Naomi Darkwater crouched in the reeds and watched her staff dim from purple to a sick gray. For six weeks the bog hags had stepped around her boot prints like she was a fire they would not touch. She was an elf princess of the wetlands, and she had decided their fear was a throne. She wanted every crawling thing in the mire to whisper her name and choke on it. The staff was supposed to feel the pulse of the swamp for her, since she could not yet feel it alone. Right now the staff felt nothing, and that was the first thing wrong. She followed the dead spot back to her camp and found the sign nailed to a cypress trunk above her bedroll. It was a slab of wet wood, bound with braided root, painted in red that was still tacky. The letters were cut in her own people's script, which meant a hag had taken the time to learn it. We are coming. Be prepared. She had walked this trail at dusk and the trunk had been bare. They had come within arm's reach of where she slept, and they had wanted her to know it. Naomi pressed her palm to the wood and felt the staff jump once in her other hand, a single hard beat, like a frog kicking inside a fist. The hags were not avoiding her paths anymore. They were drawing lines across them. She did not run. She drove the staff into the mud at the center of the camp and waited, because a sovereign does not flee her own ground. The water behind her broke without a splash. What climbed out was not a hag. It was an alligator the length of three men, its hide split open along the ribs, its eyes burning red and yellow in a face that should have been dead a season ago. It did not lunge. It walked past her bedroll, turned, and lay down between Naomi and the trail home, blocking the only dry path out. The staff in her fist flared purple again, steady now, reading something she could not. The hags had not sent a warning. They had sent a keeper, and they had decided where she would meet them next.

Naomi did not wait for the dead alligator to decide. She stepped over its tail while its red eyes tracked her, and she walked into the water on the far side of camp. The staff pulled her left, then harder left, like a dog on a rope. The hags had opened something. She could feel it now without the staff telling her, a low ache behind her teeth. If they kept pulling corpses out of the mud, she would be fighting a swamp full of them by morning. She had to find the source and shut it. She followed the pull through black water for an hour. The reeds thinned. The ground rose into a hummock crowned by old stone, a gray altar half-sunk in moss, carved with shapes older than her grandmother's name. Six hags stood around it in red. Each held a thin wand tipped with a small flame. In the center of the altar a crack split the stone, and from the crack came a red glow and thin black shapes that drifted up like smoke with faces. Every time a face cleared the rim, somewhere out in the mire a body sat up. Naomi counted the hags and the wands and did not let herself count further. She had one staff and no army. A sovereign did not need an army. She needed the crack closed. She came in low along the water and put the staff against the base of the altar before any hag turned. The purple light ran up the stone and into the crack. The staff bucked in her hands like the frog kick from the night before, only bigger, and her arms went numb to the elbow. One hag screamed and pointed the wand at her. The flame at its tip went out. Another hag's wand went out. The red glow in the crack fluttered. Naomi leaned her weight onto the staff and drove it down until the wood split her palms. The crack closed with a sound like a jaw shutting. The drifting faces tore apart in the air. Three hags dropped where they stood. The other three ran into the reeds without looking back. Out in the dark, something heavy fell into the water, then another, then a long string of small splashes as the half-raised dead slid back under. Naomi stayed on her knees against the altar until her hands would open again. She pulled the staff free. The head of it was black now, not purple, and cold. She tapped it on the stone and got nothing. The pulse of the mire that she had borrowed from the wood was gone, and this time she had spent it herself. She stood up in a swamp she could no longer feel, with three live hags loose in it who had seen her face and watched her break their work.