga had slept through nearly the entire night, which was entirely unlike her, though her sleeping position was less outrageous than some Nez had adopted in their years together. It concerned Khalore very slightly – she had never known her former dorm-mate to sleep through sunrise.

Kinga had stumbled into their clearing, barely held up by Ilja, and had barely acknowledged the others as she fell to her knees beside the tree trunks furthest from the fire, and curled up like a dog, head on her arms, to sleep; her hair, heavy with blood and viscera, hung over her face like a cloak. Ilja had watched her for a moment and then looked at Ghjuvan and Khalore. "She's still breathing," he had said helpfully, and shrugged.

That had been the first of Khalore's many questions; she and Ghjuvan had peppered Ilja with many others as the night had passed, but it appeared that the Chariot knew very little. What he could confirm only wrought new questions in Khalore's mind. So one of the druj they had encountered had not been a druj at all; so the thing that had stalked them had only been Kinga's monstrous form. That was not, Khalore thought bitterly, the same as saying the thing that had stalked them was harmless – Kinga had turned on Ghjuvan and the Champions when she had first turned. Did she have control over her curse? Khalore found that difficult to believe, particularly given the other three had not even manifested theirs. So she found herself watching Kinga from the corner of her eyes, straining to ignore the acute agony in her arm.

That was easier said than done – every time she moved her arm, every nerve in her body screamed torture. Every time she moved the rest of her body, the movement reverberated through the bone of her arm, bringing forth wave after fresh wave of pain. Even now, sitting still, it ached with a violence. It felt like that druj still had its jaws around her arm, a second, phantom pain layered upon the first.

So Kinga had been the thing in the shadows, following them – and she had not moved until Khalore had been mauled. She could have prevented it, Khalore thought bitterly, if she was there, she could have moved. Khalore would have done as much. She wouldn't have waited for someone's arm to be ruined, for Ghjuvan to be a single second from death, for the others to be staring eternity in its fanged maw.

And if she had, she didn't think she could have slept so well the next day.

The sun had risen some hours ago; still, Kinga slept. Maybe that was confidence, Khalore thought, the knowledge that, whatever dark thing lurked in the forest, you could take it. Or maybe it was exhaustion – they said some curses took more out of you than others.

Would Khalore's? Whatever it was? Would it make her arm stop hurting? That was the least she deserved, she thought, the least that she had earned. She didn't want to lose her arm. She deserved that much, right?

Ghjuvan was getting agitated to get moving again. In the dark, the monsters around them had stilled, and stopped; now that it was light again, the older Warrior was watching their surroundings acutely, a vein in his neck jumping at every sound in the forest. He helped Khalore to her feet, gingerly, wincing every time she gritted her teeth and swallowed back a cry. "Okay?" he murmured and she did not even have the strength to reply, only nodded with the careful restraint of one who can barely move her own body parts. At least it was not her legs that were injured; she could still stand. She didn't dare look at her arm; she was afraid of what she would say. Blood, and torn flesh, and bone poking through the skin – she could imagine it, without confirming it by sight.

Behind them, Ilja had gathered up one of the logs from the fire, barely cooled, and dropped it on Kinga's head. Upon impact, it crumbled into char, marking the Moon's face with so much black ash. From the silence that followed, it crossed Khalore's mind that the other Warrior might have died quietly in the night – but then Kinga rose her head minutely and said, after a long moment of silence, "ugh."

Ghjuvan said, "was that really necessary?"

"No," Ilja said thoughtfully, "but I found it very amusing."

Kinga rolled tiredly onto her knees, and climbed to her feet. She did not even bother to wipe the black cinders from her face. She was moving more slowly than Khalore had ever seen her move; it was as though she had grown old and arthritic in just two days. She moved, slightly uncertainly, across the grass, towards their makeshift hearth, and crouched beside the fire, inspecting the ashes as though she expected to see something written there. Her filthy hair hung over her face; she looked half-feral, Khalore thought, like she had returned in the visage of Kinga but beneath her face still lurked the beast that she had, however briefly, been. Then, she looked at Ghjuvan and held out her hand. "Knife?"

For a split second, the image of the great dead carcass in the chancellery's sacellum flitted across Khalore's mind: Kinga had killed her own sister just two days ago. She said nothing, only watched closely, prepared to intervene, as Ghjuvan flicked his knife from his belt and tossed it underhand to the other Warrior. Kinga caught it and, in the same motion, sliced it through her hair. It was not a good look; it was not clean. Her hair was uneven, and just as filthy, but no longer lying in her face as she stood. Kinga cleaned the knife off her leg, and handed it back to Ghjuvan. Blood-stained locks littered the grass; she kicked them into the last, smouldering embers of the fire, and watched them sizzle as she said, "you're keeping your arm?"

