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the edge of the White
     River, saying, “There’s something up north that calls me…”
    “The Lake,” Bramble said, clutching at the only possible explanation so her head would stop swimming. “The Lake transported
     you in time.”
    Baluch’s eyes were alive with curiosity and a kind of pleasure, as though he enjoyed having someone know him.
    “Often,” he said. “I come by my wrinkles honestly, but I’ve earned them in a dozen different times, whenever She had need
     of me. I’ve skipped from time to time like a stone over water. But how did you know me?”
    Trying to work out how to explain made her legs, finally, give out from under her. She sank down onto a rock, knees trembling.
    “Thank the local gods,” she said eventually. “They showed me your face.” Which was true enough, even if it was woefully incomplete.
     But how could she explain Obsidian Lake and her own, very different, travels in time? Baluch smiled as though some of what
     she was thinking showed in her eyes and she smiled back, a rush of pleasure swamping her. Someone else who remembered .
     . . It was a kind of homecoming, to look into Baluch’s blue eyes, as she had when she was Ragni, or even the girl on the mountain.
    “Who is he?” Medric asked her softly, while Baluch went to talk quietly to Ash. Ash stood straight and disapproving, but listened.
    Whatever Baluch said didn’t convince him. He shook his head, and Baluch slapped his own thigh, his voice growing louder. “I’ve
     spent my whole life protecting the Lake People, from attack after attack!” he said. “Ask her!”
    He paused for a moment, and waited. Finally, Ash nodded, but his face was still troubled. Bramble could understand that. Baluch
     was, after all, implicated in everything Acton had done. It wasn’t easy to face your enemy and realise he wasn’t a monster,
     after all.
    Baluch clapped Ash on the shoulder, a gesture he and Acton had used often to each other. It made Bramble’s heart clench.
    “Baluch. You know — from the old stories, Acton’s friend,” she said to Medric.
    “Donkey dung!” Medric exclaimed. “He’s dead!”
    “Apparently not.”
    It was a bit much to take, she supposed, for someone whose life had until yesterday been as solidly sensible as a life could
     be. But he was the man who had fallen in love with Fursey, so he
could
cope with oddity if he chose. He’d just have to. The trick was to keep him busy. And they should all be busy, because if
     Ash were here and she were here… “I have the bones,” she called to Ash. A trembling began in her gut at the thought of
     what they were about to do, but she ignored it and got up, forcing her knees to stay firm. “Do you have the songs?”
    Ash hesitated, looking to Baluch, any remnants of hostility vanishing into a need for guidance.
    “There are songs,” Ash said slowly. “But they don’t seem to be enough… in themselves.”
    “When Tern the enchanter raised the ghosts of Turvite against Acton, she used her own blood,” Bramble said. “She sang the
     song and then cut herself and scattered the blood on the corpses.”
    Ash raised his eyebrows. “That’s not in the old story. It just says she raised the ghosts of Turvite to fight Acton, and failed,
     then jumped off the cliff.”
    “Her name was Tern?” Baluch said. “I remember her. But as Ash said, she failed.”
    “She failed to give them fighting strength,” Bramble corrected him. “But she raised the ghosts well enough, which is what
     we want to do.”
    She knelt and took off her jacket, spreading it out on a flat piece of ground, and then slid her hand to the very bottom of
     one saddlebag and pulled out the red scarf. It was the symbol of rebirth, and perhaps it would help, now, to bring him back.
     She spread it on her jacket.
    Her heart faltered. Stuck to the scarf, in the folds, were hairs. Horse hairs, from the roan. She had brushed them off her
     own clothes too often to mistake them. Gently, she