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eased a fraction with every step they took.
    The ocean was hidden behind the ridge, although the tang of seawater and fish still carried in the air, when the spell wore off. Ao feltit just in time to brace himself, and then collapsed a little on the wagon’s bench.
    “Are you all right?” Jerzy, next to him, glanced sideways with a worried frown.
    “Yes. Ow. No. You said ache, not . . .”
    “Bad?”
    “It could hurt less. It could hurt more.” Ao’s cheerfulness was strained enough to let them know that, in fact, it hurt a great deal, but he waved off any assistance, leaning against the cask packed up behind him and tucking the blanket around the stubs of his legs with a forced casualness.
    The cart they had hired was larger and far more comfortable than the one they had been offered in Irfan; a full wagon, in fact, large enough for all their belongings and the remaining half-casks of spellwine they had taken from Vineart Esoba, from the now-fallen House of Runcidore. Jerzy held the reins of the placid piebald draft horse that pulled the wagon, barely having to guide it along, while Mahault and Kaï rode alongside on slighter-built brown geldings, their blades now lashed to the saddles, in reach—and, more important, in clear view, despite the apparent ease of their departure.
    The others might have relaxed, but Jerzy found himself growing more tense as the road passed under their wheels. Once, those working in the field would have stopped to watch when a stranger passed by, their curiosity an open, easy thing. Jerzy himself, moving back and forth between the smaller yards owned by his master, rarely received more than a lazy wave if recognized, a long stare as he passed if not. Even the occasional troop of soldiers under Lord Ranulf’s command, the lord who claimed these villages and fields, did not excite comment; there were enough villagers who had served, or sent their sons to serve, that the sight was familiar, if never entirely comforting.
    In the time Jerzy had been away, that had changed. The few stooped figures working the fields now were conspicuous in how they did not look up, not ignoring the wagon and horses clattering by, exactly, but giving the strangers no cause to stop and notice them, either. Therewas a tension in their bodies that should not have been there, not here, where Sin Washer’s Commands had kept strife to a minimum for more than a hundred years.
    These were not trained warriors ready for battle, but ordinary folk, fearful of things they did not understand and could not predict. Unlike the fisherfolk, alert for trouble, Jerzy realized, these folk held themselves like slaves, aware that at any moment, without warning, the lash might come down on their heads.
    Once Jerzy saw that, other changes were impossible to ignore. The comfortable, sloping fields and thick-leafed groves that Jerzy had grown up with remained . . . but it wasn’t the same. The colors of encroaching autumn were the same, and yet the leaves seemed duller, the villages seemed more tightly built, once-open meadows now fenced to keep livestock contained, the areas between houses smaller, the herds grazing closer in, and more than one child visible, tending the flock or herd.
    In less than a ten-month, the land had shifted.
    “Something’s wrong,” Jerzy said, his voice tight as they left one such village, a cluster of a shared barn and five houses, three of them with their shutters closed against the mild weather. “The villagers . . .”
    “They’re afraid,” Kaïnam said, swinging his gelding around to ride alongside the wagon. His voice was low, his free hand resting on the hilt of his blade. Mahault fell behind slightly, on the other side of the wagon, keeping pace with the back wheel, her sword now ready on her hip.
    “They’re not afraid,” Jerzy said. “They’re hungry.”
    Kaïnam was a princeling, Mahault grew up in a city, and Ao had more experience with roads than roots. But Jerzy had spent his