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knelt quickly, pulling the boy's hood roughly back, and checking for injuries. The boy's eyes were shut, and he shook uncontrollably, his breathing ragged, and uneven. Orim pulled off a glove to touch his face. Even accounting for the cold it felt much too hot.
    The head of a nearby javelin caught his attention. It glittered with the characteristic grey-blue sheen of sevyric iron in the dawn sunlight, and there would be enough in all the weapons here to suppress casting as far as the edge of the clearing. This had not been some casual hunt, the dead men scattered around the stump were clearly well equipped elite soldiers.
    Orim glanced round the clearing, considering. Something terrible had happened here, and whatever caused it might still be lurking in the trees. If the woman had been powerful enough to do this, surrounded by sevyric iron and riddled with arrows, he would almost certainly have known of her.
    With the boy building a fever, he needed to get back to Fyrenar as quickly as possible, but to attempt to force a passage here might be hazardous. Wayfarers were at their most vulnerable in the moments they stepped between worlds, briefly stripped of all power. Any attack in that moment could be catastrophic.
    Quickly reaching a decision, he stowed his snow poles, scooped the boy into his arms, and headed in the direction of the shortest distance to the edge of the forest.
    Orim knelt briefly behind a tree just beyond the clearing, and drew out a pinch of yellow fire powder. He'd been warned to expect more than one party hunting the woman, and instinctively he sensed danger.
    His strong affinity for flame meant he seldom needed any assistance beyond invocation and gesture, but the nature of the element made it unpredictable, and liable to flare out quickly. Here he wanted to produce living sparks, and hold them ready.
    The powder flared and blew from his hands in a shower of bright points, some dying immediately as his summoning finished. The others he infused with a primal hunger for the living wood in the trees, and they swarmed around him like a cloud of incandescent insects.
    A ward would have been safest, but impossible to take with him for any distance, and the blended motes of were-flame, which danced and trailed after him in a loose cloud, could be easily turned to many uses.
    A hundred paces further into the forest Orim felt something, a prickling sensation against his skin like the trembling of a spider's web. He sensed power there too, carefully shielded to appear like an empty space a less skilled caster might have easily passed over, and under the concealment he detected a small group moving towards him.
    He lowered the boy to the snow behind a broad tree and calmly stepped forward, controlling his breathing, and relaxing his awareness. Against a group, he couldn't hope to press an attack while still protecting the boy.
    Two dozen dark-clad figures moved through the trees towards him, running across the snow with unnatural swiftness. Even at a distance of forty or fifty yards their speed might have allowed for an effective ambush if he'd been unprepared.
    The ones facing him slowed as they closed, whilst those on the sides raced forward to outflank him. A detached part of him noted the orchestrated pattern of attack — not chance, but the product of careful training.
    Subliminally he registered no tracks in the snow under the feet of most of the figures. So skilfully crafted illusions, copies of the two or three real men, intended to distract and confuse.
    He felt surges in his extended awareness from left and right as his real foes unleashed simultaneous attacks. A hail of stones snapped into the air between Orim and the man on his left, each the size of a small egg, hissing towards him like a volley of sling-shots. From the other side, a fraction behind the stones, a shower of razor-edged darts humming in a broad sweep.
    Reacting smoothly, Orim flicked out an expanding shield of flame before him, a cluster