Chapter 18: The Bruxa's Terms

The fog moved, and nothing moved with it.

That was the wrong kind of nothing. The marsh had been full of small wrongnesses since they crossed the first boundary stone — sounds mismatched to their sources, the sweet rot of something large and dead somewhere northeast, the green-gold light that had appeared in the fog like a held breath made visible. This was different. This was the stillness that exists in the space between a predator deciding and a predator acting, and Arthur had been in enough rooms with enough dangerous people to know the flavor of it.

He had been in those rooms, however, with something he could negotiate with.