“We can’t go that way right now,” Moss replied the first time Ashes asked if they shouldn’t be travelling toward the darkness which haunted Ashes. “The lake is in the way. We must go around,” Moss said the second time. “It’s too dangerous. We need to find a place to rest a while and grow stronger again,” Moss said the next.

Finally, when Ashes continued to press, Moss blurted out her true reasoning.

“Lechat Leriand is fallen. There is no one left to save. And even if there was, who would ever ask such a thing of a little girl—find some crown? Avenge your people? You’ve done enough. Just stay with me, now.”

Moss, whose flower Ashes had lost and whom Ashes had nearly lost as well, did not want Ashes to find the crown. She didn’t want Ashes to be an acolyte or a princess or anything else. She only wanted Ashes to be Ashes.

The truth was, Ashes didn’t really want to find the crown, either. Because at some point during their fearful flight, Ashes had ceased being afraid and stopped feeling as if they were running. The days flowed together of quiet walking through the untamed beauty of wilderness, the tapestry of nature’s symphony broken only by her voice and Moss’s as they talked and laughed and simply lived, stopping to look at a cascade of blooming water lilies or huddling quietly in a stand of cedar to witness the terrifying majesty of an ancient cerbho passing by.

Live each moment, and with great mindfulness.

Moss had dismissed Ashes’ sense of responsibility and feelings of guilt. She had granted Ashes permission to let them go.

The two girls lived out the wise counsel of the Mother of Death, just as they’d been taught, each and every day. The other black and bitter aspect which had brushed against Ashes faded a little more with every step, until it became easy enough to offer the same excuses to herself that Moss offered.

Tomorrow. Some other day.

Until those excuses and their tomorrows had lasted for twenty years.

When people spoke of The Meres, they spoke of Blackdelve or the fallen kingdom of Lechat Leriand or the Shantwarrens or one of the few other centers of population in that marshy, wild land. If they mentioned at all the vast amount of territory which lay outside those isolated locations, they spoke in sweeping generalizations about acres of lakes and wetlands, as if water and land were the only things which existed there. Possibly they thought to refer to the cerbhos or snakes or wildcats which lurked in the wilds.

In truth, as many people lived outside the cities of The Meres as in them. But those who chose to live in the swamps embraced solitude, and so stories about them were fewer.

On the day the slavers came, Ashes and Moss had lived in the swamp for twenty years. Their flight from Lechat Leriand’s fall was far in the past. They had not been children for quite a long time—if they ever truly had been. They remained close to one village or another, most of the time.

The house they lived in at any given time varied—water levels rose and fell and land shifted in the swamps, so sometimes relocation became necessary. Their current home nestled in the low branches of a gnarled cypress, its floor a platform of vine-bound oak branches. Thatch formed a roof over their heads, and mats of woven reeds rolled and unrolled to provide walls or allow breezes to pass through as needed.

When they left their home that morning, Ashes had not considered whatsoever that it might be for the last time. She picked up her gathering basket and followed Moss down the rope ladder and into the marsh.

“Marsh marigold, I think.” Ashes didn’t offer further explanation to Moss. The people in a nearby community knew of the two women as swamp witches. Most assumed they were sisters. Neither ever bothered to disabuse anyone of either notion—both claims were close enough to the truth.

Moss of course knew that with her mention of the marigold, Ashes spoke of a remedy for the woman who’d come that morning. “That should help with the cramping.”

The sun had been at mid-morning when they left home. Now, it stood high overhead, beating warmth against Ashes’s arms despite the cooler, humid air. Against the bare soles of Ashes’s feet pressed the moss-covered ground, spongy and colder yet when the pressure of her foot forced mud to seep up.

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Reed beds rose to her left, marking an area of shallow water. Slender green blades of tall grasses thinned gradually to a stretch of open, deeper water. From there, the lake wound into dimly-lit channels which flowed through and around the exposed root systems of bulbous tree trunks clinging jealously to whatever soil they could find. Insects sang a low, humming song punctuated by the shrieking calls of birds.

A handful of yellow flowers peeked around a clump of grass and caught Ashes’s eye. She stepped toward it, crouched, and brushed her fingers through the fine grasses.

A single white anemone bowed forward, freed from its hiding spot by Ashes’s motion. Ashes smiled at the little flower.

Now, after the passage of all those years, Ashes rarely thought of the darkness or fear or even of the father who had indeed abandoned her. When her gaze fell on an anemone, her instinctive first reaction was happiness. Ashes glanced up and around at Moss.

