Renna grunted. ‘Sounds like you made quite the Jongleur’s show of it. Figure you must want them thinkin’ you’re the Deliverer, at least a little.’

Arlen’s face darkened. ‘Last thing I want anyone thinking. Waitin’ for the Deliverer’s kept us hiding behind wards for three hundred years.’

‘Ay, but the wait’s over, ent it?’ Renna said. ‘Painted Man’s come to save us all.’

Arlen scowled, but Renna dismissed it with a wave. ‘Oh, you slap the fool out of any that bow to you and call you Deliverer, but you’re just as quick to temper when folk don’t take one look at you and start hopping to your words.’

Arlen pulled back, stung, but Renna matched his stare and didn’t back down. Finally he gave a helpless chuckle and shrugged. ‘Can’t deny it helps get things done, Ren. And there’s a lot to do. Folk ent got any idea of what’s coming with the next new moon, and I ent got time to baby ’em.’

Renna smiled. ‘Ent arguin’, just keepin’ you honest.’ Quick as a rabbit, she darted in and kissed his warded cheek.

They rode for some time before splitting off from the Old Hill Road down a thickly overgrown Messenger way. Late in the day they met up with a new road of hard-packed dirt. There was a large warded campsite at the intersection.

‘Huh.’ Arlen hopped down from Twilight Dancer, moving to inspect the wards. ‘Little clumsy, but thick and strong. Darsy Cutter painted these.’ He grunted. ‘Hollow must be growing like wildfire, they’re this far north already.’

‘Sun’s setting.’ Renna said loosening her knife in its sheath as magic began to seep into the lengthening shadows, opening the paths from the Core. ‘We should get moving.’

Arlen shook his head, again not meeting her eyes. ‘We’re stopping here.’

‘Ent going to hide behind the wards every night over one close shave,’ Renna growled.

‘Ent asking you to,’ Arlen said.

‘Then we’re going,’ Renna said.

‘Going where?’ Arlen asked. ‘Right where we need to be.’ He went to the camp’s wood stores, then began laying kindling in the firepit. He did not meet her eyes, but there was a smugness about him, like this was a game.

Anger flared in her, hot and fast, and out of the corner of her eye Renna saw the magic drifting in gentle whorls and eddies at her ankles suddenly flow into her like smoke from a pipe. As soon as she noticed it, the flow stopped and nothing she could do could will it back.

She looked at Arlen, still laying a fire, proud as a cat with a mouse in its teeth, and grew angrier still. Magic came to him easy as breathing, but not to her? Why?

Ent eaten enough. Still got a way to go.

‘Gonna hunt, then,’ she said.

Arlen shrugged. ‘Won’t kill you to have some supper first.’

Renna wanted to slap the back of his shaved head. Her fists clenched, nails digging into her skin, drawing blood. She wanted to rend …

She caught herself. Magic pulsed through her, primal and powerful, awakening base desires and turning them into raging storms.

Maybe I’ve eaten too much already.

Renna breathed deeply, again and again in rhythm, the Krasian technique Arlen had taught during her sharusahk lessons. Slowly her fists began to unclench, and her heart stopped pounding in her chest, or at least slowed to a steady throb. She forced herself to dismount, brushing down Promise and letting her graze on the thick grass at the side of the road.

They had almost finished eating when Arlen craned his head as if listening to something far away. He smiled. ‘There it is.’

‘What?’ Renna asked, but he stood quickly, scraping the remains from his bowl and stowing it with his cookpot. He drew a ward in the air, and the fire winked out.

‘Come on.’ Arlen leapt into the saddle and kicked Twilight Dancer into a gallop, tearing down the road.

‘Son of the Core,’ Renna muttered, dumping her own bowl and hurrying after. Promise had limbered as the day went on, but it was still several minutes until she caught up to Arlen as he pulled to a stop. Up ahead was a hazy glow and the sounds of battle, but he seemed unconcerned.

‘Seems the Hollow’s expanding again. Reckon the Cutters got it in hand.’ Arlen dismounted and nodded into the woods. ‘Put your cloak on and let’s see if we can get a peek.’

He led them quickly through the trees. A wood demon stepped into their path, ready to strike, but Arlen hissed at it and the wood wards on his body flared, driving the coreling back. They soon came to a thin spot in the trees just outside a huge clearing, still full of stumps and the smell of fresh lumber. Here Arlen stopped, watching from the darkness.

In the centre of the clearing, bonfires burned in a large warded circle, full of tents and tools and draught animals. The fires gave light to the men and women moving about the clearing, fighting a great copse of wood demons and a ten-foot rock demon.

Every instinct in Renna’s body told her to leap into the battle – her blood was on fire with the need to kill demons. She smelled ichor and felt her mouth water, ready to aid in choking down their foul meat.

But Arlen stood calmly, clearly having no intention to interfere. She forced herself to relax, taking her hand off the handle of her knife and letting her warded cloak envelop her fully, hiding her from demon eyes.

The cloak had changed since she began eating coreling flesh. She could feel the wards drawing off her own personal magic, but rather than flare brighter, they, and the cloak itself, seemed to dim and blur. Staring at it too long made her dizzy. She wondered how much demon meat she would need to eat before it faded from sight entirely. More than Arlen, it seemed, for he could still see the cloak, though she noted he never looked her way long when she wore it.

‘What are they doing?’ Renna asked, when silence and inaction began to weigh on her.

‘Clearing a greatward,’ Arlen said. ‘They start by chopping trees to form a centre for the town, then they branch out, clearing land in the shape of a ward of forbidding miles wide. At night, they kill the demons that rise in the area, so they’re culled and not just pushed to the edge of the forbidding when the ward activates.’

‘Why doesn’t everyone do that?’ Renna asked. A ward that big would draw so much magic that no corespawn could penetrate it, and it would be almost impossible to mar.

‘Reckon they used to, back in the demon wars,’ Arlen said. ‘But people forgot, and since the Return, folk have been too busy hiding to use their heads.’

Renna grunted and watched the battle more closely, recognizing the Cutters immediately. Cutter was a common name in the hamlets, the surname of most anyone who felled trees or sold wood. Even in Tibbet’s Brook, hundreds of miles away, there were close to a hundred Cutters, living in a cluster by the goldwood trees. It was shocking how alike they were to the Hollowers.

The men were big and burly, dressed in sleeveless vests of thick leather, with banded bracers and biceps that seemed bigger than Renna’s head. She could almost squint and see Brine Cutter, who had defended Renna in council, those months ago. She hadn’t had the will to move that night, even to speak in her own defence, but she remembered every word as the elders of Tibbet’s Brook condemned her to death. The Cutters had stood by her.