Joren Rale knelt in the mud and pressed two fingers to the last bootprint. It was old. Rain had softened the edges, and the man he had hunted for three years was gone again. Joren had glimpsed that man's face once, in a burning doorway, and had chased it beneath a dark cloak ever since. Now the trail had died in the wet forest, and he had nothing. He walked in circles until dark. Broken twigs told him nothing. He crossed the same stream twice. His enemy could be a day ahead or a week. Joren stopped when his legs shook and admitted the truth aloud. "I've lost him." That was when he saw the light. High above, threaded through the branches, a warm glow leaked from a home built into a great tree. A ladder climbed the trunk. Beside it stood a cluster of small sheds, each door open, each shelf packed with jars and rolled cloth. Someone lived here, hidden and careful. Someone might have seen a stranger pass. Joren climbed. He kept one hand near his knife. He reached the platform and knocked. The door opened a crack. A girl faced him, small enough to reach his belt, a green scarf wound to her chin. She held a blade low and steady, and she did not step back. "You're hunting him," she said. It was not a question. Joren's grip tightened. "How could you know that?" "Only his hunters look that tired." Her eyes moved over his cloak, his mud, his knife. "I'm Kira. He left me out here to die." She said it flat, the way people say things they have finished crying over. "I fed myself off those sheds a whole winter. I know his habits. I know where he sleeps when he thinks no one follows." Joren studied her. A child alone in the wild, fierce enough to hold a knife on a man twice her size. The enemy had made her, then thrown her away. That made them the same kind of person. "Why help me?" he asked. "Because you can protect me, and I can point you." She opened the door wider. Warm air spilled out. "He crossed north four days ago. There's an old mill past the ridge. He waits there when a job goes bad." Joren's dead trail turned live in a single breath. He had a name for his enemy's habits now, and a witness who wanted him found as much as Joren did. "Show me the way at first light," he said. Kira nodded and sheathed her knife. "Then you sleep here tonight. But understand one thing." She met his eyes. "When we find him, you don't let him run. I've watched too many hunters watch him run." Joren stepped inside. The door shut behind them. For the first time in three years, he knew exactly where to go, and he was no longer walking alone.

At dawn Kira led Joren north, straight to the ridge streams. The spring flood had swallowed the crossing. Brown water tore between the banks, fast and loud, dragging whole branches under. Kira crouched at the edge and studied it. "The mill is close," she said. "But this used to be a stream you could step across. Now it will drown you." Joren tested the current with a fallen limb. The water ripped it from his hands. He could not swim it. He could not wade it. His enemy waited half a day north, and a flood stood in the way. "Someone knows this river," Kira said. "They always do." As if her words called him, a man stepped from the treeline along the bank. He was broad through the chest, gray hair long past his shoulders, a beard down to his belt. He moved like the woods belonged to him. A knife hung at his hip. He looked at the flood, then at Joren, and did not slow. "You want across," the man said. Not a question. "I'm Garrick. I've crossed this water two hundred times. Two men drowned here this month. You'd be the third." Joren met his eyes. "Then take us over." "Costs you." Garrick's gaze dropped to the blade on Joren's belt. "Not coin. I've enemies on this bank. I want a man who can hold a knife at my back while I work. Do that, and I'll walk you dry to the far side." Joren thought of his promise to Kira. He would not let his enemy run. He needed this crossing. "Done," he said. "My blade guards you across. Nothing more." Garrick nodded once. He led them upstream to a bend where the water ran wide and shallow-looking. "Don't trust your eyes," he said. "There's a rock shelf under here, knee high. It caught me once and pulled me down. Step where I step. Nowhere else." He waded in. The current shoved his legs. Joren followed, one hand on Kira's shoulder, his knife drawn against whatever Garrick feared on this shore. Garrick stopped, felt with his boot, then stepped left around the hidden shelf. Joren copied him exactly. Halfway across, the water reached his chest and pushed hard. Kira gripped his belt and did not make a sound. They climbed out on the north bank, soaked and cold. The mill lay somewhere ahead through the trees. The flood was behind them now. Garrick wrung out his beard. "I held my end," he said. "You held yours. There'll be more of it before you're done with me." Kira stared into the woods ahead. "He's close now," she said. "He doesn't know the river let anyone through." She looked at Joren. "That was our only cover. From here, he could see us coming."