leader who touched the wood with his fingertips, and made the kindling spring to life. The red glow of the fire turned their faces more deathlike yet.
Ilbran did not understand their purpose until the drugging clouds of smoke billowed out toward him, until the chanting began, in a harsh foreign tongue.
He tore a strip from the bandage that still wrapped his shoulder. Soaked with water, it helped to mask his nose and mouth. He could not stop his ears, to drown their voices. He heard the leader say again, “You will join us before dawn.”
And when was dawn? The night was endless. All things were forgotten but the need to keep his mind his own. At one time, he took the dead man’s sword and scored his own arms. That helped him for a little time, as the salt sweat poured into the stinging cuts. His blood ran down and dripped on the threshold, joining old dark stains already there.
When he looked down at the ghostly crowd, he saw a familiar face among them, glowing and evil—the beak-nosed stranger who had died on the forest path—and then he thought the drugging smoke had truly mazed his mind.
He shouted defiances at the creatures of the night; he screamed curses at them to drown their voices; their laughter was the only reply. He was at war with himself, for a part of him desired to go down the steps to meet the dark ones and their death. And that part grew stronger as the night went on.
Still, he endured. Day came without warning, and before his eyes, the ghostly crowd thinned and vanished like the stars. Ilbran waited till the sun was bright before descending the steps. Even then, he walked in fear, almost expecting to feel a touch on his shoulder from a creature invisible but still present.
The smoke still rose from the bonfire, dizzying him. The discarded green branches were from no tree that he had seen before, one with a narrow green leaf and reddish bark. There were bloodstains at the base of the steps where the man had lain, but if he had not known, he would have passed by without a thought or glance.
He turned his face toward the meadows from which he had come. So quickly had his fear of the kingsmen, and his dread of the city of the dead, become trivial. He would not spend another night within the forest, though all the kings of the earth might bribe, and all the lovely ladies of the world might beg.
But toward noonday, his dread grew again. Where was the honest sunlight, the wide and light-filled meadows? Morning turned to afternoon, and the forest paths stretched before him and behind him the same. What did the songs say? The roads are not as roads in the wide world. He turned his steps back toward the only safety he knew in this strange world, hurrying at first, and then running, as the sun moved to the west.
Twilight was dimming when he caught sight of the clearing. Half-staggering with exhaustion, he climbed up the safehold steps. Though it were the safety of a dungeon cell, he would have welcomed it, with his blood smeared across the doorstep from his fight of the night before.
With nightfall came the dark hounds, and after them, their masters. They taunted and threatened. They burned their incense, but it had less mind-numbing power than it had had the night before.
Drunk with weariness, Ilbran mocked them in turn. “You filth, you scum, carrion feeders. You have bows slung at your sides. If you are such fine hunters, why do you not use them?”
They made no move to attack. His guess had been good. This place sheltered him from such things.
Daybreak came, and Ilbran slept, and did not wake till the hounds returned at nightfall. Again he had to fight off their masters, but their powers of fear were even less. He looked at the safehold walls, the watchful beautiful statue, with love and gratitude. They had guarded him well.
At first light, once the sun had truly risen, and the hunters gone, he set out, back along the same path. Refreshed by his day of sleep, he was confident that he could hurry, and be out of the forest perhaps by noon.
But at midmorning, he stopped perplexed. Two paths branched before him, plain and clear. He had no remembrance of the one that turned off squarely to his left, a fine clear path. Could his