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Prologue

We learned of Shadow’s spread far later than some. That knowledge arrived in the form of Graemor, a crippled warrior who lacked both a left arm and a left eye. A shiny, lighter thread of scar emerged from beneath the patch that covered his eye socket and ran through the ebony of his face, ending in what remained of his shoulder. His appearance sent a chill through all who saw him—which was soon everyone, given the rarity of travelers and excitement at seeing someone new—but the news he bore created less interest. Shadow, he claimed, had begun spreading through the land, and those who faced it often suffered terribly for their temerity—as he had done. We had scant evidence his claims were true, since Shadow was mostly a thing for the priests to worry about and we had little desire to seek evidence it was real. Most of the village believed that an extraordinary wolf or even an ordinary man with a sword had caused the damage that so horribly disfigured him. Secure and placid in what proved eventually to be an island of Light in a sea of darkness, most of us felt little need to question the matter further. Most wrote him off as a crazed veteran of some distant war, inventing wild tales to make his injuries seem more heroic and to spare him the necessity of earning his keep.

His skills with his remaining arm and his woodcraft lent credence to the most popular rumors of his origin, which related to a military career that ended badly. But his burning desire to teach those skills, in exchange for nothing more than food and a place to sleep, earned him a seat at our table. Few accepted his offer of training, and few for long; there was more important work to do, such as tilling the fields and tending the crops, or retrieving strayed livestock. Only those of us young enough and restless enough to chafe at the peaceful nature of our lives stayed. For us, his origins and his dire warnings were catnip for cats, and led us to endless speculation whenever we could escape our chores and the constraints of adult supervision. When it became clear that only we few were interested in learning more, Graemor focused his persuasions on us and abandoned the adults to their own devices.

I sought that escape eagerly, along with a few like-minded friends. Each of us was old enough to have earned some independence, but not yet so old that adult responsibilities had entered and consumed our lives. Before coming to Haven, I’d sought my freedom in the many books and a few ancient scrolls in the Temple library, relishing that form of escape from childhood’s bondage, the more so when those yellowed pages held tales of heroes and adventure. But that ended when the Council sent me away, along with most boys and girls of my age, to be fostered in a distant village, as was our people’s custom. After the stench and crowding of a large city, Haven had many compensations, not the least being the clean air, the endless fields, and the dense woodland surrounding them. But Haven’s Temple was too small to have much of a library, and I felt that as a grievous lack. I missed my parents and some friends I’d left behind, but our people had many lifetimes of experience in the practice of fostering, and knew how to ease the pain of separation. In any event, it was a pain that soon eased. Not so the loss of those books, which I mourned ever more keenly when I’d finished reading all the books available to me in Haven.

To fill the time I’d rather have spent reading, I eagerly sought out Graemor’s martial training. In the absence of anyone who might possibly wish to war upon such a small community, and with no bandits or other scofflaws in recent memory, the profession of arms seemed an attractive sport, for there was little risk of having to use my newly acquired skills and risk our teacher’s fate. Better still was the woodcraft he taught. As one of Graemor’s Rangers, I could easily bring in enough game to feed him, myself, and possibly even a future family. With the way that Mareth had begun to look upon me as my muscles expanded under the burden of all this exercise and as my wit grew somewhat nearer to its natural bounds from my time spent mastering woodcraft, this seemed a very good thing indeed. Both arms and ranging were legitimate professions that, once mastered, would spare me the only other profession I could reasonably hope to perform with the skills the Light had gifted me. These included neither the fine dexterity and hunched back of a future craftsman nor the quiet subservience and aching bones of a laborer. For a village the size of Haven, that left only farming or herding. By no means do I scorn those who labor to keep us fed, but neither was it in my personality to accept such fatiguing work and so many constraints. Ranging the woods about the village satisfied my need for freedom admirably.

When he perceived that we believed his wilder tales no more than the rest of the village, Graemor prudently left off his warnings and concentrated on tales more relevant to our immediate needs. But he also vanished occasionally for several days without warning, and one day a few of us took it upon ourselves to learn why. It was both terrifying and exhilarating to travel so far from our village on our own—for Graemor had endurance that put many a younger man to shame, and we knew from previous fruitless explorations that he walked more than a day’s travel from our homes. Given the length of his typical absence, we suspected we might have a long hike ahead, so we packed food accordingly. As a man who had no reason to fear being tracked, he was easy to follow, and after a time it became clear where he was heading. An abandoned road led west of our village, and remained distinct despite the absence of any traffic since I’d come to Haven, years ago now. The road passed over a low range of hills and... and vanished into a wall of night, though it was still full day when we first saw it. That darkness looked uncomfortably like the Shadow he’d warned us about and that was mentioned, in intimidating terms, in many of the older books that I’d read.

