Days bled into a dark, agonizing blur of damp straw, rain-slick roads, and the suffocating stench of bitter herbs.
Karl became a ghost driven by a cold, mechanical paranoia.
He never stayed in a single place for more than a day.
One night it was a drafty shepherd's hut high in the pine crags; the next, the floor of an abandoned grain mill or a foul-smelling stable on the outskirts of a forgotten border town.
He transformed them both with ruthless, clinical precision.
He hid Eiravyne's long, dark hair, until every trace of the Duchess of Wandova was buried beneath the dull, matted appearance of a common peasant.
He shed his own Romani clothes, dressing in the threadbare tunic of a dirt-poor itinerant peddler traveling with his dying, invalid sister.
To the few travelers who crossed their path, she was merely a hollow-cheeked, sickly girl wrapped in coarse, stained wool.
To Karl, she was a secret he couldn't afford to let speak.
