Fawn slipped down the tree trunk and peered around it. The one-handed man—riding rear guard?—was looking back over his shoulder. She ducked out of sight again till the hoofbeats faded, then unclutched the apple tree and went to seek the farmwife. Her pack, she was relieved to see in passing, lay untouched on the bench. Dag glanced back, wondering anew about the little farm girl who’d been hiding shyly up the apple tree. There, now—down she slid, but he still gained no clear look at her. Not that a few leaves and branches could hide a life-spark so bright from his groundsense at that range.

His mind’s eye sketched a picture of her tidy farm raided by a malice’s mud-men, all its cheerful routine turned to ash and blood and charnel smoke. Or worse—and not imagination but memory supplied the vision—a ruination like the Western Levels beyond the Gray River, not six hundred miles west of here. Not so far away to him, who had ridden or walked the distance a dozen times, yet altogether beyond these local people’s horizons. Endless miles of open flat, so devastated that even rocks could not hold their shape and slumped into gray dust. To cross that vast blight leached the ground from one’s body as a desert parched the mouth, and it was just as potentially lethal to linger there. A thousand years of sparse rains had only begun to sculpt the Levels into something resembling a landscape again. To see this farm girl’s green rolling lands laid low like that…

Not if I can help it, Little Spark.

He doubted they would meet again, or that she would ever know what her—mother’s?—strange customers today sought to do on her behalf and their own.

Still, he could not begrudge her his weariness in this endless task. The country people who gained even a partial understanding of the methods called it black necromancy and sidled away from patrollers in the street. But they accepted their gift of safety all the same. So yet again, one more time anew, we will buy the death of this malice with one of our own.