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dozen cozy mud-and-wattle cottages had grown up here with roofs thatched from wheat straw. As a child, Fallion had imagined that they were living things, lounging among the herb and flower gardens, partitioned with rock walls. The homes had been shaded in the long summer by fruit trees.
    He regarded the ruins of a cottage on a knoll, and suddenly had a memory from when he was a child of three. In it, his father had come home from his wanderings, and had taken him out into the village among the crowds. Fallion had ridden on his father’s shoulder, until his father stopped beneath a cherry tree on the knoll. There,Fallion pulled the red cherries from the tree, and they were so ripe that they burst at his touch, and juice ran thick down his fingers. He licked it off and picked his fill, all the while begriming his father, he was sure now.
    But his father had only laughed with delight.
    Fallion remembered riding upon the shoulders of a king, being taller than everyone, looking down upon men that had dwarfed him, wishing that he could be that tall forever.
    He smiled. It was a good memory, and one of only a handful that he recalled of his father. The journey across the ocean had been worth making just for that.
    But no cottages graced the fields anymore. Nothing was left but burned-out remains: their rocky husks down in the distance looked like dead beetles.
    The folk in the castle had probably burned the houses so that the monsters would not be able to hide in them.
Strengi-saats
, the enemy was called in the old tongue, the “strong ones.”
    And it was rumored that worse things had begun to haunt the woods. It was rumored that one of them might even haunt Castle Coorm.
    “Castle Coorm has become an island, a refuge of stone besieged by a wilderness of trees,” Fallion mused. “Now there’s not a hamlet within thirty leagues.”
    “We should know,” Talon groused. “We just floundered through every bog between here and the Courts of Tide.” She crouched, resting on her heels.
    Fallion was more leg-sore and hungry than he had ever been. Worse, he had a bad cut on his calf. It wasn’t much, but the smell of congealed blood drew strengi-saats.
    He wasn’t sure if he should try to rest here. He had heard a strange rumor of this place, the strangest that he’d heard in his life. It was said that several years past, a woman of Coorm had given birth not to a child, but to a tree—a short, stunted tree with a handful of roots and two gnarled limbs. The tree, it was said, had bark that was a ruddy gold. Fallion wondered at the tale. It was said thatthe woman’s flesh was green, like one of the Wizardborn filled with Earth Powers, and some speculated that her offspring was a “World Tree,” like the One True Oak of legend that had spread its branches wide, giving shelter to all of mankind at the beginning of creation.
    Among the peasants, the idea of a woman giving birth to a World Tree somehow did not seem beyond the realm of possibility. After all, since the coming of the Earth King, Fallion’s father, the world had changed. The children born after his coming were stronger than men in times past, wiser and more purposeful, even as the world around them grew stranger and more treacherous. Men were becoming more perfect.
    So was evil.
    The tree, so the tale went, had been planted in the castle green, where it could be protected and admired, but then a bandit came from the woods, Lord Hale, a man of great power.
    It was said that he slaughtered the wizardess.
    Many had fled from Coorm then, and for years now, there had been no news from the castle.
    Suddenly, a woman screamed down below.
    “What’s that?” Jaz asked. He pulled on his boot, leapt up. It was not the drawn-out wail of someone grieving past loss. It was announced first by grunts and short yelps of pain, shrieks of terror.
    “Someone is fighting,” Fallion said.
    “Someone is dying!” Rhianna corrected.
    From across the fields, at the eastern verge of