Maeva fought to hold onto herself. The wolf’s shadow clawed at her with violent instincts so strong, she nearly lost control the moment she pulled it over her head. It’d been hard enough to cast the spell while she crouched beneath the cart. The village girls sat atop it, screaming their heads off while the arrows fell, distracting her all the more. Once the wolf heard their cries, Maeva dragged the shade into place and felt the wolf’s savage fury fill her limbs.

She sprang from beneath the cart, which tipped when the horse hitched to its harness reared at the sight of her. Maeva’s eyes filled with a blur of legs as more animals ran past. She felt the primal urge to do in death what the wolf had in life: Hunt. Fell. Kill.

She went for Nath’s traitor, first.

Maeva was hardly aware of the one-armed man spilling from the saddle while the wolf tore at the horse beneath him. Her thoughts and wants shrank to fractured impressions. A flailing arm, a bone-white face… This man had belittled Nath and tried to get him drunk. Maeva started to gnaw at the memory, but a flare of pain on her back drew her awareness back to the wolf’s senses. Arrows stuck to its pelt and more shot through the air toward her. Maeva dragged her will against the shade’s instincts to run and drove it straight for the trees. The wolf scattered the archers, their legs kicking up dirt while they fled. She chased after them, subsumed by the wolf’s prey drive.

Still she tried to hold onto her senses from inside the shade. Maeva saw sunlight glint on a few crescents among the sprinting legs. The men who carried them had the same wide shoulders and long legs as Nath and his countrymen. None had their hair cropped or wore the leather vambraces mages donned in times of war. Most telling of all, they were all men and no women.

More pretenders to Nymaut.

The wolf bared its teeth. A small, scrawny man just ahead of it stumbled and Maeva was on him in an instant. She felt a thrill of retribution when the wolf bit down on the screaming man’s neck. If the Corpse Flowers wanted to play at magic, she was glad to be the embodiment of their consequences.

Maeva studied the man’s face through the wolf’s eyes while she delivered the fatal bite to his throat. Dry black hair loosely brushed down around the ears. Flower-blue eyes dilated to glassy stillness. She narrowed the wolf’s eyes on the brown smudges painted on his pale cheeks and recognized the clumsy renderings of wartime blessings. The wolf sniffed at these. Maeva imagined that she could smell the witch’s blood being painted on her own face before battle:

Shut Death’s eye

So He won’t See

Close Death’s ears

So He can’t Hear

The wolf sneezed the Corpse Flower’s blood from its nose. Maeva was far too deep within the skin, her thoughts tangled together with the wolf’s. The beast couldn’t understand the tumble of thoughts filled Maeva’s mind — memories, strategies, rituals. The wolf knew only that the dead man smelled wrong, and there was more prey to hunt.

Maeva let the wolf run away with her. The forest whipped by in shades of green, white, and yellow. The trees overhead seemed to open and shut like curtains. Maeva could not say whether one hour passed that way, or twenty. Once, she thought she heard the noise of a hammer on an anvil. A hazy impression came to her of a high fence made of sharpened logs. The wolf smelled smoke and iron, there, and silently padded away.

More time passed and now she thought it might be night. A whimpering cry somewhere in the dark made the hunger in her belly flare. The wolf moved without volition, sliding through the dark. Maeva heard a thump, then felt her mouth grow warm with blood while the wolf fed on a beast she did not remember killing. Its forgotten teeth gnashed against a strap of red leather with a meta buckle.

A saddle girth? Human thought returned, dragging along three others. Each poked a hole in the wolf's shadow over Maeva’s head. Now she could feel the tingling in her limbs where they ended and the pelt began. She pushed at the pelt and came back to herself chewing on a horse’s stringing ribcage. Her stomach roiled at the smell of it and Maeva wrenched her head away from the carcass, retching.

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She was on hands and knees somewhere deep in the forest. This poor nag had been tied to a tree that looked dry and dead, with no water or food nearby for it. She turned her head from side to side, searching the trees. They did not look the same as the downturned evergreens Nath had led her through down from the Sight pool. This place was gray with narrow trunks of hemlock ringed so tightly that whitish roots twisted up through the earth like fingers.

