Selik tensed to drive the blade home. There was a heavy thud. Selik’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell sideways, landing on the ground next to Hirad, blood seeping from the back of his skull. There stood Sol, cudgel in hands and a look on his face that would brook no opposition. He checked both Ilkar and Hirad were all right and helped Hirad to his feet before turning to Selik’s people and the crowd of onlookers.

‘Anyone else who wants to test my commitment to The Raven, feel free to go right ahead,’ growled Sol.

Men and women were backing away from him as he spoke. City guards were elbowing their through the growing crowd. Sol collared the first of them and pointed down at Selik’s prone form.

‘He goes to the cells. And there he stays. He gets no treatment. If he survives till morning, he goes before the court. If he doesn’t, then this body will be host to a less odious soul.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the guard.

Sol addressed the crowd. ‘These are my streets. You tell me you are my people. Act like it. There will be no summary justice dealt out by the living or the dead. If you have a grievance, you bring it to me or to my officers. That is the way it is and will stay. We are in a serious situation. The rumours of invasion will have reached all your ears. Transgressions will be dealt with swiftly. I need all of you to back your city and your college. We must stand together if we are to prevail.’

A pale-looking woman pushed to the front of the crowd and spoke into the silence that had followed Sol’s words. She was no older than forty but had a haggard look about her that told of too many tears and too little sleep. She wore poor clothes but tried to make them appear smart with ribbons and ties. She stared at Ilkar and, before she uttered a word, he knew with a guilty cold feeling exactly what was coming.

‘Then hear me speak, Sol of Balaia,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘Tell me how should I feel and how should I react? There stands my son. The body of my son. Stolen by another soul. He treats the body as his own, yet it is not. He desecrates my son’s memory by using his body though I know him to be dead because he does not know me.

‘I want that body back and I want it now. To offer the respect my son deserves and to see him laid to rest in the right manner. This walking body insults me and it insults all my family and all of those taken by grief over the ones they have lost yet still see walking our streets. This cannot be right. It must be ended now.’

Ilkar felt the tension rise around them. Two of the city guard had begun to move the senseless Selik away, leaving four to stand in a loose ring around Sol. The crowd was still growing, albeit slowly given the hour of the night, but those present were four-square behind the poor woman. For himself, Ilkar could only nod and let his head fall forward a little to avoid her stricken gaze. He saw Sol move towards her.

‘I am sorry for your loss and I will not claim to understand it,’ he said, his voice gentle. The crowd fell quickly silent. ‘How can a mother react when the son she knows is dead is seen to walk but it not be him? Your desire to want his body for respectful burial is natural and will not be denied any longer than it must be. But you must understand these are days the like of which we have never seen and we must all be patient, wary and have courage. People like you most of all.’

Sol reached out to touch her but she drew away.

‘Your words mean nothing to me.’

‘Will you hear me?’ asked Ilkar.

‘You even speak with his voice,’ said the woman, tears falling down her cheeks. ‘He was no virtuous lad but he doesn’t deserve this, no one does.’

‘No, he doesn’t. But right now his soul is lost and that is far, far worse. Those of us returned, most of us, seek only to find a new resting place where we, and those like your poor son, can be at peace. Grieve for his soul but not for his body. The body is merely the vessel that your son used for his time alive. And if you can, rest easier knowing that his body, young, fit and wiry, is used now in an effort to save not just his soul, but yours too, everyone’s.

‘I don’t know if that makes sense but I promise you I will take care of this body as if it were my own and will make every effort to leave it unsullied.’

‘But where will that be?’ asked the woman. ‘Some distant battlefield? Some lonely corner of Balaia where I will never find him, never have the sight of him to close my mind on his life? What good is that to me?’

She turned back to Sol.

‘This has to end, Sol of Balaia. I am but one of many who hurt this way and there is no comfort for us. We don’t want the dead in the bodies of our loved ones. We want them gone. Leave us to fight our own battles. We do not need them. And we do not need you if you offer them sanctuary.’

Sol sagged visibly. ‘My lady, all I want is to help you live through what is to come. You must try and understand where we find ourselves. Find it in your heart to trust me and the decisions that I make.’

But the woman shook her head. ‘You are the mouthpiece of every ordinary Balaian, yet you are too close to the college, too close to the barons and too close to the elves. I have spoken but you have not listened. What more do we have to talk about?’

She turned away and was lost in the shadows. Angry faces glared at Sol, Ilkar and Hirad but no one said anything more. Ilkar put a hand on Sol’s shoulder and Balaia’s king turned an unhappy face to him.

‘I’m failing them,’ he said.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Ilkar. ‘They just have yet to see what we do.’

‘I feel like a fraud,’ said Sol.

‘I’m the fraud. Standing here in her son’s body. I feel for her, I really do. But what choice do we have?’

‘Either to stand here and yak about it, or get inside and yak about it over a goblet of wine.’

Sol managed a smile. ‘Well put, Hirad. Well put indeed. Come on. I’ve got some good stuff uncorked. Needs drinking with those I love.’

The evacuation fleet came in a night early. Throughout that night, quiet knocking on doors and silent escorting to the docks to take ship had worked well. Yet it was a slow process and with the morning came the inevitable anger and with it panic. Word spread quickly through those not destined to leave and tensions around the dock soared.

Ysundeneth was all but surrounded by flame and the clattering of the Garonin’s vydospheres. Beyond the borders of the city, the rainforest was part inferno, part charred dustscape. Out in the harbour, the forest of sails was slowly thinning out. The deep-water berths were full and every small craft had been pressed into service to ferry elves out to their only means of escape.

Forty thousand had come to hear the words uttered at the Caeyin, and all who desired it were offered passage and issued with papers. Yet twice that number now clogged the approaches to the docks or muddied the waters of the harbour in their own little boats, begging for passage. Ten thousand would be lucky. Thirty thousand would either take their chances in small craft or be abandoned to die.

Rebraal had said three hundred ships were guaranteed, and that was a number that would have been beyond imagining only ten years before. Yet, as Auum had predicted, it was nowhere near enough. Not even for the population of Ysundeneth alone, far less those who had journeyed from the rainforest.

Many thousands still waited to take ship and their path was being hampered by their less fortunate brothers and sisters. Standing in the harbour flag tower, Auum looked down on the growing and inevitable disaster. However much they had planned, it would still have come to this eventually. There had simply not been enough time to counter every threat. The Garonin, for all their ponderous advance, had left nowhere else to run.