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The figures from the trees surround John and the others on the road to Maelport. They are not, John notes with mild disappointment, the bow-bearing greenwood bandits of legend; they are better dressed than he expected, their cloaks well kept and a few of them brightly coloured. He climbs down off his horse, slides his staff from the saddle, and prepares to do some wizarding. They cannot afford another mortal wound for Ealstan — his chronometer tells him another thirty-three hours before the nanites can do the trick again.

Thokk stops him. These men, she says quietly, are desperate. They have already given up their fathers, their hearths, their gods. You cannot scare them. They are already terrified. Keep quiet for now. He turns off his vocal augments. His horse, locked up with terror, decides at the last second to come join the others, nearly squishing him into them.

The lead bandit walks a slow circle around the party. His clothes are too well kept for a roadside thug; cloak deep red, silver clasp, beard trimmed to a point. He stops beside a particularly large tree and asks, gravely, whether they would not say this is a fine tree. Sefawynn, who has caught the form of the line, agrees that it does seem an important tree. *Grown from a seed of the world tree,* the bandit confirms. *Worthy of seeing and appreciating. A toll, one might say, might be paid for visiting.* Ealstan asks his lineage; the bandit cheerfully accepts the implied charge and replies that yes, of course, he is a fallen lord — *what did you think bandits were, outlander*, Thokk hisses at John under her breath, *weapons are expensive*. The Weswaran road racket is run by men with sword-money, conducting a toll: take enough to make it pay, leave the traveller free to come back and pay again.

Ealstan presses with one more line about how all men used to fight together against outsiders. The lead bandit waves him off and fines him double, once for himself and once for his ego, and Sefawynn tells the thegn softly to stop — anything he could shame them with, they have already thought of, and worse. Ealstan falls silent. The bandit nods at her, takes the measure of her, and asks. *I'm a skop,* she says, eyes level, and several of his men back up muttering. *You may pass without a toll,* the lead bandit replies, *story bearer. Our road is your road.* It is the proudest John has seen her since they met. He understands, watching, why failing the boasts hurts her the way it does.

Three tolls then, for the rich travellers, the lord pronounces. He will take three of the four horses. They are welcome to keep one, for the storybearer. Thokk he sizes up next. *You a skop too?* he asks her — and Thokk tells him with absolute matter-of-factness that she is basically dead already and has no use for stories. He grunts and turns to John. *He's my nephew,* Thokk tells the bandit, smoothly. *Slow of wits. Good luck getting anything useful from him.* John does not complain. He wants to keep moving.

They shift their bags onto the packhorse and the bandits let them go. John reflects, as they walk away, that two thousand years of progress and the mafia is using the same playbook he was trained in — most thievery is run by people with a different sort of power, not against power. *Strangely,* he says aloud, *that's the first thing here that's made perfect sense.* Thokk sighs immediately. He turns to ask what — and something hits him hard from behind, and everything goes dark.