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The Lady stepped to the edge of the circle, cut her own thumb with a knife very like Gwen’s, and added her blood to the handful of soil. Gwen noted absently that her blood was as red as any mortal’s, and not blue, or green, or starshine.

Gwen stooped down again and patted the handful of soil into place, opening the circle. The Lady clapped her hands, the mist swirled around them so thickly that for a moment Gwen could not see anything at all—

And then they were gone.

And her boots were beginning to get very damp. She looked down, and saw that water was rising around them.

Fast.

“Back to camp!” Ifan said, as the mist thinned, but only in the direction of their campsite. Gwen had no wish to argue with him, for the water was already at her instep and rapidly rising to her ankle. All four of them ran up the way that had opened in the mist and did not stop until they were well out of it.

Only then did they pause and look back down at the valley.

For as far as the eye could see, it was covered in that thick mist, which the setting sun was now turning to gold. There were things moving in it. She shivered. She pitied March’s men if they did try to cross here.

Cataruna and Ifan looked at each other, numbly. Bronwyn shook her head. “There’s more moving here than we reckoned on,” the old woman said.

That night, the storm Ifan and Cataruna had called broke, and Gwen had cause to regret that she had not put some form of provision against that in her bargain.

Not that there was any way of knowing whether a bargain with water spirits would have any effect on a storm.

They had done their best to prepare the camp for the onslaught, but there was only so much shelter that branches and stacked bracken could give against the sort of storm that eventually arrived. This was not a country for caves, and they had been traveling too light even for a bit of canvas.

When the storm hit, it did so as a full tempest. Torrential rain, lightning, thunder, wind . . . it would have been impressive within the walls of Castell y Cnwclas. It was a nightmare out in the open.

They had gotten the four horses into the little clearing, and because Cataruna had a foreboding, they had tied and hobbled them so that they could scarcely move, then made crude blinders and tied them over the horses’ heads. It was a good thing they had done so, or they would have been kicked to bits, trampled, and, had they survived that, found themselves without mounts the next day. As it was, the poor beasts whimpered and moaned and fought the hobbles until they were exhausted. Based on Cataruna’s foreboding, Gwen had opted for “sturdy” over “space” when it came to the shelter. It was a lean-to made of branches and many layers of bracken, and the four of them could barely squeeze into it.

They had been sitting around their fire, gnawing the last of the meat off the bones of the rabbits Gwen had shot, when they heard the storm coming. As it approached from the southwest, the steady growling of thunder was like a great beast in the distance. The closer it came, the more the horizon lit up with so many lightning strikes it looked as if it were crawling on dozens of legs toward them.

Down in the valley, the mist still had not lifted, and there were strange, dim lights moving in it. Those lights actually brightened in response to the coming storm. And strangest of all, as a wind sprang up, strengthening until their cloaks were blowing straight away from their bodies, the mist remained, unchanged, and unmoving.

At that point, with the branches of the trees tossing wildly, the horses fighting their bonds, the fire actually blew out. That was when they all scrambled into the tiny shelter and wrapped their cloaks tightly around themselves. Gwen and Ifan put themselves on the outside corners and grabbed the branches, determined to hold onto the thing no matter what.

Then the storm hit.

Rain pounded down onto them quite as if someone had emptied a river on their heads. The wind was terrible, and it was