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reprieve lasts forever.
    “I assume we’ll turn east when we reach the ridge?” Jor asks as the path grows steeper. His voice sounds even more feminine when drifting to my ears from behind than it did talking face to face.
    You can tell the boy was raised among fairy folk, where the men and women act so much alike it can be hard to tell one from the other. The Fey have become reclusive in recent years, since Ekeeta placed a bounty on every fairy head, but I’ve run into enough fairy men to know that, despite their skill in battle, they’re far more interested in singing and dancing and fussing over their ancient plants than in any respectably masculine pursuit.
    The manliest thing about Jor is the scar above his left eyebrow, that puckered bit of skin the only part of his face that isn’t smooth and pillowy. From his apple cheeks to his button of a nose to his smooth chin and mouth with the upper lip curving in a bow, the boy might as well be Fey himself. I’ve been called a pretty boy myself a time or two, but I was never as delicate as the boy behind me. Even my brother Valerio, who my father bitingly called his “firstborn daughter,” had the shadow of whiskers by fourteen.
    “Did you hear me?” Jor asks, that uppity note creeping into his voice again.
    “I heard you,” I grumble. Thank the gods I’m the youngest of my cursed brothers and accustomed to a certain degree of abuse. Nariano and Ninollo would have exercised their fists on anyone who dared to use that tone with their princely selves.
    “And? Will we be turning east?”
    “Considering turning west will take us closer to Mercar and people who want your head on a pike, I think east is best.” I close my eyes for a moment, knowing Alama will keep to the trail. “Unless, of course, your sister is hidden somewhere to the west …”
    “I told you, I’m not taking you to Aurora until you—”
    “Your army. I know.” I open my lids a crack and regret it immediately as the sun flickering through the canopy stabs its cruel rays into my eyes. “Have you thought of how you’re going to pay for that army? I notice you didn’t bother with your pack.”
    “I was trying to hurry,” Jor says. “You said you had enough gold for both of us.”
    “I have enough gold to keep us in food and drink and pay for an inn once we get close enough to a village to find one, not to hire an army.”
    Jor sighs. “Well, I may not need gold. I’m told the people in the Feeding Hills are sympathetic to my cause.”
    I grunt. I would wager the cowards in the Feeding Hills are sympathetic only to their own cause. The entire population is composed of nobles who swore loyalty to Ekeeta and her ogres during the takeover of Norvere—watching those who stood against the queen robbed of their souls and thrown into the sea—only to sneak away in the night in the months following to hide in the one place the ogres wouldn’t dare hunt them down.
    The Feeding Hills are the birthplace of the ogres, the spot from which they emerged from the ooze to become the first beings walking the land. It is also said to be the location of their last surviving predators. The Feeding Trees atop the hills are as old as Mataquin itself, gnarled behemoths as big around as a farmer’s hut, with trunks that reach through the clouds. No human alive has ever seen them do anything but sprout needles, sway in the breeze, and other trees-going-about-their-business sort of things, but the ogre legends say the Feeding Trees house the spirits of the upstart gods who banished the Lost Mother to the underworld. In her last act of magic, the goddess transformed her enemies into trees.
    Trees with a taste for vengeance …
    Allegedly, the Feeding Trees use illusions to lure ogres into their trunks, where the creatures are digested over the course of a few hundred years. Fairy story or not, the ogres are spooked enough to leave the traitors living in the Feeding Hills alone, despite the fact that the