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off infection. Now her leg stank of bear fat and gwassen berries, the principal ingredients of the paste. The smell made her a little homesick. It was a long way from the mountains and the squat gwassen bushes with their bitter, restorative fruit.
    With the bandage secure, Ferin gingerly hopped up on her good foot. She was concealed in a thick clump of black alders by the riverbank, but she still took care to move slowly and stay hidden. She hadn’t got close enough to be sure which clan the horse nomads who’d caught up with her came from, but it didn’t matter. The shaman’s immediate unleashing of the wood-weird confirmed her early suspicions: the word had spread to all Twenty Tribes now, to find the Athask woman far from her mountain. Find her and kill her.
    All the clans that gave tribute to the Witch With No Face would obey that instruction. Which, as far as Ferin knew, was nineteen of the Twenty Tribes. Only the raft people who drifted across the bitter sea in the far west had managed to avoid the tribute and theretribution of the Witch With No Face, by the simple expedient of taking their rafts to the far side of their salty waters. The horse-folk of the steppe, and even her own mountain-dwellers, they all gave the Witch With No Face the required offerings.
    â€œOfferings,” whispered Ferin, and smiled. That was how she had gotten her use-name. The name she had been given at birth was lost, all record and memory of it destroyed when she’d been chosen to be a tribute to the Witch. But later, her very smallest not-sister had tried to call her “offering” like the adults did, but only “ferin” had come out. While the adults carefully always called her Offering, as was traditional, nearly all the children called her Ferin.
    At least they did when she was allowed to see them, which was not very often. Each clan’s chosen offerings had to live away from the rest of their people, a league or more from the main camp, to be overseen by the tribe’s best teachers, who ensured the offerings would grow up to be physically and mentally strong. Fast and lithe, supple in mind and body, trained with bow, sword, and knife. Taught to speak the common language of the clans and the Old Kingdom, even to read and write as well, something most nomads never bothered with unless they were to become a witch or shaman.
    The Witch With No Face wanted only the best when it came time to move into her new body.
    Ferin grimaced, both from the thought of that and from the pain in her leg. No muscle or tendon was severed, and it would support her weight if absolutely necessary. But it hurt, a pain that not only inhabited the wound but sent stabbing outriders up her leg and into every toe.
    The tribute had been going on for centuries, the Witch With No Face demanding girls be kept ready, choosing one every dozen years or so, depending on how hard she had treated her current body. When that grew too old—and her bodies aged far faster than they would have simply from the normal passage of time—or was injured,the Witch With No Face would leave her old body and move into the new one.
    If an offering achieved the age of seventeen without being chosen by the Witch, she was killed and her body burned, the ashes sent to the Witch as proof of the deed. After all, there were always plenty more. If one clan ran out, another would have a suitable candidate, a new body for the Witch With No Face.
    But not anymore, thought Ferin with grim satisfaction.
    Something had happened to the Witch some eight moons past, a great defeat that had completely destroyed the body she inhabited. This had briefly been a cause of rejoicing, on the first news, until it became clear that the death of her body did not mean the Witch With No Face was actually dead herself.
    She had returned from Death as a terrible spirit, something like the entities which inhabited wood-weirds and Spirit-Walkers, or even the tiny, malignant