Khalore glowered, very slightly. She did so to belie the fact that, actually, she wasn't certain that she was. Ghjuvan had been mollified, slightly, by their argument the previous night, and by the fact that she was standing under her own power now; she did not believe he would remain so for long. Worse than that, there was some part of her afraid that he was right. She would slow the others down; it would only get worse. But without her arm she could not fight, and if she could not fight, what was she good for? "I'll be fine."

Kinga shrugged, and didn't seem inclined to argue, as she said "where are we meeting the others?"

Ghjuvan said, looking like he predicted a poor reaction, "your guess is as good as ours."

Behind him, Ilja said, "you didn't see any trace of them?"

Kinga was wearing a peculiar kind of dead-eyed stare that Khalore had never seen before; it was like she was still trying to claw her way back from deep within herself, to some semblance of normal humanity. She turned that gaze on Ilja now and said, "I didn't see much of anything, Schovajsa."

"You saw us," Khalore said, and Kinga shook her head, but said nothing more. What was she trying to say? Maybe Khalore had been right. Maybe she had, as that beast, been utterly mindless.

Kinga made a sound between a cough and a sigh, and rose to her full height. Khalore hadn't realised earlier, but the other Warrior was still wearing her uniform from initiation – the grey shirt was now stained with something dark and faintly foul-smelling. She went to take a step forward, not saying anything, and then –

"No. No more splitting up." Ghjuvan held up a hand; it hovered an inch from Kinga's shoulder. He did not need to ask where Kinga had been going; he could read her face, quite easily. Khalore wondered if he thought he could stop her. "There's four of us," Ghjuvan said, solemnly. "We keep it that way."

Khalore said, gritting her teeth against a fresh spasm of agony through what had once been her elbow, "she has more chance than any of us."

Ilja said, kicking dirt over something that was fascinating him on the ground, "that's saying very little, Khal." Khal. He had never called her that before, though most of her friends among the candidates did; Ghjuvan and Myghal alone called her Lore. It was a strange concession, now of all times – were they really being drawn closer by this suffering? Last night, he had wanted to take her arm. She hadn't forgiven him that, just yet. "Ghjuvan is right. We're stronger together."

Stronger, Khalore thought bitterly. Was this strength? Missing half their team, exhausted and starving, her arm hanging by a tendon from a shoulder deadened by agony? This wasn't what Warriors were meant to be. They were meant to be strong. They were meant to be protectors. They had achieved nothing except nearly getting killed thrice over.

Finally she said, spitting the words towards the Moon of Kur with about half of her usual venom, "what did you see?"

Kinga spoke slowly; it sounded like her vocal chords had rusted from disuse. No, Khalore thought – it sounded like she was an animal learning to speak for the first time. "Sixty."

Ilja translated for her, and then seemed surprised that he could; Khalore could see him questioning where this information had come from. Maybe Kinga had told him the night before. "We're about sixty miles from the walls."

The walls, Khalore thought – of course. The walled fortress of Illéa. Hearing those words, her pulse jumped; they were so close. Sixty miles… How far had they travelled over the course of the past day, twenty or thirty miles? It was very far inland, then, and she wondered, not for the first time, how the Schreaves had managed to settle a land so utterly blighted by druj. The final curse must have been powerful indeed, she mused, and that thought sent a shiver down her spine. Could they really expect to defeat someone imbued with such strength – not only defeat, but steal that strength from them?

She could see Ghjuvan was thinking something similar. It all felt so much more real now, and Kinga was the only person among them to have got to some kind of grips with her ability. "Sixty miles," Ghjuvan repeated. "That's… less than two days. If we hustle."

Ilja was looking at Khalore's arm, rather dubiously. "More like four."

Khalore turned on Kinga. "Can't you carry us? You could transform..."

Kinga looked gaunt as she shook her head; it rather looked as if she hadn't slept at all. There were black marks on her face, stretching from her eyes into her hairline, as though she had been grasped by black fingers from behind; she said nothing, so Ilja spoke for her. "She's exhausted, Khal. We can give her a day to recover."

Ghjuvan's voice was sharp. "And if we're attacked?"

"You have a knife," Kinga said in that new, awful voice of hers. "Don't you?"

"Yes," Khalore said, feeling a fresh pang of agony burst from elbow to shoulder. She could no longer feel her hand; she thought that was probably worse than the pain. Sixty miles, she thought. Sixty. "Because that went so well the first time."