Nonetheless, Graemor’s trail led unfalteringly in that direction, and seemed certain to vanish into the darkness. The whole situation was sufficiently unfamiliar that we halted and debated for some time before proceeding. I, for one, felt increasingly uncomfortable, beginning to believe that even Graemor’s most unsettling tales had some truth to them. I argued that point with a growing discomfort that I’d never experienced before. Perhaps there was a reason the rare travelers between villages always carried an ark of the Light with them?

On the other hand, several of us argued there might be nothing whatsoever amiss with this darkness; who, after all, could claim to know enough of the world beyond our farms to say what was and wasn’t natural? Perhaps all the world was this way! I reminded them that none of us had traveled far from our origins, and certainly not far enough to speak with authority about the wider world. The possibility that we really didn’t understand our world at all, and that the warnings in the scriptures might be more than religious sophistry, was every bit as terrifying as Graemor’s tales. That fear made me reluctant to accept what the evidence before us suggested. I wished I remembered more of what I’d read, but even so, it might not have helped; the older books were far too metaphorical and obscure to provide any certainty.

Those who argued we were well-armed and—though we later found out how foolish this notion had been—well prepared for anything the world might throw at us won the day. So we proceeded. By sunset, we had approached close to that wall of darkness, though we agreed without the least dissent to camp a stone’s throw from it, just in case. Suddenly, this simple lark, the tracking of our absent master, had become something altogether more exciting. But had we not been surrounded by friends and the implied threat of mockery for any who fled, we doubtless would have returned home, even at the risk of marching by night. Instead, we took turns on guard as Graemor had taught us, as if this were warfare and we had no desire to be surprised by some hypothetical enemy. And though we’d learned to sleep at our ease in woods that were home to boars, bears, and wolves, and despite the presence of a series of guards who’d been scared into vigilance, none of us slept well that night. In the morning, when we made our first tentative efforts to enter the strange new land, we discovered we’d been right to proceed cautiously.

As the oldest Ranger, they chose me to enter the dark lands first, despite my protests; the others would follow if nothing untoward happened, or would rescue me if something did—and should rescue prove impossible, would race home bearing news of my fate. Had it not been for the false bravado inspired by their good-natured mockery, I might still have refused, but in the face of those gibes I had no choice.

Entering Shadow for the first time reminded me of the river that ran past my village and that became the site of many a test of one’s budding manhood. There was the time that, on a dare, I’d jumped into the river the first day after the ice had broken up and begun its annual migration downstream. I remember the tension in my groin as my balls retracted painfully tight, and I remember the panic of how sluggish my muscles felt and how near I’d come to joining with the Light before someone pulled me from the river, my limbs shaking and the cold of the grave upon me. Another, warmer, time, I’d essayed to touch the bottom to impress Mareth, even though it lay deep below a swift current. I succeeded, narrowly, but to this day, clearly remember being crushed by the weight of all that water. I’ve also never forgotten the inexorable feeling of expansion as I hurtled to the surface, a slimy stone clutched in one hand as proof that I’d succeeded, lungs bursting with the need to breathe, straining to hold in the last of my air, and how that weight came off me in a rush, my ears popping as I broke the surface.

But despite this previous experience, Shadow came as a shock. There was the expected chill, for it was a warm day and I was stepping into what appeared to be deep shade, but more than that, there was a profound difference in my mind. As had happened when I’d fled the river bottom, seeking a different light, I felt an irresistible sense of expansion. It was as if I were being pulled outward in all directions at once, while simultaneously blurring, mentally and physically, in some terrible way I couldn’t then find words to describe. Entering Shadow felt very similar. Had I not staggered backwards from the sheer terror of that experience, and fallen full length on the ground, I hesitate to think what might have happened to me. As it was, two of my friends were fleeing as fast as they could run back towards Haven by the time my eyes refocused, and the others, the whites of their eyes showing, were not far from joining them; they refused to say what they’d seen, and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Things might have gone ill for me had not Graemor chosen that moment to rejoin us.

