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I have saved this box for last.

All my other possessions I have given away, sold, burned, everything that I will not need, or that the horses could not carry. This I thought, in particular, to burn, unopened, to burn and spare myself the sting, but to deny loss is to never have possessed at all.

My hands open the box. I gather my will to halt them, to make them cease this rebellion, to replace the objects they have removed, one by one, to close the dark wood over them again. But I do not. The hands, the wood, the objects, right here with me, are mine, though somehow they seem to recede down an impossible distance; the will that moves the hands is mine, though I would deny it.

They set upon the table a first object, a talisman, a token...

(The object is a knife, its blade hooked inward, an elaborate curving claw, dark with the ripple pattern of the finest folded steel. The hilt is complicated, strange, too many rings and curves of wire-wrapped metal.)

...and I am elsewhere...

So sharp is the edge that I do not feel the cut, only see the blade shed an arc of ruby drops as it sweeps away from my forearm. A voice snarls, more animal than human, a high, thin, keening sound...

(The object is a braided length of rope, tied and cut and tied and cut again, twisted fibers dry and dark and smooth with age)

Birdsong, treeshadow, the smell of leaf mold and trail dust.

"Pleeeease..."

"I don't understand. Am I not your enemy?"

"It doesn't matterrrr naowww..."

(The object is a horseshoe, shrunk to an arc of rust. A single nail, barely more than a sliver of fragile red decay, juts upward from it.)

Strange mismatched eyes watching me.

"Are you still so determined to see me die? Are you all born crrruel?"

"You misunderstand. I do not desire your death. This is my duty. I take no pleasure in it."

(The object is dual, two locking fetters joined by a length of chain. The steel is strong still, hard and smooth.)

My fingers are buried in softness finer than ermine. Tiny hard muscles shift beneath it, trembling...

(The object is a coiled whip of braided bullhide, long and thick and heavy, cracked with age. The innermost coil is discoloured, its thin length stained throughout with old blood.)

Her scream is a piercing shock of agony. Sweat runs down my chest and back, my eyes sting with it...

(The object is a strip of once-white linen, twisted back on itself, also dark with blood.)

"Whyyyy? Whyyy should I live? What have you left me to live for?"

A dryness in my mouth, a tightness in my throat...

(The object is a collar of cunningly interlocking segments, its length twisting this way and that as gravity clashes with the supporting stiffness of the steel links.)

Sunlight and birdsong and running water. Mismatched eyes looking up at me, brimming with moisture.

"You want it BACK?"

"Well... sometimes..."

(The object is a small bundle of dried wildflowers.)

(The object is scrap of scarlet cloth.)

(The object is a lock of what appears to be tawny hair, tied with a green ribbon.)

I remember...

No, I am well, it is nothing. The smoke stings my eyes, that is all. I am fine now. I am fine. Please forgive my rambling.

***

I should start from the beginning, insofar as there was a beginning. But if a beginning there was, then it began many leagues to the north of here, in the King's Forrest. It began, as most tales either begin or end, in blood.

The clearing was thick with the metallic stink of it.

"They were here, my lord. Both o' them. Slashed up something fierce, they were. There, my lord, where the ground's all torn up and stained."

I reined in Bastion, swung down from the saddle, and rounded upon the fool. "You've touched them? Moved the bodies ? Walked through here ?"

"Aye, my lord. We buried 'em decent-like. Bad enough they were murdered, lord. If we left 'em unburied, their ghosts would come a'walkin' for sure."

I restrained the urge to knock the man sprawling, loosen a few of his teeth for him. "Never do that. Never touch anything. Never move anything. You can bury a man easily enough after the King's Justice has been."

"My lord? I don't think-"

"That's right, you don't, or you would have realized that I would need to see the bodies, see where they lay, how they died, what the murderer did after. Tracking isn't magic, you buffoon, and no ghosts will rest easy if you let their slayer go free with your clumsy, ignorant, short-sighted intentions to help!"

"Sorry, m'lord. Can you-"

"Yes, I probably can, but I'll need to see the bodies. Show me where you buried them." I turned back, fumbling with the rawhide ties which held a short-handled shovel across the back of Bastion's saddle. The massive grey did not shift, or stamp, or snort, as a lesser animal would have. He simply stood.

"You're going to dig them up, my lord? Their ghosts-"

"No, I am not going to dig them up. Their are two kinds of people in this world, Thomas Thatcher of Greenway town. Those who are addressed as 'my lord', and those who dig. You dig."

***

He had probably been a squatter, a refugee from the wars, drifting through the contested lands to settle in the King's forest, to scratch out a living for himself and the woman however he could, a living fraught by want, by fear of the King's Sheriff and of his men.

By fear of me, and of my men.

I wished they were with me now, instead of this frightened buffoon, this Thomas Thatcher, who huddled at the edge of the trees, his eyes darting that way and this, no doubt expecting that any moment angry ghosts would rise from the pitiful corpses that lay at my feet, their ragged clothing smeared with red earth. I would have given much then to have Little Peter with me, or Three-League Jake, or any of my foresters beside me.

