Rojer shrugged and put his hood up, pulling the edges of his motley cloak together to strengthen the wardnet. The last of the light had faded, and all around them misty forms were rising from the snow, solidifying into corelings that hissed and cast about, scenting them in the air but unable to find them.

Erny had set his house away from the village so that he would not have to endure complaints about the smell of his papermaking chemicals, but that distance also put it outside the great ward of forbidding that protected the village proper.

A wood demon wandered into Rojer’s path, sniffing the air. Rojer froze, not daring to move as it searched. There was a sharp movement under the cloak, and she knew one of the warded throwing knives he kept strapped to his wrists had fallen into the palm of his good hand.

“Just walk around it, Rojer,” Leesha said, continuing down the path. “It can’t see or hear you.” Rojer tiptoed around the demon, twirling the knife nervously in his fingers. He had grown up juggling blades and could put one into a coreling’s eye at twenty paces.

“It’s just unnatural,” Rojer said, “walking plain as day through hordes of corelings.”

“How many times must we do it before you tire of saying that?” Leesha sighed. “The cloaks are safe as houses.” The Cloaks of Unsight were her own invention, based on wards of confusion the Painted Man had taught her. Leesha had modified the wards and embroidered them with gold thread into a fine cloak. Demons ignored her when she wore it, even if she walked right up to them, so long as she moved at a slow, steady pace and kept it wrapped around her.

She’d made Rojer’s cloak next, embroidering the wards in bright colors to match his Jongleur’s motley, and she was pleased to see that he seldom removed it, even in daylight. The Painted Man never seemed to wear the one she had made for him.

“Nothing against your wards, but I don’t think I ever will,” Rojer said.

“I trust your fiddle magic to keep me safe,” Leesha said. “Why don’t you trust mine?”

“I’m out here in the dark, aren’t I?” Rojer asked, fingering his cloak. “It’s just eerie. I hate to say it, but your mother wasn’t far off the mark when she called you a witch.”

Leesha glared at him.

“A Ward Witch, at least,” Rojer clarified.

“They used to call Herb Gathering witching, too,” Leesha said. “I’m just warding, same as anyone.”

“You’re not the same as anyone, Leesha,” Rojer said. “A year ago, you couldn’t ward a windowsill, and now the Painted Man himself takes lessons from you.”

Leesha snorted. “Hardly.”

“See the light,” Rojer said. “You argue his own wards with him all the time.”

“Arlen is still thrice the Warder I am,” Leesha said. “It’s just…it’s hard to explain, but after looking at enough wards, the patterns started…speaking to me. I can look at a new ward and just by studying the lines of power, guess its purpose more often than not. Sometimes I can even change the lines to alter the effects. I’ve been trying to teach the knack to others, but none seems to get past rote.”

“That’s what fiddling’s like for me,” Rojer said. “The music speaks to me. I can teach my apprentices to play songs well enough, but you don’t play ‘The Battle of Cutter’s Hollow’ for the corelings to pacify them. You have to…massage their mood.”

“I wish someone could massage my mother’s mood,” Leesha muttered.

“About time,” Rojer said.

“Ay?” Leesha asked.

“We’ll be in town soon,” Rojer said. “The sooner we talk about your mum, the sooner we’ll be done talking about it, and can get on with our business there.”

Leesha stopped short and looked at him. “What would I do without you, Rojer? You’re my best friend in the world.” She put just the right emphasis on the word friend.

Rojer shifted awkwardly, walking on. “I just know how she gets to you.”

Leesha hurried after. “I hate to think my mum could be right about anything…”

“But she often is,” Rojer said. “She sees the world with cold clarity.”

“Heartless clarity is more like it,” Leesha said.

Rojer shrugged. “Rabbit in one hat, bunny in the other.”

Leesha casually reached out to take snow from a low branch in her gloved hand, but Rojer noted the move and easily dodged the snowball she threw at him. It struck a wood demon, which looked about frantically for its assailant.

“You want children,” Rojer said bluntly.

“Of course I do,” Leesha said. “I always have. Just never seemed to find the right time.”

“The right time, or the right father?” Rojer asked.

Leesha blew out a breath. “Both. I’m only twenty-eight. With the help of herbs, I can likely carry a child to term for another two decades, but never as easily as I might have ten, or even five years ago. If I’d married Gared, our first child might be fourteen now, and there would likely have been several more after that.”

“Arrick used to say, There’s nothing gained in lamenting what never was,” Rojer said. “Of course, he was living proof of how hard those words are to live by.”

Leesha sighed, touching her belly and imagining the womb within. It wasn’t Gared she lamented, really. Her mother had been right about the bandits on the road, as Rojer well knew. But what she had never told him, or anyone, was that it had been her fertile time when it happened, and she had feared a child might come of it.

Leesha had hoped Arlen would add his seed when she seduced him a few days later. If he had, she would have raised the child, if one came, in the hope it sprang from tenderness and not violence. But the Painted Man had refused, vowing to have no children lest the demon magic that gave him his strength infect them somehow.

So Leesha had brewed the tea she had sworn never to brew, and ensured that the bandits’ seed could find no purchase. When it was done, she had wept bitterly over the empty cup.

The memory brought fresh tears, cold lines streaking her cheeks in the winter night. Rojer reached out, and she thought he meant to wipe them away, but instead he put his hand into her hood and withdrew it suddenly, producing a multicolored handkerchief as if from her ear.

Leesha laughed despite herself, and took it to dry her tears.

By the time they reached town, half a dozen corelings were trailing them, sniffing at the footprints in the snow beyond the radius of the cloaks’ magic. A woman at the edge of the forbidding raised her bow, and warded arrows struck the demons like thunderbolts, killing those that failed to flee.

All the young women in Deliverer’s Hollow studied the bow now, starting as soon as they could hold one. Many of the older women, not strong enough to pull a great bow, had begun learning to aim a loaded crank bow so they could throw in. The women worked in shifts to patrol the edge of town, killing any demons that ventured too close.

As they came into the light, Leesha saw Wonda waiting for them. Tall, strong, and homely, it was easy to forget the girl was only coming to her fifteenth summer. Her father, Flinn, had died in the Battle of Cutter’s Hollow, and Wonda was sorely wounded. She’d recovered fully, though she was badly scarred, and had become attached to Leesha during her time in the hospit. Wonda followed Leesha like a hound, ready to kill any coreling that came near. She carried the yew great bow the Painted Man had given her, and could put it to deadly use.