‘But our compact-’ Santiren started to say, and Cynthaen cut her off with a short gesture.

‘Our compact holds. I will find your boy somewhere to hide.’ A smile made it to her face at last. ‘I know just the place, but you must be swift. Follow me and never leave my presence, or you will surely die, compact or no.’

‘What’s in it for her?’ Marcantor demanded, following Cynthaen as closely as he could, through the tangle of roots and branches.

‘Quiet, Marcantor,’ Santiren warned him from the back.

‘Tell me. What’s this compact?’ he pressed. He was in a foul mood, cold and scratched, limping like all of them. This new place was not kind to bare feet.

‘I’ll tell you,’ came Cynthaen’s voice.

Marcantor hissed at her angrily, but the boy said, ‘I would hear it, if you would tell us. You are helping us, and therefore we have no right to an answer, but I would hear it.’

The land-kinden woman stopped at that, turning back to gaze at him with a slight smile on her face. The boy decided that she was pretty when she smiled like that. Not beautiful like Paladrya, but there was something in her exotic features that could be appealing, when she tried.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Cynthaen said, turning and heading off again. ‘Only a little. What little there’s left. Go back long enough, you know, we were the masters of everything, or our masters were. Better times then. Age of Lore. Everyone knows it.’

The boy had to strain to hear her, to sieve the words from the quick, accented speech.

‘Then it all went to the pyre. We used to roam everywhere. Now, just a few places left where we can keep them out. So many traditions lost. What was a whole Hold once, now just a few families to it. The old ways, gone now, most of them, or going. We’re all on each other’s toes. Can’t keep hold of what used to be the important things. The differences. The traditions.’

She led them on for quite a while without speaking further, and the boy tried to work out if she had answered him somehow, lost in those rapid, disjointed phrases, or not.