text: The forest whispered and murmured around Aedwen in the darkness. From where she lay under the thick blanket of cloaks and bracken she could make out a small patch of sky through the boughs of the great linden tree that spread its limbs above her. The light from the quarter moon silvered the leaves as they waved in the light breeze. Far beyond the tree, in the infinite expanse of the sky, the spray of stars was bright against the deep purple of the night's shroud.
  
  Staring up at the moon, she wondered whether she would see it swallowed up before her eyes, as she had when they had fled from Briuuetone. But its light remained constant and cold in the sky.
  
  An owl hooted far off. Aedwen half-imagined she heard the plaintive call of a wolf on the wind, but perhaps it was just a dog in a farmstead somewhere nearby. She recalled the prints that Dunston had told her belonged to a wolf and shuddered, despite feeling snug in her hiding place.
  
  Something rattled and cracked out in the blackness of the woodland and she started, clutching tightly the small knife Dunston had given her. She shook her head. What use would such a weapon be should a wolf come upon her in the darkness? The thought of slavering jaws, full of drool-dripping sharp teeth filled her with terror.
  
  She tried to push the thoughts away. No wild animal would attack her. No, she thought, it should not be the animals that frightened her. There were worse things in the woods that night.
  
  She had watched in rapt silence as Dunston had daubed mud over his shiny axe and rubbed the mire on his face and beard. She knew he had once been a warrior, and she had watched him fight at Briuuetone, but now she had seen the true nature of the man. He had killed without thought, and then, painting his face so that he seemed more beast than man, he had slunk off into the night to kill again.
  
  The sounds of Ithamar's torture had ripped at her soul, terrified her. After witnessing the aftermath of these men's tortures in Cantmael, she could well imagine what they had been doing to the monk.
  
  When she had finally found the courage to ask Dunston what he meant to do, he had turned to her and she was sure there had been a savage gleam of hunger in his eyes.
  
  "I am going to even the odds," he had said.
  
  He had promised to return, but as she lay there in the darkness, she trembled to think of him coming back for her drenched in blood and stinking of death.
  
  She tried to push such thoughts from her mind. It was unfair of her, she knew. He had shown her nothing but kindness and he was risking his life for her. And yet there had been something in his gaze since he had slain the man that unnerved her.