From the sun and the smells outside her tent, she guessed four hours had passed since dawn. Maeva tried to judge how far the knight would have walked. She did not know just how old he was, but she guessed near thirty. With his age and height, he would walk twice her speed.

Maeva started with a jog. She had the tight, supple build of an acrobat from decades of climbing the Penitent Way up to the Great Dome and a two-year tour of duty on the Ammarish front when the search for the Winze first started. Even so, her knees complained after only an hour — she was no longer young.

Maeva sharpened her gaze, picking out the signs of the knight’s trail all along the ground. His fine boots left dull curves in the fresh patches of snow.

I told him someone hunts him — and he doesn’t bother to hide his tracks… Is this what Ammar teaches its knights? There was a time when Nymaut believed Ammarish knights to be the most cunning of foes. Clever and swift, stalking the trees like mountain lions. This knight seemed to be stumbling through them instead, like a drunk deer.

She heard shouts echoing up the slope. Maeva slowed her pace and turned off from the knight’s trail. The old instincts took over and she took up a place in the shadow of a tree to draw on the stillness. With the bearskin tugged up over her hair, she would look like no more than the brown lump of a tree trunk if anyone wandered near her.

Maeva breathed deep and made the sign of Hearing on the ground where the shadows of the trees dappled the forest floor. The old witch who’d taught it to her called it the Gossip — one of the gifts God gave to the Children of Ny so that they could Hear all the precious words spoken in the blessed lands. When someone stepped on a Hearing shadow, Maeva could listen to what they said as clearly as if they’d spoken the words in her ear.

She Heard footsteps on the ground, spread over a half a kilometer. Voices shouted to one another in measured intervals: “No man… No man…!”

Scouts searching for someone. Maeva smiled, pleased to know that she’d been right. She fell deeper into the spell, straining to Hear what some of them said to one another. Wondering whether they would say the name of the knight.

“Shouldn’t be out here… Too close to the Teeth…

“Says he came out this way. Wasn’t in the camp.”

“Corpse Flower’s hungry, lads. Keep searching…”

The name set Maeva’s mind racing. A corpse flower wasn’t a plant known to the Ammarish. The name came to them as a suggestion, supplied by a spymaster at the Great Dome. In the term before hers, the High Court had supplied funds to a sect within Ammar’s church in exchange for the names of every witch who came to join their congregations. All to the purpose of finding the Winze.

Memory thrust into her mind with vivid detail. She pictured high stacks of shelves filled with leather-bound ledgers, and the hem of her robe rustling across the library floor. For twelve years, the High Court funded the Corpse Flowers. One of her first duties as an archmage’s clerk had been to read through the ledgers they supplied, looking at names and birth dates. When they’d found the Winze, the funds stopped. Maeva won her election to the court that very same year.

No one in her term voted to continue the program. By then, the sect had devolved into a cult far outside the mainstream of Ammar’s church. The Dome had the death-witch and the war could finally end.

Are they out here searching for the Winze? she wondered. Does the whole world know, then, that the Dome lost him…?

That she lost him. Maeva’s hands went numb. She looked down at them, horrified to find them shaking. The scouts drew closer to where she crouched in the shadows. She could no longer Hear them over the yawning panic that spread itself across her mind. A twig snapped just a foot to her left, and a sudden blur of red and green exploded from the trees from her right.

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The sound of a wet crack snapped Maeva out of her daze. She looked up and saw her knight swinging his bare fists at the head of a Corpse Flower. A silent snarl twisted his face and the man he struck spat blood onto it, crying out.

Maeva watched the frantic scuffle. The knight got the scout down in three hard punches, but fumbled to get the man’s sword off him. He struggled to hold blades made for right-handed men.

He stood and their eyes met. His gaze steadied her. Maeva pushed both hands against the ground and called on the Gossip. Twigs and dead leaves crackled under heavy boots as feet rushed toward them. She turned, raking the Sight through the trees to find out how many. Four at least came running toward them.

“Run,” the knight barked at her.

Maeva glanced at him. Even without the Sight, she knew the fight would not end well for him. If she wanted, she could hide in the shadows and watch the bloody mess play out. They might kill him here, or only capture him. Nymaut would be blamed in any case, and she would have no way to know whether the Dome revived the Corpse Flowers to find the Winze.

“You run,” Maeva told him.

She tugged the bearskin down over her face. Her head settled into where the skull would go and the ragged holes of the eyes fell over her cheeks. Shrouded in the dead animal’s skin, she called on Speech, the third gift God gave to the Children of Ny. Maeva formed the shapes of the words with her fingers against the inside of the empty skin. With her mouth, she murmured the sounds that went with them.

She begged the bear’s shadow to come back: “Come, shade. Cleave to the flesh and haunt the bone. Reclaim what was once your own.”

The sound of the old words grated on her ears. As a child, she’d believed all the best spells had to rhyme. Every mage dreamed of the day when they could perform a spell to sing before the Emperor and win their archmage’s palla. Only once you’d worn one did you understand that real magic did not need to rhyme. And that the Boccean Emperor pinned the palla on any who could afford to pay a bribe.

The bear shadow fought her spell. It swam beneath the fur, moving around her, refusing to fill out the skin. This one had been old and injured, ready to die after its last mating. It did not want to remember how tired and sore it felt. Maeva sank deeper into the spell, thinking of her tender knees, her sagging skin.

The bear shadow confused her feelings for its own. Its memories became her memories, and the raw instinct to rear back and growl seized her. She heard the echo of the sound in her ears, followed by the panicked shouts of men.

“Saints’ ballsack, it’s a fucking bear!”

“Back up, back up!”

Sunlight flared on the edge of a blade. Maeva turned and let the bear-shadow rake at it with phantom claws. She roared again in the bear’s voice and slipped down further into its awareness, scenting the coppery tang of blood deep in her black snout. She shuffled her feet, letting the bear snarl and lunge around her while the Corpse Flowers scattered.

Only the knight didn’t run. He picked off one, then two of the fleeing scouts with neat, methodical slashes with his stolen blade. Maeva’s bear-shadow killed a third, the force of the animal spirit turning malevolent at the stench of men in its territory.

Stop, she commanded it. Stop…

Maeva had to plant her feet and dig her toes into the dirt to keep the bear from running away with her. She struggled up from beneath the spell, breathing hard and trembling while she shrugged off the skin and let it fall to the ground. The last bit of shadow held its shoulders up for a moment, before it slid out from the empty eye sockets and vanished into the ordinary shadow of the trees.

“Son of a bitch.” The knight stared at the bearskin at her feet. He shook the blade once and wiped the blood from it with the edge of his stained tabard. When he tucked it into his belt, he reached for her hand. “Come on — let’s go.”

Maeva stared at him, dazed. She saw the sheen of sweat on his brow, the set of his jaw beneath the brown-black stubble on his chin, and the shape of his lips beneath a darkening bruise. She could not say whether it was some lingering feeling of the bear, or her own instinct that made her reach for his hand. He led her through the trees, sure footed and sharp-eyed even without the Sight.