“And now what?” Chester asked.

For several hours we’d pressed on through a drizzle that had chilled us all to the marrow, having drawn a mantle of miserable silence around ourselves to concentrate on picking our way through the softened soil and the irregular ditches that sliced through the trees. The world smelled of cold mud and dying leaves, close and wet, and more immediately for me of damp genets, and compounding those sensations with the increasing nausea as we drew nearer the source of the wrongness had made for an interminable ride… until the trees simply stopped.

Before us spread a broad lip devoid of anything taller than grass. We’d been approaching it from an oblique angle, which had prevented us from the sight of it, and the sight of it….

“Master!” Almond said, bracing me as I swayed. Kelu grabbed at me as well, but I ignored her to croak something I hoped to be Amhric’s name. He was riding alone—

“Got him,” Chester said, snatching at my brother before he could fall from his mount.

“What is it?” Ivy asked, guiding her horse up along mine. “Morgan?”

The wrongness was a river here, flowing past the lip and into the trees. Drums beat in my ears, and my heart accelerated to match the relentlessness of its rhythm. The taste of blood was on my tongue, and grief.

“We’re close,” Amhric said for me.

When I was sure of my voice, I said, “Somewhere ahead of us.”

“Then… there’s a problem.”

I lifted my head, managed to focus on Carrington by her voice… her voice, and the glow in her, which had grown sure and steady, a lighthouse in fog.

“When I was reading about Mother’s Stand, most of the accounts agreed that there was more than one path to it, and to use the low road was to die. We have to find the high road. There should be something… a path, a trail, something that leads up instead of down.”

“Down is where the feeling leads,” I said in a voice that felt like scraped-up butter.

“If down is what’s making you feel this poorly, perhaps Doctor Carrington is right,” Ivy said.

“But if she’s wrong, we’ll lose time. And we don’t have time,” Chester murmured.

Eyre spoke. “But if she’s right, we might die taking the low road.”

“We might die doing anything,” Chester said. “We’re chasing a sorcerer who’s going to summon a demon. What are the chances of us surviving this? Us, the humans, anyway.”

And with a single utterance, Chester made my decision for me. “Can you find this high road?”

“The accounts all agree that it’s close enough to the entrance to be obvious.” Carrington’s voice was firm.

“Then lead, please,” I said. “I know our chances of success are slight. But I have been making decisions based on folklore for months now. There’s no use stopping now.”

The light in her flared, and for a moment it cut through the miasma gripping me. My eyes watered behind the spectacles and I closed them.

“All right,” Carrington said. “Let’s go then, but stay alert. Legend says the bones and blood are layers deep here. I can’t imagine there’s anything left to trouble us, but there’s no use tempting fate.”

“But before we go…” Ivy slid from her horse and said to the genets, “Will you share a horse with Chester and myself? So we can put the king and Morgan on the drake.”

“So that the two people most likely to collapse will be on the same mount?” Kelu asked.

“Because there’s no use not putting them on the same mount. Morgan won’t let anyone else ward him. Besides, the drake can keep them astride.” She ran a hand over its cheek. “Can’t you?”

It huffed, a soft exhalation that smelled of ash and burning wood.

Looking up at me, Ivy said, “Yes?”

“Yes,” I said. And knew the other reason she’d made the suggestion. With someone to be strong for, I would master myself more completely.

We made the trade then, and Amhric went before me, and we resumed our trek in the wake of Carrington, who led us with more confidence than I’d anticipated, or perhaps than she had. We had brought her to the threshold of the culmination of years of research, and she was eager for it in a way none of the rest of us could be.

For no one else was eager. There was something about the gulch into which we were descending that discommoded everyone, something invisible and yet all too tangible to other senses. Even the drake’s nostrils flared, over and over, as if reacting to some stink too faint for human noses. It was so distinct an unease that the very innocuousness of the landscape made everyone skittish. When at last, several hours later, Carrington said, “Here!” Ivy jumped, her horse shying at her twitch, and even Last brought his mount up short.