The scarred veteran appeared as if from nowhere, stepping forth from the benighted land as casually as if he’d been there and watching us all along. Many years later, I still wonder whether that was the case and he’d been waiting all this time for us to muster the courage to follow him. That day, he made no comment on our impudence, but instead examined me carefully before nodding his head, satisfied I was all right. That, more than anything, reassured me, for with my mind still in shock, I’d begun to doubt who and what I was.

Graemor sat us down, then explained as best he could what had happened to me. In short, Shadow transforms us, and without training on how to resist its effects, that transformation can prove permanent or even fatal. Then to bring home his lesson, he stepped again across the line that separated us from that horror, and showed us the effects of Shadow. For all his grim demeanor, he was no fool; he began his changes subtly and gradually, lest he terrify us into joining our departed comrades. And yet... seeing a man transform into a creature of Shadow, a rack of antlers that would have shamed the largest deer in the forest growing from his head, shook each of us to our core. When he was done, and returned to his natural form, he reassured us that any strong man—or woman, in Bethan’s case—could walk in Shadow and still remain human. Then he began to teach us how we could do the same.

Learning to stand in Shadow was equal parts terror and exhilaration. The terror came from that irresistible outwards pressure that built as soon as you stepped across the line separating our world from that of Shadow; the exhilaration lay in learning how to resist the pressure by instead shaping it to our own ends. To become, for example, a deer or a wolf. In time, the terror vanished, replaced by a growing self-confidence and the breathless excitement of feeling like something larger than yourself. Once I understood and mastered Shadow, I could no more have renounced its freedom than I could have renounced breathing.

Those were the early days, when Shadow still lay a comfortable distance beyond our circle of Light. We soon learned that it wouldn’t always be so. When the day came that Shadow approached close enough to our village to be seen on the horizon from our most distant field, life in our village changed. Graemor called together our Council and repeated the tales they’d scorned. Though they treated him once more with polite skepticism, each Ranger took our turn confirming what we could of his story; eventually, we mounted an expedition with the Council and anyone who could afford the time away from their fields and who was willing to either laugh in our faces or be convinced. We convinced them in short order, and they returned to town, pale and shaking, to bear witness of what they’d seen. Talmin, the priestess who tended our Temple of the Light, anxiously studied and restudied the few books that spoke of Light and Shadow in anything beyond metaphorical terms, but found no knowledge of how to stop Shadow from encroaching, other than to keep the Light burning steadily in the Temple, as the scriptures commanded.

Fear of what the encroaching Shadow might portend let Graemor wrest an informal sort of command from Haven’s Council, at least in the matter of self-defense against what Shadow might bring, and he began training anyone who could be spared from the fields. Those stolid enough to be trusted with weapons, he taught the art of arms so they could patrol the boundary between Light and Shadow in case something chose to cross that boundary. But we few who’d been with him since the beginning, and who had the courage to remain with him, became his elite Rangers. It was a heady feeling to see the people of Haven watch us with fear, and sometimes even respect, when we returned from our patrols.

Our excursions soon revealed that Haven was surrounded by a slowly closing sea of Shadow and that we had nowhere to run. Not that we could have fled our homes anyway, with the crops still far from harvest and no certain knowledge of anywhere that would shelter us closer than the capitol from whence I’d come, a journey of several weeks. Graemor sent us endlessly into Shadow, seeking we knew not what, knowing only that we might conceivably find something that would help us avert the spreading darkness. I could have refused to go, as some did, and had I refused, it’s doubtful anyone would have forced me; Graemor led us strongly, but knew not to push us beyond our limits, particularly those of us who hadn’t yet seen our sixteenth birthday. On the other hand, it would have been difficult to refuse his command yet still embrace the freedom that was Shadow, which called to us from beyond the last tilled field.

Mareth had become my girlfriend during this time, and eventually my lover. Like the wisest of all lovers, she knew not to compete with this other love, though she could rarely hide her displeasure at having to share me. For her, the knowledge that I’d promised to always return seemed enough; her trust in me was inspiring, and gave me increasing confidence with each safe return. The knowledge that I was respected in the village for my dangerous profession—even feared by some—made me a man, at least in my own mind. Sadly, the definition of what makes a man expands with time, from being able to touch the river bottom, to earning the right to sleep with a beautiful woman, to something so much more complex these many years later.

