The sunlight was blinding. After spending so long traversing the dark, overgrown Cimant forest, the open fields stretched towards a shimmering lake in the distance. Beyond the town on the far shore, mountains reached up towards the sky. In the distance, beyond the mountains, there were dark clouds building. Lewis sighed. It felt good to be out of the forest at last.

'Wow,' Cassandra muttered. 'It's amazing.'

Even though Ellen was a few paces ahead of them, Lewis was sure that she was rolling her eyes. 'This is Springcaster,' Olivia said from his left.

'I've never left the forest before,' Cassandra said. 'In fact, I don't think anyone from the tribe has before.'

'I'm not surprised,' Lewis replied. 'That place was huge.' In terms of the forest, describing it as huge was an understatement. It had taken them the best part of three weeks to walk through it, two of which had been before they had met the Cimant people.

Since they had fled the village on the night of the attack, they had barely stopped. Had she not been outnumbered three to one, as Lewis expected, Ellen would have kept them walking continuously. Despite allowing them to stop each night, she had never been harsher on them. On the good days, any questions were met with stony silence. The bad ones ended in a collection of cuts and bruises. It seemed as though Ellen deemed Lewis responsible for all of Cassandra's questions, preferring to inflict the pain on him instead.

'Is that where we're going?' Cassandra asked tentatively.

Silence. Today must be one of the better days, Lewis thought, watching as Ellen ignored her, quickening her pace slightly.

'No,' Olivia said. 'The tower is beyond Springcaster, behind the mountains.'

'How long?' Lewis asked. Having gone through guard training in Tristan, he had always been fit, but the lack of proper food was affecting him badly. In the three or four hours that Ellen allowed them to sleep, he almost always woke up two or three times with cramps. He didn't know how much more of this he would be able to take.

'A couple of days, three at the most,' Olivia said.

Ahead of them, Ellen had reached the fence that surrounded the field between them and the lake. As if it were nothing more than a fallen tree in the forest, she climbed over it, setting off across the field.

'She does know that field is someone's property, doesn't she?' Lewis asked as he spotted a large stone house sitting a little way away to their left.

Climbing over the fence Olivia glanced back at Lewis and Cassandra. 'I'm sure she does.'

With a shake of his head, Lewis walked over to the fence, helping Cassandra climb over it. The fact that she was still wearing her wedding dress had been restrictive, with obstacles in the forest taking her a lot longer to traverse, much to Ellen's annoyance. Lewis had found out all about that.

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'Thanks. Cassandra smiled as Lewis let go of her hand, following her over the fence.

'I'll find a way to get you back to your people as soon as I can,' he promised as he joined her, walking by her side. Rather than wait for them, Olivia walked on ahead, although she maintained some distance from Ellen. It hadn't taken them long to see that she would target them when they were on their own. If they stayed grouped together, she would more often than not leave them alone.

'I've always wanted an adventure,' she laughed, a hint of sadness in her voice at the mention of the village. 'I wonder if anyone survived.'

'I'm sure they did; some of the hunters were using the fire as a weapon as well,' Lewis said.

'What if they didn't, though?'

'Then, assuming we can find a way to escape the tower, you can come back to Tristan with me,' he said.

'Really?'

'Of course, I'm not going to leave you in that huge forest alone.'

'So, how are we going to get out of the tower?' she asked brightly. The offer of a new life seemed to have excited her.

'No idea,' he admitted. There would be more members of The Dawn, for certain. He highly doubted that they would let them walk out the front door. Ellen had mentioned other students as well; perhaps he would be able to get some information out of them.

'We could just run away,' she suggested, looking back towards the forest. 'She would never be able to find us in the forest again.'

'I wish we could, but there's still the bond,' Lewis said.

'You mentioned it before; what exactly is it?' Cassandra asked. She was right; he had mentioned it back in the village.

'I don't really know how it works,' he admitted. 'The night she captured me, she grabbed my arm, and I felt this coldness spread through me as if I had ice in my veins. She tied her own life to Emily's to protect herself. If I do anything, she could kill Emily in an instant.'

'Can't we force her to remove the bond?' Cassandra said. 'Like tie her up and threaten her until she gets rid of it.'

'It wouldn't work. She knows that we can't threaten to kill her because doing that would kill Emily as well.'

'Besides, the bond can't be removed,' Olivia added from in front of them. Distracted by the conversation, he hadn't noticed that she had slowed down, allowing them to catch up with them. Out of earshot, Ellen was oblivious to their scheming.

'So he's stuck with it forever, then?' she asked. 'Isn't that a bit much?'

'The bond doesn't last forever, at least not as long as he figures out how to break it,' Olivia explained.

'Seeing as I'm right here, you wouldn't mind telling me how to break it, would you?' Lewis asked. It felt strange having the two of them talk about him as if he weren't there.

'I can't,' Olivia sighed.

'Has she got you under a bond as well?' Cassandra asked.

'No. The bond is different for everyone. If I knew how to break it, I would tell you,' she said.

'What keeps you doing this if you aren't under a bond?' Lewis asked. Despite asking on several occasions, he never got a straight answer. The idea of her having a bond of her own had crossed his mind many times.

'You shouldn't judge The Dawn on Ellen,' she snapped. 'A lot of us work hard to help people. Just because she is like this doesn't mean we all are.'

'I wasn't suggesting that,' Lewis said, immediately regretting bringing the topic up again. Now it was Olivia's turn to ignore them. Leaving his words hanging in the air, she quickened her pace again. 'I really didn't mean it to sound like that,' he said, glancing at Cassandra when Olivia was out of earshot.

'I know you didn't,' she said, placing a hand on his arm sympathetically. By the time he reacted, it had disappeared again as she ran her hand through her hair. 'Hopefully she's right. I don't know what we'll do if there are more people like Ellen wherever we're going.'

'Hopefully,' Lewis sighed. One Ellen was definitely more than enough.