Mages know the difference between dreaming and not. The way they train you early to tell it apart so you don't get yourself trapped--nothing formal for Matthias, whose education was in mud-spattered tents and on frozen marches between battlefields and danger. But he knows to look for the seams so he can pick it apart, keep himself safe.

So as the ghosts begin to appear--all ages, all sizes, some pristine and some spattered in gore and some barely there at all--he turns with confidence to whoever he's stood near.

"Want to have a bet?"

Sunshine is spilling from an open door, and the floor of the landing here is softer with every step, stone that gives way to spring mud. Matthias, climbing the stairs, stops on the landing and grabs, blindly, for whoever he's with, intending to pull them to a stop along with him.

"D'you hear," he says, and then there it is, a distant tolling of a country chapel bell, somewhere far away.

Stretched long down the flagstones spills a black shadow. Difficult, at first, to make out. Dangling bare feet. Scrawny legs. A threadbare dress, Matthias already knows the color--brown, everything was brown in the village. The inky shadow of the crossbar, not a gallows but a tree in the field.

"It's not real." He says it, but Matthias is looking at that open door still. The creak of a rope, the tolling of the bell. "It's never real. I know it's not."

But. Like a hook in the belly. He stays on the stair.

It's not funny now.

"C'mon!"

The girl wears her long brown hair in two braids and when she turns to run, they whip round her. Her leather armor is battered and well-worn and a little too large so that it stands away from her chest like framework. There's mischief in her smile. And she looks real, and living, and whole, and leaving bloody bootprints on the stone floor.

"We've found a way through," she says. "They tried to hem us in from the east, the bastards, only there's a gap and we can make it if we're quick about it. The others are waiting for us but they won't wait long so we must be quick--"

Around the corner, then, and there's more blood with every step that she takes. The smell of it oils in with the smoke and fire and the odor of magic crackling like peppermint above it all. The girl stays just ahead, leading the way, and at the end of the hall is an open window with its curtains streaming in the cold chill wind. For a moment they look like banners, and grouped beneath them are more children in half pieces of armor--all of them fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years of age. All of them waiting.