But even had I not cherished those times when I fled the Light, however briefly, I would have had little choice but to serve my village in this manner. Such service was the only way to earn a home in the village and a share of the stored food accumulated by the farmers. Playing at being a Ranger generally remained a safe life, for despite the encroaching darkness, much remained the same. But every now and then, Shadow’s inhabitants found courage to approach our circle of Light more closely and carry away a farm animal, or sometimes a villager. When that happened, someone had to brave the darkness to retrieve them—whether they were dead, mad, or still salvageable. And all the while, Shadow closed in with the inevitability of the seasons.

Chapter 1: Salvage operation

I knew the missing farmer: not well, but well enough to recognize her motionless body, face staring blankly at the dark sky. From all appearances, she wouldn’t be salvageable, other than as the corpse her family would need for a funeral. When I knelt to inspect what remained after the soul had taken flight, I saw no signs of violence, so it was likely she died of fear before Shadow had time to distort her beyond recognition.

It was as I examined the dead woman that the shadowbeast leapt at me from the dark, and had I not still been in wolf form, I might never have known it until three-inch talons opened my throat. But I favor the wolf form for more than the power in those tireless legs and the rush of submerging my humanity beneath the wolf’s primal needs. A wolf’s ability to follow scents through any part of the forest makes it the ideal choice when ranging, and those astonishingly keen senses and reflexes provide a tremendous advantage against most denizens of Shadow.

When the shadowbeast attacked, the wolf part of me had already been dimly aware of its presence for some time, and was ready. So I jumped aside with a quiet bark of pleasure before whirling and sinking my fangs into the muscles of that taloned forearm. Warm, pungent blood washed over my tongue, and the creature yowled and tore its limb from my fangs. We faced each other warily, taking each other’s measure. It wore the form of a man-sized cat, albeit one with flowing tentacles of darkness for rear legs and far too many eyes. The wolf within me surged up and I let it sweep me along; this creature was its ancestral enemy, at least to the extent that any creature of Shadow had such a thing as an ancestor or a traditional enemy, and the wolf knew far better than I how to cope with cats.

The killer cat crouched across the body from me and hissed defiance. I felt the hackles rise on my neck and the muscles of my thin legs bunched beneath me, awaiting another leap. Instead, the cat did something startling. With a motion both subtle and disorienting, it flowed into something I’d never seen before, something roughly man-shaped and upright, but with nonreflective black sword blades in place of upper limbs. It began swinging those limbs in a deceptively simple but deadly windmill motion, then advanced, stepping carefully across the body. I feinted a bite at those arms and lost half my whiskers and part of the fur on my nose for my trouble before I could retreat out of range. The creature smiled, gaping mouth half-filled with rows of wickedly serrated bone, and moved slowly closer.

Graemor always taught that when in doubt, we should revert to type and fight in our most familiar form: as a human. I clearly wasn’t going to get anywhere against those scything limbs in wolf form, so I took his advice and concentrated on my former shape. As I did, the muscles in my back tightened and bunched, drawing me upright as wolf paws became feet and hands. I endured a brief visual distortion as my skull reshaped itself, taking my eyes along for the ride, and the palette of colors I could perceive changed. Simultaneously, an enormous prickling sensation swept across the entire surface of my skin as my fur vanished. Long practice kept me from staggering as my balance shifted and kept me from disorientation as my senses changed even more dramatically. The change took less time to do than to describe, but even so, it upset my opponent not at all. That was more than a little worrying.

I drew the sword that had vanished Light knew where while I played wolf and parried strongly, the beast’s horny limbs clicking on good, tempered steel. I caught enough of the force of the blow to gauge the strength of the muscles that drove it, and relaxed slightly: I wasn’t overmatched, at least not on the basis of strength alone. Indeed, Bareni had often struck me harder when we sparred. I circled to my left, keeping the sword between us and watching for any pattern in the creature’s movements while keeping to the mostly obstacle-free ground of the clearing. It wasn’t working as well as I’d hoped. Against the equivalent of two swordsmen, my tentative thrusts weren’t penetrating the creature’s guard, and I saw little likelihood of improving that outcome anytime soon. Turning tail and running, even at the expense of leaving the farmer behind, was beginning to seem increasingly attractive.

