Sat on the cold stone floor with his knees drawn close to his body, Rakon almost laughed into the dark. He could have been spending an idle afternoon in the whore house on the road to Armoria, dividing his attention between Weslar with his perfectly shaped lips, and Maragreet, who had the most exquisite breasts he had ever had the pleasure to lay eyes upon. He could have been hunting beneath the cool green leaves of Nymed, a full quiver of arrows at his back and a frothing wineskin at his hip. He could even have been at home, floating amongst the satyr like an Asrai prince. But he wasn’t doing any of those things. He was imprisoned a mile beneath the earth in an impenetrable dungeon that stank of piss and echoed with the screams of the wasting condemned. And it was all his own stupid fault.

  Probing the edges of the weeping knife wound in his thigh rewarded him with a biting flare of agony. He flung himself back against the wall, choking on his pain. Rakon knew he had to bind the wound, but there was nothing in the cell he could use for a bandage. With a low grunt, he resigned himself to ripping a strip of fabric from the linen vest he was wearing. The sacrifice stung. He had been uncommonly fond of that vest.

  “Bastard.”

  Rakon spat the word, bending to wrap the strip of linen tightly around his bleeding thigh. The vest was ruined anyway, split at the seams when the vicious little Salt Sword broke his glamour.

  He was still finding it hard to believe that sliver of a girl had bested him. His disguise had slipped away somehow when she entered the room and he had been able to fight as his true self, as a satyr. That should have given him an advantage. Her fists were half the size of those his own hands could make. Her feet, cushioned in their soft leather boots, were laughable when compared to his hooves—wide, smooth, and hard as the obsidian rock that presently towered over his head. But her punches had landed so hard and her kicks had been so swift.

  “Bastard,” he spat again, unable to come up with any satisfactory explanation.

  An icy chill seeped from the stone bricks on all sides, biting into the bruised skin of Rakon’s back. He briefly thought about lying in the scant straw scattered across the floor. A rat emerged from a minute gap in the brickwork and sniffed the air, long whiskers quivering. It darted out across the straw to retrieve something too small for Rakon to see, then scurried back to its hole with its prize carefully held between dull yellow teeth. The satyr rapidly changed his mind about lying down and straightened against the freezing stone.

  Rakon’s fingers closed about the necklace hanging at his throat. Vixana had called it an amulet, though it was really little more than a dull rock on a rope. Rough and jagged, the colour of pond slime. No casual observer would guess at the hideous power contained within it. Rakon had experienced that for himself the very first time he’d worn it. How incredibly stupid he had been. How casually he had thrown the ugly necklace over his head. In his more charitable moments, he told himself he could never have known Vixana would be so devious. Still, an infinitely more sensible, yet bone-weary, part of him knew he should never have trusted a witch.

  Known throughout the wilds of Joria, people turned to Vixana and begged for her help when they were unable to conceive a child, or when their child was ailing. When their crops were dying in the fields or their grapes were withering on the vine, hers was the door they would knock on, their arms full of bribes and their eyes full of hope. And so hers was the door Rakon had found himself in front of when he had his own favour to ask.

  Vixana’s cottage was half-hidden by overhanging trees and creeping trails of ivy, squatting at the end of a neatly cobbled path long left to weeds. Huge stalks of stinging nettles lined the bottom of a high stone wall that appeared to belong to some sort of outbuilding. Rakon wondered if the place was once a smallholding. Now the wall was dense with moss, the gaping crevices in the brickwork stuffed with dry leaves and the glossy heads of starling chicks, their orange mouths open wide to the sky as they jostled against each other. Blocking the end of the path outside the cottage was a huge cauldron suspended over a pyre, freshly built within a circle of blackened stones.

  Rakon began to walk around the stone circle but paused when his hoof crushed something chalky and brittle against the cobbles. The ground before the cottage was carpeted with the small bones of animals. Flaring his nostrils, he picked a path through the grisly debris and knocked loudly on the cottage’s sun-bleached door, hoping the wood wouldn’t splinter to dust beneath his fist.

