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plans. And that’s one thing we don’t want to do. I’ve got one more thing to report. That wand of his, Martez made a big thing of laying it out in the sun as soon as they’d made camp.”
    Judging by the smile on Brise’s face, this was good news. The significance was lost on Deryn and the miners, but not Faren. He clenched his hand in a fist and punched the air. “Yes!”
    “What?”
    “Does it matter?” Several voices muttered questions.
    Faren answered. “A lot of the demons’ magic draws on the power of the sun. This wand must do the same. Martez had to let the wand soak up sunrays until it held enough power for his display. I bet he couldn’t have set fire to a second tree. He didn’t turn the wand on the barricade, and us standing behind it, because the hour the wand had gotten didn’t capture enough sunrays to burn through heavy timber.”
    Deryn looked at the burning tree. Already the flames were dying, and now that she was over the initial shock, she could see the wand had set fire to the pine needles and a few twigs, but it had not touched the trunk of the young tree. Nor had the flames spread to others nearby.
    Brise frowned at the sky. “There’s another three hours before dusk. We don’t know how many sunrays the wand needs before it can set fire to the barricade. Maybe it never could. And Martez wants to slow things down. That looks good for us.”
    Faren took a deep breath. “Okay. Here’s how I read it. Martez led his band out here, hoping to hide up in the woods, wait until all of us were in the same spot and then kill as many of us as he could with a single fireball. But we were lucky and caught wind of them. So he’s gone to his fallback plan. They’ve moved to a defensible spot for tonight. He’ll spend tomorrow morning trapping sunrays in his wand. They’ll come over at noon, just in case we’ve been stupid enough to hand over our weapons. When he sees we haven’t, he’ll use the wand to do as much damage as he can, then go back to his camp and repeat the whole cycle again the day after, until there’s none of us left. He knows time and numbers are on his side.”
    Brise agreed. “That’s how my guess goes.”
    “And if you’re wrong?” Dace sounded less surly than before, as if he was finally convinced of the logic. This did not mean that he was happy.
    Faren shrugged. “Doesn’t matter too much. Regardless of what his plans are, we need to disrupt them. And the surest way to stop him calling the shots is for us to get our attack in first.”

    *

    The image of the burning tree kept running through Deryn’s head. She tried to push the thought aside, but the other, older memories that replaced it were worse. Briefly, she let her face sink into her hand, covering her eyes, but she was not a young child anymore and she had a job do to. Deryn raised her head.
    Her position, halfway up the hillside, was a good vantage point to watch the entire lake, while the bush she was lying under provided dense cover. A few straggling leaves danced before her face, tickling her nose. Deryn carefully pushed them aside, giving herself a clearer view of the outlaws’ camp below.
    On three sides, the rocky islet was bounded by a lacework of oily black pools and reeds. Only the corner farthest from the bank jutted out into the open waters of the lake. The islet could be reached on foot, but that meant wading through fifty yards of thick mud, where an attacker would be a slow-moving target, out in the open. Even on horseback, the distance could not be covered quickly enough to evade arrows or fireballs, especially since the outlaws had embedded defensive rows of sharpened stakes in the mud.
    The lake itself was small, no more than an eighth of a mile across. A boulder-strewn beach lined the opposite shore. Swimming to the island would be quite feasible, as long as the swimmers were not encumbered by metal or clad in heavy leather, and that was the problem. The Iron Wolves were outnumbered as