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Aspar strained his hearing to catch what Stephen’s ears had heard. After a moment he had it, a sound like a low, hard wind sweeping through the forest, the sound of so many feet that he couldn’t discriminate the individual steps, and with it, a faint humming in the ground.

“Sceat.”

“Slinder” was the name the Oostish had given the servants of the Briar King. Once they had been human, but the ones Aspar had seen did not seem to have retained much Mannish about them.

They wore little or no clothing and ran howling like beasts. He had seen them tear men limb from limb and eat the raw, bloody flesh, watched them throw themselves on spears and pull their dying bodies up the shafts to reach their enemies. They couldn’t be talked to, much less reasoned with.

And they were close already. How could he not have heard them? How had Stephen not, with his saint-sharpened senses? The boy seemed to be losing his knack.

He glanced quickly around. The nearest trees were mostly slender and straight-boled, but some fifty kingsyards away he saw a broad-shouldered ironoak reaching toward the sky.

“To that tree,” he commanded. “Now.”

“But Neil and Cazio—”

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Aspar snapped. “We can’t reach them in time.”

“We can warn them,” Winna said.

“They’re already over there,” Stephen said. “See?”

He pointed. Across the narrow valley, bodies were pouring over the rim and down the steep slope. It looked as if a flood were carrying an entire village of people down a gorge, except that there was no water.

“Mother of Saint Tarn,” one of the Dunmrogh soldiers gasped. “What—”

“Run!” Aspar barked.

They ran. Aspar’s muscles ached to bolt him ahead, but he had to let Winna and Stephen start climbing first. He heard the forest floor churning behind him and was reminded of a cloud of locusts that once had whirred through the northern uplands for days, chewing away every green thing.

They were halfway to the oak when Aspar caught a motion in the corner of his eye. He shifted his head to look.

At first glance the thing was all limbs, like a huge spider, but familiarity quickly brought it into focus. The monster had only four long limbs, not eight, and they ended in what resembled clawed human hands. The torso was thick, muscular, and short compared to its legs but more or less human in its cut if one ignored the scales and the thick black hairs.

The face had little of humanity about it; its yellow carbuncle eyes were set above two slits where a nose might be, and its cavernous, black-toothed mouth owed more to the frog or snake than to man. It was loping toward them on all fours.

“Utin,” Aspar gasped under his breath. He’d met one before and killed it, but it had taken a miracle.

He had one miracle left, but looking past the shoulder of the thing, he saw that he needed two, for another identical creature was running scarcely thirty kingsyards behind it.

Aspar raised his bow, fired, and made one of the luckiest shots in his life; he hit the foremost monster in its right eye, sending it tumbling to the ground. Even as Aspar continued his flight to the tree, however, the thing rolled back to its feet and came on. The other, almost caught up now, seemed to grin at Aspar.

Then the slinders were there, pouring from between the trees. The utins wailed their peculiar high-pitched screams as wild-eyed men and women leapt upon them, first in twos, then in threes, then by the dozens.

The slinders and utins were not friendly, it seemed. Or perhaps they disagreed on who should eat Aspar White.

They finally reached the oak, and Aspar made a cradle of his hands to vault Winna to the lowest branches.

“Climb,” he shouted. “Keep going until you can’t climb anymore.”

Stephen went up next, but before he had a firm foothold, Aspar was forced to meet the fastest of their attackers.

The slinder was a big man with lean muscles and bristling black hair. His face was so feral, Aspar was reminded of the legends of the wairwulf and wondered if this was