Carrington’s high road was in fact, a broad path that went up, skirting the edge of the gully. Someone had maintained it, for there was not so much as a weed to mar it, and the surface had been leveled.

“Now that makes me as nervous as if we were to go straight in,” Eyre admitted. “Do you suppose there are people ahead? Was there some mention of a community that waits at Mother’s Stand?”

“No,” Carrington said. “A witch, certainly, but not a large number of people. This is purportedly a lonely redoubt, built to repulse the casual visitor.”

“If it’s supposed to repulse the casual visitor, it probably shouldn’t be so easy to use or find,” Ivy muttered.

Kelu nodded from behind Chester. “Looks like a trap to me.”

“Perhaps the witch is kind?” Almond asked.

“I doubt there’s a witch,” Carrington said. “That’s one of the least common of the stories about Mother’s Stand. There’s probably nothing here, except maybe that sorcerer you’re chasing.”

“Let us hope he’s not there before us,” I said.

I allowed Carrington to continue leading us, not because I thought there would be any more choices on where to go—it was obvious to me that we were now heading in the right direction—but because it meant so much to her. The time would come when I would have to take the fore, but until then, let her enjoy herself. Someone should.

“And you?” I murmured to Amhric, who was slumped in front of me, using the arm I had around his waist for support. “Do you do well?”

A long silence. Then he seemed to marshal himself. “Well enough. Weak, though, and no notion as to why that might be.”

“I sense we will have some answers soon.”

“I pray.”

I tightened my hold on him, ignoring my own nausea, and concentrated on the path.

We were soon above the floor of the gully and rising, and not even an hour after we gained it we were over some of the trees. The vantage afforded us a good view of the area we would have been riding through, and it seemed inoffensive enough, despite the growing oppression that thickened the air. Looking over his shoulder, Last commented, “It narrows.” At my quizzical glance, he pointed. “There, you see? The walls close in. They named this place well, if they call it a redoubt. One man could hold off an army there, at that point. And if I am not mistaken, there is another such lock ahead.”

“As if someone had built the place to defend it,” Chester said.

“Or to trap with it, as the genet suggested.”

I was grateful this conversation had been conducted in the Gift. It was hard enough not surrendering to my distress without having to reassure half our members that we were safe enough. I closed my eyes and trusted to the drake to carry us in the wake of the others, and took some solace from the nearness of my brother, and the heat of the drake’s skin beneath us.

Stopping was what made me realize I’d fallen asleep. But though Ivy’s gasp was strangled, I woke immediately, reaching for the staff.

Ivy, Eyre, and Carrington had halted at the edge of the road. We’d not ridden much higher, though it was hard to tell—the trees had fallen away, leaving the gulch an open channel that snaked around a turn.

It was entirely filled with the animate dead. Like a mound of insects roiling, they were pushing at one another, scrabbling in an attempt to move forward and failing because there were so many of them. They churned, a nauseating carpet of bone and gristle and decaying tissue. And they were not silent: the scrape of their limbs against one another, the scrabble of skeletal fingers clawing, the rattle when one fell and the others trampled it in their mindless need to plow forward….

“My God,” Eyre whispered, face blanched.

Almond was whimpering, her face hidden against Ivy’s back. My beloved was pale but resolute, staring down into the mass.

Carrington… Carrington was shocked. Perhaps she hadn’t believed us, not fully. To be healed is one sort of magic. To see the unnatural, and in such profusion….

“But what are they seeking?” Last said from behind us, using Lit so all could understand. He guided his mount up alongside the others. “And why have they not gotten it yet, when there are so many?”

“Obviously...” Carrington stopped, moistened her lips, continued somewhat more steadily. “Obviously they’re here for the shrine.”

“Or to attack the witch?” Ivy said. “There’s a witch, isn’t there?”

“There is no witch,” said a new voice in accented Lit. “But I believe I am the woman they mean.”