Cnán halted just outside the clearing surrounding the stone monastery and dropped to a crouch. She knew how to move silently in the dense woods of the North, and she had approached the isolated ruins more quietly than the breeze in the branches or the insects scuttling under last year’s leaves.

Through the uneven morning mist, she could make out the ruin of the monastery on the northern verge. The broken, roofless walls of outbuildings stretched south of the main ruins in a broken curve. Birches and a few young oaks had grown up where monks had likely once raised vegetables. The rest of the clearing was filled with grass and brambles cut through with newly blazed paths. Four lean-tos had been erected just beyond the stone fence of an overgrown graveyard.

She had found a camp—that much was certain. But whose camp?

From far away came the rattle of a woodpecker gathering breakfast, interrupted by a closer and louder clash of steel—the unnatural sound that had drawn her attention. This close, she could hear men talking—many men—but she had yet to see the monastery’s new guests.

Two days before, a band of black bone Mongols had chased her like a deer to the edge of the thick forest, where they had jerked up short, cursing in bastard Turkic and peppering the trees with arrows. Steppe-bred warriors loathed thrashing through cluttered groves where they could neither gallop freely nor swivel quickly on their powerful ponies. The deep woods were still safe, though traveling through them was slow.