She frowned. Where was the snow?

Maeva shrugged the pelt the rest of the way from her shoulders. The arrows that had found its side caught on the tangled underbrush wound around the tree roots. Without the wolf’s senses to sniff the air, Maeva couldn’t say what smells filled her nose — but she thought she recognized the foul must of rotting flesh. She checked her own skin first, shoving aside the wool and squirrel fur wrapped around her limbs. Mages lost their lives slipping skins, but she saw no rot on her flesh. Her hands shook when she looked at her fingers and for a moment they looked wrinkled and browned.

When she blinked, the illusion vanished — and now Maeva was left alone with only her thoughts. She hugged her knees to herself and stared at the lifeless horse tied to the dead tree. The saddle she’d bitten looked like the one Nath had strapped to his horse just that morning. Only the color of the beast’s hide told her it was not the same one. Not his mount and not the same forest she’d left him behind in. A grown wolf could travel twenty miles in a day — Maeva supposed she’d gone at least that far.

Something on the ground by the horse caught her gaze. Her eyes traced a familiar curved shape, too perfect to be one of the gnarled hemlock roots. She got to her feet, fighting the trembling in her muscles and went over to examine the

Maeva looked at the ground, next. It looked dry and cold but without a touch of ice in the dirt among the twisted roots and scattered needles. Her eye caught on something curved alongside a root. Maeva traced the familiar shape with her eye and recognized the bones of some animal lay between the trees. At first she thought it might be another horse tied up there and left to starve.

Then she saw the faded red-yellow tabard beneath the skeleton.

“Blessed Ny,” she swore.

Maeva shivered and pulled the wolf pelt around her shoulders. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw bones strewn across the ground in every direction. Some looked like beasts, but most were men. Hundreds bore the same colors as Nath’s tabard, in bits of cloth and armor still clinging to the remains. Others looked far older, stripped to nothing but bone and dirt. Beside of few of these, she saw more holy crescents lying forgotten on the ground. Dull and unpolished just like Nath’s imposters’.

It’s a killing field. Maeva signed six prayers in succession against wrongful death and sullied graves. Her mind started to slip to all the battlefields she’d walked, all the death that she had seen since that awful day she first beheld the death witch in the pool. Prayers against him are useless. Chains didn’t work either…

“How? How could this happen?” she muttered to herself. Without Nath there to put his arms around her, the shaking started. Maeva shot to her feet and stumbled away from the bones. Inside her mind, she still felt rooted to the spot. The exact place where she had stood over the death witch with her crescent in hand, speaking the words that should have sealed him away forever.

And she hadn’t.

Maeva leaned against a cold tree trunk. She gripped the velvet bag still tied around her throat and pictured Nath’s face while she squeezed. The pain of the shards biting into her hand steadied her. With those broken bits, she’d carved a spell that brought him to her and she had saved his life. That, at least, she had done right. She vowed to point out his traitor and she had. She might be an apostate, a broken Seer, but Maeva never went back on her word.

Thinking of Nath steadied her. He was still out there somewhere in the woods. If she could not work out how she’d come to the killing field, she couldn’t prevent him from falling into the same trap as his companions.

Maeva opened her eyes and studied the bones again. She counted up all the ones with Nath’s colors, cut in quarters on tabards and sewn into swallow-tailed banners. Rust red bloodstains on fabric spoke to a battle fought just before they died. But the rot told Maeva the bones had lain there a year at least. She remembered the old folktales of fairy forests and witch’s cottages, where whole seasons could pass in a day.

Witchcraft. A death spell, Maeva thought. She felt sure now that her quarry had come this way. She ran the frayed wolf fur between her fingers until she found the arrows stuck to its hide. When she pulled the shafts out, her fingers were covered in black ash. The same that had been used to coat the Winze dolls.

Someone brought Nath’s men here to die.

She blurred her eyes and ran the Sight across the ground. Where she saw footsteps between the bones, she followed. If she could find the place where they were thrown in, she might find those who were still alive.