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yes.’
    ‘Could Rendine be harming-free?’
    ‘You mean apart from you and me?’
    We looked around at the town, with its thatched roofs and flowering window boxes; a place where nothing more unpleasant occurred than the town drunk being dragged under the millwheel on his unsteady way home.
    Rodden sighed. ‘I suppose. Come on, I need a drink.’

    Two days later, on the road to Ercan, we got our lead. Griffin had been hunting up ahead but came swooping back to me with an alert! that nearly knocked me out of the saddle. Harmings. We’d been bound to pass some sooner or later. But would they know who we were? I pulled my horse alongside Rodden’s.
    ‘You’ve got your mind shielded?’ he murmured. His eyes were scanning the road ahead.
    ‘Yes.’
    He nodded. ‘Good. Just act natural. We’re travellers like anyone else.’
    With their safety in mind, I urged Leap and Griffin to make themselves scarce. Then I concentrated on keeping my thought-wall impenetrable.
    I watched the flow of traffic: a farmer with a cart full of squash; a wagonload of children with a dark-haired man at the reins; a young boy leading a milking cow with a big clanging bell around its neck. Then I noticed something peculiar about the children in the wagon. They were young and scrappy, the eldest about fourteen, and they all wore the same pale blue shirt. But what raised the hairs on the back of my neck was their uncanny silence. Two dozen pairs of icy blue eyes stared at us as their wagon trundled by. I turned and saw the wagon pulling off the main road onto a dirt track. When they’d disappeared we pulled our horses over.
    ‘Those children were all harmings, weren’t they?’ I rubbed my forearms, suddenly chilled to the bone. Children. It had never occurred to me that they’d take children.
    Rodden had one hand on the strap of his crossbow and his eyes on the turn-off. He nodded. ‘Did you see the shirt they wore? It looked like an orphanage uniform. That road they turned off on leads to Yib. It’s a farming district, and a pretty lonely one.’
    ‘What do you think it means?’
    ‘Enclaves. I haven’t seen them in Pergamia before. My guess is they were stolen from an orphanage in Ercan and are being taken to a training enclave.’
    ‘They were so young,’ I said wistfully.
    ‘The harmings are taking the destitutes off the streets and the unwanted from the orphanages; people no one will ever miss. Some for blood and some to swell the harming ranks, I’d wager.’
    ‘Should we do anything?’
    Reluctantly, Rodden shook his head. ‘There’s not much we can do for them now. Except . . .’ He trailed off.
    I winced. Except kill them, he meant. ‘It’s such a waste. Their lives are over before they’ve begun.’
    He looked at me with worried eyes. ‘Stay close, all right?’
    I nodded. Leap and Griffin returned, and I clutched my cat against my body as we broke into a canter.

FOUR
    T he blinding sun did little to dispel our grim mood as we rode into Ercan the next morning. I had slept badly, partly because I had been thinking of the harming children. I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d been afraid when the harmings had come for them; if they’d cried out for their mothers, even though they were orphans and their mothers were dead. It was awful to contemplate. For the first time I was glad that I’d been infected as a baby – if it’d had to happen at all – and not when I was old enough to remember it.
    But mostly I slept badly because of Rodden. I didn’t think he had slept at all. Instead, by the light of his glowing eyes he had sharpened all our weapons. First his knife, then my knife, then the arrow tips – boththe yelbar and ordinary ones – and even the crossbow bolts. The rasping of whetstone on metal had been incessant. It had been on the tip of my tongue to tell him to knock it off , but I sensed that my protestations would be ignored. At first light he had been up and away and I had managed to drop off