For the bodies told a tale, and I knew what I must do.

"This was a fight."

"My lord?"

"Oh, stop simpering and come here, man. I've seen hundreds of corpses, and made a few, and I've never yet seen any ghosts. The worst you'll get from these poor wretches is the stink of death in your nostrils, and you've that already, I'll warrant. That you'll get from me, if you don't attend, is a clout about your thick skull. Now move."

Shuffling, reluctant feet.

"Now, see here? Those cuts? Forearm, shoulder, ribs, then throat. I make him swinging something, and meeting a blade coming the other way."

"I...found a hatchet a little way from the man, my lord."

No need to ask what he done with it. The wars had hurt everyone, and good tools were valuable. No cause to take him to task for it; the smallfolk must survive how they can, when times are hard.

"Was there blood on it?"

"N..no, my lord."

"Aye. Be surprised if there was. Whoever did this was quick, you see? This here...the cut is not deep, but it's clean, no ragged edges or pulling, and it's right on the tendons. A knife, most like, something short but very sharp indeed, and he who held it knew what he was about."

"A bandit, my lord?"

"No, Thatcher. Outlaws wouldn't have bothered with refugees. Nothing to steal. And if they had, they'd have simply put an arrow in them. But..."

"My lord?"

"Something's not right here. See this, on the ribs?"

"Oh. It's going upward... from below?"

"Yes, exactly. Maybe you're not so hopeless after all. Quite sharply upward indeed. Whoever did this was quite short, almost child-sized. Are you getting all this?"

"Ah... yes, my lord. But w..."

"Because I need you to go back to Greenway Town, Thatcher. Tomorrow or the next day, you should see a patrol come in, wearing Sheriff's livery. You are to tell the one called 'Little Peter' what you saw here, and what I went to do. You'll know which one he is; he'll be the one that's as big as any two of the others put together. Got all that?"

"Aye, m'lord. But what are you going to do?"

"Track him. From the look of these folk, he has a day's start on me. I'm not about to let him get more. Bastion!"

The destrier was at my side in an instant, and stood like a stone as I swung myself into saddle.

"Oh, and... Thomas?"

"M'lord?"

"Bury them again. Decent, as you said, just a little too soon. Always think first, Thatcher, then feel afterwards."

"M'lord..."

But I did not wait to hear the rest.

***

Most of the King's Sheriffs employ trackers, and so do I. But I am not the Sheriff of High Rock, or Arwick Town, or Gareth's Rest, whose fifty thousand souls are bounded within stone walls a man may walk between in the space of an hour. My charge is the Seitforest, hundreds of leagues of verdant green, from Stardock to Beggar's Ford, from Greenway Town to the sea. I will employ no man who cannot track a red deer over broken ground at night, and I am neither the best nor the least of them in this.

The murderer camped cold, built no fires, cooked no food, scarcely rested at all. He merely plied his way north, careless of how he broke brush, bent grass, moved earth, as if he had no fear at all of what might follow; no fear at all, or too much.

I never guessed that are other things to fear than what follows, or that fear can drive towards as easily as away.

***

Some things are long in the telling and short in the doing and others quite the reverse. Shall I tell you of the business of tracking a criminal through the forest? Of bent twigs and crushed fallen leaves? Of cold camps and of sleep warily caught, always listening for the footstep of the quarry, some poacher or murder or outlaw desperate enough to turn on the hunter, to chance ambush on a man armed and armoured, in a bid for freedom or at least life?

No, I will not trouble your ears thus. I have tracked men before, slain them when I must, brought them back for flogging or hanging or prison when I could. It is a grim business, and I have brought far too many to a grim enough end to have any joy of it, or any joy in the telling. My name may be black indeed among those who fear, and black enough it deserved to be, then, but never have I relished taking life. My sins, though black enough to damn me, were other than this.

And so I rode with neither eagerness nor reluctance, but with the deliberation of a man with a job of work to do. Tracking a man is no simple thing, no business of following footprints in soft earth, no exact alchemy or doctoral art of judging the length of a man's stride, or the weight of his body, so that the expert may say such nonsense of how the man they follow has a clubbed foot, or is a master swordsman, or was out of breath when he walked here.

It is a business of broken twigs. Of bent branches, and matted grass. Of little signs here and there, which may tell you whether you follow a man, or a horse, or a deer, or an oliphant (if such things truly exist), but will say little of what manner of man you follow.

So you must not think me ill at my office, when I say I expected nothing of what I found, when, in the predawn cold before the fifth day, I broke, riding hard, into the murder's camp, and saw...

...her.

How to describe the shock of it? And how to part years of memory, to grasp at the moment when the familiar was strange? When constant was past all expectation?

I am no craven. I feel fear as any man must, when facing a mortal foe, but that fear has never frozen or unmanned me, and never will. Yet at that moment, surprise and wonder froze me as still as fear never could.