I was about to exercise that unattractive option, when all at once, the shadowbeast paused and cocked its malformed head skyward as if listening, windmilling arms slowing to a halt. Never one to hesitate over the niceties of combat, I immediately thrust it through the chest, hoping to strike a heart or something similarly vulnerable. The beast hissed like a kettle overflowing onto the fire, and pushed itself off my blade as I sprang back on guard, its thick blood spattering on the forest floor. Our eyes met for an instant, and for a moment, I saw nothing animal—nor yet anything human. Then the creature wheeled and fled, sword-arms blurring into more conventional limbs that let it escape on all four legs.

Breathing deeply, I rubbed at my nose, still raw and bleeding sluggishly. As the sound of the fleeing beast faded into the distance, I began to sheathe my sword, then stopped and looked long and hard around me to be sure my deliverance hadn’t resulted from the appearance of an even larger predator. Amidst the monochromatic landscape with its silvery highlights, I saw no obvious signs of danger, but since my opponent had fled, that meant nothing. As always, I felt Shadow pulling at me, subtly distorting my form, so I responded to that pull and let myself change again, providing the necessary guidance. My spine arched and my hips rotated, and that prickly itch erupted across my body again as I went to all fours and became a wolf. This time, the wound on my nose healed fully; a good thing, as there were more than enough scents to sort through without having to ignore the smell of my own blood and the droplets scattered by the fleeing creature.

Once my vision cleared and my brain adapted to the new mode of seeing, there was little difference from what I’d already seen as a man. Nor did my ears detect anything much different, though sounds were louder and there were more of them—but they were all normal sounds. My nose was what made all the difference. In addition to the familiar forest smells, the clearing held the scents of two humans, my own familiar scent and that of the farmer, mingled with the foul scent of her loosened bowels. There was also the heavy cat musk of the shadowbeast I’d fought, and another smell I couldn’t identify. The taint of the sword-armed creature that the cat had become? I resolved to remember that one and stay far away in the future.

But most interesting, there was a smell that was both human—and not. Something I’d mistaken for the farmer when I first entered the clearing. I bared my fangs in a low snarl and felt the hackles rising all along my back as the dark bush I’d brushed against during the fight blurred suddenly into human form. I readied myself to leap at its throat, but whoever it was evidently knew enough of wolves to read my intent.

“Hold! I mean you no harm.”

With a conscious effort, I relaxed my facial muscles until my fangs were once again concealed, but no effort would make the hair on my back fall into place. Resisting the pull of Shadow, I pushed my head into a human conformation, forcing myself roughly past the disorientation until I could focus on the small, wiry man who faced me.

“Yet despite those fair words, you lurk beside the corpse of one of my countrymen. That inspires little faith in your good intentions.”

The stranger folded gracefully into a sitting position. He was well built, though not particularly imposing, and had a plain, honest face. At first glance, he seemed not much older than me, but it was hard to tell in Shadow, where Graemor could seem as young as the youngest among us and appearances were rarely more than a rough guide to a being’s true self. But there was something in his intense eyes that told me he could have been much older. Graemor once told us that the creatures of Shadow showed little sign of their age, and lived much longer than we humans anyway, so guessing his age was no proof of anything.

“I’m Mohri, and in these days, you do well to be on your guard. But I’m as human as you. Indeed, I come from another village.”

“You do, do you?” As he could do me little harm from his sitting position, and appeared unarmed in any event, this Mohri presented no immediate danger—though I’d never heard of a man becoming a plant before and that counseled caution. Resisting the wolf that still raged in me, I forced myself back into a fully human shape. Whatever concealed weapons he might carry, I was hardly unarmed and was confident I could defend myself, as the shadowbeast had discovered.

“Yes, I do come from another village, though one so distant you’ve never heard its name, and never would have even had our peoples traveled more between villages in recent years.” His skin was as dark as Graemor’s, several shades darker than my own honey and cream. If it were his real color, then he did come from far. But his accent didn’t sound different enough to account for such a distance. It was a puzzle.

In any event, I was relieved to know other villages existed intact out there, somewhere, for on nights when my soul despaired, I’d begun to think Haven might be the only village still holding back the dark. But on the other hand, claiming to come from a faraway village was an obvious and predictable ploy. I tried one of my own.

“It’s good to know we’re not alone. You can’t imagine how good.” I tried for an ingenuous expression, something I’d been told—to my chagrin—I was good at.

“Oh, I can well imagine, friend. You have no idea how long I’ve walked in Shadow, or how far.” A curious distortion I couldn’t interpret crossed his face. Shadow sometimes did that to a man who let his guard slip. But his response had piqued my curiosity.

