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cleared an ancient oak and stopped short. An enormousgreen mantis, taller than an ogre, held Sevren in two scythelike claws. Four other legs held the insect’s slender body off the ground, and its long abdomen jutted out and up behind it. Sevren had managed to pull out two long knives, but it was all he could do to keep the mandibles at the bottom of the creature’s triangular head from tearing open his belly.
    Kauth lifted his crossbow to his eye and sighted along the shaft of the quarrel, aiming for one of the insect’s enormous eyes. Just as he tightened his grip to loose the bolt, a centipede the size of his finger dropped onto his hand from a branch above. He jerked, and his quarrel soared over the mantis’s head.
    “Bugs, indeed,” he muttered, shaking his hand to throw the centipede off. In the same moment, something landed on the back of his neck and bit, sending a jolt of pain down his spine.
    Swatting at whatever had landed on him, he stumbled away from the oak where he’d stopped. Glancing back at it, he realized that the tree was alive with centipedes, writhing and crawling over every inch of bark. He shuddered, brushing at his arms and chest, then he remembered Sevren.
    Just as he turned, Sevren fell from the mantis’s claws, the creature’s head falling with him. The creature jerked spasmodically, lashing out with its claws as it staggered forward. One claw raked across the shifter’s chest, but Sevren lashed out with a knife and cut it cleanly off. With a final shudder, the mantis fell to the ground, its legs twitching in the air.
    Kauth ran to the shifter. “Let me look at you,” he said. “How bad are your wounds?”
    “Don’t worry about me!” Sevren snarled. “We need to get to Vor!” He sheathed his knives, retrieved his bow from where it had fallen, and set off, nocking another arrow as he ran.
    The shifter leaped over ferns and roots without breaking stride, and Kauth found himself lagging again. When he lost sight of Sevren, he felt the forest close in around him. Everywhere his eyes fell, he saw some kind of crawling thing—spiders the size of his fist skittering along branches, thick millipedes snaking amid the fallen leaves, beetles whirring their wings in the air, a scorpion the size of a dog creeping slowly alongside his path.
    He felt them all watching him—thousands of eyes following his every movement, sizing up their prey. His skin crawled, and every few steps he swatted at some real or imagined vermin pricking his exposed skin.
    He broke, panting, out of the forest and onto the road in front of the Orien coach. Vor stood directly in front of the coach, the ground around him littered with the shattered carapaces of enormous spiders and insects of every description—as well as one crumpled gray-cloaked human form. Two more of the hooded figures dodged the sweeping strikes of his greataxe, trying to slash through his armor with their curved blades. A wasp the size of a horse darted around him, lunging at him and then flying back out of his axe’s reach, the droning of its wings drowning out the sounds of the battle.
    Two men and a woman, all wearing the unicorn symbol of House Orien on their shoulders, stood behind Vor with lightweight blades in their hands. They jabbed at the hooded Children of Winter and the pack of scorpions and spiders at their feet, but it was clear that if the defense of the coach had rested in the hands of these warriors alone, it would already be overrun. The horrorstruck faces of the other passengers peered out the windows at chittering swarms and gigantic vermin crawling over the carriage’s sides and windows.
    Sevren and Zandar ranged back and forth at the edge of the forest to line up clear shots against the Children of Winter and their many-legged minions. Sevren kept his bow in his left hand, but he alternated between pulling it back to loose an arrow and yanking out his knife to cut down a foe that came too close. His arrows feathered several