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muttered to the magus, protested for a few minutes, and
then realised the futility of making a pious girl travel on the
Sabbath. The hunter sat by her, a few metres away from the magus,
and looked up at the stars from under his hat, smiling faintly.
    ‘ You don’t share your employer’s lack of faith?’ she asked him.
Gabel seemed to be surprised by her words.
    ‘ I owe a lot to Father,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t accompany him
in his religion, nor in the old man’s. I’m here not to comfort you,
Rowan, but to try and dissuade you from this respite.’
    She listened
to the chirping of the insects for a few seconds, as if the little
things were speaking. She felt strangely calm, though the cold
winds that followed the waters were uncomfortable at best. She
gazed at the purple fireflies that gathered around the reeds near
her feet.
    ‘ Joseph, the thing that murdered Bethany … You said it was
a…’
    ‘ A were-creature, called a theriope. You’re asking me this
because you know the magus was there that night? I suspected he
might be involved because he foretold that I would lose something
dear to me.’
    ‘ He did?’
    ‘ Something along those lines.’
    She followed
the insects as they made their illuminate way up from the reeds and
mingled with the stars above them. ‘What do you think now?’
    ‘ That he’s as accurate as he is mysterious.’ He smiled at her.
‘But he’s not a theriope. I can smell these things. Let’s move on
in the morning, all right? It’s dangerous around here.’
    ‘ I can’t just abandon the rules I’ve set for
myself.’
    ‘ Rowan, you’re not living with the priest now. You can make
your own rules.’
    A nod, followed by another glimpse upward at the bright
nebulous cloud of lilac-hued insects. They swam mindlessly for a
few minutes, before taking off along the path of the river and
blinking out, one by one.
    ‘ If that’s what you want,’ she said.
    ~
    They set off an hour before sunrise, again keeping close to
the riverbank and following it west toward the town of Pirene. The
magus described the place to Rowan with such vivid detail that she
felt that the picture in her head was more a real memory than her
imagination: a town powered by water wheels that turned steam to
energy, and made up of single-story houses clustered around a bomb
crater; a sunken remnant of the war.
    After the fighting had
stopped, grass sprang up around the inside of the basin, and in the
very centre a tree had grown. It hit the height of seven feet, and
then abruptly stopped growing. Its springy boughs turned to
inanimate stone. Its petrified branches remained forever bare. The
soon-to-be founder of the town had stumbled across this spectacle,
and Pirene was built around it.
    Rowan was
halfway through pointing out that the people of the town were
living in sin, praying to a false idol, when Gabel asked brusquely
for silence. Together they waited quietly amongst the trees as he
stood, still as a winter lake, listening.
    ‘ I can’t hear anything,’ Rowan whispered.
    ‘ A noise like insects,’ said the magus. ‘Hornets?’
    ‘ Not quite,’ Gabel whispered back.
    ‘ Music,’ said the magus suddenly. ‘But this far into the
forest?’
    He got no
reply from the factotum, who was listening patiently. Slowly he
began walking once more, and Rowan saw his fingertips flex, itching
to stroke the trigger of his pistol.
    The other two followed nervously. As they got closer it did
almost sound like music, but it was distant and they had the trees
to listen through. Before any of the three could make a decision,
the sound stopped.
    Voices tinkled in the still air as they proceeded cautiously
into the forest.
    They stopped at a wide junction in the footpath paved with
wood-chippings, and in the centre of the fork lay another fallen
tree. Leaning against its mossy bark were two young women, dressed
in rural clothing in hues of cream and brown. They stopped talking
and watched as the travellers