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bottom of the ravine, looking up at his legs as the blood trickled along them and hearing the splintering of bone that followed the horse’s dying screams.
    No, the worst was knowing that sword and dagger had been lost in the brushwood tangle of his descent, and that at least one leg was useless, vised between the interlocking branches that pinned him. He was trapped, and the monster would come back. He had seen its eyes. It would come back for him. And he might not be dead by then.
    He’d been a fool, and he was paying for that luxury now in the only coin that closes such debts.
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    Ruana Rulane rode through the autumn fields, and on into the woods that framed the deep forest. There would be no heat in the autumn sunlight until the late afternoon; Ruana was glad of her heavy cloak and the warmth of the horse between her knees.
    She loosened Shadowkiss in its well-greased sheath, and told over the ashwood shafts of the hunting spears she’d bought from the forester’s widow, and wondered what prey she sought.
    A monster, the villagers said. That could be anything. But wolves wouldn’t take children when sheep could be had. And Worm would blight the land and leave the children and the folk to starve. The forester had spoken to his wife of a cat before he was killed himself, but the tracks were weeks gone and the cats in these woods hunted rabbits, not men.
    Somewhere in the back of her mind, a memory stirred.
    She came finally into the rocks and the open land, and her horse and the carrion feeders shied at the same moment. She saw the half-eaten horse, still in its gaudy trappings. Its neck had been bitten through, and there were deep claw-marks upon its shoulders and its flanks. The memory came clear, and she remembered.
    Tiger. No creature of sorcery, but Death in a gray dappled coat. She’d seen them in the east. Over mountains and rivers, beyond lakes wide enough to fool the eye that there was no other side, at the far side of deserts burnished bright and hard as glass, there was a place where cats with teeth as long as knives hunted men: a land whose forests stretched like feasting-halls from mountain to desert. Men did not rule there.
    This was not a land for tiger. Perhaps some tribute-wagon bound for Alarra had disgorged its cargo untimely.
    She looked about for a place to tie her horse, and finally wedged its reins beneath a boulder far enough from its dead fellow that it wouldn’t, probably, choose to bolt.
    The ashwood spears would be useless. They would kill wolf and boar, but not tiger. She left them with the horse. Then she pulled Shadowkiss from its sheath and walked slowly forward, studying the ground for signs. The sword hoarded daylight, giving it back in ocean-colored fire, and the print of the wide clawed pads was blatant in the blood-muddied dust.
    Then she heard a low coughing growl.
    It had cost him dear, but Moonflute had freed his leg. He could not stand, but he could crawl, and the gilt of his sword-hilt glittered among the fallen leaves.
    His sword arm was useless; bruised to aching numbness in the fall and clawed by the monster besides. He did not think about that. Only the sword mattered.
    At last he could clasp his fingers about it, and rolled onto his back, panting with exhaustion, drawing his sword awkwardly to him with the hand he could still use.
    And stared once more into the eyes of the Monster of Paloe.
    It was as if someone had taken the small cats of the forest and somehow made them bigger than stags. Its fur was the ash gray of a dying fire, and upon that ash lay the spots and stripes of a gray darker still. From its upper jaw hung two enormous fangs as long as his hand.
    It crouched in the brush a few yards farther down the slope. Only its eyes betrayed it to his sight: pale and inhuman as death, they glittered in the autumn sun. It watched him unmoving. Soon it would rush forward, and his brief life would be over.
    No one would know that he had lived, or