The marked wizard, and the marks are not a figure of speech: dense black rule-work and sigils inked over brow, cheeks, throat and chest, a wheel set between green eyes, all of it looking out from under an embroidered hood. Beside him Chúl — bald, bare to the waist, wiry as rope, a long grey beard, a blue rune laid over his heart and a felling axe across his shoulder. They give their trade as timber: pine off an estate Dirdenach is raising on the north shore of the Mwrost, to be swapped for the stout white oak the Balwens nurture in Kildealg.

An axe and a fistful of sigils, buying oak in the wood where the king went missing. What are those two really cutting for?