“We’ll ride out with Crispin’s men,” he said. “It gives us the best chance to slip off unobserved, if the Council’s soldiers are watching. Say nothing to the squadron of where we’re headed, or why.”
We mounted and filed out the eastern gate. Beyond the shelter of the walls, the snow battered our faces, and I wrapped my scarf up to my eyes. For ten minutes, we followed Crispin east along the main road, before turning south to trace a broad circle around the town’s walls. Torches burned at intervals along the wall, each one illuminating a few yards of snow. In the watchtowers, lanterns glowed. The town’s ring of light only made the darkness seem thicker where we rode.
At one point I could smell smoke, and Crispin pointed to the south.
“A few miles that way, there’s a camp of Council soldiers,” he said. “At least a hundred of them. We’ve had scouts watching them since last week.” In the dark, the sole sign of them was the trace of smoke in the snow-heavy air. “The Ringmaster and Simon are planning a raid, soon,” said Crispin.
I nodded. A raid was the sensible thing to do, before more Council soldiers arrived and before New Hobart could be encircled. But the thought of another battle, however necessary, made vomit rise at the back of my throat. This was how violence worked, I was learning: it refused to be contained. It spread, a plague of blades.
The patrol rode in silence around the south of the city, the ghost of the burned forest on our left. As we began to turn to the north, I heard music. It was snatched away by the wind in an instant, and when I raised myself in my stirrups and looked around, the others were riding on as though they’d heard nothing. Fragments of music kept coming, falling around me like the snow. I called ahead to Piper, but he said he heard nothing. I knew, then, that there was nothing to hear but the wind, and the hoof-falls of our horses on snow. The music was in my head.
Our route was about to cross the main road running from New Hobart to the west. Crispin, at the front of the patrol, raised his hand to halt us. There was something in the road ahead, beneath the lone oak. Crispin’s troops fanned out, weapons at the ready. It was hard to make out the shape in the thick snowfall. It looked like a figure, but it was too high, and it wavered with the confused wind. For a surreal moment I thought the man was flying, as if we’d encountered a ghost, one of the unburied bodies from the battle, grown restless. Then another gust of wind swept aside the snow for a moment.
The man hung from the tree. There was an unmistakable wrongness to the angle of the neck. Three crows took flight from the branch above him as Crispin and two of his men rode toward the body.
“Stay back,” said Piper, throwing his arm out to stop me as I urged my horse forward. Piper had his knife out, and Zoe and the other soldiers were scanning the space around us.
“It’s an Omega,” Crispin called back to Piper. “He wasn’t here when the last patrol came through, but there are no tracks—they must have strung him up around sunset, before the snow.”
The horses had picked up on our unease and were snorting, backing into each other.
“It’s a message,” Piper said. “They left him here for our patrols to find.”
“I need to see this,” I said.
“You want to see the inside of a Council cell again?” snapped Zoe. “Because that’s where you’ll end up, if you don’t listen. We’re a mile from the walls. It could be an ambush, for all you know.”
I ignored her and kicked my horse forward. Piper rode after me, shouting. But I wasn’t listening to him. The music in my head—I knew what it was: the refuge song. The closer I got to the swinging man, the more the music was out of tune—the notes of the melody were wrong, as if played on slackened strings.
It was Leonard who had been hanged. His guitar had been smashed and then the strap looped back over his head. The arm of the guitar made a crooked scarecrow out of him. When the wind spun him, I could see his hands tied behind his back. Some of the fingers stuck out at strange