This Forest Dark

Some of those who come to help us are older than the hills they walk out of.

What Tara is can no longer be hidden. She speaks of a people who did not die when the world changed but withdrew into the hollow places of the earth, and of what is gathering in the east. They travel toward it together, followed by riders, or by a storm; no one can say which. At the edge of the forest she lets him go on alone, and for the first time in a very long life, she wonders why it hurts. Book III of four, on Kindle.