Tarin opened his eyes and winked.

“What should I do?” Voran felt no older than ten, called to account before the elders of the seminary. Come to think of it, this man could very well have been an elder in his time, if not for his madness.

“Ah, something useful at last,” said Tarin, becoming serious. “I know of your search for the weeping tree. I can take you to it. One condition. You must become my slave.”

Voran laughed. “You freed me! Now you want me to put on my shackles again?”

“That is my condition.”

“And if I refuse? What is to stop me from going to Vasyllia now? As you said, Sabíana waits for me.”

Tarin grimaced like a masked jester. He extended his hand and began to count off his fingers. “First, those wounds will kill you soon. Second, you severed your bond with Lyna when you lay with the hag. You won’t stand a chance against anything out in the wild. Third, you are still in the Lows of Aer, and I doubt you will find a way back without me. Fourth, Vasyllia is already under siege by the Raven. Fifth, you are an idiot.”

Voran bristled, but managed to keep quiet.

“While I offer you a solution to all of those problems, especially the fifth one. You have the word of a storyteller, and tellers never lie. But you must become my slave.”

There was no point in having this conversation. Voran was too tired to think, much less construct a rational argument.

“I am leaving in ten minutes,” said Tarin. “Come with me or not. Your choice.”

Voran followed Tarin through the village. Beyond a stone hedge marking the edge of the village, the valley continued straight for a day’s journey, then crested up into a narrow pass.

Where were they? Were they in the Lows or in the real world? What was the real world, anyway? The thoughts left Voran with bile in the back of his throat.

As they approached the last house of the village, a leaning ruin with a young osier bursting from the roof, Tarin stopped and entered.

“Stay here, slave” he said, leaving Voran no time to come up with any suitable answer.

When Tarin came out, he had a pack in each hand. Tarin laid both packs—one of them felt like it was full of rocks—on Voran’s back and took the sword from him.

“You are now my ass,” he said, beaming at him proudly. He slapped him on the back, and Voran fell face-first into the mud. Tarin laughed as he walked out of the village. Curses that he didn’t even know he knew hissed out of Voran’s lips. Tarin seemed not to hear.

It took them most of the day to reach the pass. Beyond, the grayish path switchbacked up into white-capped mountains, taller even than those in Vasyllia.

“We are going there?” Voran pointed at the peaks. “It’s the middle of winter. We’ll freeze to death, if an avalanche doesn’t get us first. And I don’t have any clothes other than these rags.”

Tarin broke into verse:

“Raven Son, hark now to me.

Twixt faith and mind, what shall it be?

A choice I leave to you to make—

To crawl to doom (a fool, a snake),

Or walk with me. Which shall it be?”

Voran sighed and bowed his head. Tarin clapped him on his shoulder again. This time, Voran stayed on his feet. Tarin seemed pleased by that, judging by the way he hopped in place and hiccupped.

They continued to walk, even after the sun set. Voran expected them to camp for the night, but Tarin kept on walking, head erect and back perfectly straight. Heavy flakes soon swirled around them, but Tarin only sang at them. They seemed to dance to his melody. Voran had always prided himself on his strength, but his endurance was nothing compared to the old warrior’s, whose head did not so much as dip during those heavy night hours. Voran soon began to trip over his own feet from fatigue, and once or twice he caught himself falling asleep between steps, only to jerk awake at the pain in his knee as his leg caught the full weight of his body and the two packs.

Just when Voran thought he could go no further, a dark shape loomed directly in front of their path. It was a huge bear, standing on its hind legs. It roared and rushed at them on all fours. Voran cried out in warning, but all that came out was a dry rattle. Tarin didn’t seem to see the bear.

At the last possible moment, the bear pulled up short and stood up, waving its arms like a child learning to walk. Tarin raised his own hands and whooped. He chattered and growled at the bear, gesticulating with his hands. The bear…laughed!

Tarin embraced the beast and slapped him on the side of the head, and the bear continued on his way. Voran’s shuddering limbs refused to listen to him for a time as Tarin—grumbling and whistling all the while—kept walking forward.

This occurred several more times throughout the night, but every time the encounters were never less than horrifying. Finally, the sun inched toward the horizon.

“Well, here we are,” said Tarin, stopping in the middle of the road. They had climbed about half the distance up the switchback path hugging the mountain, and the peak loomed above them, still impossibly far. The sounds of the waking forest bubbled up to Voran’s awareness—snakes rustling through dry brush, rabbits running from the cover of one shrub to another, groundhogs pushing up against the fresh blanket of snow covering their holes.

Then Voran saw it. Just off the road was a hole in the ground, gaping at them uninvitingly.

“In you go, slave,” said Tarin, waving his arm toward the hole.

“Yes, Lord,” said Voran, with a hint of sarcasm that earned him a sound blow across one ear.

“You will learn to keep a civil tongue, my ass.”

Voran jumped in head-first, then the world turned upside down and he found himself sitting on prickly, yellow marsh grass. For a moment, his mind thought that he should be falling still, and it spun uncontrollably, until he felt his feet sink into a pool of icy water. He cursed and pushed himself up, and the world righted itself. But something was still wrong. It was too quiet, so quiet that the silence buzzed in his ears.

Someone was watching him, but every time he turned around he saw nothing, not even Tarin. Yet the feeling remained. It grew, until he was sure that an invisible army was staring at him. Far away, dim across the endless marshland surrounding him, Voran thought he saw something swirling and dark.

“Hurry,” said Tarin, appearing suddenly at his side. “It seems they knew we were coming.”

Now the malice coming from that mass of something dark was palpable, as though Tarin’s appearance had enraged a great beast.

“What is it?” gasped Voran as they ran across the dry grass and through shallow pools, turning this way and that to avoid the deeper tarns.

“Raven’s horde,” Tarin said. “Run!”

Voran’s sides felt as though one hundred knives pierced them. His vision grew foggy. His wounds oozed and throbbed, and his feet squelched in clammy water. He tottered. Tarin grabbed his arm and threw it around his shoulders, holding his side with a grip like iron pincers.

“I can’t…”

“Just a little farther,” Tarin said between heavy breaths.

The long marsh-plain suddenly ended. They stood on the edge of a precipice plunging thousands of feet down, with nowhere else to go. Voran turned around, and now the swirling cloud was much closer. He thought he could glimpse indistinct shapes in the mist.

“Do not stop, Voran. Forward!” said Tarin.

“Forward? Are you mad, Tarin? What should we do? Fly?”

“If that is necessary, yes.”

Voran felt the fear rise like vomit.