At first I wondered what I saw... a beast standing upright? A child in a carnivale mask? Some devil, or some goblin from the realms of the Fair Folk, clothed thus in illusion to taunt me? But my eyes insisted that what I saw was real enough, and solid.

Four feet tall she stood, and perhaps a handspan more, the height of a dwarf, but with her limbs slender, straight, and graceful, not twisted and stunted. She was clothed like a human -leather, linen, a worn-looking cloak of green- , and the curves of her body, though slender, proclaimed beyond doubt that she was a woman. And yet her skin, where it showed, was dappled with tawny fur, all gold and black and yellow, and her face was strange, shaped wrongly, muzzled, and her eyes...

It was Bastion who saved my life. Had I been afoot, I might well have stood staring as she slit my throat, still trying to riddle out what manner of thing she was. The great warhorse, not clever enough to solves such puzzles, was wise enough not to care. When she came at me, he reared and kicked, slicing his great hooves downward with skull-crushing force. She, whatever she was, checked her rush with the agility of a...

...of a....

...and spun the wicked, inward-curving blade between her...fingers? They were strangely shaped, short, furred like the paw of a...

...of a...

She hissed, parting flat lips to reveal white fangs, and her eyes narrowed, glaring at me; one blue, the other green, a strange imbalance, and both had no whites at all, only wrong-shaped dark pupils, narrow slits like the eyes of a...

...of a...

...of a cat.

...and now I saw it all; a disorganization of features shuffled themselves into order before my eyes. I stared at some strange admixture of a graceful young woman of minuscule stature, and a tawny-furred cat. My muscles unfroze. I had a quarry, and a duty, and I understood the what of that I faced, if not the why.

I drew out Arbiter. The.. woman?...cat?... backed a pace, her eyes shifting warily from my face to the longsword, three feet of ripple-patterned Damask steel, honed to an edge as thin as pain.

And then she spoke. I remember still the yowling, hissing harshness of it.. "Whaiyyy do you follow meeeee? Stand off, or I will bleeeeed you, mannish."

Those were the first words she ever spoke to me. Had she not spoken, I might have cut her dead on the spot, or simply ridden her down under Bastion's mighty hooves. But whatever I saw before me, it wore clothing, used tools, and spoke. If it was not mannish, it was still a person and not a wild beast. A person, and therefore a murderer.

I slid from the saddle, bidding Bastion to hold with a gentle push from my free hand. The massive grey would fight for me better than many men, and more faithfully than a brother, but he knew only how to kill. I meant to have my quarry alive.

"I arrest you at word of his Grace Ulfgar the Third, King of Eld and the Sommerset Isles. Throw down your weapon and submit yourself to his justice."

She hissed again. And launched herself at me, without a word.

A foolish thing to do. Oh, she did not fight like a fool, no. She was all twisting grace and agile footwork, a trained fighter beyond a doubt. But she was a fool to even try it, or so I thought, for I could see no other reason to so desperately gamble her life. I must have weighed two of her, her head did not even reach to my shoulders, and for her small knife, I matched her with a three feet of the finest, lightest, sharpest Damascus steel to be had for money or loyalty or love; Arbiter will split plate and mail better than a heavy war axe, and will divide a thread of Cathayan silk dropped upon her edge. And though I am not the finest tracker of my men, I will yield to none in swordwork; I have slain men in war, and yet more in the King's forest. I could take her, I knew, and perhaps I might even take her alive.

And so it was a strange fight, as she struggled to spill my life's blood, and I struggled not to spill hers. I could have crushed her quick enough, battered through her guard with weight and reach, split through that fine golden fur to mar the forest moss with her blood...

I might so easily have...

No, I will not dwell on it. It is a mercy that we are never given to know what might have been. I have received many undeserved mercies.

But I could not pass the knife. Once past it, I could bear her to the earth, pin her with my weight and strength, and bind her over for trial. But her point swept quickly in fine, calculated arcs, always pointing, always threatening, turned back only when to reach further for me would spit her upon Arbiter's point.

I would have to offer something, present an opening, risk her lethal grace and speed, to win her close enough to my grasp.

I spun my sword in a figure of eight, as foolish, half-trained swordsmen are wont to do, pretending not to know its weakness...

She took the bait, caught with my blade in quinte, and slashed at the proferred forearm...

So sharp is the edge that I do not feel the cut, only see the blade shed an arc of ruby drops as it sweeps away from my forearm. A voice snarls, more animal than human, a high, thin, keening sound...

I cross-stepped my front foot forward and inward, catching a strangely-jointed ankle as I seized the glove of of her knife hand with my left, and held her by it as she toppled to my right. My blade keened as I swept it between us, point downward, grazing the earth, then skyward... and my sword hand, forearm bleeding freely, descended to follow her fall, the unyielding steel bars of Arbiter's basket hilt hammering her down to an insensible sprawl upon the dead leaves.

I had a prisoner.