Never one to waste energy on unnecessary movement, Moss stood perfectly still, gazing toward the trees across the stretch of water. On her belt hung a coiled whip of braided vines. In one hand she carried an unstrung longbow, and a quiver of arrows hung against her thigh. From her other hand dangled a rabbit’s field-dressed carcass.

Moss was twenty years beyond sixteen now, her skin weathered in the same way as Ashes’s, but she stood as proudly tall as she had as a teenager. Like Ashes, Moss wore a reed-woven tunic and leggings. The greenish-gray contrasted well with the copper that yet glinted in Moss’s hair, only brightened by long exposure to sunlight.

As much as she claimed to be watching for game, Moss really was watching over Ashes. Ashes worried about nothing which might lurk in the reeds or trees, freed instead to hunt a different prey.

Ashes planted her walking stick to keep her balance, set her basket onto the ground, and leaned forward. Using a long knife from her basket, she cut stems of the marigold before transferring cut plants and knife alike back into the basket.

As she rose from her crouch, Ashes glanced again at the simple white petals of the anemone. This time, though, she felt a long-familiar twinge of guilt.

I was only twelve.

The excuse was as much kneejerk reaction as the customary sense of guilt anytime Ashes thought of the past. The internal argument had continued, even though by now Ashes had stopped fighting her decision. This life she had now was so simple. So pleasant. She was happy. Moss was happy.

How could I ever take that from her?

Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the day after. Those were the words which banished the thoughts back where they’d come from. Ashes repeated them almost without thinking, and the blight of darkness passed back from whence it had come.

Ashes levered herself upright with the walking stick’s help and picked up her basket.

From behind Ashes came a soft whistle which reminded Ashes of the sound of Moss’s whip. Her pulse quickened, and she turned to see what had prompted Moss to lash out at something, without uttering so much as a warning to Ashes.

But Moss remained where she’d been, bow in one hand and rabbit in the other. The whip Ashes thought she’d heard was still at Moss’s waist.

A furrow crossed Moss’s forehead. She opened her fingers, and the rabbit thumped onto the mossy ground. Moss lifted her hand toward her neck.

Moss staggered. Her knees buckled.

Alarm boiled through Ashes’s veins. She stepped toward Moss.

The furrow across Moss’s forehead smoothed. Her eyes widened. Her mouth moved.

“Run,” she whispered.

The word shivered meaninglessly down Ashes’s spine. She reached for Moss but lifted her head and looked around—into the reeds, into the water, into the trees.

Nothing was there. But arcane symbols, long forgotten pieces of Ashes’s past, whispered at the edges of Ashes’s vision.

Ashes’s fingers touched Moss’s shoulders, but Moss slid away.

Something short and slender glinted against Moss’s neck. Moss groped at it but only slapped against her own skin before her arm fell limply away.

A dart. Metal. Well-made.

Moss shook her head. Her eyes rolled wildly, but she croaked out one more word.

“Vithtak.”

That word rolled away from Ashes, its meaning as immediately elusive as everything else. All she could see was Moss, falling. She dropped her basket and reached with both hands.

Movement rippled at the corner of her vision. In the shadows beneath the trees, the corner of a flat boat drifted from behind a trunk. A figure stood on it, clad in rough clothing which included a cloak of deep burgundy. Where the dark cloak didn’t cover, skin a papery white like birch bark showed.

Ashes stopped reaching for Moss. The other woman was unconscious before her body completed its tumble to the ground. Her cheek came to rest beside the slaughtered rabbit.

The Vithtak.

The invaders whose occupation of Lechat Leriand had driven Moss and Ashes from their home had remained, growing their base of power by stripping the land of its resources, plant and mineral.

And human.

Slavers.

The Vithtak should not have come this far south. But they had.

Because of me. Because I never found the crown. I never stopped them.

Instead, she had hidden away here with Moss. For twenty years.

That long-familiar twinge of guilt returned, but it had grown from a whisper into an outraged scream.

Another whistle. Ashes twisted her shoulders and dropped toward the ground.

I can’t let them get me, too. I have to save Moss, the way she saved me.

Ghostly rattling. Symbols whose meaning Ashes could not discern floated before her eyes and vanished.

A sting no more painful than a bee pricked not her neck but instead her shoulder. Immediately, a numbing cold spider-webbed outward from it.

Ashes’s vision blurred. As she fell beside Moss, she tried to reach her nerveless hand toward Moss’s.

Too late. It’s already too late.

Twenty years too late. The time Ashes had borrowed had now come due.