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  When Vixana opened the door she displayed no surprise to find a seven-foot satyr standing on the threshold, but for one long moment, Rakon was speechless. He had expected to find an old crone—a hag with twisted fingers and wild, thinning hair. Instead, the woman behind the door was young and beautiful, her skin so smooth, it glowed with an otherworldly sheen. Her long hair was tied with silver thread in a braid that reached her waist and each of her fingers was weighted with at least two rings. A chain of tiny stars was fixed across her forehead, framing large eyes the colour of flaking rust. Rakon felt he had wandered into the path of a scarlet-eyed cobra, one who fixed him with a hypnotising stare so it might devour him whole.

  Wordlessly, Vixana invited him inside. He ducked through the door and straightened in the flickering gloom, his horns brushing the beams of the compact cottage. The space was dusty and unkempt. There was a table pushed against the wall, littered with several soiled vessels including a blackened pot that either had the remnants of an elixir or the witch’s breakfast caked around the rim. Thick, yellow candles dripped wax onto the grimy surface. At the very back of the room, half in shadow, he could glimpse the foot of a bed piled high with woollen blankets. A mouldering curtain of tattered ribbons and bizarre hanging dolls fashioned from cloth and clay hung before it, providing a crude partition.

  “The son of Pyros,” Vixana said before he could speak. “What an honour it is for one so important to visit with a simple forest dweller such as myself.”

  “I am hoping you are anything but a simple forest dweller,” Rakon replied, finding his voice as he straightened his shoulders. “You are Vixana, are you not? Witch of the Wilds?”

  “Aye, some call me that.”

  “I have a favour to ask of you, witch.”

  He cast about for a place to sit. The two chairs and single stool scattered about the cottage were splintered and wholly inadequate. He shook out the black shaggy locks of his hair and remained standing.

  “I presume you know how to cast glamour magick?”

  “Aye,” Vixana replied. “What do you wish to disguise?”

  “Myself, of course.” Rakon took a breath before continuing. “As I am sure you are well aware, it is not easy for someone of my—” He paused, searching for the appropriate word. “For someone of my stature to move about the world unhindered. I wish to take on the appearance of a human man so that I might see more of Joria. Such an experience would make me a better leader of the satyr once the time comes for me to take over from Father.”

  “You don’t need to be inventing excuses for your whims on my account, Sir Rakon. You don’t strike me as being too bothered about leading your people just now.”

  Rakon’s mouth drew into a scowl as he prepared to argue this point, but Vixana hushed him with a wave of her hand. She turned towards an open cupboard softly decomposing against the wall, purple skirts swirling about her feet. There were many greasy bottles littering the shelves of the cupboard, crisscrossed with spiderwebs. Rakon decided the cottage must have been cared for once because the midnight blue cupboard had obviously been handsome in times past. Constellations of moons and hundreds of silver stars wove across the doors and over several drawers at the bottom, spiralling around the handles. He idly wondered if Vixana had painted it herself. She began pawing through her vast collection of dimly coloured bottles and vials and Rakon watched her with interest, curiosity overriding his indignation.

  He had never been in the presence of a real witch. There was something about the violet shadows playing across the woman’s oddly smooth face that both unnerved and thrilled him. The satyrs were a people who studied herb craft. One or two among them took up the mantle of shaman, dangling totems made from dried strips of painted deerskin from their horns and daubing their arms and chests with chalky runes. They claimed to be dreamwalkers, able to roam within a person’s head and heart as they slumbered—but they were not witches, able to summon power from the earth, or druids drawing down purple and silver magick from the moons.

  Rakon looked away when Vixana finally closed the doors of her painted cabinet and walked back across the room, trying to act as if he had not been staring. She grasped the amulet in one hand. When she stopped before him she held it out and dangled it before his face, letting it swing back and forth. Rakon reached for it but the witch pulled it away with surprising dexterity before his fingers could close on it. He took a step backwards.

  “Do you often take things without thinking?” she chastised him. “You are a thick-headed, selfish one, aren’t you? For all you know, this amulet could have been coated with poison. Or maybe it’s charmed to turn you into a stinking ooze toad as soon as your fingers brush the surface.”

  Rakon’s eyes widened in alarm. “It’s not spelled, is it?”

  “Of course, it’s spelled, you silly boy.” Vixana seemed to be taking a perverse joy in his confusion. “But spelled with what? That should be your question.”