Jake rose groggily to his feet and looked around him in amazement. The landscape was different because he was standing in dense woodland at night with no sense of where he was nor with any idea of what era.
Skeletal oak branches beckoned in the form-changing moonlight and Werburgh made the sign of the Cross. Her stomach lurched, sick of the forest in the weird night: the flitter of bat wings, the barn owl’s shriek. Bears and wolves and worse lurked among gaunt wayside trees. For sure, just as scudding clouds hid the stars, fiends and ogres lived hidden in the thick, black undergrowth; Werburgh prayed demons might not appear as suddenly as the North Star emerged against the ink-black sky. Her lips moved in a wordless prayer, imploring angels to save them from earthbound horrors: bands of t