“Longer than a day, evidently, for I’ve traveled a full day’s run from my village in all directions and seen no trace of any other village. Indeed, even before Shadow came upon us, I recall no village closer than two or three days of hard travel, and the town where I was born lies even farther away. I confess, I find your story hard to credit. Do you simply deny yourself sleep for days on end, until you find an oasis of Light in which to rest?”

I expected to catch him out on that question, for it was plainly impossible to survive that way. Instead, he surprised me. “I’m afraid that even for me, that would be impossible. But I’ve found a better way.”

“Share it with me!” I didn’t have to feign my enthusiasm.

“I share better with those who trust me enough to share their name, and the name of their village.”

I blinked, embarrassed. “Forgive me. I’m Amodai, from the village of Haven, a short distance that way.” I pointed back over my shoulder without taking my eyes off him.

He nodded. “A pleasure. The trick, Amodai, is a very simple one, at least in principle: one need only take on the form of a plant for the night, for such simple, thoughtless beings are largely immune to the effects of Shadow. Surely you’ve noticed that the trees and plants of this forest are much like their kin that grow in Light?”

I frowned, annoyed that the thought had somehow escaped me. He was right: vegetation didn’t seem to change much, if at all, from its counterpart under the Light. “But then how...?”

He returned my frown with a disarming smile. “I didn’t say that you must become as mindless as a plant, merely that you must take on the shape of one and allow your consciousness to be submerged for a time. When you’ve rested enough to gather your strength once more about you, your consciousness will return, for the life of a plant is too constraining for such as us, and our consciousness rests there uneasily. As our consciousness rebels against its woody prison, it wakes us; then, you need only exert your will to become human once more, or whatever other form you might prefer. Try it, if you’d like; it’s strangely liberating. I’ll wait.”

There was a curious, eager look in his eyes that restored my caution. A plant would be far easier to reap than an alert, armed man standing ready on two familiar feet. I fought down excitement at this new possibility. “Perhaps some other time. I have more important things to do than play at being a plant.” I cocked my head towards the dead farmer. “Her family awaits her, and I’ll be the one who must bear them the bad news.”

“I see. My sympathies.”

I nodded, accepting his words at face value. “She’s hardly the first to end this way, but she’s no less important to her family for all that.”

Mohri rose as gracefully as he’d sat. “I would never keep you from your duty.”

“Would you return with me to Haven and tell my people what you’ve learned? You’d be welcome, as would any news you bring of other villages. As you might expect, we’ve had no visitors for an uncomfortably long time.”

Mohri hesitated a moment too long. “I must decline your kind offer, but with gratitude. I shall surely return soon, but for now, I have pressing duties of my own to which I must attend.”

I didn’t much like the way he’d said that, since I could imagine no duties a man so far from home might have in our lands. Yet elusiveness aside, he’d given me no clear reason to distrust him. “Duty I can understand. But the invitation remains open; ask for me when you return and I’ll show you such hospitality as our humble village can afford.”

He smiled warmly. “And let me extend an offer to you in return. I shall be in these woods for some time yet, and should you ever need me, follow my scent; you undoubtedly learned it when you stood before me as a wolf. I should be easy enough to find.”

With that, he flowed smoothly into the form of a small, slender wolf, and bounded off into the forest, away from Haven. I made a note to remember the direction, and tried once again to fix his scent in my memory, then bent to my work. It was only once I had cleaned the farmer, slung her over my shoulder, and begun my return to town that I realized what had bothered me.

The farmer couldn’t possibly have strayed this far into the woods by mischance, nor would she have gone that far of her own free will; there were few of us these days who dared that, and apart from Graemor, all who did were Rangers no older than me. Those who did stray were soon lost to Shadow, as they lacked the considerable training and long practice required to resist its pull. Yet her shape remained largely human, even in death. Something—or someone—must have abducted her, and it couldn’t have been the shadowbeast, for the cat’s behavior and my prior experience with its kind suggested the body would have been mauled and partially eaten by the time I came upon it—yet the body had been wholly unscathed. That left only two possibilities: The first, and least difficult to accept, was to assume that the shadowbeast was something new to our woods, and that we now faced a far more dangerous and subtle predator than any we’d encountered thus far. The second, which pleased me even less, was that Mohri was both more than he’d seemed and less trustworthy. I didn’t want to consider either possibility just then, let alone the possibility that both possibilities were true.

I turned and made my way homewards, bearing two burdens.

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