In early afternoon, back aching, hands dirty and sore despite the rags, I abandoned the glare and blustering wind of the heights for a shady clearing of pine trees and oak scrub. I ate a few dried figs, hard and half turned to sugar, and refilled my water flask at the stream that mumbled through the weedy clearing, trying to decide whether to return to the ridge top to dig another bundle of scabwort roots or head down to the cottage and the uncountable tasks that needed doing before sunset.

A spider skittered across the scuffed leather of my boot. A jay screeched. Beyond the stream, something large rustled the bracken—one of Evard’s deer, no doubt. No predators, human or beast, frequented the wooded hills behind Jonah’s cottage. Nor did enemy soldiers. Leire’s current battles were being waged in faraway Iskeran. Nor did sorcerous enchantments lurk in the wild forest, threatening to corrupt the soul. As the priests and people of the Four Realms had demanded for four hundred and fifty years, the dark arts and those who practiced them had been exterminated.

I lifted my head. The rustling came louder, closer, and now accompanied by a muted, rhythmic pounding. Running footsteps… human… that halted somewhere in the trees to my right. “Who’s there?” I called out, scrambling to my feet.

As if from nowhere and everywhere sounded the blast of a horn, the clamor of a hunt sweeping through the forest on three sides: racing hoofbeats, jangling harness, a shouted command not ten paces from where I stood. The runner was closer than that.