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tell him that she was leaving.
    The Ranu soldiers never spoke to her throughout the journey except with gestures for basic needs, like eating, mounting and dismounting. True to Rasu’s promise, the escorting soldiers were distant yet polite, according her respect as if she was an important person, and she felt safe in their company.
    They shadowed an ancient forest throughout the first day after crossing the river, before turning north and joining the main road to Marella late on the second morning. Meg had only seen the forest from a distance as a dark smudge on her annual journeys to Lightsword, and to travel within a stone’s throw of it made the place mysterious and intriguing. It was different to what she remembered of the Whispering Forest in Western Shess—the trees were taller, broader, thicker, older, the trunks gnarled with wisdom and wrapped with vines. It was a forest that had seen history pass and somehow escaped destruction, the kind of place that she imagined A Ahmud Ki might have roamed.
    The Andrak had myths associated with a forest-dwelling culture called the Lendel and she had heard stories about them from people in Marella over the fifteen years, but she also remembered that A Ahmud Ki used another name, similar in sound and yet different. Aelendyell , she recalled suddenly, as a breeze whispered to her, and she shivered as if fingers had stroked her bare arm. She glanced at her Ranu escort at that moment, but they seemed oblivious to the forest’s presence or the breeze’s message.
    The first night, they rested in a village at the forest’s edge. The locals stared at her until she greeted them in Andrak, and shared her name, and then they were full of questions.
    ‘Why are you being escorted?’
    ‘Are the Ranu brutal?’
    ‘Will they take everything?’
    ‘Have you seen prisoners?’
    She answered the questions as honestly as she could, telling the dozen men and women outside the village tavern that she was on her way to Marella. ‘There’s been trouble in Marella,’ a man with a red eye-patch and a limp in his left leg told her. ‘You shouldn’t go there.’
    His comment stirred her uncertainty. ‘What kind of trouble?’
    ‘Rebels,’ he said. ‘The Ranu were ruthless with them. That’s why we’re scared that you’ve brought these four here. How many more will come?’
    ‘What have the Ranu done in Marella?’ Meg asked.
    ‘Burnt houses. Hung those who resisted,’ said the man. ‘There’s a curfew and it’s hard to get in or out.’
    ‘How do you know this?’
    ‘I was visiting when the Ranu came, but I left when the trouble started. My sister lives there. Dyan Trapper. Do you know her?’
    Meg nodded. ‘We work together in the shirt factory.’
    ‘I’m Liam Woodburner,’ the man said. ‘If you’re going there, look out for my sister for me.’
    ‘I will,’ she promised, but her heart was in turmoil for Emma’s safety now that she knew there had been conflict in Marella. When the curiosity dissipated, and the people dispersed, she accepted a woman’s offer to sleep overnight in her cottage and not on the ground in the company of the Ranu, but she took a long time to get to sleep and it was a sleep overwhelmed with dreams.
    She stood on deck of a ship, staring away from the setting sun at the endless ocean expanse. The waves rolled beneath her feet and she knew she was sailing towards Western Shess. She felt that she had been away from home a very long time and it was as if she had been waiting to make this journey.
    The old dream, standing on the battlements of a wall, came and went. Surrounded by people, she was facing a storm coming towards the walls, a storm with a blue glow at its base, and beside her were people for whom she felt an enormous love.
    Another new, brief dream startled her. She was in a space dimly lit from an unseen source, but she sensed that all around her were books, endless shelves of books, and there was someone else too, the disembodied